Reading on a Saturday Morning

The photos all link up to somebody's site.

There are some random links within these excerpts that I couldn't get Drupal to identify within the edit function ... I've no clue what I did.

“The powers of financial capitalism had (a) far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent meetings and conferences. The apex of the systems was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland; a private bank owned and controlled by the world's central banks which were themselves private corporations. Each central bank...sought to dominate its government by its ability to control Treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world.”  Prof. Carroll Quigley from Tragedy and Hope

"But what of the inequality in income that exists in today’s state-corporatist economy?  Did the 1% acquire its wealth solely through hard work?  The answer is hardly in many cases.  Though there are some innovative businessmen who became rich by providing new and better products, the sharp increase in income inequality over the past two decades is due to an economic phenomenon outside of normal market operations. 

Krugman and Stiglitz rightfully point out that the greatest periods of income inequality in the United States were the late 1920s and the period since the mid-1990s.  What they fail to mention is that both these periods were not defined by capitalism run amok but by massive credit expansion.  This expansion in credit, aided and abetted by the Federal Reserve’s loose money policy, is the real culprit behind vast income inequality." - James E. Miller, www.Mises.ca, 08-07-12

TARP, despite its mind-boggling size, was puny and practically irrelevant compared to the many trillions—how many trillions exactly is still being argued over—the Fed printed and handed out through a variety of programs, and the money started flowing to banks, and not only to American banks but to foreign banks, and to industrial companies like GE and to just about everybody on or off Wall Street who was well enough connected.  With this money, they acquired assets and drove up their value.  The banks ended up with more free money from the Fed than they knew what to do with, but instead of making low-cost loans, they bought treasuries and other assets, and they made profits not by doing what a bank should be doing but by benefiting from the Fed’s largesse.  And they paid out record bonuses.

Thelargest banks, the prime beneficiaries, were eager to buy back the preferred stock and warrants they’d issued to TARP because it was expensive money compared to what the Fed was handing out, which was free.  Thus, the Fed had done what Hank Paulson couldn’t bamboozle Congress into letting him do, namely unlimited funds to any entity, including his ownGoldman Sachs.  And in doing so, the Fed had bailed out TARP.

TARP wasn’t large enough to prop up the house of cards that these mega-banks had become. It wasn’t large enough to even bail out Citi by itself.  Had the Fed not stepped in with its trillions, the banks would have blown through the TARP billions in no time, and then that would have been it.  The “catastrophic losses” would have been reality.

However, there were casualties.  One of them was capitalism.  The Fed had preserved rotten-to-the-core banks that should have collapsed—or rather it had bailed out stockholders, bondholders, and counterparties.  Now these banks are even larger, and the creative destruction of capitalism, and thus capitalism itself, has been replaced by the Fed’s will and its printing press.   Wolf Richter, Testosterone Pit

"Consider the inter-campus rivalry in recent years. There was a breather in 1992: Bush (Yale) vs. Clinton (Yale law School). Then came 2000. It heated up again: Gore (Harvard) vs. Bush, Jr. (Yale). But this was not a full-scale confrontation. Bush also went to Harvard Business School. Then, the nation got another breather. It was John Kerry, Yale (Skull & Bones) vs. Bush, Yale (Skull & Bones). In 2008, an outsider entered the fray: McCain (Annapolis). He battled Obama (Harvard Law). Today, Yale is on the outs. It's Harvard Law vs. Harvard Law, plus Harvard MBA (Romney earned both in one shot). Dr. Obama, J.D., vs. Dr. Romney, J.D., MBA.

There have been only two major presidential elections since 1932 that did not conform to this Punch and Judy arrangement. One was in 1964, when Goldwater was able to get the Republican nomination, and the Eastern Republican Establishment literally walked out of the convention, and then spent the rest of the summer torpedoing Goldwater's campaign. The other exception, which was only a partial exception, was Reagan's election in 1980. His new Chief of Staff was James Baker III. Baker, then as now, was one of the chief advisors to George H. W. Bush. The Reagan administration was run by Bush's men, with only a few exceptions, for all eight years. Then Bush replaced him.

The American people, decade after decade, generation after generation, are persuaded that presidential elections are fought over fundamental differences regarding the way the world works and the way the world ought to work. Yet every newly inaugurated President brings in his senior advisers, most of whom are men recruited by the Council on Foreign Relations, and some have been trained in the Trilateral Commission. This never gets any attention by the media, because the media at the top are run by members of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission.

What I do believe is that there are factions within the American political establishment, just as there are within any establishment.  I think this division has been going on since at least 1948. The big banks and big oil are in cahoots together, because that is where the money is.

There is a constant trade-off between the special interests of the two factions.  Each side wants to get its share of the booty after each election.  At the margin, one group or the other gets some benefits.  One group or the other gets to preside over a giant federal bureaucracy in which virtually all of the employees are protected by Civil Service legislation, so no President has the power firing more than a few hundred of them.  

No one is talking about the unfunded liabilities of the United States government, which are now in the range of $222 trillion. Nobody is talking about closing Guantánamo Bay prison, even though Obama promised that he would when he ran back in 2008. Nobody is talking about an immediate withdrawal of troops out of Afghanistan.

