Friday, February 8, 2013

State Of Collapse

 Leadership is a historical relic - a museum piece.   Money leads all.

A conversation with a good colleague of mine triggered my rant.  He had commented that our country is lacking in leadership.  In reference to Obama's appointments of Chuck Hagel and John Brennan - "I just don't see much in the way of top leadership..."  Here's my response:

"Leadership?  What leadership?  They're just figureheads.  Look at the money behind them?  It's just incredible to me that most people look at these politicians and they think that they're the people creating and implementing policy.  They definitively are not.  They are bought and paid for many times over by big corporate interests and wealthy individuals.  The rest is nothing but a dog and pony show.  The human version of the  Westminster Dog Show.

Take a look at the people Obama has appointed for Secretary of Treasury and the SEC.  You think for one second that if most of the people in this country bothered to look into their backgrounds and Wall Street track records and current Wall Street ties that they would vote for those two people if we could vote on appointments?   No way in hell.  Both Jacob Jack Lew and Mary Jo White are completely conflicted and heavily under the influence of Wall Street. 

Look at our "wonderful" President.  Go re-listen to his 2008 campaign speeches.  He promised to clean up DC and Wall Street.  Not only has he NOT cleaned those sewage pits up, he's enabled them to take even more control of lives and our wealth.  How about the first thing he did after he got elected:  he appointed someone as Treasury Secretary who was a pure lap dog for the big banks AND who was caught cheating on his taxes three god damn years in a row.  Are you kidding me?  The guy in charge of tax revenues is a tax cheat and Obama insisted on putting him in office.  So much for cleaning up the system. 

Our system is so completely sold down the river that watching Fox News or CNN is an absolute complete waste of time.  Pure mental masturbation.  Nothing but American Idol for the class of people who think they have higher IQ's than the masses.  But they don't.  They the same creature as the zombies that slavishly watch Jerry Springer, The View and Dr. Phil.

The Government is irrelevant except to the extent that it's used as a vehicle with which the truly inside elite are raping everyone else.  That and to continue funneling printed money to more than 50% of the population in the form of outrageous entitlements as a means of keeping the masses sedated. Just read through this thorough analysis of RomneyObamaCare:  Must Read Link

The biggest problem with our country is We The People.  We stand idly by while the politicians and business leaders confiscate our wealth.  We watch with disdain, yet with full acceptance, as more and more Americans pile onto the "entitlement" payroll:  8,830,026: Americans on Disability Hits New Record for 192nd Straight MonthLINK

Now, whether or not you think people are entitled to a lot of Government support, someone has to pay for it.  Right now this massive, all-engulfing entitlement spending requires 100% of our taxpayer revenue PLUS additional Treasury borrowing.   That's right, even if we could cut defense spending to zero, this country would still run a big deficit.  Will someone please tell me how we will ultimately pay for this?  Before you answer that question, read this real life accounting of someone who definitively does not need Government support and yet is sucking the system for everything she can.  This account is from a good friend of mine who hangs out at night at a busy Denver Starbucks and has gotten to know a group of people, one of whom is this woman:

Here is that woman I told you about. Middle age woman, with husband and two kids
Husband doesn’t work, one child attends an expensive parochial school (on scholarship), one in public school.  She worked at a local food establishment, but then filed for disability, citing a back problem.  While on disability, she has used the time to complete as many community college courses as possible.  She has obtained student loans to attend this particular community college.  She brags about using some of one of the student loans to buy one child a bicycle.  Had enough money to fly her & her son to Dallas - spending the weekend, so the child could attend a school basketball tournament.  Spends days watching soap operas, then goes out to study every night. Either hangs out at her previous employer (Starbucks), mooching the fare for free, or at a local all night diner – armed with every coupon imaginable.  She manages to drive a nice car. She manages to have weekend getaways with her girlfriends at local casinos.  She is a huge Obama supporter and is adamant that her student loans should be forgiven.  Her son was arrested for egging Romney supporters and she's furious that one woman had the nerve to file charges against her son since “the eggs barely hit her.”
Now, does anyone really think this woman is entitled to disability?  Really?  Does anyone think she's entitled to use student loans to buy her son a bike and finance weekend getaway trips?  This is not an atypical story.  This is what We The People are paying for and eventually will be on the hook for.

