7 day restriction on bank withdrawals could mean the difference between preserving or destroying your life savings if the U.S. dollar collapses
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet | The recent controversy surrounding Citibank’s advisory to its customers reserving the right to impose a 7 day restriction on withdrawals from their accounts is a stark reminder of the vulnerability of the fractional reserve banking system and the FDIC’s shaky guarantee that it can insure deposits in the event of a bank run.
As we reported last week, Citibank’s notice informing its customers of the right to request 7 days notice before funds can be withdrawn from all checking, savings and money market accounts was necessary to ensure compliance with Federal Reserve regulations.
Fox News Business reported on the “little known regulation” yesterday in a piece by Darryl R. Isherwood.
“The requirement is part of Regulation D of the Securities Act of 1933. It applies to all accounts classified as Negotiable Order of Withdrawal [NOW] accounts – basically interest-bearing checking and savings accounts held by individuals and non-profits. Banks are not required to hold reserves in place to cover NOW accounts, so the rule prevents a run on withdrawals for which there are no reserves,” states the report.
For those still unaware of the fact, it may come as a shock that your bank has no reserves with which to cover withdrawals if there was a sudden loss of confidence and a good old run on the bank as has happened on several occasions over the last two years in both the UK and the U.S.
“According to a spokeswoman, the bank changed the status of the bulk of its consumer checking accounts last year to take advantage of an FDIC policy to provide unlimited account protection to certain types of accounts. When Citi transferred the accounts back to their original status, it triggered the notification of the seven-day requirement,” states the report.
Although the FDIC claims it guarantees insurance to the tune of $250,000 per depositor per bank, the rising number of bank failures and those placed on the “problem list” has stoked fears that the tank is running dry.
Alarmingly, The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. only has about $50 billion to “insure” about $1 trillion in assets across the nation’s financial institutions. This was even admitted in a Yahoo.com article shortly after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008. When Americans realize the fact that banks are “going to run out of money”, the article nonchalantly stated, a run on the banks will accelerate.
On Tuesday the FDIC announced that its deposit insurance fund suffered a whopping $12.6 billion drop in the final three months of 2009 due to accelerating bank closures. “The fund’s reserve ratio was -0.39% at the end of the quarter, the lowest on record for the combined bank and thrift fund,” according to the announcement.
Financial experts have predicted that the failure of 300-500 U.S. banks would absorb all of the FDIC’s insurance funds. This is precisely why people are worried about banks imposing delays on access to their savings, not as a result of some Internet conspiracy run amok, as the Fox News Business article implies, but as a consequence of the true magnitude of what could plausibly happen in a worst case scenario.
If the U.S. dollar was to suffer a sudden and drastic collapse as innumerable financial experts have predicted and hyperinflation ensued, then being unable to access your money or swap it for another currency or commodity for a period of 7 days could be the difference between preserving your life savings or having them rendered practically worthless.
Imagine if the United States were to suffer a Weimar Republic style collapse and the cost of a pound of butter soared to a million dollars. Generations of wealth could be wiped out overnight if people were unable to access their savings.
It’s no surprise therefore in the current climate that investors have flocked to physical gold and silver bullion not only as a means of preserving their wealth, but ensuring that it actually exists in the first place. With banks affording themselves the power to loan out increasing multiples of what they hold at any one time while the money supply is artificially doubled, being reminded of the fact that our nest eggs consist of nothing more than numbers on a computer screen which can be withheld from us at the discretion of the banks isn’t exactly going to restore trust in traditional methods of saving.
CBS News | South Carolina Rep. Mike Pitts has introduced legislation that would mandate that gold and silver coins replace federal currency as legal tender in his state.
As the Palmetto Scoop first reported, Pitts, a Republican, introduced legislation this month banning "the unconstitutional substitution of Federal Reserve Notes for silver and gold coin" in South Carolina.
In an interview, Pitts told Hotsheet that he believes that "if the federal government continues to spend money at the rate it's spending money, and if it continues to print money at the rate it's printing money, our economic system is going to collapse."
"The Germans felt their system wouldn't collapse, but it took a wheelbarrow of money to buy a loaf of bread in the 1930s," he said. "The Soviet Union didn't think their system would collapse, but it did. Ours is capable of collapsing also."
The lawmaker believes that a shift to an economy based on gold and silver coins would give the state a "base of currency" should that collapse come. As one expert told the Scoop, however, his bill would likely be ruled unconstitutional because it "violates a perfectly legal and Constitutional federal law, enacted pursuant to the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution, that federal reserve notes are legal tender for all debts public and private."
In addition, since gold and silver regularly fluctuate in value, they could not easily function as stable currency.
But Pitts maintains that his state is better off with something he can hold in his hand and barter with as opposed to federal currency, which he described to the Scoop as "paper with ink on it." He says he resents what he considers the federal government's intrusions on states' rights.
Though he did not offer a timeframe, Pitts told Hotsheet that he anticipates a nationwide economic collapse "if our federal government continues the course it's been traveling under the previous administration and this administration."
New World Order Report | After reading the article released by Cracked.com, I decided to update and revise their work. the article gave me a chuckle because it lacked many famous and much larger conspiracy theories that became known. Their article had only listed seven. I can name 33 and I am about to release a revised list soon with 75. The article I read at cracked can be viewed here, but don't waste your time, all of that is in this article and more.
Most people can't resist getting the details on the latest conspiracy theories, no matter how far-fetched they may seem. At the same time, many people quickly denounce any conspiracy theory as untrue ... and sometimes as unpatriotic or just plain ridiculous. Lets not forget all of the thousands of conspiracies out of Wall Street like Bernie Madoff and many others to commit fraud and extortion, among many crimes of conspiracy. USA Today reports that over 75% of personal ads in the paper and on craigslist are married couples posing as single for a one night affair. When someone knocks on your door to sell you a set of knives or phone cards, anything for that matter, do they have a profit motive? What is conspiracy other than just a scary way of saying “alternative agenda”? When 2 friends go to a bar and begin to plan their wingman approach on 2 girls they see at the bar, how often are they planning on lying to those girls?“ I own a small business and am in town for a short while.Oh yeah, you look beautiful.”
Conspiracy theory is a term that originally was a neutral descriptor for any claim of civil, criminal or political conspiracy. However, it has come almost exclusively to refer to any fringe theory which explains a historical or current event as the result of a secret plot by conspirators of almost superhuman power and cunning. To conspire means "to join in a secret agreement to do an unlawful or wrongful act or to use such means to accomplish a lawful end. "The term "conspiracy theory" is frequently used by scholars and in popular culture to identify secret military, banking, or political actions aimed at stealing power, money, or freedom, from "the people".
To many, conspiracy theories are just human nature. Not all people in this world are honest, hard working and forthcoming about their intentions.Certainly we can all agree on this.So how did the term “conspiracy theory” get grouped in with fiction, fantasy and folklore? Maybe that’s a conspiracy, just kidding. Or am I?
Skeptics are important in achieving an objective view of reality, however, skeptism is not the same as reinforcing the official storyline. In fact, a conspiracy theory can be argued as an alternative to the official or “mainstream” story of events. Therefore, when skeptics attempt to ridicule a conspiracy theory by using the official story as a means of proving the conspiracy wrong, in effect, they are just reinforcing the original “mainstream” view of history, and actually not being skeptical. This is not skeptism, it is just a convenient way for the establishment view of things to be seen as the correct version, all the time, every time. In fact, it is common for "hit pieces" or "debunking articles" to pick extremely fringe and not very populated conspiracy theories. This in turn makes all conspiracies on a subject matter look crazy. Skeptics magazine and Popular Mechanics, among many others, did this with 9/11. They referred to less than 10% of the many different conspiracy theories about 9/11 and picked the less popular ones, in fact, they picked the fringe, highly improbable points that only a few people make. This was used as the "final investigation" for looking into the conspiracy theories. Convenient, huh?
In fact, if one were to look into conspiracy theories, they will largely find that thinking about a conspiracy is associated with lunacy and paranoia. Some websites suggest it as an illness. It is also not surprising to see so many people on the internet writing about conspiracy theories in a condescending tone, usually with the words "kool-aid," "crack pot," or "nut job" in their articulation. This must be obvious to anyone that emotionally writing about such serious matter insults the reader more than the conspiracy theorist because there is no need to resort to this kind of behavior. It is employed often with an "expert" who will say something along the lines of, "for these conspiracies to be true, you would need hundreds if not thousands of people to be involved. It's just not conceivable."
