Great Depression

All posts tagged Great Depression

2 January 2012

by: Jim Hightower, OtherWords | Op-Ed

Not since the Gilded Age, which preceded and precipitated the Great Depression, have so few amassed so much of our nation’s riches.

As an old country saying puts it, “Money is like manure — it does no good unless you spread it around.”

Yet America’s corporate and political leaders have intentionally been shoveling wealth into an ever-bigger pile for those at the top. They’ve gotten away with this by lying to the great majority, which has seen its share of America’s prosperity steadily disappear. Yes, they’ve told us, the rich are getting richer, but that’s just the natural workings of the new global economy, in which financial elites are rewarded for their exceptional talents, innovation, and bold risk-taking.

Horse dooties. The massive redistribution of America’s wealth from the many to the few is happening because the rich and their political puppets have rigged the system. Years of subsidized offshoring and downsizing, gutting labor rights, monkeywrenching the tax code, legalizing financial finagling, dismantling social programs, increasing the political dominance of corporate cash — these and other self-serving acts of the moneyed powers have created the conveyor belt that’s moving our wealth from the grassroots to the penthouses.

Not since the Gilded Age, which preceded and precipitated the Great Depression, have so few amassed so much of our nation’s riches. Having learned nothing from 1929′s devastating crash, nor from their own bank failures in 2008 that crushed our economy, the wealthiest of the wealthy fully intend to keep taking more for themselves at our expense.

Now, however, the people are onto their lies. In an October poll, two-thirds of Americans expressed support for increased taxes on millionaires, an end to corporate tax subsidies, and policies to more evenly distribute the wealth we all help create. This rising egalitarianism shows the true American character, and it’s changing our politics — for the better.

via Shoveling America’s Wealth to the Top | Truthout.

Day 20 Occupy Wall Street October 5 2011 Shank...

Image by david_shankbone via Flickr

Creekside: Chris Hedges smacks down Kevin O’Leary.

Chris Hedges smacks down Kevin O’Leary

Transcript of the interview:

Yesterday CBC continued its ongoing snide, dismissive, and condescending coverage of the third week of Occupy Wall Street with an interview with author/activist/Pulitzer Prize winner Chris Hedges on its “inside the business world” show, the Lang and O’Leary Exchange.  After the by now obligatory opening protestations of puzzlement as to what OWS is all about – “low budget” and “pretty nothing burgers” as blowhard host Kevin O’Leary described it – he then responded to Hedges’ patient explanation by calling him “a left wing nutbar”.

Since Holly Stick kindly left me the link this morning, Let Freedom Rain has posted a link and commentary on O’Leary’s FoxNews behavior but I’m putting the vid and a transcript up here because Hedges’ argument bears repeating and also because, as appalling as O’Leary’s behavior certainly was, even more appalling is that O’Leary affects to be completely unable to follow Hedges’ logic as to what exactly went wrong that caused OWS to happen.
He and other CBC talking heads either don’t get it or pretend not to get it but you got it right away, didn’t you? A more damning example of how completely dissociated our state broadcaster is with the plight of the 99% I cannot imagine.

CBC link here. Transcript follows …

The show opens with a clip of Obama talking about Occupy Wall Street :

“I think it expresses the frustrations that the American people feel that we have the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression, huge collateral damage all throughout the country, all across Main Street. And yet you’re still seeing some of the same folks who acted irresponsibly trying to fight efforts to crack down on abusive practises that got us into this problem in the first place.”

Introduction to Hedges and Occupy Wall Street movement …

O’Leary : So what exactly is everyone complaining about? And also give me a sense of how much momentum this movement has because it’s pretty nothing burgers so far – just a few guys, guitars. Nobody knows what they want – they can’t even name the names of the firms that they’re protesting against – very weak, low budget.

Hedges : I wouldn’t agree with that assessment at all. They pulled thousands of people into the street last night and here in Washington when everyone marched past the Bank of America, they were shouting Shame! Shame! Shame! They know the names of these firms and they know what these firms have done not only to the American economy but to the global economy, and the criminal class who runs them.