This is not going to end well for our country.  The end of Saturday mail delivery is just another smoke signal indicating that the system is collapsing - a slow motion train wreck.  I don't know when, but at some point the train will hit the gas tanker stuck trying to cross the tracks.  If you want to see how this story ends, read or re-read "Atlas Shrugged."

33 comments:

  1. Obama repeals Magna Carta, asserting powers our forefathers denied to Kings

    As the America-that-Once-Was evolves into the quite different New America, the identity of those responsible becomes increasingly clear. It’s us. Our disinterest in working the Founders’ machinery of self-government. Our passive acceptance of Empire and plutocracy. Saddest of all is our abandonment of America’s ideals, the end point of a thousand year-long struggle.

    These things are all seen in our reaction to President Obama’s white paper granting himself powers not seen in Anglo-American history since the Stuart Kings. Limiting the Monarchs’ right of arbitrary arrest and punishment of their subjects took 450 years, from the first tentative agreement in Magna Carta (1215) to its achievement in the English Civil War (1641-1662). Now, with our complaisance, Presidents Bush Jr and Obama have erased much of that progress.

    What would the delegates in 1787 think of today’s America?

    http://fabiusmaximus.com/2013/02/07/obama-kill-list-assassinate-48595/



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    1. Americans are so ignorant of their past. The sovereign rights movement was the main engine of the English Civil War to give individuals their sovereign rights under the common law. This was overthrown and defeated by the bankers support for Cromwell. The French Revolution again took up the war for sovereign rights. The American Revolution led to the French Revolutionairies forcing onto the British Crown (owned by the Dutch banking class) sovereign rights for the American people which they enjoyed for a short period of time. Banking forces within American forced upon an unwilling public a Certificate of Indentured Servitude in exchange for their sovereign rights which is called the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights. These are truely Orwellian terms as everyone from John Locke onwards knows that these so called rights are in fact duties which replaced the populations sovereign rights given by the French Revolutionaries with a slavery agreement. The legal framework of which is the birth certificate or entry visa which are in reality just wharehouse or cargo receipts for slaves. This process was finally completed with the Federal Reserve which made every slave pay a tax directly to the Foreign owned banking masters called the income tax and set the stage for the full introduction of the debt based fiat currency system pioneered in Holland and then England.

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  2. Scary, huh?

    lack of leadership, incompetence, integrity challenged, -a whole bunch of issues.
    I attribute part to the Baby Boomer Generation many of whom think they are really smart (applies to politics and business. What if a President thought he was smarter than everybody else? Hire a bunch of "yes" people.

    I keep on saying, "what a mess". At least we are seeing and experiencing history first hand-that's the upside.


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  3. Great rant Dave, I just read today that Homeland security and the Social Security Admin. just increased their ammunition purchases. Gee I wonder what their going to do with all that ammo ?

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  4. You guys are wired to the extreme...In every society there are those that will take advantage of the system. You are pointing the finger at the wrong person...It is the woman on disability who should be ashamed. Why the fuck are you blaming Obama...By the way I am from Canada and you will see abuse of the system.

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    1. Obama enables the system he vowed to clean up. Entitlement payments, espcecially social security disability, has absolutely exploded since 2008. Same with student loans, which have gone parabolic under him. So has the default rate of student loans and he's making noises about forgiving them.

      Read that link about Obamacare. Obamacare is a complete disaster, especially for smaller businesses, which are the backbone of our economic system.

      I blame all the Presidents since the Fed was founded. They all suck.

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  5. I saw this in the comments section of tfmetalsreport.com . I don't know if it is a true story or not.

    As a Realtor for the past 28 years I thought I’d seen or heard it all… Until now.
    I was showing homes in Pontiac, MI one afternoon recently and showed up at a home at the 4:00 pm time my appointment was scheduled for. After I woke up the homeowner, she let us in and then proceeded to tell my buyers and I that she has already entered into a contract to sell the home on a short-sale. (A short-sale is a sale where the banks accepts less money than is owed on the home). After some chit-chat, she proceeded to tell us that she and her sister (who also lived in the area) were buying each other’s homes via the short-sale process. I mentioned to her that I thought relatives could not be involved in those transactions. She smiled and said “We have two different last names so no one knows the difference”.
    She went on to tell us that each of them owed over 100K on their homes and were in the process of buying each other’s homes for about 10-15K cash. To top it off, they were each receiving $3,000.00 in government provided relocation assistance at the closing.