I find it extremely odd that the assumption is on thousands of participants in a conspiracy. I, for one, find it hard to believe any conspiracy involving more than a handful of people but the fact remains that there have been conspiracies in our world, proven and not made up, that involved many hundreds of people. It's not a matter of opinion, it's a matter of fact.
One more thing to consider, have you noticed that if the conspiracy is involving powerful interests with the ability to bribe, threaten or manipulate major institutions (like the mafia, big corporations or government) then don't you find it odd when people use one of those as the "credible" counter-argument? What I mean is, if you are discussing a conspiracy about the mafia, and someone hands you a debunking article that was written by the mafia, it doesn't seem like it would take rocket science to look at that with serious criticism and credibility. This is the case with many conspiracies. In fact, I am handed debunking pieces all the time written in many cases by the conspirators in question. Doesn't this seem odd to anybody else but me?
While intelligent cynicism certainly can be healthy, though, some of the greatest discoveries of all time were initially received (often with great vitriol) as blasphemous conspiracy theories -- think of the revelation that the earth was not the center of the universe, or that the world was not flat but actually round.
What follows are some of these most shocking modern conspiracy theories that turned out true after thorough investigation by our society. Some through congressional hearings, others through investigative journalism. Many of these, however, were just admitted to by those involved. These are just 33 of them, and I still had a long list of others to add. There are a total of 33 in this article. Many of these are listed with original and credible news clips on the matter, as well as documentaries.
1.The Dreyfus Affair: In the late 1800s in France, Jewish artillery officer Alfred Dreyfus was wrongfully convicted of treason based on false government documents, and sentenced to life in prison. The French government did attempt to cover this up, but Dreyfus was eventually pardoned after the affair was made public (an act that is credited to writer Émile Zola).
2.The Mafia: This secret crime society was virtually unknown until the 1960s, when member Joe Valachi first revealed the society's secrets to law enforcement officials.What was known was that organized crime existed, but not that the extent of their control included working with the CIA, politicians and the biggest businesses in the world.
3.MK-ULTRA: In the 1950s to the 1970s, the CIA ran a mind-control project aimed at finding a "truth serum" to use on communist spies. Test subjects were given LSD and other drugs, often without consent, and some were tortured. At least one man, civilian biochemist Frank Olson, who was working for the government, died as a result of the experiments. The project was finally exposed after investigations by the Rockefeller Commission.
A short video about MK-ULTRA from a documentary called Secrets of the CIA:
4.Operation Mockingbird: Also in the 1950s to '70s, the CIA paid a number of well-known domestic and foreign journalists (from big-name media outlets like Time, The Washington Post, The New York Times, CBS and others) to publish CIA propaganda. The CIA also reportedly funded at least one movie, the animated "Animal Farm," by George Orwell. The Church Committee finally exposed the activities in 1975.
5.Manhattan Project:The Manhattan Project was the codename for a project conducted during World War II to develop the first atomic bomb. The project was led by the United States, and included participation from the United Kingdom and Canada. Formally designated as the Manhattan Engineer District (MED), it refers specifically to the period of the project from 1942–1946 under the control of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, under the administration of General Leslie R. Groves. The scientific research was directed by American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer.The project's roots lay in scientists' fears since the 1930s that Nazi Germany was also investigating nuclear weapons of its own. Born out of a small research program in 1939, the Manhattan Project eventually employed more than 130,000 people and cost nearly US$2 billion ($22 billion in current value).
It resulted in the creation of multiple production and research sites that operated in secret.With the total involved, this makes it one of the largest conspiracies in history.Entire towns were built for short periods of time, employing people, all under secrecy and top national secrecy at that.The government never admitted to it, the media never reported on it, and people had no idea for over 25 years.Project research took place at over thirty sites across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The three primary research and production sites of the project were the plutonium-production facility at what is now the Hanford Site, the uranium-enrichment facilities at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and the weapons research and design laboratory now known as Los Alamos National Laboratory. The MED maintained control over U.S. weapons production until the formation of the Atomic Energy Commission in January 1947.
6.Asbestos: Between 1930 and 1960, manufacturers did all they could to prevent the link between asbestos and respiratory diseases, including cancer, becoming known, so they could avoid prosecution. American workers had in fact sued the Johns Manville company as far back as 1932, but it was not until 1962 that epidemiologists finally established beyond any doubt what company bosses had known for a long time – asbestos causes cancer.
7.Watergate: Republican officials spied on the Democratic National Headquarters from the Watergate Hotel in 1972. While conspiracy theories suggested underhanded dealings were taking place, it wasn't until 1974 that White House tape recordings linked President Nixon to the break-in and forced him to resign.
8.The Tuskegee Syphilis Study: The United States Public Health Service carried out this clinical study on 400 poor, African-American men with syphilis from 1932 to 1972. During the study the men were given false and sometimes dangerous treatments, and adequate treatment was intentionally withheld so the agency could learn more about the disease. While the study was initially supposed to last just six months, it continued for 40 years. Close to 200 of the men died from syphilis or related complications by the end of the study.
9.Operation Northwoods: In the early 1960s, American military leaders drafted plans to create public support for a war against Cuba, to oust Fidel Castro from power. The plans included committing acts of terrorism in U.S. cities, killing innocent people and U.S. soldiers, blowing up a U.S. ship, assassinating Cuban émigrés, sinking boats of Cuban refugees, and hijacking planes. The plans were all approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but were reportedly rejected by the civilian leadership, then kept secret for nearly 40 years.
Author James Bamford, "A Pretext For War", discusses the declassified "Operation Northwoods" documents revealing that in 1962 the CIA was planning to stage phony terrorist attacks on the US and blame it on Cuba to start a war:
10.1990 Testimony of Nayirah:A 15-year-old girl named “Nayirah” testified before the U.S. Congress that she had seen Iraqi soldiers pulling Kuwaiti babies from incubators, causing them to die. The testimony helped gain major public support for the 1991 Gulf War, but — despite protests that the dispute of this story was itself a conspiracy theory — it was later discovered that the testimony was false. The public relations firm Hill & Knowlton, which was in the employ of Citizens for a Free Kuwait, had arranged the testimony.It turned out that she had taken acting lessons on request of the CIA and was actually the niece of a major politician in Kuwait.Nayirah was later disclosed to be Nayirah al-Sabah, daughter of Saud bin Nasir Al-Sabah, Kuwaiti ambassador to the USA.The Congressional Human Rights Caucus, of which Congressman Tom Lantos was co-chairman, had been responsible for hosting Nurse Nayirah, and thereby popularizing her allegations. When the girl's account was later challenged by independent human rights monitors, Lantos replied, "The notion that any of the witnesses brought to the caucus through the Kuwaiti Embassy would not be credible did not cross my mind... I have no basis for assuming that her story is not true, but the point goes beyond that. If one hypothesizes that the woman's story is fictitious from A to Z, that in no way diminishes the avalanche of human rights violations." Nevertheless, the senior Republican on the Human Rights Caucus, John Edward Porter, responded to the revelations "by saying that if he had known the girl was the ambassador's daughter, he would not have allowed her to testify."
11.Counter Intelligence Programs Against Activists in the 60s:COINTELPRO (an acronym for Counter Intelligence Program) was a series of covert, and often illegal, projects conducted by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) aimed at investigating and disrupting dissident political organizations within the United States. The FBI used covert operations from its inception, however formal COINTELPRO operations took place between 1956 and 1971. The FBI's stated motivation at the time was "protecting national security, preventing violence, and maintaining the existing social and political order."According to FBI records, 85% of COINTELPRO resources were expended on infiltrating, disrupting, marginalizing, and/or subverting groups suspected of being subversive, such as communist and socialist organizations; the women's rights movement; militant black nationalist groups, and the non-violent civil rights movement, including individuals such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and others associated with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Congress of Racial Equality, the American Indian Movement, and other civil rights groups; a broad range of organizations labeled "New Left", including Students for a Democratic Society, the National Lawyers Guild, the Weathermen, almost all groups protesting the Vietnam War, and even individual student demonstrators with no group affiliation; and nationalist groups such as those "seeking independence for Puerto Rico." The other 15% of COINTELPRO resources were expended to marginalize and subvert "white hate groups," including the Ku Klux Klan and National States' Rights Party. The directives governing COINTELPRO were issued by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who ordered FBI agents to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" the activities of these movements and their leaders.