Fill-in for Lang : Well Kevin made this point that nobody knows what they want. What do you say to that? We know that this is a very diverse group, there are many different agendas at play … what is the sense you have of what this movement would like to see happen?

Hedges : They know precisely what they want ; they want to reverse the corporate coup that’s taken place in the US and rendered the citizenry impotent and they won’t stop until that happens and frankly if we don’t break the back of corporations, we’re all finished anyway since we’re rapidly trashing the ecosystem on which the human species depends for survival. This is literally a fight for life – it’s that grave, it’s that serious. Corporations, unfettered capitalism, as Karl Marx understood, is a revolutionary force  – it commodifies everything – human beings, the natural world which it exploits for profit until exhaustion and collapse. The bottom line is we don’t have much time left – we are on the cusp of perhaps another major banking crisis in Europe, defaults in Greece, followed by Spain, Portugal. There’s been no restrictions, no regulations on Wall Street – they’ve looted the US Treasury, they’ve played all the games that they were playing before and we’re about to pay for it all over again.

O’Leary : Listen don’t take this the wrong way but you sound like a left wing nutbar. If you want to shut down every corporation, every bank, where are you going to get a job? Where are you gonna work? Where’s the economy gonna go?

Hedges : Corporations don’t produce anything and

O’Leary : Oh really!?

Hedges : No. Financial corporations on Wall Street

O’Leary : Are you driving a car to the protest?

Hedges : They are speculators. I’m talking about the financial institutions like Goldman Sachs. They don’t manufacture, they don’t make anything – they gamble, they use money, and they believe falsely that money is real as we dismantle our manufacturing base and send jobs over the border to Mexico and finally into the embrace of China.

Fill-in for Lang : Well I see that you and Kevin could get into an actually huge argument here.

Hedges : Well you know I don’t usually go on shows where people descend to character assassination. if you want to discuss issues, that’s fine but this sounds like Fox News and I don’t go on Fox News. Either you discuss the issues and … look, you have had very eloquent writers – people like John Ralston Saul in Canada who have laid this out with incredible lucidity – and to somehow attack this critique by calling someone a nutcase engages in the kind of trash talk that’s polluted the corporate airwaves.

O’Leary : Excuse me, let’s debate the issues then. …

Hedges : You were the one who started it – you were not debating the issues.

[crosstalk] …I did not call you a nutcase, I called you a nutbar.

Hedges : You said [I] sounded like a leftwing nutcase .. bar

O’Leary : Yes, bar, nutbar.

Hedges : That’s an insult.

O’Leary : Are you left wing in leaning at least would you say?

Hedges : No, I would say ..

O’Leary : You’re a centrist?

Hedges : Can I finish?

O’Leary : Please.

Hedges : I would say that those who are protesting the rise of the corporate state are in fact on the political spectrum the true conservatives because they’re calling for the restoration of the rule of law. The radicals have seized power and they have trashed all regulations and legal impediments to a corporate reconfiguration of American society into a form of neo-feudalism. And that’s what we’re really asking for – is the restoration of the rule of law.

O’Leary : Ok, but you don’t see any value in the banking system providing a financial infrastructure …

Hedges : That’s not what I said.

O’Leary : I’m asking you.

Hedges : A banking system that functions as a banking system should. And in Canada you do not have a banking crisis because you did not tear down the walls between commercial and investment banks and turn all of your banks into hedge funds. If, instead of handing massive sums of money to CitiBank, Wells Fargo – which are basically zombie banks that still hold tremendous toxic assets – we had created ten regional banks with $10 billion each and leveraged them 10 to 1, people could have been saved. Six million people have been pushed out of their homes because of foreclosures and mortgages. We could have reinvested in communities, small businesses which cannot get credit would have gotten credit. Instead they’re just sitting on the capital and not lending it.