So, where is the great debate? It isn't about Medicare, Social Security, Afghanistan, the war on terror, Federal Reserve policy, a Federal Reserve audit, immigration, tax policy, or even the extension of the Bush tax cuts. Where exactly is the great ideological battlefield on which class warfare is being conducted?" - Gary North, PhD,  Reality Check, www.GaryNorth.com,

"The West’s ragtag army of foreign hirelings, masquerading as the 'Free Syrian Army' have been badly beaten in their attempts to carve out a foothold of opposition in both Damascus and Aleppo. The Syrian Army, trained by Russian advisors and amply supplied with post-soviet equipment, has proven to be one of the most formidable of Israel’s opponents in the Middle East – that’s why the globalists are pushing to remove Assad and replace him with a Western puppet leader.  While I’m no fan of tyranny, I’m even more opposed to Western puppets pretending to represent democracy while fronting for the new globalist tyranny.  This week the US moved to create yet another phony threat in Syria in order to justify NATO military intervention and a no-fly zone. 

In the first place, this is not a civil war – it’s a foreign intervention. Second, this threat is trap for Syria no matter what they do.  One of England’s most venerable international reporters Robert Fisk got in on the ground in Syria and filed this report on the so-called 'Rebel army,' and confirmed 'They're a gang of foreigners.' One Syrian major reported to him that one of the prisoners they captured thought he was fighting the Israelis in Jerusalem, and didn’t know he was in Damascus!  the US and NATO are gathering intelligence on Syrian air tactics in preparation for attacking it—as they actively did in Libya under the cover of enforcing a no-fly zone.  Ultimately, the attack on Iran is what is driving the move against Syria, whose arsenal of deadly rockets poses a major risk to Israel should Syria help Iran retaliate after a pre-emptive strike by Israel on Iran.  

There is a growing hysteria about the necessity of attacking Iran emanating from Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and his defense minister Ehud Barak. Both are attempting to drum up support for the attack and insist that it be done soon. They and the media which promotes the imminent nuclear threat scenario are clearly attempting to prepare the public in both Israel and America for war - Joel Skousen, World Affairs Brief, 08-24-12

"The pieces come together...

"1) New software, associated with Google, will recognize customers in stores so as to offer them discounts; having your photos uploaded to allow this service will (for now) be voluntary.

"2) A new surveillance system in New York will store footage from cameras in, for example, the subway, so that when an unattended package is discovered, the police can look back in time to see who left it.

"3) TSA is perfecting a laser that will allow detection on travelers of trace amounts of drugs, explosives, and doubtless a wide variety of other things.

"4) The government is moving toward mandating black boxes on cars to record information thought to be useful in ascribing blame in crashes.

"5) Various police departments are beginning to use 'drone' aircraft to monitor the population.

"These are recent pieces of the coming world. They have not yet all been completely deployed and linked. Some are voluntary, for the moment. Others are in development. All are coming.

"Add the now-routine tracking of passports, cameras that read every passing license plate and record the time, NSA’s automated monitoring of email, Google’s and therefore the government’s knowledge of your searches, GPS tracking of cell phones, detailed records of bank transactions, and so on. Not all of these are instantly accessible by the police. They can easily be made accessible, and they move in that direction.

"In short, the technology exists for a detailed, unblinking, unforgetting watchfulness of the entire population beyond anything imagined, or perhaps imaginable, a few decades ago.  Fred Reed

When Republicans are in office, the conservatives go to sleep and we lose our civil liberties like with the 'Patriot Act'. We lose liberties under Democrats as well as they expand and invent new government programs. Americans lose under either major party.  The real issue of this election should be about runaway government police power and the loss of civil liberties." - Joel Skousen, World Affairs Brief, 08-17-12

"The United States won’t prosecute Corzine for raiding segregated customer accounts, but will happily convene a Grand Jury in preparation for prosecuting Julian Assange for exposing the truth about war crimes.  Nobody knows how much dirt Corzine has on other Wall Street crooks.  Not only may Corzine get away with corzining MF Global’s clients’ funds, he may well end up with a whole raft of seed money to play with from those former colleagues and associates who might prefer he remain silent regarding other indiscretions he may be aware of. But the issue at hand is the sense that we have entered a phase of exponential criminality and corruption. A slavering crook like Corzine who stole $200 million of clients’ funds can walk free.  

Meanwhile, a man who exposed evidence of serious war crimes is for that act so keenly wanted by US authorities that Britain has threatened to throw hundreds of years of diplomatic protocol and treaties into the trash and raid the embassy of another sovereign state to deliver him to a power that seems intent not only to criminalise him, but perhaps even to summarily execute him.  The Obama administration, of course, has made a habit of summary extrajudicial executions of those that it suspects of terrorism, and the detention and prosecution of whistleblowers. And the ooze of large-scale financial corruption, rate-rigging, theft and fraud goes on unpunished." - John, Aziz, azizonomics.com, 08-16-12 ...

"The Status Quo around the globe is trying to manage perceptions to foster the illusion that all the high expectations can be met; but the reassurances are increasingly hollow, and the promises increasingly threadbare. People are waking up, one at a time, to the reality that all the promises and guarantees are fantasy, and their emotional response is deeply negative: they feel betrayed by the Status Quo and its institutions, and they feel a volatile mixture of rage, distrust and resignation.