    My buyers and I were amazed that she was outright admitting to fraud and yet, she continued. She began to tell us that the best part of her scheme was that because they currently were not working that they (both) are now receiving Section 8 Vouchers. I said I thought those were for renters and she said “That’s the best part; me and my sister are going to be renting each other’s homes so we don’t even have to move, and Obama is going to give us each $800.00 a month to pay the rent!” She then picked up a picture she had framed of Obama and did a little happy dance around her living room and while she kissed the picture she was singing “Thank you Obama…. thank you Obama.”

    So here is the bottom line… Both of these scammers got at least $80,000.00 in debt forgiven, $3,000.00 in cash for relocation (when in fact they did not relocate) and to boot, you and I will now be paying (through our taxes) $1,600.00 in rent for each them each and every month…. perhaps forever!

    Is it any wonder why so many people have decided that all they have to do is VOTE and they will be taken care of for life at the expense of the taxpayers? I would not be at all surprised if they are receiving food stamps and whatever other programs are available for anyone who is willing to lie to get assistance.

    These women went from working and paying about $900.00 each in mortgage payments to staying home and getting paid $800.00 each per month to live in the same home they had been living in and all they had to do was lie on a few papers. This craziness has to stop! I’m sure this kind of fraud is going on each and every day all across the country and no one wants to touch the subject of entitlements because they might OFFEND someone or lose a vote or two.

    By the way… she had an almost new SUV in the driveway, three flat screen TV’s and a very nice computer set up in her living room which was furnished entirely with nice leather furniture.

    It’s the NEW ‘AMERICAN WAY’…

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  6. Excellent article and well-written!

    A) I wish, however, to address the quote, "Entitlement payments, espcecially social security disability, has absolutely exploded since 2008".

    A lot of older americans got laid off. Facing age discrimination and no job opportunities, they filed for SSDI or early SS Retirement or retired from their state pension. They had no choice. Either you do or you die. What percentage they represent is unknown but I bet its big. I have been unemployed for almost the 73 total weeks. From day one, the job center told me that I was "too old to hire, too young to retire". I have been to jobs where I sat across from the break room while employees were having their break and no one was over the age of 35. I am 54 years old with two bad knees and a bad right hip but I can work and have an excellent work history. I have arthritis in the thumbs so I can't type 30 WPM but I ran a warehouse all by myself, shipping all over the country through Worldship UPS, FEDEX,etc. We have a lot of Vets that have excellent skills but they can't get hired. So what do we expect people to do? These aren't your "obama-fone" personalities (there are other faces to that word "entitlement"). These were hard-working Americans with many years and skills to their credit. But they don't have a linklin account or a facebook account or let's just face it: they are just DAMN TOO OLD and are behind the times. Sometimes I feel this cattling them into SSDI has to do with Obamacare but it's just a feeling. But corporate world is aiming for the younger generation cause they will be around in 10 years and I might not. That's why Best Buy employees keep looking younger and younger. They should be recruiting from middle school any day now.

    B) Americans have no idea what is going on because:

    1) they don't care. they just want things to get better and return to a "normal" life. TV and Internet sedation is all the crave. Their favorite show is on tonight! Or they gotta post to youtube or write to friends on facebook! When they do find out the real news, it's 6 months to a few years old. And it's easily forgettable to them because they don't understand the implications down the road for them and they could really care less.

    2) they don't know anything about economics and have never invested into anything for long-term wealth. their balance sheet has always looked negative but, since they don't know how to use a simple spreadsheet, they don't even have one so they could care less. It's all scribble down on some piece of paper that gets lost in the car or thrown out in the trash. If all the bills are paid, the rest of the pay is spent anyways.

    3) They don't know history. history is repeating itself. only this time, it's going to be BRUTAL!

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  7. I liken the current system to a cotton picking plantation that existed prior to the War Between the States (call it the Civil War, if that suits you). There are masters who control absolutely everything (think banksters and other assorted oligarchs/plutocrats), there are house slaves who do their masters' bidding (think politicians, judges, mainstream media moguls, etc) and then there are the field slaves at the bottom who toil, bleed and die and who own nothing so that the parasites above them can live the good life (we are the field slaves and we're being ground down into the dust). Warren Buffett was right: it's class warfare and the rich are winning.

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  8. I believe that the sooner this system implodes,the better.
    I worked hard for 30 years and thought I was contributing to
    a worthwhile system. In 2005, (when I turned 50)I headed down the
    rabbit hole......
    Now I am considering food stamps, disability, the whole shiteree just to
    bring this madness down a bit faster. Never thought I would say this, but,
    going on the dole as a form of protest. Bring on obamacare, bring down the system!!