O’Leary : So we’re certainly giving you an opportunity to speak your mind. Just so we can come full circle, what do you suggest should be done with Goldman Sachs specifically?

Hedges : They should be prosecuted. When you shove sub-prime mortgages on families that you know can’t repay it and then you dice up those mortgages as assets and sell them and bet against them through AIG, that’s fraudulent activity.

Fill-in for Lang : Alright, well thank you so much for joining us – we like to hear your thoughts.

Hedges : Well it’ll be the last time.

.

Economic Doomsday: World’s Experts Predict ‘Total Disaster’ | Before It’s News.

Earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis, nuclear meltdowns…all fade into insignificance compared to the coming whirlwind of financial Armageddon many of the world’s top experts see directly ahead.

Economic Doomsday some are calling it. And now—they say—it’s literally unavoidable. Starvation, collapse and death on an Apocalyptic scale.

Will it be as bad as the Great Depression or World War Two? Worse, say many economists. Those events were a walk in the park compared to the total economic collapse coming to scores of countries.

Fed Chairman Bernanke’s monetary policy a ‘complete failure’

What to expect

The world’s financial experts…they almost sound like conspiracy theorists, but these are some of the most respected financial insiders.

Here’s what they expect during 2012: civil wars breaking out all over the planet; currencies collapsing into worthless paper; and roving bands of desperate, violent thugs willing to maim or murder for gold, silver—or even cans of beans.

In essence, anarchy will be breaking out all over as governments desperately respond with tyrannical martial law attempting to restore a semblance of order to masses of frightened, starving citizens.

Widespread food and water shortages are expected and food and energy prices will soar.

Remember everyone celebrating the arrival of the Millennium? People wanting to put the upheavals of the 20th Century behind them? Welcome to the 21st Century.

Find the tallest building and jump off?

Although none of the experts are advising jumping off buildings, they don’t have much advice about anything. Some are at a loss over what to do with their own portfolios let alone any assets others might have. That’s because they predict almost everything will plummet:

Real estate: think it’s bad? It’ll get worse, they warn.

Stocks: the Dow was below 1,000 in 1982. It can reach that again say market pundits.

Bonds: may look good on the surface, but with highly inflated, illusory values they’ll be about as worthless as paper currency. They might be good as pretty wallpaper, for those that happen to still live in dwellings with walls.

Banks: many more will fail including some of the largest in the world. Same goes for some of the top insurance companies.

Annuities: although the principal is guaranteed, the currency they’re based on is not. If it takes a barrel of dollars to purchase a loaf of bread, think what the “money” in an annuity will be worth. That’s right, almost nothing.

         This time the sky IS falling

The 12 disciples of Doom

Here are just twelve of the thousands of financial experts that are predicting the worse case scenario is really going to happen this time. No Chicken Little among them—the sky IS falling.

Ann Barnhardt: The head of Barnhardt Capital Management, Inc.: “It’s over. There is no coming back from this. The only thing that can happen is a total and complete collapse of EVERYTHING we now know, and humanity starts from scratch. And if you think that this collapse is going to play out without one hell of a big hot war, you are sadly, sadly mistaken.”

Gerald Celente: Trends Research guru to Fortune 1000 companies, Celente’s accurately forecasted hundreds of social, business, consumer, environmental, economic, political, entertainment, and technology trends over the decades. What does he see on the immediate horizon? “America is in for a Great Depression and riots by 2012.”

Stefan Homburg: Dynamic leader of Germany’s Institute for Public Finance: “The Euro is nearing its ugly end. A collapse of the monetary union now appears unavoidable.”

And when Europe collapses, America, Russia, and China will soon follow.

George Soros: Evil genius to some, just insightful and hard-nosed to others, Soros says: “Financial markets are driving the world towards another Great Depression with incalculable political consequences. The authorities, particularly in Europe, have lost control of the situation.”

And Soros always puts his money where his mouth is…he’s dumped Europe’s sovereign debt, calling it poison.