This is a documentary on COINTELPRO:
Main Core is the code name of a database maintained since the 1980s by the federal government of the United States, which contains personal and financial data of millions of U.S. citizens believed to be threats to national security. The data, which comes from the NSA, FBI, CIA, and other sources, is collected and stored without warrants or court orders. The database's name derives from the fact that it contains "copies of the 'main core' or essence of each item of intelligence information on Americans produced by the FBI and the other agencies of the U.S. intelligence community."
The Main Core database is believed to have originated with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in 1982, following Ronald Reagan's Continuity of Operations plan outlined in the National Security Directive (NSD) 69 / National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) 55, entitled "Enduring National Leadership," implemented on September 14, 1982.
As of 2008 there are reportedly eight million Americans listed in the database as possible threats, often for trivial reasons, whom the government may choose to track, question, or detain in a time of crisis.
The existence of the database was first reported on in May 2008 by Christopher Ketcham and in July 2008 by Tim Shorrock.
Rex 84, short for Readiness Exercise 1984, is a plan by the United States federal government to test their ability to detain large numbers of American citizens in case of civil unrest or national emergency.
According to scholar Diana Reynolds:
The Rex-84 Alpha Explan (Readiness Exercise 1984, Exercise Plan; otherwise known as a continuity of government plan), indicates that FEMA in association with 34 other federal civil departments and agencies, along with other NATO nations, conducted a civil readiness exercise during April 5-13, 1984. It was conducted in coordination and simultaneously with a Joint Chiefs exercise, Night Train 84, a worldwide military command post exercise (including Continental U.S. Forces or CONUS) based on multi-emergency scenarios operating both abroad and at home. In the combined exercise, Rex-84 Bravo, FEMA and DOD led the other federal agencies and departments, including the Central Intelligence Agency, the Secret Service, the Treasury, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Veterans Administration through a gaming exercise to test military assistance in civil defense.
The exercise anticipated civil disturbances, major demonstrations and strikes that would affect continuity of government and/or resource mobilization. To fight subversive activities, there was authorization for the military to implement government ordered movements of civilian populations at state and regional levels, the arrest of certain unidentified segments of the population, and the imposition of martial law.
Existence of a master military contingency plan, "Garden Plot" and a similar earlier exercise, "Lantern Spike" were originally revealed by journalist Ron Ridenhour, who summarized his findings in "Garden Plot and the New Action Army."
Rex 84 was mentioned during the Iran-Contra Hearings in 1987. The Miami Herald wrote subsequently on July 5, 1987:
See video of it here:
Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North and the Federal Emergency Management Agency ... had drafted a contingency plan providing for the suspension of the Constitution, the imposition of martial law, and the appointment of military commanders to head state and local governments and to detain dissidents and Central American refugees in the event of a national crisis.
The basic facts about Rex 84 and other contingency planning readiness exercises—and the potential threat they pose to civil liberties if fully implemented in a real operation—are taken seriously by scholars and civil libertarians.
Exercises similar to Rex 84 happen regularly. Plans for roundups of large numbers of persons in the United States in times of crisis are constructed during periods of increased political repression such as the Palmer Raids and the McCarthy Era.
For example, from 1967 to 1971 the FBI kept a list of over 100,000 persons to be rounded up as subversive, dubbed the "ADEX" list. This list contained many labor leaders, scholars, and public figures of the time.
In 2008, for the first time an active military unit has been given a dedicated assignment stateside for civil unrest containment. It is assigned to Northcom, a joint command established in 2002 to provide command and control for federal homeland defense efforts and coordinate defense support of civil authorities.
12.The Iran-Contra Affair: In 1985 and '86, the White House authorized government officials to secretly trade weapons with the Israeli government in exchange for the release of U.S. hostages in Iran. The plot was uncovered by Congress in 1987. The documentary series, Core of Corruption, will be exploring details on the Iran Contra conspiracy in greater detail. The series if 5 seperate films written and directed by Jonathan Elinoff, investigative journalist and reporter for the New World Order Report. During Iran Contra, drug smuggling by the CIA was uncovered and to this day the United States population is largely unaware of the findings of this information. Both posts on CIA drug running in this article of 33 conspiracies that turned out to be true are about this very topic of drug running during Iran Contra.
13.The BCCI Scandal: The Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) was a major international bank founded in 1972 by Agha Hasan Abedi, a Pakistani financier. The Bank was registered in Luxembourg. Within a decade BCCI touched its peak, it operated in 78 countries, had over 400 branches, and had assets in excess of US$ 20 billion making it the 7th largest private bank in the world by assets. In the late 1980's BCCI became the target of a two year undercover operation conducted by the US Customs Service. This operation concluded with a fake wedding that was attended by BCCI officers and drug dealers from around the world who had established a personal friendship and working relationship with undercover Special Agent Robert Mazur. After a six month trial in Tampa, key bank officers were convicted and received lengthy prison sentences. Bank officers began cooperating with law enforcement authorities and that cooperation caused BCCI’s many crimes to be revealed. BCCI came under the scrutiny of regulatory bodies and intelligence agencies in the 1980s due to its perceived avoidance of falling under one regulatory banking authority, a fact that was later, after extensive investigations, proven to be false. BCCI became the focus of a massive regulatory battle in 1991 and was described as a "$20-billion-plus heist". Investigators in the U.S. and the UK revealed that BCCI had been "set up deliberately to avoid centralized regulatory review, and operated extensively in bank secrecy jurisdictions. Its affairs were extraordinarily complex. Its officers were sophisticated international bankers whose apparent objective was to keep their affairs secret, to commit fraud on a massive scale, and to avoid detection."
This is a report from July 23, 1991 on the BCCI:
This is a report from July 8, 1991 on Connections between BCCI and the CIA:
This is a report from August 6, 1991 on how the BCCI funded Pakistan's Nuclear Programs:
This is a report from March 4, 1991 on the BCCI:
14.CIA Drug Running in LA: Pulitzer Prize Award winning journalist Gary Webb exposed this alongside LAPD Narcotics Officer turned whislteblower and author Michael Ruppert, CIA Contract Pilot Terry Reed, and many others. In August 1996 the San Jose Mercury News published Webb's "Dark Alliance", a 20,000 word, three-part investigative series which alleged that Nicaraguan drug traffickers had sold and distributed crack cocaine in Los Angeles during the 1980s, and that drug profits were used to fund the CIA-supported Nicaraguan Contras. Webb never asserted that the CIA directly aided drug dealers to raise money for the Contras, but he did document that the CIA was aware of the cocaine transactions and the large shipments of cocaine into the U.S. by the Contra personnel. "Dark Alliance" received national attention. At the height of the interest, the web version of it on San Jose Mercury News website received 1.3 million hits a day. According to the Columbia Journalism Review, the series became "the most talked-about piece of journalism in 1996 and arguably the most famous—some would say infamous—set of articles of the decade."
April 6, 1987 Report on CIA Drug Running:
January 20, 1987 Report on CIA Drug Smuggling
November 19, 1993 Report on CIA Drug Running:
15.Gulf of Tonkin Never Happened:The Gulf of Tonkin Incident is the name given to two separate incidents involving the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the United States in the waters of the Gulf of Tonkin. On August 2, 1964 two American destroyers engaged three North Vietnamese torpedo boats, resulting in the sinking of one of the torpedo boats.This was also the single most important reason for the escalation of the Vietnam War.After Kennedy was assassinated, the Gulf of Tonkin gave the country the sweeping support for aggressive military action against the North Vietnamese.
The outcome of the incident was the passage by Congress of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which granted President Lyndon B. Johnson the authority to assist any Southeast Asian country whose government was considered to be jeopardized by "communist aggression".In 2005, an internal National Security Agency historical study was declassified; it concluded that USS Maddox had engaged the North Vietnamese on August 2, but that there may not have been any North Vietnamese vessels present during the engagement of August 4. The report stated “It is not simply that there is a different story as to what happened; it is that no attack happened that night…”In truth, Hanoi's navy was engaged in nothing that night but the salvage of two of the boats damaged on August 2.In 1965, President Johnson commented privately: "For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there."
In 1981, Captain Herrick and journalist Robert Scheer re-examined Herrick's ship's log and determined that the first torpedo report from August 4, which Herrick had maintained had occurred—the "apparent ambush"—was in fact unfounded.In 1995, retired Vietnamese Defense Minister Vo Nguyen Giap, meeting with former Secretary of Defense McNamara, categorically denied that Vietnamese gunboats had attacked American destroyers on August 4, while admitting to the attack on August 2.In the Fall of 1999, retired senior CIA engineering executive S. Eugene Poteat wrote that he was asked in early August 1964 to determine if the radar operator's report showed a real torpedo boat attack or an imagined one.In October, 2005 the New York Times reported that Robert J. Hanyok, a historian for the U.S. National Security Agency, had concluded that the NSA deliberately distorted the intelligence reports that it had passed on to policy-makers regarding the August 4, 1964 incident. He concluded that the motive was not political but was probably to cover up honest intelligence errors.
November 9th, 1995 New Clip on Gulf of Tonkin:
16.The Business Plot:In 1933, group of wealthy businessmen that allegedly included the heads of Chase Bank, GM, Goodyear, Standard Oil, the DuPont family and Senator Prescott Bush tried to recruit Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler to lead a military coup against President FDR and install a fascist dictatorship in the United States. And yes, we're talking about the same Prescott Bush who fathered one US President and grandfathered another one.Smedley Butler was both a patriot and a vocal FDR supporter. Apparently none of these criminal masterminds noticed that their prospective point man had actively stumped for FDR in 1932.Smedley spilled the beans to a congressional committee in 1934.
Everyone he accused of being a conspirator vehemently denied it, and none of them were brought up on criminal charges. Still, the House McCormack-Dickstein Committee did at least acknowledge the existence of the conspiracy, which ended up never getting past the initial planning stages.Though many of the people who had allegedly backed the Business Plot also maintained financial ties with Nazi Germany up through America's entry into World War II. In 1934, the Business Plot was publicly revealed by retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler testifying to the McCormack-Dickstein Congressional Committee. In his testimony, Butler claimed that a group of men had approached him as part of a plot to overthrow Roosevelt in a military coup. One of the alleged plotters, Gerald MacGuire, vehemently denied any such plot. In their final report, the Congressional committee supported Butler's allegations of the existence of the plot, but no prosecutions or further investigations followed, and the matter was mostly forgotten.
On July 17, 1932, thousands of World War I veterans converged on Washington, D.C., set up tent camps, and demanded immediate payment of bonuses due them according to the Adjusted Service Certificate Law of 1924. This "Bonus Army" was led by Walter W. Waters, a former Army sergeant. The Army was encouraged by an appearance from retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler, who had considerable influence over the veterans, being one of the most popular military figures of the time. A few days after Butler's arrival, President Herbert Hoover ordered the marchers removed, and their camps were destroyed by US Army cavalry troops under the command of General Douglas MacArthur.
Butler, although a self-described Republican, responded by supporting Roosevelt in that year's election. In a 1995 History Today article Clayton Cramer argued that the devastation of the Great Depression had caused many Americans to question the foundations of liberal democracy. "Many traditionalists, here and in Europe, toyed with the ideas of Fascism and National Socialism; many liberals dallied with Socialism and Communism." Cramer argues that this explains why some American business leaders viewed fascism as a viable system to both preserve their interests and end the economic woes of the Depression.
17.July 20, 1944 Conspiracy to Assassinate Hitler:Among another 20 some odd attempts, this one was one of the largest conspiracies involving hundreds of loyalists in the highest echelons of Hitler’s inner circle.Near the end of WWII, things were rapidly going south for Germany and the time seemed ripe for guilt-ridden Nazi officers to assassinate Hitler and overthrow his government. Colonel Henning von Tresckow recruited Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg to join the conspiracy in 1944.The plot to take out Hitler and then all of his loyal officers was called Operation Valkyrie.
The plan was to use the Continuity of Government Proceedings during an assassination on Hitler’s life to take over full control of the government in Germany.The assassination would be blamed on the Nazi SS and therefore allow Stauffenberg to take full control of all aspects of the government.It almost worked.In July 1944, Stauffenberg was promoted so that he could now start attending military strategy meetings with Hitler himself. On more than one occasion Stauffenberg planned to kill Hitler at such a meeting with a briefcase bomb, but he always held off because he also wanted to take out Hitler's two right-hand men, Hermann Goering and Heinrich Himmler. On July 20, he went for it anyway and exploded a bomb inside Hitler's conference room with a remote detonator. Hitler survived only minor injuries.
18.Operation Ajax: For years, Britain had a spiffy trade deal with Iran regarding their prodigious oil fields. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company was basically a giant money machine for the Anglo half, while the Iranian half got shafted. That all changed in 1951 when Iran nationalized the AIOC and the Iranian parliament elected Mohammed Mossadegh as Prime Minister. Mossadegh was relatively secular, something that pissed of Iranian clerics, but he was also very nationalistic.He was a democratically elected, pro American figure but the West saw his nationalizing of the oil fields a communist move(something Mossadegh thought was the right of the people to profit and pay for services in the country with).Those oil fields were under the control of British Petroleum, but unfortunately Mossadegh overruled this long standing business control.The United States sent Kermit Roosevelt, FDR’s nephew and CIA coordinator in to figure out the mess.
The best he could come up with was to confront Mossadegh and have him overthrown and this was accomplished by bringing in what the agency refers to as “jackals.”The United States backed the return of the Shah of Iran, one of the most brutal dictators the country had ever seen and intentionally overthrew years before with the democratic leader, Mossadegh.Until 1979, that is, when a pissed off Iranian populace finally revolted and replaced the monarchy with an anti-West Islamic Republic.The result was a violently anti-American revolution lead by the Ayatollah Khomeini which overthrew the Shah and took hostage US Embassy workers, many of whom were involved in the plot with Kermit Roosevelt that installed the Shah.The planning for the Coup took place largely in that embassy, but Americans were told this was due to the rise of radical Islam and rise of democracy hating Muslims, which of course was far from the truth.
Part 1 of a video done on Operation Ajax history:
Part 2 of the video:
19.Operation Snow White:Some time during the 1970s, the Church of Scientology decided that they'd had enough.Apparently, the Church of Scientology managed to perform the largest infiltration of the United States government in history. Ever.5,000 of Scientology's crack commandos wiretapped and burglarized various agencies. They stole hundreds of documents, mainly from the IRS. No critic was spared, and in the end, 136 organizations, agencies and foreign embassies were infiltrated.
As early as 1960, L. Ron Hubbard had proposed that Scientologists should infiltrate government departments by taking secretarial, bodyguard or other jobs. In the early 1970s, the Church of Scientology was increasingly scrutinized by US federal agencies, having already been raided by the Food and Drug Administration in 1963. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) claimed it owed millions of dollars in taxes and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) sent agents into the organization. The Church's response involved a publicity campaign, extensive litigation against the IRS and a program of infiltration of agency offices.
The specific branch of Scientology responsible for Operation Snow White was the Guardian's Office. Created in 1966 by L. Ron Hubbard himself, the Guardian's Office's purpose was to protect the interests of Scientology. At the time of Operation Snow White, the Guardian's Office had worldwide headquarters (Guardian’s Office WW) located at Saint Hill Manor in England. Headquarters in the United States (Guardian’s Office US) were in Los Angeles, California. A smaller office also existed in Washington, D.C. (Guardian’s Office DC) and other cities throughout the United States. Each of the Guardian Offices had five bureaus including the Information Bureau which oversaw the infiltration of the government. L. Ron Hubbard oversaw the Guardian's Office, though it was Mary Sue Hubbard, his wife, who held the title Commodore Staff Guardian.
Several years later, in 1973, the Guardian's Office began a massive infiltration of governments around the world, though the primary target of the operation was the United States. Worried about Scientology’s long term reputation, the Guardian’s Office decided to infiltrate Interpol in order to obtain documents relating to Scientology, as well as those connecting L. Ron Hubbard to criminal activity. This duty was handed by Jane Kember to Henning Heldt and his staff.
Around this time L. Ron Hubbard himself wrote Guardian Order 732, which called for the removal and correction of “erroneous” Scientology files. It is here that Operation Snow White has its origins. Though the order called for this to be achieved by legal means, this would quickly change. Hubbard himself would later be named by federal prosecutors as an "unindicted co-conspirator" for his part in the operation. Though extensive records of his involvement exist, many Scientologists claim his directives were misinterpreted by his followers.
Operation Snow White would be further refined by Guardian Order 1361. Addressed from Jane Kember to Heldt, Duke Snider, and Richard Weigand, GO 1361 called for, amongst other things, an infiltration of the Los Angeles and London offices of the IRS, and the Department of Justice.