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  9. I concur with Chris Hedges that Obama is a Madison Avenue contrived "brand". A brand well accepted internationally, as the idea of a black president "struggling" against "the system" does very well in Germany and (apparently) elsewhere. It is Hedge's Empire of Illusion that comes to mind.

    As far as true leadership it may be that the last true leader we had as president was JFK. Look where that got him.

    But I don't "blame" Obama for the problems of today, nor do I simply accept that he "inherited" those problems. Both ideas are irrelevant for our debt based dollar reserve international monetary and financial system. Rather, simple mathematics prevails.

    Debt will parabolically expand until the system collapses under the strain of combating debt with nothing more than more freshly issued debt.

    Therein lies the TRUTH IN GOLD. Gold alone will "lead" once it is freed from the high priests of fiat. In essence a new money religion will be born again.

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    1. So God Made a Banker

      http://youtu.be/rCkIgBfP1I4

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    2. And then, GOD HELP US, he went and made a POLITICIAN !!!
      AHHHHHGGGGGGGG !!!!

      Delete
  10. Neil Barofsky Tells Jon Stewart How the Ego and Narcissism of Washington Preserve a Broken Status Quo

    Hope you enjoy this chat. I did, despite its predictably depressing conclusion. Stewart and Barofsky do a good job of conveying how DC works and why that guaranteed “a thoroughly broken financial system” would stay intact.

    Read more at http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/02/neil-barofsky-tells-jon-stewart-how-the-ego-and-narcissism-of-washington-preserve-a-broken-status-quo.html#t5jBscF1rZpbDHXx.99

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  11. The Exterminators
    by PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

    In the 21st century Americans have experienced an extraordinary collapse in the rule of law and in their constitutional protections. Today American citizens, once a free people protected by law, can be assassinated and detained in prison indefinitely without any evidence being presented to a court of their guilt, and they can be sentenced to prison on the basis of secret testimony by anonymous witnesses not subject to cross examination. The US “justice system” has been transformed by the Bush/Obama regime into the ”justice system” of Gestapo Germany and Stalinist Russia. There is no difference.

    In an article available here: Stephen Downs, formerly Chief Attorney with the New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct and Kathy Manley, a criminal defense attorney and member of the New York Civil Liberties Union, report on how the US government destroyed a charity, the Holy Land Foundation, which provided money for feeding the poor and for building schools and hospitals in Palestine.

    The charity, aware of the perils of being based in the US and doing anything for Palestinians, relied on the US State Department and the US Department of Justice (sic) for guidance on where to send humanitarian aid. The charity sent its aid to the same aid committees in Palestine that the US Agency for International Development and the UN used to distribute aid to the Palestinians.

    Injustices are everywhere, the authors admit, so why is this important to you? The answer is that the due process clause of the US Constitution requires that criminal laws give fair notice as to what conduct is prohibited. According to Downs and Manley, the Holy Land Foundation followed the US State Department’s list of designated terrorist organizations and avoided all contact with organizations on the list, but were indicted and convicted regardless. This tells us that federal prosecutors are viciously corrupt and that jurors are so inept and propagandized that they are useless to defendants.



    http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/02/01/the-exterminators/

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  12. You can’t make a burger for 50 pence (08Feb13) (if you’re paying more: 1) you’re buying substitution like horse meat 2) this is primarily a story about inflation & QE in the UK)

    http://maxkeiser.com/2013/02/09/you-cant-make-a-burger-for-50-pence-08feb13-if-youre-paying-more-1-youre-buying-substituion-like-horse-meat-2-this-is-primarily-a-story-about-inflation-and-qe-in-the-uk/

    Think about all the food deals you see...what are they giving you?

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  13. Gold vending machine in Boca Raton may be first of many

    The gold vending machine is back at Town Center of Boca Raton.

    Just outside of Burberry, Tory Burch, Stuart Weitzman and Banana Republic stores in the corridor next to the Brahman Motors Bentley display is a six-foot-tall golden box that dispenses 1 gram to 10 grams of gold.

    Meris Kott, managing director of PMX Gold Bullion, said the machine was placed at the mall Jan. 4 and the company has a year lease. The company used a German machine about two years ago for a trial run at Town Center. This time PMX Gold Bullion Sales, based in Boca Raton and a subsidiary of publicly listed PMX Communities Inc. (OTC BB: PMXO, 7 cents), had its own machine designed.