"Studies have found that people (usually those in the lower social and financial tiers) with low expectations tend to be happier than those with high (and unmet) expectations. The Status Quo bought the support of the masses by raising expectations of permanently rising prosperity and security for all. Now that these near-infinite claims cannot be fulfilled, the Status Quo has no institutional ability to lower expectations to more realistic levels. It only knows how to spin artifice and fantasy, in the vain hope that managing perceptions will substitute for managing reality. This is how credibility is lost.

"Managing perceptions is a dangerous game, as the perceptions are pushed ever-farther from reality, increasing the shockwave when the two snap together: it won't be reality rising to meet lofty perceptions, it will be perceptions and expectations plummeting to meet reality. This is how the Status Quo will collapse: it will lose the faith of its people, and become the target of their wrath." - Charles Hugh Smith, www.OfTwoMinds.com, 08-14-12 

“The government that lies to you about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, about Iraq’s al Qaeda connections, about the Taliban in Afghanistan, about Osama bin Laden, about Libya and Gadhafi, about Iranian nukes, about Syria, about Pakistan, about Yemen and Somalia, about Bradley Manning, about Julian Assange and Wikileaks, indeed about everything under the sun, also lies to you about jobs, unemployment, economic recovery, GDP growth, 9/11, the ‘terrorist threat,’ everything.

Try to find anything that the government has said over the past 6 presidential terms that is not a lie. Other than some minor insignificant detail, ‘your’ government has been consistently lying to you about everything of importance. ‘Your’ government lies to you, because ‘your’ government has an agenda that it most certainly will not tell you about, because if you knew what it is, you would revolt. Putting down the revolt would divert the government from its agenda. It would also alert the rest of the world to the fact that the US government has an undeclared agenda of world domination, despite the costs to the American people and every other people. - Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, Former US Asst. Sec. of the Treasury

Our new motto ..... We're here to brighten your day.

If you're in a good mood just go somewhere else.

This is some fairly seriously depressing shit right here.

All of the following excerpts link to the full article, most of the charts link up to stuff as well.

 I have no confidence in paper money of any kind; or the promises of any and all governments and their employees. The relative safety of one kind of paper as against another is of no importance...What worries me most is the incredible prevalence of official lying, delusion, ignorance and dishonesty ... It's a whole gang of crooks in a system that encourages and rewards fraud ... It isn't just the fact that money is nothing but confidence.   Edelweiss Journal

"Here in Europe, the Greek government is helping itself to its citizens’ bank accounts; the Italian government is working with banks to freeze customers out of their accounts without warning. Spanish police are embroiled in a bloody struggle against bazooka-wielding workers who are protesting austerity measures. EU leaders in Brussels have announced their intention to impose capital controls as part of a ‘rescue plan’. This is today’s reality. It can happen here, it probably will happen here. And frankly, it’s all unfolding almost exactly as it has so many times before throughout history:

1. A nation rises to greatness and becomes wealthy based on sound principles and the hard work of initial generations.

2. Eventually, being wealthy becomes the natural expectation… an entitlement, rather than a goal to work hard for and achieve.

3. A nation begins living beyond its means to maintain the high life without the hard work, leveraging its credibility to trade tomorrow’s production for today’s consumption.

4. Living beyond its means eventually becomes unsustainable. Government begins to slowly, then staggeringly, devalue its currency.

5. The market (i.e. people) finally wake up to the fraud being perpetrated.

6. Financial repression usually follows– high taxes which steal from the productive, negative real interest rates which steal from the savers, etc.

7. Capital flight comes next. People take their money and run.

8. Governments implement capital controls, border controls, price and wage controls, and anything else they can do to maintain the status quo. People find out who the police are really there to protect and serve.

9. Capitulation (default) is the endgame; the system resets itself and begins anew.

"This is nothing new. From the 3rd Dynasty of Ur (2000 BC) to Medieval Venice to the familiar stories of Rome and the Ottoman Empire, the world is full of monuments to the past greatness of failed civilizations. We’re seeing the same pattern unfolding now. And sure, anything’s possible. Maybe the skies open up and the unicorns come out to play and the whole world manages to fix itself without skipping a beat. But let’s live in reality: there are consequences when nations go bankrupt. And nearly every western nation on the planet is insolvent. That is a fact.  Simon Black

Red is cities and counties, black is municiple utilities and other government entities.

America's transition into a welfare state continues, as May saw a new all time high number of American households, 22.3 million to be exact, enter technical poverty and collect foodstamps. At the individual level, 46.5 million Americans lived off foodstamps, a 222,157 increase in the month, or nearly three times the number of people who found jobs in June according to the BLS. Next month this too will be a record, as it is currently just 17,367 before the previous all time high set in December of 2011. The good news, and we use the term loosely, is that the average benefit per household rose from all time lows of $275.82 to $276.76. Surely, the bottom is in and just like housing, there is on blue skies ahead.