Mohammed El-Erian: The PIMCO CEO sees: “These are all signs of an institutional run on French banks. If it persists, the banks would have no choice but to delver their balance sheets in a very drastic and disorderly fashion…Europe would thus be thrown into a full-blown banking crisis that aggravates the sovereign debt trap, renders certain another economic recession, and significantly worsens the outlook for the global economy.”

Since he spoke those words the crisis has accelerated.

Attila Szalay-Berzeviczy: the global head of securities services at UniCredit SpA (Italy’s largest bank): “The only remaining question is how many days the hopeless rearguard action of European governments and the European Central Bank can keep up Greece’s spirits.”

Nigel Farage: An EU Parliament Member: “I think the worst in the financial system is yet to come, a possible cataclysm and if that happens the gold price could go (higher) to a number that we simply cannot, at this moment, even imagine.”

Carl Weinberg: Respected chief economist at High Frequency Economics: “At this point, our base case is that Greece will default within weeks.”

Most economists agree that when Greece fails Italy, Spain, Portugal—and maybe France—will also collapse.

Alan Brazil: A top Goldman Sachs strategist thinks, “Solving a debt problem with more debt has not solved the underlying problem. In the US, Treasury debt growth financed the US consumer but has not had enough of an impact on job growth. Can the US continue to depreciate the world’s base currency?”

The short answer is No.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Brazil believes that “as much as $1 trillion in capital may be needed to shore up European banks; that small businesses in the U.S., a past driver of job production, are still languishing; and that China’s growth may not be sustainable.”

Josef Ackerman: One of the top, most savvy bankers in the world and CEO of Deutsche Bank: “It is an open secret that numerous European banks would not survive having to revalue sovereign debt held on the banking book at market levels.”

Which is something that is happening even as this is written.

Alastair Newton: A world-renown strategist for the giant Nomura Securities, London office: “We believe that we are just about to enter a critical period for the Eurozone and that the threat of some sort of break-up between now and year-end is greater than it has been at any time since the start of the crisis.”

Lakshman Achuthan: With ECRI: “When I call a recession…that means that process is starting to feed on itself, which means that you can yell and scream and you can write a big check, but it’s not going to stop.”

Falling dominoes

Financial experts across 60 countries are publicly warning of the impending global financial disaster. The world’s politicians—and the governments they run—have painted their economies into a corner after decades of mismanagement and now there’s no safe place to hide.

The dominoes will fall like this: the European Economic Union (EEU) has run out of options. Servicing debt with debt is a losing proposition. It’s like flapping your arms wildly after you’ve fallen off the edge of the Grand Canyon.

The EEU’s demise will cause the cracks in America to widen until everything tumbles into the gaping pit.

Massive trade disruption and lack of revenue will cause the Eastern European, the Russian Federation and Chinese economies to collapse.

Africa will become a seething hellhole and Australasia will fall as well. Another warning sign: New Zealand just had its sovereign debt downgraded.

Dead

Most of the world is broke. Dead broke. The stage after being dead broke is just dead.

Countries that are self-sufficient in the Southern Hemisphere might fare better—among them Chile, Brazil and Peru. The irony is not lost there, however, as just several decades ago Brazil had a shaky economy hovering near the bottom of the world’s economies.

Yet if the dominoes do fall, Brazil may emerge as the “last man standing” and the world’s new superpower.

Almost 1 in 6 Americans living below poverty line – Americas, World – The Independent.

By David Usborne, US Editor

Thursday, 15 September 2011

A shantytown in Miami. The figures will dent optimism about a US economic recovery since 2008

REUTERS

A shantytown in Miami. The figures will dent optimism about a US economic recovery since 2008

New figures on income levels released this week confirm what many in the United States struggling to make ends meet already knew: it is a country in the midst of a poverty crisis that will define a generation.

Soaring poverty rates and a decade of stagnation in prosperity levels even for wealthier Americans emerge as the gloomy headlines from a new Census Bureau survey showing that 46.2 million people in the country were subsisting below the poverty level last year, more than has been seen in any year since the surveys began 52 years ago.