    Another machine will be placed in a Florida mall in the next few weeks, Kott said. Her goal is to have 10 to 12 machines placed in various malls by the end of June.

    http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/business/gold-vending-machine-in-boca-raton-may-be-first-of/nWHbY/

    lots of South Americans in S. Florida, hmmm?...see Venezuala

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    1. South America Goes Critical: Now Chavez Devalues Currency: “This May Well Be the Lighting of the Proverbial Fuse… Everywhere.”

      One of our insightful readers, Just One Guy, explains:

      This is a REALLY big devaluation.

      The implications here are really not GOOD.

      Venezuela is a smidgen on the map, but as a major OPEC nation, it will have – in short order – BIG implications in the global oil price, say 60 days… no more until the effect hits. In the meanwhile the Venezuelan government will enforce price controls internally while trying to skim the differential off it’s oil sales into the government’s coffers.

      The net effect of this will be a stall in the consumer goods imports since the peoples wages will NOT increase…

      A very short clock is now ticking since this will ripple through ALL of South America in VERY short order…

      This may well be the lighting of the proverbial fuse… everywhere.

      Further ‘Nationalizations’ will begin happening and will spread rapidly throughout the continent… as that happens Europe’s life-blood will trickle to a halt.

      Our investors will be affected too, but Europe’s sole profitable business’s are overseas…many in South America.

      So it begins…

      Argentina and Venezuela, two of the region’s largest commodity exporters, just went critical. It will spread. As we noted previously, nationalization efforts were already under way before this week’s developments.

      http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/south-america-goes-critical-now-chavez-devalues-currency-this-may-well-be-the-lighting-of-the-proverbial-fuse-everywhere_02092013?

      do you think Chavez has a plan for all that gold he took possession of?

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  14. ‘Rain Man’ claims Libor scandal ‘goes much higher’

    In an email the Justice Department released when it settled with UBS, Hayes, admitting his request was a “bit cheeky,” asked a trader to raise the rate in the Libor submission from the trader’s bank. “Anytime I can return the favour let me know as the guys here are pretty accommodating to me,” Hayes wrote. The unidentified other trader replied, “I will try my best.”

    As one of Tokyo’s biggest derivatives traders, Hayes was a coveted customer of brokerage firms that match buyers and sellers. Soon, Hayes roped certain brokers, too, into his Libor-massaging effort, according to the Justice Department. The DOJ said that after discussing the strategy with his UBS boss, he started asking the brokers to help influence other banks’ Libor submissions. In exchange, he routed transactions and sometimes cash to the brokers, according to the Justice Department and other regulators.

    The strategy wasn’t a secret. Each morning at a meeting of UBS’s interest-rate-derivatives desk in Tokyo, Hayes told colleagues which way he planned to push Libor that day, according to the Justice Department. Hayes was so open about his strategy that he would change his status on his Facebook page to reflect his daily desires for Libor to move up or down, said a person familiar with the matter.

    Though generating tens of millions of dollars a year in revenue, he worried his bosses weren’t satisfied. “Have had ok year but management still pushing me for more,” he wrote to a trader at another bank in November 2007, according to the CFTC.

    As Hayes brought in more revenue, UBS loosened the reins.

    The bank let him take so much risk that he could lose up to $3 million for every hundredth of a point rates moved, said people familiar with the matter.

    http://www.marketwatch.com/story/rain-man-says-libor-scandal-goes-much-higher-2013-02-09?pagenumber=1

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  15. For Some Landlords, Real Money in the Homeless

    Willy Machan acknowledges he is a gadfly, someone who writes bristling letters to local officials to get conditions improved in his grim single-room-occupancy building. But he was surprised by what his landlord offered last July to persuade him to move out of the room he has lived in since 1984 and for which he pays $371 a month.

    If you are not happy, I will give you $25,000 cash,” he recalled the landlord’s representative telling him.

    Though barely getting by on Social Security, Mr. Machan, a 68-year-old retiree, turned down the offer, saying he had nowhere else to go. But some of his neighbors in the building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan — where the 71 rent-paying residents share bathrooms and there is no kitchen — told others they accepted similar cash payouts with the excitement of lottery winners and quickly vacated.

    The landlord, Alan Lapes, was clearing out these tenants to accommodate a group of people not often regarded as desirable: New York’s homeless.

    The city’s Department of Homeless Services pays many times the amount the rooms would usually rent for — spending over $3,000 a month for each threadbare room without a bathroom or kitchen — because of an acute shortage in shelters for homeless men and women.

    Indeed, the amount the city pays — roughly half that amount goes to the landlord, while the other half pays for security and social services for homeless tenants — has encouraged Mr. Lapes to switch business models and become a major private operator of homeless shelters. He is by most measures the city’s largest and owns or leases about 20 of the 231 shelters citywide. Most of the other shelters and residences are run by the city or by nonprofit agencies, but his operation is profit-making, prompting criticism from advocates for the homeless and elected officials.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/09/nyregion/for-some-landlords-real-money-in-the-homeless.html?_r=0

    oh those bad poor people...always taking advantage of the wealthy...wait till they privatize soup kitchens with the recycled urinal water they try to pawn off as consommé. Wonder what they'll get for a bowl of that?

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  16. Putin Turns Black Gold Into Bullion as Russia Out-Buys World

    “The more gold a country has, the more sovereignty it will have if there’s a cataclysm with the dollar, the euro, the pound or any other reserve currency,” Evgeny Fedorov, a lawmaker for Putin’s United Russia party in the lower house of parliament, said in a telephone interview in Moscow.

    Gold, coveted by Russian rulers including Tsar Nicholas II and the Bolshevik leader whose forces assassinated him, Vladimir Lenin, has soared almost 400 percent in the period of Putin’s purchases. Central banks around the world have printed money to escape the global financial crisis, sapping investor appetite for dollars and euros and setting off a scramble for safety.

    In 1998, the year Russia defaulted on $40 billion of domestic debt, it took as many as 28 barrels of crude to buy an ounce of gold, Bloomberg data show. That ratio tumbled to 11.5 by the time Putin first came to power a year later and in 2005, after it touched 6.5 -- less than half what it is now -- the president told the central bank to buy.

    During a tour that November of the Magadan region in the Far East, where Polyus Gold International Ltd. and Polymetal International Plc have operations, Putin told Bank Rossii not to “shy away” from the metal. “After all, they’re called gold and currency reserves for a reason,” Putin said, according to a Kremlin transcript.

    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-02-10/putin-turns-black-gold-into-bullion-as-russia-out-buys-world.html

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  17. ***Important Notice - King World News Responds To Attack On Its Internet Site

    Powerful entities do not want our global audience to have access to the material that King World News provides. Each time KWN releases an interview from certain key sources, our internet site is attacked. This is the war that King World News has been fighting behind the scenes on the Internet.

    At this time I have decided to break my silence on this subject because of concerns that the latest events could be part of a much broader effort to suppress content on the Internet. The Internet must remain a place for free speech and free inquiry, let's hope it stays that way.

    KWN is protected by the top company in the world in this area and they now have us online with no malware and no problems. If you have been to the KWN Internet site in the past 48 hours, please erase the cookies and cache in your Internet browser and start fresh.

    We have two incredible interviews with Eric Sprott and Art Cashin on King World News this weekend.

    From all of us at King World News we would like to thank all of the readers and listeners for their patience, and the many sites around the world that reached out to assist KWN. With your help we fight on.

    http://kingworldnews.com/kingworldnews/KWN_DailyWeb/Entries/2013/2/10_Eric_Sprott_-_Expect_%24200_Silver_As_Financial_System_Implodes.html

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  18. "The NDAA and the death of America"

    An update from Chris Hedges'supreme court hearing last Wednesday

    http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_ndaa_and_the_death_of_the_democratic_state_20130211//

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  19. More Stealth Inflation as Maker’s Mark Slashes Alcohol Content

    They just ain’t making Maker’s like they used to. According to company, an apparent bourbon shortage has besieged the company leaving it no choice but to cut the alcohol content of their booze from 45% to 42%.

    I’m sorry, but this excuse reeks of marketing spin. What manufacturer decides to dilute their product when they face high demand, rather than just raise the price by 3% and keep the quality intact? In a world where horse meat is increasingly finding its way into “all beef” product, where biotech salmon is soon to hit the streets and where Subway’s foot long sandwiches are less than 12 inches, I’d be willing to bet this is simply just another case of good old fashioned stealth inflation.

    http://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2013/02/11/more-stealth-inflation-as-makers-mark-slashes-alcohol-content/

    STEALTH INFLATION ALLOWS THIS:


    Fed's Yellen: Low prices allow unemployment focus

    WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- The fact that inflation is low allows the Federal Reserve to push forward on its efforts to lower the unemployment rate, said Janet Yellen, the vice-chairman of the central bank, on Monday. In a speech to a conference sponsored by the AFL-CIO labor union, Yellen said the past five years have been "the toughest that many of today's workers have ever experienced." While the job market is improving, the progress has been "too slow," she said. Long-term unemployment has had a devastating impact on workers' mental health and families, Yellen noted.

    http://www.marketwatch.com/story/feds-yellen-low-prices-allow-unemployment-focus-2013-02-11-139109

    BET YOU MRS YELLEN NEVER HAD A HORSE MEAT BURGER....

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  20. Daniel Ellsberg "We Are Apart of A Death Squad Country"

    http://youtu.be/7hxlzCrQJc0

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  21. "8,830,026: Americans on Disability Hits New Record for 192nd Straight Month"

    I talked with a disablitiy agency and they said that the government is making it harder to get on disability and that you have to be currently under a doctor's care. One lady I met at walmart says her daughter is partially paralysized and in a wheelchair and has all the doctor's notes saying she has MS and yet she has been denied by the judge 3 times. Yet another person I knew got it in 6 months for her knees and her knees are better than mine (but she drinks A LOT of beer so maybe that's why). And yet an elderaly lady nearby said it took her 4 years and several denials to get on the system.

    I don't argue with the article that its happening but it's not happening here in Nevada like that.

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    1. The numbers nationally show the facts. Disability awards are increasing at a parabolic rate, the ability of our country to afford disability declines everyday. Notwithstanding what you Nevada agency claims, the numbers show differently. Maybe the people you know not getting it need to hire a lawyer. There's a law firm in Denver that runs late night tv ads claiming at 92% success rate with disability claims...

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    2. The disability advocates I talked to have a high success rate in the 90's as well. The people I talked to that has got or are trying to get disability do have a lawyer. I don't disclaim that disability awards are increasing at a parabolic rate and that the ability of our country to afford disability declines everyday. But when I compare the news I read vs the experiences of the people involved in that sector or industry and the two views do not match, a "red flag" pops up saying there's something funny going on. If it was one or two people, then you simply count the majority but the majority here are saying they are having a difficult time. I wonder if some states are making it easier than others?

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  22. The "Savage Capitalism*" of Goldman Sachs
    Goldman Sachs's morality is based on the value of money:

    "If you make money the center of your value system, then finally you have no value system because money is not a value." (quotation from Georg Simmel mentioned in The Moral Order article by Morris Berman in Counterpunch)


    The Federal Reserve is complicit in this savage capitalism because it, too, has a value system based solely on money. The Fed has supported the insolvent banks and rigged the financial system to profit the banks and corporations as the expense of the population.

    The Federal Reserve policy is "the massive effort to save the financial system [for the] benefit of bankers and plutocrats while 'adequate' fiscal stimulus to solve the economic pain of the populace is nowhere to be found." (from End the Fed by Rob Urie in Counterpunch)

    "However, [t]here is ample evidence of rampant lending fraud to feed the securitization pipelines of the Wall Street banks. (Rob Urie in End the Fed)


    *Savage capitalism is a phrase used by Rob Urie in End the Fed

    http://www.goldmansachs666.com/2013/02/the-savage-capitalism-of-goldman-sachs.html

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  23. Judge Rules Against a Bank - Precedent Could Cost Bank of America Billions
    Published on Feb 10, 2013

    Bill Black: Judge rules that Flagstar, a big mortgage lender that gave "liars loans", is liable to insurance company - same issues at stake in Bank of America case

    http://youtu.be/DfJXxE6iQHA

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  24. Expecting the Unexpected: An Interview With Edmund Phelps

    Q: So rather than live with variability, write a formula in stone!

    A: What led to rational expectations was a fear of the uncertainty and, worse, the lack of understanding of how modern economies work. The rational expectationists wanted to bottle all that up and replace it with deterministic models of prices, wages, even share prices, so that the math looked like the math in rocket science. The rocket’s course can be modeled while a living modern economy’s course cannot be modeled to such an extreme. It yields up a formula for expectations that looks scientific because it has all our incomplete and not altogether correct understanding of how economies work inside of it, but it cannot have the incorrect and incomplete understanding of economies that the speculators and would-be innovators have.