“If the bond ever starts falling in price, they unwind the carry trade…Then you get a message, ‘Do not pass go.’ Sell your bonds, unwind your overnight debt, your repo positions. And the system then begins to contract – exactly what happened in September and October of 2008. That was a minor trial run for the great unwind that is going to happen when the Treasury market is finally shattered with a lack of confidence because, on the margin, no one owns a Treasury bond: they just rent it on borrowed money. If the price starts falling, they’ll get out of that trade as fast as they got out of toxic CDOs ... 

“The Fed has destroyed the money market. It has destroyed the capital markets...And you can’t have capitalism if the capital markets are dead, if the capital markets are simply a branch office – branch casino – of the central bank. That’s essentially what we have today...They are monetary central planners who are attempting to use the crude instrument of interest-rate pegging and yield-curve manipulation and essentially buying debt that no one else would buy, in order to keep this whole system afloat. It’s Ponzi economics...

“There are 25 million households in America who couldn’t move if they wanted to, because their mortgages are under water. They cannot generate a down payment and the 5% or 6% broker fee that you need to move. So we’ve got 25 million households immobilized, paralyzed, and worried every day about when they are going to lose property, because of what the Fed did. It’s a terrible indictment...It’s policy. If we don’t do something about the Fed, if we don’t drive the Bernankes and the Dudleys and the Yellens and the rest of these lunatic money-printers out of the Federal Reserve and get it under the control of people who have at least a modicum of sanity, we are just going to bury everybody deeper...

“As a result of that you have a doomsday machine. As I was saying when the great margin call comes and they start selling the Treasury bond, they’ll take everything else with it. Real estate is priced off Treasuries. Mortgaged-backed securities are priced off Treasuries. Corporates are priced off Treasuries. Junk bonds are priced off Treasuries. Everything. The stock market will go into a panic...

“The only thing I think you can conclude is preservation is the only thing you are about as an investor. Forget about yield. Forget about return. Just keep yourself liquid and preserve your capital, because you can’t predict the day when, as I say, the great margin call in the sky comes down.“ – David Stockman, Former Director OMB under Reagan

"The state is a thug. Basically, it relies upon two things to elicit cooperation from people in order to ‘convince' them to surrender their rights and wealth. The first is the myth of legitimacy; this is the notion that an electoral process or a hereditary line-of-succession or 'fill in the blank' establishes an elite group who consist of politicians and those with political pull. These elite individuals somehow have the ‘right' to tell other individuals what to say and what to do with their own body. They live by a double standard. Theft is wrong except if done by them in the form of taxation. Killing innocent people is wrong except if done by them in the war against terrorism. 

Today the myth of legitimacy is being widely seen for what it is: a myth. Every day, fewer and fewer people believe in the legitimacy of the elites.  And without that myth, their actions are being seen for what they are: a vicious double standard that excuses theft and murder. This means the state has to increasingly use the second method by which it elicits your cooperation: raw force or the threat thereof. And a sure sign that the elites have lost legitimacy and know it is the fact that they are becoming more violent toward their own citizenry by the hour...

My purpose is the business of living ... by privatizing your own life, you make the state increasingly irrelevant, which is what politicians fear most. They are desperate to be part of our lives, to teach our children, to regulate our work, to read our messages and hear our phone calls, to dictate our medical choices ... And the most effective personal response when the State knocks at your door may well be to not answer even by the act of raising your fist." - Wendy McElroy, Whiskey & Gunpowder,

"The false premise which guides their decisions is that we can all grow wealthy by borrowing and consuming, instead of by producing and saving. People have been sold this lie for more than a generation. It is embedded in social DNA. In the current western economic system, you are rewarded for going into debt with all sorts of tax deductions. Save money, on the other hand, and you are punished through taxation and inflation. The incentives are all wrong; [unless the diabolical purpose is to enslave the masses] it’s no wonder that people have over-borrowed and overspent given that the system is so blatantly slanted to promote such behavior.

"Housing is one of the most interesting examples of bad incentives: tax policy in many countries encourages people to take out debilitating mortgages, and governments end up with a moral imperative to ensure home prices continue rising. This strikes me as truly bizarre. You’d think people would want housing costs to stay low and affordable, not rise. Nobody cheers when the price of healthcare goes up, even though they could just as easily profit by investing in any number of insurance companies. I don’t click my heels when the price of food goes up in the grocery store, even though we’ve been paid handsome sums from the bountiful harvests of our farm in central Chile. And let’s not forget how much turmoil ensues when gasoline prices get too high. Why should housing be any different? For the vast majority of people, a house isn’t wealth. It’s an expense. And wishing for this expense to increase is both foolish and destructive. Yet most politicians and central banksters in the west are frantically fanning the flames of broken housing markets, desperately trying to re-inflate prices.

"Here in Portugal, for example, housing prices have fallen dramatically. Housing has become affordable. Cheap, even. This is a good thing. Yet the bureaucrats keep trying to figure out ways to ‘prop up the housing market’ and distort prices, often through policy that is very unfriendly to homeowners. In the United States, the Federal Reserve keeps ratcheting down long-term interest rates and scooping up mortgage bonds in an attempt to re-inflate home prices.

"With so many Nobel Prize-winning economists backing these kinds of policies, it’s clear that the people in charge haven’t even begun to acknowledge the flaws in their intellectual framework. And if you can’t even admit that you have a problem, then you are light years away from solving it." - Simon Black,

"Just as the 'terrorist threat was used to destroy the laws that protect US civil liberty, the financial crisis has resulted in the Federal Reserve moving far outside its charter and normal operating behavior. To sum up, what has happened is that irresponsible and thoughtless--in fact, ideological--deregulation of the financial sector has caused a financial crisis that can only be managed by fraud. Civil damages might be paid, but to halt the fraud itself would mean the collapse of the financial system. Those in charge of the system would prefer the collapse to come from outside, such as from a collapse in the value of the dollar that could be blamed on foreigners, because an outside cause gives them something to blame other than themselves." - Paul Craig Roberts

"Contrast the anti-war sentiment during the Vietnam era with how the government/media is now pulling out all the stops to create an ultra-patriotic, 'support our troops' mentality as they drive the nation to war in Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond for their own globalist conflict-creation purposes. I assure you it isn’t that these politicians have had a change of heart or repented of their betrayals. They purposely used the discouraging no-win restrictions and the resulting combat deaths of Vietnam to destroy in the minds of Americans the long-held inclination to combat communist aggression. Decades later they would rally the former anti-war media into shills for government and turn Americans into knee-jerk unthinking patriots ignorantly lending support to a totally different kind of war for empire and domination. This recent effort was started by our government’s created terror incidents and by exaggerating the war on terror in order to justify continual intervention in other nations. They poured money into millions of yellow ribbons and 'Support our Troops' bumper stickers in order to make support for troops synonymous with the rightness of wars—which was no longer true. Media lackeys constantly put forth the government line that all this money and sacrifice was for the purpose of establishing democracy in the Middle East—which wasn’t their true purpose at all. We are still fed this line today and thousands of soldiers will yet die in the falsified war(s) on terror." -  Joel Skousen, World Affairs Brief, 07-20-12

"For every wealthy entrepreneur, there are countless hundreds to thousands of individuals that tried out a new idea and failed. They risked their own capital savings and lost it. Does society owe them for their losses? Why does society get the proceeds from the successful risk takers but doesn't owe a thing to the failed risk takers? Entrepreneurial profits are a kind of risk premium. 'Society' isn't taking that risk; the individual is. So, it is the individual that should receive the reward for the risk he or she alone took." - Marc Porlier, 07-20-12

"A six-figure income used to be a hard-earned sign of success, but due to skyrocketing costs and inflation, $100,000 doesn't have the cachet it once had. Crunching the numbers for standard inflation, it would take $172,000 in 2011 dollars to match a $100,000 salary in 1990. 'What would have cost you $100,000 in 1976 would cost you $381,000 today,' Mari Adam of Adam Financial Associates to Bankrate. '

"Washington has been at war since October, 2001, when President George W. Bush concocted an excuse to order the US invasion of Afghanistan. This war took a back seat when Bush concocted another excuse to order the invasion of Iraq in 2003, a war that went on without significant success for 8 years and has left Iraq in chaos with dozens more killed and wounded every day, a new strong man in place of the illegally executed former strongman, and the likelihood of the ongoing violence becoming civil war. Upon his election, President Obama foolishly sent more troops to Afghanistan and renewed the intensity of that war, now in its eleventh year, to no successful effect.

"These two wars have been expensive. According to estimates by Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, when all costs are counted the Iraq invasion cost US taxpayers $3 trillion dollars. Ditto for the Afghan war. In other words, the two gratuitous wars doubled the US public debt. This is the reason there is no money for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, the environment, and the social safety net. Americans got nothing out of the wars, but as the war debt will never be paid off, US citizens and their descendants will have to pay interest on $6,000 billion of war debt in perpetuity.

"Not content with these wars, the Bush/Obama regime is conducting military operations in violation of international law in Pakistan, Yemen, and Africa, organized the overthrow by armed conflict of the government in Libya, is currently working to overthrow the Syrian government, and continues to marshal military forces against Iran.

"Finding the Muslim adversaries Washington created insufficient for its energies and budget, Washington has encircled Russia with military bases and has begun the encirclement of China. Washington has announced that the bulk of its naval forces will be shifted to the Pacific over the next few years, and Washington is working to re-establish its naval base in the Philippines, construct a new one on a South Korean island, acquire a naval base in Viet Nam, and air and troop bases elsewhere in Asia. In Thailand Washington is attempting to purchase with the usual bribes an air base used in the Vietnam war. There is opposition as the country does not wish to be drawn into Washington’s orchestrated conflict with China. Downplaying the real reason for the airbase, Washington, according to Thai newspapers, told the Thai government that the base was needed for 'humanitarian missions.' This didn’t fly, so Washington had NASA ask for the air base in order to conduct 'weather experiments.' Whether this ruse is sufficient cover remains to be seen. US Marines have been sent to Australia and elsewhere in Asia.