Last year an additional 2.6 million Americans fell below the poverty threshold, set at $22,113 for a family of four. Moreover, median household incomes dipped to a level not seen since 1997. The US has not seen such an extended period without growth in household income since the Great Depression.

The Census Bureau statistics amount to a study in gloom and lost optimism. The percentage of Americans living below the poverty threshold was the highest it has been since 1993 – 15.1 per, up from 14.3 per cent the previous year and 11.7 per cent in 2001.

They are also a study in disparity. While Americans in the top 10 per cent of earners saw median household income drop by only 1.5 per cent since 1999, for those in the bottom tenth of the income spectrum it plummeted by 12 per cent. And while 22 per cent of all American children were living in poverty last year, it was true for nearly four in 10 African-American children, and barely better in Hispanic households.

The picture was worse than most analysts had been expecting and is likely to reinforce the growing sense that the country is on a historic losing streak, that any recovery since the 2008 crash has done little or nothing to improve the lot of the majority. It may thus also darken the gloom already enveloping President Barack Obama as he travels the US trying to pitch the American Jobs Act he unveiled last week.

“This is one more piece of bad news on the economy,” said Ron Haskins, co-director of the Centre on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution. “This will be another cross to bear by the administration.”

Lawrence Katz, an economics professor at Harvard, said: “A full year into recovery, there were no signs of it affecting the well-being of a typical American family. By late 2010, the economy was sort of dead in the water, and that’s where it’s remained.”

He told the New York Times: “This is truly a lost decade. We think of America as a place where every generation is doing better, but we’re looking at a period when the median family is in worse shape than it was in the late 1990s.”

Last year, 6.7 per cent of Americans had fallen into deep poverty, living somewhere below half the poverty line. The figures could give Mr Obama and the Democrats in Washington ammunition against Republicans who continue to resist any changes in tax rates that might force the richest Americans to pay a higher share and who support to only parts of the Obama jobs plan.

It is joblessness that lies behind the poverty rates. About 48 million Americans aged 18 to 64 did not work at all last year, the Bureau said. Some may have foregone work by choice, but among those who tried and especially those now among the growing ranks of the long-term unemployed, the difficulties only multiply as their homes are foreclosed on and health insurance premiums are beyond their reach.

US poverty in numbers

48,000,000 Americans aged 18 to 64 did not work at all last year.

40 per cent of African-American children living in poverty.

46,200,000 people in the US in poverty this year, up by 2,600,000 on 2010.

$22,113 Official poverty line for a family of four in the US.

The Marijuana Conspiracy – The Truth why Hemp is illegal. – YouTube.

Yearly over 1.5 million people  are arrested for pot in the US!
It all began long ago, in the 1900′s, when more than a million Mexican laborers poured into the Southwest, taking jobs that were in short supply already. Since this was during the Great Depression, Americans began blaming the immigrants for everything. Since many of these Mexicans liked to smoke marijuana, it wasn’t long before Marijuana was blamed for everything from crime to poverty. It wasn’t long and pot became pulic enemy number one. 
California, nine States passed legislation outlawing immigrant populations from smoking pot between 1906 and 1927. During this time, one senator told the Texas legislature: “All Mexicans are crazy, and this stuff (pot) is what makes them crazy.”
Criminalization Moves East

After 1930, anti-pot laws spread to the eastern states, but by then the government expanded to include African-Americans involved in jazz, making them their demographic target user. Harry Anslinger, the first director of the newly established Bureau of Narcotics told Congress in 1937: 

“There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the U.S., and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, results from marijuana usage. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others.”
Anslinger’s racist and biased remarks was regularly published in newspapers owned by William Randolph Hearst. Considering Hearst owned considerable timber interests, many believe to this day, that his support of the anti-hemp initiative was really because he feared hemp-based paper would end up replacing tree-based paper for newspaper contracts. Unfortunately, the infant hemp industry seemed to threaten these rich men’s monopoly in the pulp and paper industry. In fact, in 1937, Popular Science predicted that hemp would become a billion dollar industry. Jack Herer concluded in 1985 that the DuPont corporation had plenty to do with the criminalization of cannabis in his book, The Emperor Has No Clothes (available for free as an ebook from AssEtEbooks.com), pointing out that DuPont owned the patent for creating paper from wood pulp, which would have seriously been threatened by hemp based pulp.
The War on Drugs
Whether Anslinger was on the take by DuPont doesn’t really matter. He was ambitious and saw the fear of marijuana as his ticket. The Encyclopedia of American Civil Liberties wrote: “William Randolph Hearst, whose papers led the fight, offered Anslinger space in his papers and magazines, and Anslinger gladly availed himself of the opportunity. He published one article after the other with scare stories warned against the dangers of hemp.

Anslinger was instrumet in having the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 passed, making the possession or transfer of cannabis illegal throughout the U.S. In the 1969 Supreme Court case Harvard professor turned LSD advocate, Timothy Leary vs. United States, this law was declared unconstitutional. Effectively Congress repealed the Tax Act and replaced it with the Controlled Substance Act of 1970, keeping pot illegal.

With propaganda calling cannabis the great corrupter of youth, alcohol consumption became the number two cause of death, after lung cancer.

Today, due to education about the dangers of their use, alcohol and tobacco consumption is dropping. And although marijuana consumption peaked about twelve years ago, it is again on the rise, particularly among today’s youth, in spite of anti-pot propaganda. Considering new studies have completely overturned the gateway myth surrounding marijuana (check out my article, New Research Suggests Marijuana is NOT Gateway Drug as Believed), it is indicated that marijuana is less harmful than alcohol.

Still, the media would rather not publish such information, for fear of advocating marijuana use. Instead, it continues to publish anti-marijuana propaganda, naming it drug abuse education, and saying it is necessary to warn people of the dangers of drug abuse. Education such as this, no matter how well intentioned, will not prevent use, abuse or addiction. 
Surveys suggest that 41% of Americans have tried marijuana and that 52% of Americans now favor legalization.  
Regardless of marijuana’s growing acceptance, most of our elected officials still won’t come out of the closet to support the use of medical marijuana because they don’t want to appear pro-legalization. They still believe this as political suicide, though I believe that this could actually produce a winning ticket.
If Marijuana were Legalized America might not even Notice
Should the legalization of marijuana ever be passed, many experts feel mainstream America might not even notice the difference. Studies and statistics show that society would not fall apart if marijuana were legalized. Few would smoke more pot, commit more crimes or be to lazy to go to work. Only the nearly 900,000 people who are arrested for pot each year will be spared a tremendous amount of pain.
However, things won’t change anytime soon. Pot’s continued criminalization has been championed, under and over the table by the alcohol, tobacco and pharmaceutical industries, the prison-industrial complex and many law enforcement agencies,  all of which have  something to loose should marijuana ever be legalized.
And so marijuana remains illegal.
Opposing Industries
The idea that alcohol and tobacco companies would oppose looser restrictions on marijuana may seem ridiculous. Both industries are in the business of making people feel good, after all. However, research discovered that pot is more a substitute for alcohol and tobacco than a complement.

Amanda Reiman, a UC Berkeley social scientist, published a 2009 study in the Harm Reduction Journal that 40 percent of her patient population had substituted cannabis for booze somewhere down the line, worrying tobacco and alcohol companies about losing market share to marijuana.

The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, otherwise known as, NORML, used a Freedom of Information Act in 1991, requesting to examine the nonprofit that provides anti-drug resources to parents funding called the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. They discovered that half of the organization’s capital came from the alcohol, tobacco and pharmaceutical industries!

In a CNN interview about a California Beer and Beverage Distributors $10,000 donation to Public Safety First, an organization fighting against California’s Prop 19, Mason Tvert, executive director of SAFER (a Colorado-based pro-pot advocacy group), said: 
“Every objective study on marijuana has concluded that it’s a far safer substance than alcohol. Clearly what we’re seeing here is that the alcohol industry is trying to prevent competition. They realize that marijuana is the next most popular recreational drug after alcohol and they want to insure the booze keeps flowing and the pot does not.”
However, there are those who feel that these industries are actually playing both sides of the fence, considering that no one is better positioned to start selling legal marijuana than the alcohol and tobacco industries.
Pot Arrest Statistics

Marijuana arrests are close to a record high in spite of continued efforts to control its smuggling into the United States and to eradicate its cultivation domestically. In 2009 alone, more than 1.7 million people were brought in on marijuana-related charges, with over half being arrested for simply smoking pot. 

According to a report by Drug Science public policy analyst Jon Gettman, enforcing America’s pot laws costs taxpayers $10.7 billion yearly. And that doesn’t count the strain on our criminal justice system or the disruption of the lives of those who find themselves in the criminal justice system with a record for smoking pot. Although lately even some police organizations have spoken out for the legalization of marijuana, “No group is more opposed to the legalization of marijuana than law enforcement,” said NORML spokesman Allen St. Pierre. “They aren’t just arguing for preserving the current status quo—they want stiffer penalties and more restrictions and the reason is simple: it’s job security.” At least 30 percent of the work of law enforcement currently revolves around marijuana prohibition, with pot accounting for more than 50 percent of all drug arrests according to Allen St. Pierre. Although I’m sure there are plenty of police associations accross America that oppose the legalization of marijuana, maybe even actively lobby to keep it illegal, there are also some police groups actively speaking out for the legalization of marijuana, the most prominent of which is probably, L.E.A.P., or Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. LEAP is made up of current and former members of the law enforcement and criminal justice communities who are speaking out about the failures of our existing drug policies.
If you want to do a comprehensive examination of the cannabis issue, I strongly recommend you read, Otherwise Law-Abiding Citizens: A Scientific and Moral Assessment of Cannabis Use, as Matthew Stolick is highly accurate in his scientific analysis, offering a truly interdisciplinary look at this highly political issue, he clearly articulates the reasoning behind the categorical rejection of legal cannabis use by the United States and other nations.
The Global Commission on Drug Policy says America’s War on Drugs is a total failure. In a new initiative, the Commission has made some important new, gamechanging recommendations in its Drug Policy Report (read my article, The Global Commission on Drug Policy says War on Drugs is Total Failure) on how to bring more effective control over the illicit drug trade. You may also want to check out my articles Is Marijuana really the Wonder-Drug that could Help Millions or actually a Menace of Society?, New Research Suggests Marijuana is NOT Gateway Drug as Believed and Why Parents Should Support the Legalization of Marijuana on my Addicts Not Anonymous blog. When will America say, enough already, lets end this futile War on Drugs that’s never going to work and put the cartels, smugglers and local dealers out of business? What is it even the business of our government to tell us what we can and cannot put into our own bodies? When where do we draw the line of our personal freedom? If you are like me, and you’ve have had enough of the War on Drugs, then do what you can to promote peace. Contact NORMAL, write your Congressman or hold a rally in your town. I suggest you download from, AssEtEbooks.com for free and without obligation, How to Coordinate a Campaign for Change, a practical guidebook for coordinating campaigns for real change, from forming a campaign group, recruiting, inspiring and motivating your members to lobbying officials, dealing with the media and writing speeches – in short everything you will need to achieve real, positive steps towards the legalization of marijuana.

If you have any thoughts or beliefs you would like to share with Conspiracy Watch readers, please feel free to leave a comment bellow.

Two men walking along a dusty depression-era road, USA

Dust-bowl refugees walk towards Los Angeles during the Great Depression. House prices have now fallen further than in the 1930s. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

America clocked up a record last week. The latest drop in house prices meant that the cost of real estate has fallen by 33% since the peak – even bigger than the 31% slide seen when John Steinbeck was writing The Grapes of Wrath.

Unemployment has not returned to Great Depression levels but at 9.1% of the workforce it is still at levels that will have nerves jangling in the White House. The last president to be re-elected with unemployment above 7.2% was Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The US is a country with serious problems. Getting on for one in six depend on government food stamps to ensure they have enough to eat. The budget, which was in surplus little more than a decade ago, now has a deficit of Greek-style proportions. There is policy paralysis in Washington.

The assumption is that the problems can be easily solved because the US is the biggest economy on the planet, the only country with global military reach, the lucky possessor of the world’s reserve currency, and a nation with a proud record of re-inventing itself once in every generation or so.

All this is true and more. US universities are superb, attracting the best brains from around the world. It is a country that pushes the frontiers of technology. So, it may be that the US is about to emerge stronger than ever from the long nightmare of the sub-prime mortgage crisis. The strong financial position of American companies could unleash a wave of new investment over the next couple of years.

Let me put an alternative hypothesis. America in 2011 is Rome in 200AD or Britain on the eve of the first world war: an empire at the zenith of its power but with cracks beginning to show.

The experience of both Rome and Britain suggests that it is hard to stop the rot once it has set in, so here are the a few of the warning signs of trouble ahead: military overstretch, a widening gulf between rich and poor, a hollowed-out economy, citizens using debt to live beyond their means, and once-effective policies no longer working. The high levels of violent crime, epidemic of obesity, addiction to pornography and excessive use of energy may be telling us something: the US is in an advanced state of cultural decadence.

Empires decline for many different reasons but certain factors recur. There is an initial reluctance to admit that there is much to fret about, and there is the arrival of a challenger (or several challengers) to the settled international order. In Spain’s case, the rival was Britain. In Britain’s case, it was America. In America’s case, the threat comes from China.

Britain’s decline was extremely rapid after 1914. By 1945, the UK was a bit player in the bipolar world dominated by the US and the Soviet Union, and sterling – the heart of the 19th-century gold standard – was rapidly losing its lustre as a reserve currency. There had been concerns, voiced as far back as the 1851 Great Exhibition, that the hungrier, more efficient producers in Germany and the US threatened Britain’s industrial hegemony. But no serious policy action was taken. In the second half of the 19th century there was a subtle shift in the economy, from the north of England to the south, from manufacturing to finance, from making things to living off investment income. By 1914, the writing was on the wall.

In two important respects, the US today differs from Britain a century ago. It is much bigger, which means that it benefits from continent-wide economies of scale, and it has a presence in the industries that will be strategically important in the first half of the 21st century. Britain in 1914 was over-reliant on coal and shipbuilding, industries that struggled between the world wars, and had failed to grasp early enough the importance of emerging new technologies.

Even so, there are parallels. There has been a long-term shift of emphasis in the US economy away from manufacturing and towards finance. There is a growing challenge from producers in other parts of the world.

Frenzy

Now consider the stark contrast between this economic recovery and the pattern of previous cycles. Traditionally, a US economic recovery sees unemployment coming down smartly as lower interest rates encourage consumers to spend and the construction industry to build more homes. This time, it has been different. There was a building frenzy during the bubble years, which left an overhang of supply even before plunging prices and rising unemployment led to a blitz of foreclosures.

America has more homes than it knows what to do with, and that state of affairs is not going to change for years.

Over the past couple of months, there has been a steady drip-feed of poor economic news that has dented hopes of a sustained recovery. Optimism has now been replaced by concern that the United States could be heading for the dreaded double-dip recession.

In the real estate market, which is the symptom of America’s deep-seated economic malaise, the double dip has already arrived. Tax breaks to homeowners provided only a temporary respite for a falling market and millions of Americans are living in homes worth less than they paid for them. The latest figures show that more than 28% of homes with a mortgage are in negative equity. