This one book will explain more history than any other I have ever read. South Pole Sends.
Phi Beta Iota: The public is starting to do to the Rothschilds, Central Banks, and the Federal Reserve what plane spotters did to CIA rendition flights. We support truth & reconciliation; we do NOT support revenge or expropriation of illicit assets. The ill-gotten gains of the Rothschilds and the banks that front for them, notably the Federal Reserve, are a drop in the bucket compared to the infinite wealth that the five billion poor can create if these parasitic “elites” will just get out of the way. So that is the deal: stay out of the way and keep what you have. Interfere with the emergence of the global community of informed participatory democracy, and the deal is off.
This time the big banks and mortgage servicing companies, with their long, one-sided fine print contracts, may have outsmarted themselves. The newspaper headlines and the network television news are blazing news of the erupting fraudulent foreclosure process. This long-overdue coverage is generating public visibility and suddenly hundreds of thousands of foreclosures may be questioned due to what one commentator delicately called “flawed paperwork.”
Ralph Nader
That is a euphemism for fraudulently executed contracts violative of state laws regarding home title changes. Read full article online….
In what i2 called a “multiyear scheme of fraud and industrial espionage,” Palantir knowingly used fraudulently obtained software to design new intelligence products that would help Palantir compete directly and…
One of the most interesting open source information documents in some time….the day will come when the beltway bandits are brought to justice as well, one can only hope that happens before they go bankrupt.
Economic historians have long recognized that one of the biggest mistakes deepening and prolonging the Great Depression was the establishment of beggar-thy-neighbour policy wars, like trying to protect domestic production by imposing protective tariffs. But these tariffs hurt everyone, because the reduction in world trade depressed demand and production to a greater extent than tariffs protected production. The US contribution to this debacle was the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, passed by Congress and signed into law in June 1930. Smoot-Hawley raised the already high tariffs of the US by an average tariff by 20%. This prompted retaliatory — i.e., beggar-thy-neighbour — tariff increases in about two dozen other countries, thereby contributing materially to a collapse of world trade by two-thirds between 1930 and 1934 and materially worsening the global depression. FDR began to reverse course by reducing tariffs in 1934, but the damage was done. Some historians have argued that nationalistic beggar-thy-neighbor policies in the Depression's early years contributed to the rise in political extremism in Europe and to a lesser extent in the US.
The information contained in the attached report by Professor Michael Hudson suggests beggar-thy-neighbor policies are again raising their ugly heads. This time, they are taking the form of the predatory financial policies evolved by the US and its copycats in the Eurozone, who are trying to handoff the pain to each other and others in the world economy. Whereas Smoot-Hawley related directly to the real economy of production and consumption, and in that sense was at least theoretically related to the well being of the working class, the predatory financing policies described below are both parasitic and speculative. They benefit an already wealthy financial class that does not produce things. Moreover, the pattern of speculation described below may be even more dangerous economically, because, it is being financed by the Federal Reserve's quantitative easing policy, which like TARP, has the effect of postponing inevitable asset revaluations (downward) and debt liquidations, thereby feeding a festering cancer that is threatening to metastasize into a full-blown global debt deflation — i.e., a collapse of demand and consumer confidence via a massive repudiation and/or liquidation of debts.
Ominously, like the 1930s, right-wing political extremism is again on the march, but this time that extremism is evolving more rapidly in the US than in Europe.
I urge you to read the attached report carefully and … fasten your seat belts.
October 11, 2010
A CounterPunch Special Report
“Who Needs an Army When You Can Obtain the Usual Objective (Monetary Wealth and Asset Appropriation) Simply by Financial Means?”
What is to stop U.S. banks and their customers from creating $1 trillion, $10 trillion or even $50 trillion on their computer keyboards to buy up all the bonds and stocks in the world, along with all the land and other assets for sale in the hope of making capital gains and pocketing the arbitrage spreads by debt leveraging at less than 1 per cent interest cost? This is the game that is being played today.
Finance is the new form of warfare – without the expense of a military overhead and an occupation against unwilling hosts. It is a competition in credit creation to buy foreign resources, real estate, public and privatized infrastructure, bonds and corporate stock ownership. Who needs an army when you can obtain the usual objective (monetary wealth and asset appropriation) simply by financial means? All that is required is for central banks to accept dollar credit of depreciating international value in payment for local assets. Victory promises to go to whatever economy’s banking system can create the most credit, using an army of computer keyboards to appropriate the world’s resources. The key is to persuade foreign central banks to accept this electronic credit.
Phi Beta Iota: The obvious global response could be–should be–the immediate nationalization and expropriation of all US corporate “assets” derived from a history of predatory capitalism in the context of virtual colonialism and unilateral militarism. This means that the US stock market will crash again. It could mean that domestically the US could begin to see local movement expropriating land from absentee landlords such as the mega-agriculture companies that have destroyed agriculture, communities, and the land. These are interesting times. Washington is operating on 2% of the relevant information, lacks integrity, and has zero focus on “the public interest.”
There are some problems that neither pure capitalism nor charity can solve. Social capital is a new way of looking at solving those problems. This month, people from all over the world came to SOCAP10 in San Francisco to talk about social capital, and put their money where their mouths are.
Over the next several days we’ll be posting stories about companies that have what is called a “triple bottom line” — where they measure results not just in profit, but also in the business impact on people and the planet.
Our first video focuses on just what the social capital movement is about. We talk with people who run social capital companies such as Firefox maker Mozilla, people who are seeking funding for their businesses, and journalists who are covering the social capital movement.
Many Americans view their country and its soldiers as the “good guys” spreading “democracy” and “liberty” around the world. It just ain't so.
October 8, 2010
Peter Dale Scott, Robert Parry / Consortium News
Alter.Net Editor's Note: Many Americans view their country and its soldiers as the “good guys” spreading “democracy” and “liberty” around the world. When the United States inflicts unnecessary death and destruction, it's viewed as a mistake or an aberration.
In the following article Peter Dale Scott and Robert Parry examine the long history of these acts of brutality, a record that suggests they are neither a “mistake” nor an “aberration” but rather conscious counterinsurgency doctrine on the “dark side.”
For a number of years I reported on the monthly nonfarm payroll jobs data. The data did not support the praises economists were singing to the “New Economy.” The “New Economy” consisted, allegedly, of financial services, innovation, and high-tech services.
This economy was taking the place of the old “dirty fingernail” economy of industry and manufacturing. Education would retrain the workforce, and we would move on to a higher level of prosperity.
Time after time I reported that there was no sign of the “New Economy” jobs, but that the old economy jobs were disappearing. The only net new jobs were in lowly paid domestic services such as waitresses and bartenders, retail clerks, health care and social assistance (mainly ambulatory health care services), and, before the bubble burst, construction.
The facts, issued monthly by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, had no impact on the ”New Economy” propaganda. Economists continued to wax eloquently about how globalism was a boon for our future.
. . . . . .
The wage and salary cost savings obtained by giving Americans’ jobs to Chinese and Indians have enriched corporate CEOs, shareholders, and Wall Street at the expense of the middle class and America’s consumer economy.
Paul Craig Roberts was an editor of the Wall Street Journal and an Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press.