"To corral China and Russia (and Iran) is a massive undertaking for a country that is financially busted. With wars and bankster bailouts, Bush and Obama have doubled the US national debt while failing to address the disintegration of the US economy and rising hardships of US citizens.  Paul Craig Roberts

"If we look at the global economy with unclouded eyes, we reach this conclusion: 'This whole thing is about leverage.' If leverage doesn't increase, the system implodes. But since collateral is disappearing from the global economy like sand castles in a rising tide, and disposable income has stagnated, there is no foundation for more leverage.

"As a result, the State/finance cartel has only one choice: increase leverage by whatever means are left. There are only two:

1. Allow banks to claim phantom assets as capital/reserves

2. Lower interest rates so stagnant income can leverage ever greater quantities of debt.

"The State/finance Empire and its army of academic toadies (economists) must cloak this reliance on leverage from the citizenry, lest they grasp the precariousness of the entire financial system...

"The easiest way to 'grow' is to increase leverage so more money/debt can be created. If a bank was constrained to only loaning the cash it held in deposits, that would severely limit the amount of money available in the system for purchasing villas in Spain, BMW autos manufactured in Germany, etc. If we magically enable 25-to-1 leverage, then every euro supports 25 euros in debt (mortgages, auto loans, etc.) The danger is obvious: if 1 of the 25 euros of debt goes bad, the lender has zero reserve. If 2 euros of debt go bad, the lender is insolvent.

"The only way to 'save' an over-leveraged system is to increase leverage and lower interest rates. If we claim phantom assets as real and increase leverage from 25-to-1 to 50-to-1, we have enabled a doubling of loans. All that wonderful new money will flow into the economy as spending, fueling 'growth.' This explains why the State/finance Empire in Europe keeps lowering reserve requirements for its insolvent banks. If the reserve requirement is 10%, then you need 100 million euros on deposit in cash to support 1 billion euros in loans. If you lower the reserve requirement to 1 euro, then the contents of a child's piggy bank supports 1 billion euros in debt. The other game is to claim phantom assets have market values that justify their substitution of cash...

"Any loan is fundamentally a claim on future income. Interest and principal will be paid out of future income.

"The key to keeping the leverage-based system afloat is to lower interest rates...once rates fall to near-zero, the leverage-income-into-more-debt machine runs off the cliff...

"...the bottom 90% leveraged their stagnant incomes into mountains of debt to compensate for their declining purchasing power. The Federal Reserve (a key player in the global State/finance Empire) has been publicly fretting over the dreaded 'debt divide,' which is Orwellian econo-speak for the bottom 90% running out of leverage. Like Wiley E. Coyote, the bottom 90% has run off the cliff and is now in looking down at the air beneath them...

"The same reliance on leverage has occurred in China, Japan, Europe and the U.S. The entire global economy's 'growth' was based on increasing leverage. That machine has soared off the cliff, and now the Empire's global army of toadies is desperately attempting to mask this reality by substituting phantom assets for actual capital. They can't do anything about lowering interest rates, though; that mechanism has already been maxed out as rates approach zero." - Charles Hugh Smith, www.OfTwoMinds.com

" Western democracy is an intellectually bankrupt concept in its current state. What we have today is regulatory democracy, an environment in which money power's corporate interests feed off the State and thus a mercantilist economy engulfs us all. Politicians are nothing more than talking mouthpieces for the elite, they are there to protect money power's interests – using force if necessary...Barack Obama said he would introduce real change when he was campaigning for the presidency. He said he would improve America's relations around the world and steward a foreign policy that would usher in peace. America would be a beacon once again to all...Obama has done nothing he said he would do to improve America's relations around the world – not that we ever actually believed he could anyway, he is just an actor..." Anthony Wilie, www.TheDailyBell.com

"Civilized people save and plan so as to take care of themselves and their families in the present and future. Fiscal conservatism and prudence is valued in a nondemocratic society, as are sound ethics. Democracy undoes the tendency for people to act cooperatively and responsibly. Politicians constantly look to appease voters with more benefits to care for them from cradle to grave, so as to win the next election. At the same time, the bureaucracy that hands out the benefits grows larger and larger and is unaccountable to anyone — especially voters...In order to distribute these benefits, the government must violate property rights. Government produces nothing; it must take from one group in order to give to another... Douglas French, The Daily Reckoning, 07-11-12 .

We've run a number of interviews with law professor and former federal government banking regulator Bill Black who has become one of our personal heroes having put a no kidding thousands of bankers in jail during the Savings and Loan fiasco.

We learn something every time we stumble across one.

The overall quality isn't as good as the couple we have posted previously, but it is no less educational.

If you'd like to know how it is that the banks in this country were able to effect another no kidding trillions of dollars in fraudulent mortgages while riding off into the sunset with a bailout on the losses leaving you with the bill, Professor Black has your answers.

At just under 14 minutes, you have the time.

Way super double highly recommended.

Our highest recomendation. 

We have two previous interviews with professor Black posted here.

We finally got around to placing links to the sites where we hang out.

Most days, someone from around here will hit every one of these sites with the exception of Zeal which we hit most every Saturday morning for their weekly essay.

In alphabetical order.

 The single best international news gathering outfit out there ... period.  Wildly anti-Israel.  Owned by the state of Qatar.

  Mostly a compiler and a blog much like us, only ..... you know ..... professional.  Primarily news for investor/trader types.

Another outstanding international news gathering outfit. Wildly pro-Israel.  We're guessing owned by MOSSAD.

One of our favorite sites.  We hit every link Jesse posts despite the fact that he resides well to our left.

 Primarily a personal blog and promotional site for Charles Hugh Smith's books, Of Two Minds consistently provides a well thought out and supported point of view not commonly available from mainstream outlets.  Besides, he's got a Les Paul Custom.

   Completely unique from beginning to end.  Nobody out there approaches their breadth of in depth content.

  Another primarily investment/trading site.  Mostly jargon free, clearly written financial news.

Alleged to be owned by the FBI/CIA ...take your pick ... and a tool of the Oligarchs.  We mostly believe it.  Anonymous hacks em and WikiLeaks publishes their emails.  Seems shrewd to be reading some of the same stuff the big guys are getting.

     Wolf Richter's fine site offers clearly written, mostly jargon free and well thought out research on economic, energy, social and occasionally completely random issues.  Among the sites somebody from around here hits most days.

     They claim that "If it's blacked-out, covered-up or censored, you can find it here".  That might maybe be a little strong, but still very good stuff.

     Just outstanding, simple technical analysis.  If you trade, go there!!!

A jargon filled zone.  Still, a cut above just about everybody else.  The comments are a must if you enjoy the occasional ..... ok ok, frequent ..... vulgar rant.

From The New York Times, here's yet another lesson on the consequences of our dumbass tax policies.

As always click on either photo for the entire piece.

Recommended.

How Apple Sidesteps Billions in Global Taxes

Published: April 28, 2012  By CHARLES DUHIGG and DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI

For the last two years or so I have predicted we will not see an uncoordinated crash of the euro, but rather a coordinated fall of multiple currencies US$, Euro, Yuan, Pound, Yen.

They all are/were in big trouble, but none of them could act on their own unless they wanted to expose themselves as bankrupt.

If they default, the banking system collapses.

If they inflate on their own, their holdings move away, so they had to find a way to inflate at the same time, so that the currency pairs don't reveal the problem to the public & since people are convinced that inflation is about prices, it all needed to go in sync.

Now, they‘ve done the first step to coordinate their printing presses.

Essentially all the big currencies on the planet are increasing the money supply in a linked fashion, keeping the currency pairs stable, devaluing the savings, keeping the banks afloat, keeping the system running.

If this is successful, the predictions of libertarians claiming the system will destroy itself by inflation will not come true.  We shall see.   Richard Russell

No portfolio is perfect or without risk.  Yet, too often we think of risk narrowly and ignore the greatest risks of all in the form of monetary collapse, social disorder, regime change, and emergency edicts.

Warren Buffett disparages gold because it has no yield.

The reason it has no yield is that is has no risk. Yield is what you earn when you take risk.

Gold has no credit risk, no currency risk, no maturity risk, indeed no risk of any kind. It is just gold.

In contrast, Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway stock when priced not in dollars but in ounces of gold has declined in value by about 75 percent since 2000 from 280 ounces per share to 70 ounces per share.

Put differently, someone who bought gold rather than Berkshire in 2000 could today buy four times as much Berkshire stock using the same gold.

There has been similar appreciation in the value of fine art. Admittedly this is a selective example. Yet it is true that over centuries it is the hard assets not the paper assets that retain value through collapse and catastrophe.

The old money knows this ... they have seen it all before.   James Rickards

I guess two things stand out to me.  The first is it’s amazing how much complacency the various central governments can buy with the liquidity they are pumping into the market. 

You have the situation in Spain, which is looking like Greece on steroids, and nobody seems to care because of the liquidity coming into the markets.”

“I’m too old to wish for chaos, but it’s coming.  I think the market’s response to situations that make otherwise rational people seem nervous, is fairly amusing.  What we are seeing right now is the rising tide of liquidity floating most ships, particularly the conventional ships.   Rick Rule

“For every one person these days who dies fighting in US wars around the world, 25 other soldiers kill themselves. Veterans are killing themselves at a rate of one every 80 minutes. There are more than 6,500 veteran suicides every year. That’s more than all the American soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq in the last 10 years, according to a New York Times analysis. Being a veteran apparently doubles your risk of suicide. Economic conditions wrought by government policies around the world have contributed to the death toll.

 Europe is undergoing an epidemic of suicide in countries seriously hurt by the downturn. In Greece, the suicide rate among men increased more than 24% since the disaster hit. In Ireland, male suicides have shot up more than 16%. In Italy, economic-motivated suicides have increased 52%...

Life is hard enough on its own. Government makes it harder. Its recession-causing policies; its policy responses that do not work; its regulations that makes people crazy; its poverty-inducing taxes and inflation; and, most of all, its wars, have driven millions to despair. Why the state in particular? It all comes down to the sense of having control over your life. The essence of statecraft is the absence of choice and the inability to escape. Many operations of the state try to disguise these features…

The faces of people in line at the DMV, the sauntering mass in line to be screened by the TSA and even the blank stares you see in the post office lines. There is something about state policy that demoralizes us all. That takes a toll on our health and our outlook on life and even leads to tragedy.   Jeffrey Tucker

There are 240 million voting age Americans. About 130 million will likely vote in the 2012 election based upon recent voter participation results. This means that 110 million Americans don’t give a crap about who runs this country or they’ve come to their senses and realize our votes don’t matter. Between 1840 and 1900 voter participation ranged between 70% and 82% as Americans took their civic duty seriously and believed their vote counted.

Since 1913, when the politicians relinquished control of our currency to a private bank controlled by a small group of powerful men, voter participation for President has ranged between 49% and 62%. It hasn’t surpassed 57% since 1968. Now that corporations are people and our candidates are selected by a few rich men, the transformation from a republic to a corporate fascist state is almost complete…

There are high paying good jobs in America, but there aren’t many and on-line college graduates from the University of Phoenix aren’t going to get them. The highest paying jobs today require a high level of specialization and education, especially in the healthcare and technology industries. This disqualifies the vast majority of government run public school graduates…

The conversion of our country from making high quality things other countries needed to a debt driven service economy of paper pushers, hash slingers, and retail ‘specialists’ has slowly but surely destroyed the middle class. The masses are distracted by the latest technological marvel that allows them to waste another two hours per day posting how they feel about the latest episode of America’s Got Something or America’s Top Whatever. We have become a country that glories in our materialism and shallow culture while acting like a thug around the world with our unparalleled military machine…

This result is not an accident. It was set in motion by the actions of a handful of rapacious, wealthy powerful men that have been calling the shots in this country for the last hundred years. It wasn’t a planned conspiracy but the logical result of man-made inflation, a fiat currency not backed by gold, the craving of rich men to become richer, a willfully ignorant populace, and a slow devolution of our society into a corporate fascist state. We praise and honor psychopathic criminals while scorning and ridiculing the middle class workers that built this country. The American dream has become a nightmare for the millions of unemployed and underemployed. The acceleration of debt accumulation and money printing guarantees this rotting carcass of a country will go belly up in the foreseeable future.”    Jim Quinn

“A decent man is too busy — improving his business, his home, his family — to take much interest in politics.  Besides, he knows it is a flim-flam.  He’s seen how hard it is to make any real improvement at home, even when you are close to the facts and on the job full time. Imagine trying to improve things far away, where you don’t really know what is going on! 

An honest man knows better than to interfere in other peoples’ business. His own business is tough enough.  He cares deeply about the things around him...and tries to make his world better in every way he can.  But he would be embarrassed to pretend to solve other peoples’ problems.  Even if he is only offering advice, he does so reluctantly...carefully...and tentatively.

If he is smart he knows that you can’t really make things better by bullying and threatening people. An economy works best by doing the one thing that the fixers can’t allow — letting people make their own deals, find their own jobs, and solve their own problems. It’s the one thing the fixers can’t do, and the one thing every candidate regards as political suicide — just getting out of the way.”   Bill Bonner

“To the establishment media, the race for the Republican nomination is over — Mitt Romney is the presumed winner.  Every globalist on the Republican side has come out and endorsed him — including those who don’t want him as president.

This reflects the concern Republican kingmakers still have about Ron Paul, who will now make a better showing than ever at the polls, due to the anti-Romney feelings among many conservatives and the growing anti-war sentiment.  

What is disturbing to the PTB is that Ron Paul continues to rack up delegates far in excess of his showing in primaries, which were not binding. ..... Huh?.....  However, I think they will pull out all the stops to keep a brokered convention from happening and make sure that Romney wins on the first ballot at the Tampa convention.”   Joel Skousen

From Zero Hedge who evidently has drawn enough mainstream attention to be noticing some blowback.

While our government economists assure us that inflation is under control at under 2%, General Mills is having a completely different experience, and is of course passing that experience on to you.

Just skip down to the red.

Physical gold held by ETFs, at 2,469 metric tons, is now the world’s 4^th largest gold stash, behind the US, Germany and the IMF.

Iceland is considering adopting the Canadian dollar, “the loonie”, as its currency.

Every $10 increase in the price of crude oil reduces US GDP by 1%.

A record 46.5 million Americans are on food stamps, 15% of the US population, over 22 million US households.

TSA’s VIPR teams conducted 9,300 unannounced checkpoint and frisking operations in the US in 2011 on highways, subways, train stations, ferry terminals, all mass transit locations.

Windows 8 will have a “kill switch” that will have the capability to arbitrarily access your computer and delete “dangerous software”.

The yield on the 10-year bond issued by Portugal jumped by 70 basis points last week coming close to a 14 percent yield. The Greek 10-year bonds jumped to a yield of more than 38 percent.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), obtained hundreds of documents from the Department of Homeland Security through the Freedom of Information Act and found details of an arrangement with General Dynamics in which DHS has been paying the defense contractor to monitor social media websites and other Internet communications to find criticisms of the department’s policies and actions. The company was contracted to monitor the Web for ‘reports that reflect adversely on DHS,’ including sub-agencies like the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Citizenship and Immigration Services, Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”

CNN of all people provides a well done story on Dean Tofteland, ripped off farmer in the MF Global fraud and his pursuit of John Corzine and Dean's stolen $253,000.

Seems kind of simple when you put it that way.