    Q: One of the issues I have with rational expectations is the assumption that we have perfect information, that there is no cost in acquiring that information. Yet the economics profession, including Federal Reserve policy makers, appears to have been hijacked by Robert Lucas.

    A: You’re right that people are grossly uninformed, which is a far cry from what the rational expectations models suppose. Why are they misinformed? I think they don’t pay much attention to the vast information out there because they wouldn’t know what to do what to do with it if they had it. The fundamental fallacy on which rational expectations models are based is that everyone knows how to process the information they receive according to the one and only right theory of the world. The problem is that we don't have a "right" model that could be certified as such by the National Academy of Sciences. And as long as we operate in a modern economy, there can never be such a model.

    Q: Do you get a lot of push-back from the economics profession on your views?

    A: I am far from being the only economist who has critiqued the premise of rational expectations. I’m just the main victim, since that approach drove people away from my approach -– from my emphasis that expectations are a driver of what happens in modern economies. Several economists saw that the emperor has no clothes. Oskar Morgenstern explained that rational expectations would be untenable in the modern world, and Friedrich Hayek got the point.

    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-02-11/expecting-the-unexpected-an-interview-with-edmund-phelps.html

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  25. Mutually Assured Destruction: The Legacy of Timothy Geithner -- and Robert Rubin

    One of the key subplots in any discussion of the TBTF banks is the rescue of Citigroup by Timothy Geithner. First at the Fed of New York and later as Treasury Secretary, Geithner only ever represented the interests of the political group surrounding former Citigroup Chairman and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. The Washington machinations of the Rubin political machine over the past two decades and more are a national disgrace, yet no one in the Big Media speaks of it in a significant way. Robert E. Rubin served as a Director of Citigroup from 1999 until he retired from the Board on April 21, 2009. Rubin also was a Member of the Office of the Chairman and Chairman of the Executive Committee of Citigroup from 1999 until he retired in April 2009. Rubin also served as Chairman of the Citigroup Board from November 2007 until December 2007. Rubin was involved in Citigroup's key strategic decisions and certain key business decisions relating to risk, and was responsible for increasing Citigroup's risk tolerance and use of off-balance sheet vehicles to hide subprime credit risk from the bank's investors. One only need read the first hundred pages of former FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair's 2012 book, "Bull by the Horns," to appreciate that the supposed bailout of the largest names in the banking industry via TARP was really a bailout of Citigroup and its board of directors, including Rubin and Dick Parsons, to name but a few. And now Secretary Geithner is apparently going to park at the Council on Foreign Relations to recharge his political battery and continue to participate in the defense of Wall Street.

    Consider the judgement of Simon Johnson in "The Legacy of Timothy Geithner" published on January 17 by The New York Times: "Rather than moving to change management, directors or anything about the big banks’ practices, Mr. Geithner favored more financial assistance – both from the budget (through various versions of the Troubled Asset Relief Program), from the Federal Reserve (through various kinds of cheap loans) and from all other available means, including insurance for private debt issues provided by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation." With the exit of Geithner from Washington we see Jack Lew, another Rubin minion and a committed Marxist-Lenninist who worked at Citigroup in the lead up to the debacle, taking over at Treasury. The migration of Lew to Treasury can only gladden the hearts of the folks at Goldman Sachs and all of the Rubin tendency on Wall Street, but it portends ill for reform of taxes or the financial services sector. Mark Gongloff writes in the Huffington Post: "The connection to Rubin is particularly troubling, as Rubin was the chief architect of the financial deregulation in the 1990s that helped set the stage for the crisis. Lew was not as close to Rubin as were Tim Geithner or Larry Summers, writes Michael Hirsh in the National Journal. But he at least owes Rubin for his big Wall Street payday." The one thing you can be sure about is that so long as Robert Rubin and his followers are calling the shots at the White House on financial policy, the economy is not going to recover and the bad actors that authored our shared national malaise will go unpunished. Consider the belated lawsuit filed by Obama's completely useless Department of Justice against S&P for losses suffered by insured depository institutions.

    http://us1.institutionalriskanalytics.com/pub/IRAMain.asp

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  26. Disability has indeed become the best strategy for getting ahead in America. These freeloaders see themselves as the new "street-smart" Americans.

    They believe themselves entitled to get every "free" dime thay can. Many of them are NOT disabled at all. You can find many of them working-out at local gymns each day. They laugh at those paying for them.

    Lawyers have built an industry getting these losers free money.

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