While the order was specific to the IRS, the Guardian’s Office was soon recruiting their own field agents to infiltrate other governmental offices, including the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the U.S. Coast Guard intelligence service, and the National Institute of Mental Health, among others, as well as the American Medical Association. The program called for rewards to be given for successful missions carried out by Scientologists.
Other planned elements of the operation included petitioning governments and the United Nations to charge government critics of Scientology with genocide, on the theory that official criticism of the group constituted "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction". One of the sentencing memoranda in the case also noted that, contrary to what the defendants claimed, the programs planned by the Guardian's Office were not restricted to trying to remove "false reports" but included plans to plant false information—for instance, planting false records about "a cat with a pedigree name" into US security agency computers so that later "the creature holds a press conference and photographic story results." The purpose of this plan was "to hold up the American security to ridicule, as outlined in the GO by LRH."
The start of 1974 saw a Michael Meisner appointed Assistant Guardian for Information in the District of Columbia (AG I DC). Meisner’s responsibilities now included the implementation of all Information Bureau orders, programs, and projects within the DC area. Meisner’s supervisor at this time was Duke Snider, the Assistant Guardian for DC, or AG DC. This was the highest position in Washington’s GO office.
In July 1974 Meisner was ordered by Duke Snider to implement the previously written plan to obtain Interpol documents, which were then located in the U.S. Department of the Treasury. Meisner had more to do than just this, though, as by August he was also taking directions from a Cindy Raymond, the GO's Collections Officer for the US, who ordered Meisner to assist her in finding a loyal Scientologist agent to gain employment at the IRS headquarters in Washington DC. This employee was to steal all documents dealing with Scientology, especially those involving current litigation by Scientology against the government. Meisner discussed this with Raymond for a period of a month before interviewing various Scientologists with no luck. A month after the order had been given, Raymond informed Meisner that she had selected Gerald Wolfe.
20.Operation Gladio:Gladio is a code name denoting the clandestine NATO "stay-behind" operation in Italy after World War II, intended to continue anti-communist resistance in the event of a Warsaw Pact invasion of Western Europe. Although Gladio specifically refers to the Italian branch of the NATO stay-behind organizations, "Operation Gladio" is used as an informal name for all stay-behind organizations, sometimes called "Super NATO".
The role of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in sponsoring Gladio and the extent of its activities during the Cold War era, and its relationship to right-wing terrorist attacks perpetrated in Italy during the Years of Lead and other similar clandestine operations is the subject of ongoing debate and investigation. Italy, Switzerland and Belgium have had parliamentary inquiries into the matter.What can we prove about that role?Thousands of documents, depositions and testimony as well as recorded conversations and admission by the highest levels of government in Italy.That’s about as credible as it gets, regardless of the CIA’s adamant denial it ever happened. What took place?The shooting of innocent civilians, terrorism and assassinations all blamed on leftist communists were actually apart of well coordinated, “black operations.”Black operations are typically involving activities that are highly clandestine and, often, outside of standard military protocol.
“The right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing.”Black ops missions often fit into the deniable category, a situation in which there is no claim of responsibility for the action, and/or a false flag operation is used to give the appearance that another actor was responsible, or – most often – black operations involve extensive arrangements so as to be able to hide the fact that the black operation ever occurred. Black military operations, or paramilitary operations, can be used by various secret services to achieve or attempt to achieve an unusually sensitive goal. The methods used in black operations are also used in unconventional warfare. Depending on the precise situation in a given case, and the level of authoritarianism of the national government or other responsible party, some tasks will be conducted as black operations, while there are usually other activities that can be admitted openly.
Black operations may include such things as assassination, sabotage, extortion, spying on allied countries or one's own citizens, kidnapping, supporting resistance movements, torture, use of fraud to obtain funds, use of child soldiers, human experimentation, trafficking in contraband items, etc.Since 9/11, many black operations and long time unethical standings have been approved for legality in the war on terror.In other words, since September 11th, 2001, it is no a longer conspiracy for any of this to occur, a simple decision by a top level military or CIA official is enough, without oversight or even one thread of admission by the Government or Private conspirators.Much of the Black operations today are performed by private contract companies like Blackwater (now Xe).
This is a documentary banned in teh United States that was allowed to air on BBC. It was an investigation into Operation Gladio:
21.The CIA Assassinates A Lot Of People (Church Committee): The Church Committee is the common term referring to the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, a U.S. Senate committee chaired by Senator Frank Church in 1975. A precursor to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the committee investigated intelligence gathering for illegality by the CIA and FBI after certain activities had been revealed by the Watergate affair.The Committee uncovered, among many other things, that the CIA had violated its charter to perform only gathering of intelligence.
For example, the assassinations of Allende in Chile and Mossadegh in Iran. Assassinations against Central and South American leaders and revolutionaries, as well as Africa, Middle East and East Asia.The list was tremendous.They even declassified a “Heart Attack Gun” the Agency had made for the use of killing someone without it being detected.Cancer, car accidents, skiing accidents, suicide, boating accidents, heart attacks, and just plain being shot were common assassination methods.The hearings, although recorded in full in congressional record, the mainstream media and official policies, is still largely not taught in American schools on recent history.The American public still has no idea this was ever actually confirmed or even took place.It is common for people to still refer to any of these assassinations as a joke or made up conspiracy.
Watch the one-minute video below for the description of a former CIA secretary and Congressional testimony on this secret assassination weapon which caused heart attacks.
To watch the revealing 45-minute documentary from which the above clip was taken, click here.
22.The New World Order:This popular conspiracy theory claims that a small group of international elites controls and manipulates governments, industry and media organisations worldwide. The primary tool they use to dominate nations is the system of central banking. They are said to have funded and in some cases caused most of the major wars of the last 200 years, primarily through carrying out false flag attacks to manipulate populations into supporting them, and have a grip on the world economy, deliberately causing inflation and depressions at will. The people behind the New World Order are thought to be international bankers, in particular the owners of the private banks in the Federal Reserve System, Bank of England and other central banks, and members of the Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission and Bilderberg Group.Now, although this conspiracy theory was ridiculed for years, it turns out that the Bilderberg does meet and requests no media coverage.They receive no media coverage.The world’s elite meet every year and it goes largely unreported, for what?
Discussions at the meetings include the economy, world affairs, war and in general, world policy.After the financial collapse, the Bilderberg played a key role in proposing that the world prepare for a new world order and have a standard world currency.This was propsed shortly after by almost all attendees of the Bilderberg meeting.During the 20th century, many statesmen, such as Woodrow Wilson and Winston Churchill, used the term "new world order" to refer to a new period of history evidencing a dramatic change in world political thought and the balance of power after World War I and World War II.
They all saw these periods as opportunities to implement idealistic or liberal proposals for global governance only in the sense of new collective efforts to identify, understand, or address worldwide problems that go beyond the capacity of individual nation-states to solve. These proposals led to the creation of international organizations, such as the United Nations and N.A.T.O., and international regimes, such as the Bretton Woods system and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which were calculated both to maintain a balance of power as well as regularize cooperation between nations, in order to achieve a peaceful phase of capitalism.
In the aftermath of the two World Wars, progressives welcomed these new international organizations and regimes but argued they suffered from a democratic deficit and therefore were inadequate to not only prevent another global war but also foster global justice. American banker David Rockefeller joined the Council on Foreign Relations as its youngest-ever director in 1949 and subsequently became chairman of the board from 1970 to 1985; today he serves as honorary chairman. In 2002, Rockefeller authored his autobiography Memoirs wherein, on page 405, he wrote:
"For more than a century ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents ... to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as 'internationalists' and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure - one world, if you will. If that's the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it."
Thus, activists around the globe formed a world federalist movement bent on creating a "real" new world order. A number of Fabian socialist intellectuals, such as British writer H. G. Wells in the 1940s, appropriated and redefined the term "new world order" as a synonym for the establishment of a full-fledged social democratic world government.In the 1960s, a great deal of right-wing conspiracist attention, by groups like the John Birch Society and the Liberty Lobby, focused on the United Nations as the vehicle for creating the "One World Government", and contributed to a conservative movement for United States withdrawal from the U.N.. American writer Mary M. Davison, in her 1966 booklet The Profound Revolution, traced the alleged New World Order conspiracy to the creation of the U.S. Federal Reserve System in 1913 by international bankers, who she claimed later formed the Council on Foreign Relations in 1921 as the shadow government. At the time the booklet was published, "international bankers" would have been interpreted by many readers as a reference to a postulated "international banking conspiracy" masterminded by the Rothschilds and Rockefellers.American televangelist Pat Robertson with his 1991 best-selling book The New World Order became the most prominent Christian popularizer of conspiracy theories about recent American history as a theater in which Wall Street, the Federal Reserve System, Council on Foreign Relations, Bilderberg Group, and Trilateral Commission control the flow of events from behind the scenes, nudging us constantly and covertly in the direction of world government for the Antichrist.
After the turn of the century, specifically during the financial crisis of 2007–2009, many politicians and pundits, such as Gordon Brown, Henry Kissinger, and Barack Obama, used the term "new world order" in their advocacy for a Keynesian reform of the global financial system and their calls for a "New Bretton Woods", which takes into account emerging markets such as China and India. These declarations had the unintended consequence of providing fresh fodder for New World Order conspiracism, and culminated in former Clinton administration adviser Dick Morris and conservative talk show host Sean Hannity arguing on one of his Fox News Channel programs that "conspiracy theorists were right".
In 2009, American film directors Luke Meyer and Andrew Neel released New World Order, a critically-acclaimed documentary film which explores the world of conspiracy theorists, such as American radio host Alex Jones, who are committed to exposing and vigorously opposing what they perceive to be an emerging New World Order.
Daily Paul Liberty Forum | William Randolph Hearst, who arrived on the scene in 1887, was already in control of the headlines on a day-to-day basis because of his efficient business practice within the industry. He was able to produce his Newspapers at next to nothing by manufacturing the tree pulp used and controlling the channel of production down to his papers, the San Francisco Examiner, and eventually the New York Journal (Which became a leading Newspaper).
He teamed up with Henry Dupont to manufacture the ink used in the New York Journal and the partnership began to grow.
ALONG CAME HEMP
Hemp grows 4 times faster than the timber used for tree pulp by Hearst.
Hemp grows annually and can be grown more times
Hemp produces a better quality paper.
Hemp can be grown in any region of the United States.
Since Hemp grew so fast and it grew in every region, Hearst could not stop the middle class farmer from decentralizing the industry. Hearst knew that he could not provide the intellectual property to keep Hemp from destroying his industry and replacing it with middle class producers.
In other words he was afraid of the free market. He was afraid of us… he had to stop it!
Dupont and Hearst knew then that not many Americans understood the difference between Hemp and Cannabis. So they used it against the Americans by claiming Cannabis will make you rape and kill your sister if smoked, illustrating the dangers of inhaling by using grim reapers in their newspapers with joints. And people believed it!
Time and Time again they would use this propaganda through the New York Journal, claiming that Mexicans bringing Marijuana across the border would sleep with White Wives and take White Jobs. They were also saying this about Black Americans who took up smoking and started the Jazz movement.
Dupont’s banker was Andrew Mellon, Mellon bank of Pittsburgh (5th largest bank at the time). Andrew Mellon had a Nephew, Harry Anslinger. Andrew Mellon financially backed Anslinger and threw all of his weight into convincing the U.S. treasury that Marijuana is dangerous and it should be heavily regulated by way of taxation and prohibition.
The treasury could use a program that would generate that much income for the government so in June of 1930 the treasury gave birth to the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.
Ansligner hated Mexicans, Blacks, and Cannabis. He was on a mission to eliminate all of them. Immediately Ansliger waged war on Cannabis regurgitating claims made by Hearst in his Newspapers. (Success stories followed in the New York Journal).
Then, in 1937 Anslinger approached congress with intent to fully regulate all Cannabis. The entire meeting was comprised of Ansliger making emotional outbursts and attempting to offer evidence, all of which was newspaper clippings out of Hearst’s Newspapers.
With the exception of one congressman, all agreed and the act passed, Marijuana became criminal giving birth to the Drug War.
Not to mention Hearst, Dupont, and Mellon were all filthy rich now and had their hands in official pockets.
But the story doesn’t stop here. Andrew Mellon had to study the enemy, He saw what happened with Alcohol Prohibition and he knew it wouldn’t be long before the public caught on.
Mr. Mellon then financed Pharmaceutical companies through government grants and private equity to try to create a synthetic substitute for the over 60 different medicinal properties Cannabis contains. (They have yet to accomplish this goal)
If you look into the history you will find that fossil fuels would have never existed if it wasn’t for this intervention in the market place.
CANNABIS CAN SUPPLY THE ENTIRE NATION WITH ENERGY ON ONLY 1% OF U.S. LAND. ALL CARBON CLEAN.
(AND REMEMBER IT GROWS EVERYWHERE)
This is where the Federal Reserve comes in. The Federal Reserve System does not want to see the decentralization of resources towards localism because if that were to happen the Fed would lose a stronghold on the liquidity pools it artificially creates. It would also mean they couldn’t use the Carbon Tax to consolidate wealth across the world.
With Cannabis being legal and having over 25,000 uses there would be no way to compete against local and more sustainable banks.
So, the Federal Reserve uses banks like the Mellon to fund the DEA and keep money flowing and keep marijuana illegal. The Fed knows that with Cannabis being legal our GDP would boom but not in favor of large monopolies like the FED, but quite the contrary.
This is why I always say...the day we legalize it is the day we end the FED!
Editor: It's official, the hijacking is complete. The Tea Party movement has been usurped by the GOP, this is confirmed by the $100,000 payout for Sarah Palin. The history of the movement has been hidden from the public by the MSM just like George Orwell's 1984. From the Guardian :
"The term tea party, a reference to the Boston Tea Party, is credited to a commentator on CNBC, Rick Santelli, who launched a tirade last February against the Obama administration's financial plans and called for a display of outrage which he called a Chicago tea party."
Below is an excerpt from a article I wrote describing the hijacking in its infancy.
I guess you could say that the media's new catch phrase these days is Tea Party. A couple of years ago, this tradition was reborn by a nationwide grassroots movement of non-partisan freedom lovers, who are seeking a return to the Constitutional roots of this nation.
Arising first as the Ron Paul Revolution and now the Campaign For Liberty, this diverse and tech-savvy group of creative individuals reignited the idea of liberty in the political collective consciousness.
The problem is that the Orwellian newspeak media has left out the fact that the Ron Paul Tea Parties started under the Bush administration, and were not focused on attacking Bush, but instead were exposing the unconstitutionality of the Fed, IRS, NAU, Patriot Act, NAFTA, wars for empire and the list goes on. Our enemy is not a politician, political party or pundit, it's the corporate governmental mechanisms of control that expand no matter who is in office.
This blatant hijacking of the patriot, truth and liberty movement, should be further confirmation that the majority of Americans are waking up and shaking off the two-party propaganda tool that is used to divide and conquer. New counter measures had to be taken by the ruling oligarchy to prevent any further movement outside their control system. The current financial crisis has lifted the veil just enough for some light to pass through, so they need to apply a new layer of filters to conceal the truth behind the veil.
Huffington Post | This weekend marks the controversial National Tea Party Convention in Nashville at the elaborate Gaylord Opryland Hotel. This convention has been dogged by vocal opposition from other aspects of the Tea Party movement and the departure of major sponsors as well as some speakers over financial aspects of the event. The kickback has led some pundits to suggest that the convention has put the entire Tea Party movement in jeopardy.
Many in the Tea Party movement became disenchanted with the National Tea Party Convention after it was revealed that the company behind the convention is a "for profit" entity. Tea Party acolytes became more upset with the high price of admission to attend. To participate in either the convention proper or Sarah Palin's speech costs $349 plus fees; for both, $549.
American Banking News | Saying the Federal Reserve is the only institution in the world he knows of that isn’t audited, famed investor and author Jim Rogers said in an interview, “It’s incomprehensible to me these people are saying they have no reason to be audited — they must have done something wrong, must have something to hide.”
This was in response to a question of whether Rogers supported the bill by Ron Paul to audit the Federal Reserve.
Rogers strongly states that we not only need to audit the Fed, but like Ron Paul, we need to completely abolish it as well. Reasons for that, according to Rogers, are: “The Fed is printing huge amounts of money, which we’ll have to pay for sometime. The Fed is borrowing gigantic amounts of money on their balance sheet…the numbers are so staggering that this is going to have ramifications before too much longer.”
This practice of course has been the systemic problem of having a Federal Reserve in the first place, as it has been employing these practices since its inception, albeit on a smaller level than the extraordinary measures they’ve taken recently.
In an amazing statement most of us can only hope fervently for, Rogers says that he believes the Federal Reserve won’t need to be abolished by anyone, as it’s “going to abolish itself” sometime in the next several years. He particularly points out the horrendous performances of current Fed chairman Ben Bernanke as well as his predecessor Alan Greenspan, who in reality set up the circumstances which Bernanke responded to so poorly.
As Rogers states in the interview, he has found no credible reason for the Federal Reserve not to be fully audited, and suggests the idea of an independent Fed being interfered with by Congress concerning monetary policies, especially interest rates, is for the most part nonsense and irrelevant to the action if it does happen.
Again, there is probably much the Federal Reserve is hiding to resist the audit so much. If not, you would think they would embrace it gladly to allow its great decisions and monetary genius be seen by us all. That’s of course not the case, and is not going to happen unless it’s forced upon them by the government, which looks increasingly like it will be.
When pressed on whether the shutting down of the Federal Reserve would be devastating to the economy, Rogers stated: “Yes it would be complicated and painful for a while. But I’d rather find out they’re bankrupt today than to find out in five or 10 years — when they’ve had another 10 years of this madness where they’re printing even more money [and] taking out even more debts in our name.”
Rogers also reminds us that there have been several other central banks in the history of the United States, and when they were shut down we kept on going successfully without them. There’s no reason to suspect it would be any different without the Federal Reserve as well.
Reuters | The U.S. government racked up a gaping shortfall in the first two months of this fiscal year after posting a record budget deficit last year, congressional analysts said on Friday.
In October and November, the government spent $292 billion more than it took in, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said.
That was even worse than the same period last year, when the government was on its way to posting a record $1.4 trillion deficit for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30.
The federal budget has been battered by the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s, as tax revenues have plunged and spending on safety-net programs like unemployment insurance have skyrocketed.
Ron Paul's economic views, long dismissed by the political establishment, seem to be resonating more broadly.
Politico | Is libertarian rock star and Texas Republican Ron Paul going mainstream?
He’s got everyone from South Carolina Republican Sen. Jim DeMint to Minnesota moderate Democrat Collin Peterson to California liberal Barbara Boxer on his side in his audit-the-Fed crusade. He’s drawing liberal support in his push to rein in the cost of the war in Afghanistan. Senate candidates like Democratic Rep. Paul Hodes of New Hampshire are finding Dr. No’s populist economic anger to be useful in the campaign, echoing Paul’s criticism of the Federal Reserve.
Even Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) is delivering backhanded compliments, taking credit for merely allowing a vote on Paul’s amendment to audit the central bank.
This convergence of odd bedfellows, and the economic angst that’s driving it all, is yet another signal that President Barack Obama is going to have more and more trouble keeping his traditional Democratic allies on his side as the economic debate continues. It seems that everyone is looking for something new to latch on to in the economic debate — even if those ideas belong to one of the more eccentric members of Congress.
“This brought people together [from] the whole political spectrum, from progressives and liberals and libertarians and conservatives. ... they all came together. That, to me, is what is really so important,” said Paul, who has been introducing his audit-the-Fed measure since the early ’80s.
After so many tries, this time Paul’s measure attracted 313 co-sponsors in the House, representing every possible point on the political spectrum. It also scored a strong vote in a key committee and has a companion in the Senate that’s supported by a bipartisan coalition of senators.
And Paul’s economic views, long dismissed by the political establishment, seem to be resonating more broadly than just the audit-the-Fed measure, both in the larger financial reform debate and the growing concern about the cost of continuing the war in Afghanistan.
American Banking News | In a recent and unusual action, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke wrote a column in a newspaper, in this case the online version of the Washington Post, which attempted to undermine the legislation initiated by Ron Paul to at minimum require that the Federal Reserve be fully audited by the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
Some of Bernanke’s thoughts are actually very disturbing, and confirm more than ever why the Fed needs to be audited. Let’s look at several comments he made in the column.
In reference to auditing the Fed and taking away its regulatory powers, Bernanke said this:
“These measures are very much out of step with the global consensus on the appropriate role of central banks, and they would seriously impair the prospects for economic and financial stability in the United States.”
What Bernanke subtly attempts to do here is take the issue out of the authority of the United States in the minds of the readers and place it in the authority of “global consensus.” Who cares about global consensus, and what he also calls the “appropriate role of central banks?”
With the fact that Bernanke continually refers to this in a variety of ways when attempting to defend the Federal Reserve in its ‘doing business as usual,’ it seems to strike at the core of what Ron Paul and many of us are concerned about, and that is what types of entangling alliances and agreements are being made with foreign governments and foreign central banks without lawmakers or the American people knowing what they are. This, probably more than anything else, is what Bernanke wants to keep hidden.
Essentially how I read it, is Bernanke is attempting to make it look like this isn’t an American issue but some type of global issue. Bernanke is wrong! If this isn’t an American issue than what is? It already unveils that Bernanke has something to hide in this regard, and global governance through these financial alliances seems to be a big part of it. All Americans should be concerned about that.
The other major attempt at manipulation Bernanke attempted to persuade people with the column was to make it seem like all of this is just a result of the public being angry with the Federal Reserve for not handling the current economic crisis in a way that it would largely be avoided.
“The Federal Reserve, like other regulators around the world, did not do all that it could have to constrain excessive risk-taking in the financial sector in the period leading up to the crisis,” Bernanke said.
Bernanke goes on to say that once they got hold of things they then came to the rescue and made things much better for us (laughter in the background).
The problem with Bernanke’s idea that lawmakers are simply responding to the anger of the public over the situation is completely false, at least in how it relates to Ron Paul and auditing the Fed. It could possibly true with Chris Dodd’s proposal to create a super agency to regulate monetary policy, as he’s behind in the polls in his bid for reelection, and has been perceived as a friend of the big banks for a long time.
But with Ron Paul, he has been on the record for decades concerning not only reining in the Federal Reserve, but ending it altogether. So to make it look like this is something new, is completely dishonest on the part of Bernanke, who knows full well the beliefs and thoughts of Ron Paul on the matter over the decades.
Finally, Bernanke plays the old card of political independence, which it seems he is the only one concerned with. Bernanke writes that if the public perceives Congress is influencing interest rate decisions, it “would undermine the confidence the public and the markets have in the Fed to act in the long-term economic interest of the nation.”
There’s no other way to say it, that is just a bunch of hot air. The vast majority of the public has no idea how all of this works, and to say they’re walking around thinking with dread that Congress could be influencing interest rates, is bizarre to say the least.
For the markets, they just try to figure out what the near-term interest rates will be to make base their decisions on. Those rates don’t always match the expectations of the markets, and so aren’t that important or as valuable for market confidence as Bernanke is attempting to make us think.
The bottom line to me is Bernanke knows the proposal by Christopher Dodd probably will have little if any possibility of passing into law. What he fears is the bringing to light of the activities of the Fed, which the full audit from the Government Accountability Office would do, through the legislation presented by Ron Paul, which has unprecedented support. This is why he’s attempting to confuse and distort the issue, in order to take our focus away from what needs to be done.
StreetInsider| A key House panel approved the Paul-Grayson Amendment by an overwhelming 43-26 Thursday afternoon, which will give watchdogs new authority to audit the Federal Reserve.
Here is a summary of the Paul-Grayson Amendment:
Dear Financial Services Committee Colleague:
It is encouraging to see the issue of Federal Reserve transparency receiving so much attention during this current markup. Today we plan to offer an amendment to the Financial Stability Improvement Act that expands on the many extant proposals to enhance Federal Reserve transparency. Our amendment is based on HR 1207, the Federal Reserve Transparency Act, which has broad bipartisan and grassroots support. The bill is cosponsored by 309 Members of Congress, including all Financial Services Committee Republicans and 13 Financial Services Committee Democrats.
The amendment removes restrictions on GAO audits of the Federal Reserve, as HR 1207 does, but makes a few changes to take into account some of the concerns that the Fed has made known in public testimony. Specifically, the Paul/Grayson amendment:
* Exempts unreleased transcripts and minutes from meetings of the Board and FOMC to address the Fed’s concerns that free and open debate in their meetings would be stifled.
* Sets a 180-day time lag for release of details of market actions the Fed has undertaken, to address the Fed’s concerns that Congress or GAO is second-guessing its actions.
* Removes boilerplate language that allowed GAO to make recommendations on monetary policy and adds a section stating that nothing in the amendment shall be construed as interference in or dictation of monetary policy to the Fed.
Unlike proposals that target the Fed’s 13(3) facilities, the Paul/Grayson amendment opens up the entire $2 trillion Federal Reserve balance sheet to a GAO audit. The Fed’s recent purchases of nearly $800 billion in mortgage-backed securities (MBS) have occurred under the MBS Purchase Program, authorized under section 14(b) of the Federal Reserve Act. This program, which is expected to reach a size of $1.25 trillion, would remain exempt from audit even if all the current 13(3) audit proposals were to go into effect. Targeting facilities that are in the process of being drawn down and that are authorized under a specific subsection of the Federal Reserve while allowing other facilities to spring up in their place is counterproductive to true transparency. All purchases and loans that appear on the balance sheet should be subject to audit, without loopholes for the Fed to evade scrutiny.
More importantly, the Paul/Grayson amendment does not create any additional burdens. Some competing proposals, while making a good effort at expanding the number of 13(3) facilities open to audit, take a step backwards by imposing new restrictions on GAO that are more burdensome than the restrictions currently written into law. We cannot accept these new restrictions. Unlike competing proposals, this amendment amends existing restrictions on GAO audit authority, a necessary precondition for a complete audit. Competing proposals leave these restrictions in place, and even add new ones.
We also reject the false dichotomy between transparency and independence. The Paul/Grayson amendment would achieve the necessary transparency of the trillions of dollars of Fed interventions while keeping Congress from directly intervening in the decision-making process. Independence should not be synonymous with secrecy. We urge our colleagues to support the Paul/Grayson amendment.
Sincerely,
Ron Paul, Member of Congress
Alan Grayson, Member of Congress
Fall Of The Republic documents how an offshore corporate cartel is bankrupting the US economy by design. Leaders are now declaring that world government has arrived and that the dollar will be replaced by a new global currency.
President Obama has brazenly violated Article 1 Section 9 of the US Constitution by seating himself at the head of United Nations' Security Council, thus becoming the first US president to chair the world body.
A scientific dictatorship is in its final stages of completion, and laws protecting basic human rights are being abolished worldwide; an iron curtain of high-tech tyranny is now descending over the planet.
A worldwide regime controlled by an unelected corporate elite is implementing a planetary carbon tax system that will dominate all human activity and establish a system of neo-feudal slavery.
The image makers have carefully packaged Obama as the world's savior; he is the Trojan Horse manufactured to pacify the people just long enough for the globalists to complete their master plan.
This film reveals the architecture of the New World Order and what the power elite have in store for humanity. More importantly it communicates how We The People can retake control of our government, turn the criminal tide and bring the tyrants to justice.
Bloomberg | Central banks flush with record reserves are increasingly snubbing dollars in favor of euros and yen, further pressuring the greenback after its biggest two-quarter rout in almost two decades.
Policy makers boosted foreign currency holdings by $413 billion last quarter, the most since at least 2003, to $7.3 trillion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Nations that report currency breakdowns put 63 percent of the new cash into euros and yen in April, May, and June, Barclays Capital data show. That’s the highest percentage in any quarter with more than an $80 billion increase.
World leaders are acting on threats to dump the dollar, while the Obama administration shows a willingness to tolerate a weaker currency in an effort to boost exports and the US economy, as long as it doesn’t drive away creditors. The diversification signals the currency won’t rebound anytime soon, after losing 10.3 percent on a trade-weighted basis the past six months, the biggest drop since 1991.
“Global central banks are getting more serious about diversification, whereas in the past they used to just talk about it,’’ said Steven Englander, chief US currency strategist at Barclays. “It looks like they are really backing away from the dollar.’’
The dollar’s 37 percent share of new reserves fell from about a 63 percent average since 1999.
America’s currency has been under siege as the Treasury sells a record amount of debt to finance a budget deficit of $1.4 trillion in fiscal 2009.
Foreign companies are starting to say their economies are being hurt by the weak dollar. The economies of Japan and Europe depend on exports that get more expensive whenever the greenback slumps.
ABC News | U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on Tuesday called on the International Monetary Fund to provide rigorous surveillance to spot new investment bubbles and keep country foreign exchange policies in line with goals to rebalance the global economy.
In remarks prepared for delivery to the IMF and World Bank annual meetings here, Geithner said the IMF needed to help police economic and currency policies among the Group of 20 developed and emerging countries.
"The IMF will need to be a truth-teller," Geithner said in the remarks, which were to be delivered by Treasury Acting Assistant Secretary Mark Sobel.
"For the IMF, this means that rigorous surveillance must help us shed light on trends that could lead to the next unsustainable boom," Geithner said. "Under the new G20 framework for strong, sustainable and balanced growth, the IMF must provide forward-looking analysis of whether the world's major countries are implementing economic policies, including exchange rate policies, which are collectively consistent with G20 objectives."
Geithner said the global economy was stabilizing and showing initial signs of recovery but conditions remained fragile. He said the international community had recognized that "the world cannot return to a pattern of uneven growth, characterized by an excessive reliance on a single engine of consumption-led growth, while others relied heavily on external demand."
"First and foremost, the responsibility for tackling these problems rests with sovereign governments, including my own," he said.
Geithner added that the IMF and World Bank needed to enhance their legitimacy and the United States was "delighted" with international commitments for a shift of at least 5 percent in IMF quota share toward "dynamic underrepresented countries" by January 2011 and by a call to shift at least 3 percent of voting power in the World Bank by spring 2010.
Geithner called the World Bank the "centerpiece" of the multilateral development system, but said it will need to focus more on building resilience to crises and laying foundations for prosperity, with a special focus on support for the poorest, Geithner said.
"With concessional financing deploying more quickly, donors must commit to successful and timely replenishments of IDA and the African Development Fund, Geithner said. "When considering the MDB capital requests, we must recognize the importance of maintaining the IBRD's financial soundness."
He said the World Bank must more actively prioritize work on three emerging global priorities: agriculture and food security, support in the most fragile environments, and facilitating a transition to a green economy.
AFP | Europe put pressure on the United States to support a weak dollar as finance chiefs from the Group of Seven richest economies gathered in Istanbul on Saturday for talks on the economic crisis.
"Everyone needs a strong dollar," French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde said on Friday ahead of the G7 talks in the run-up to annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Turkey's biggest city.
The IMF has said that a tentative global economic recovery has begun but has also warned that the economic crisis is not yet over as the financial sector remains badly battered and unemployment in many countries continues to rise.
The G7 finance chiefs were to discuss "the next steps and implementation" of a roadmap agreed at the G20 summit last week for recovery from the worst recession since World War II, a US Treasury official said earlier.
Signs of recovery have pushed down the value of the dollar, which is traditionally seen on currency markets as a safe haven in tough economic times and whose status as the world's main reserve currency has been questioned.
The current state of the dollar has also led some experts to conclude that Washington is now allowing the currency to lose value as a way of boosting US exports by making them cheaper -- a tactic that would weaken European exports.
US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has sought to dampen these fears, saying recently that "a strong dollar is very important" to the US economy.
The dollar meanwhile fell against both the yen and the euro on Friday, going down to 1.4590 dollars to the euro in late trading in London.
"Excessive volatility and disorderly movement in exchange rates has adverse implications for economic and financial stability," European Central Bank chief Jean-Claude Trichet warned earlier this week.
Trichet is set to attend the Istanbul talks, along with finance ministers and central bank governors from the G7 members: Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States.
This grouping of rich global economies has now been eclipsed by the G20 which includes major emerging markets such as Brazil, China, India and Russia.
Leaders at a G20 summit in the US city of Pittsburgh last week agreed the wider grouping was the main forum for international economic cooperation.
Stressing the decline of the G7, IMF managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn disparaged the group in an interview on Friday.
"The old G7 -- I was about to say the late G7," the former French Socialist finance minister told news television network France 24.
G7 meetings were "a bit without substance" and "floating in the clouds with communiques which no longer interest anyone," he added.
The US Treasury official however said the G7 remained "a valuable format for finance ministers" by bringing together "the largest creditors in the system."
Though the meeting on Saturday is of the G7, Russian Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin is expected to participate. The G7 meeting will also be the first for the new Japanese finance minister, Hirohisa Fujii.
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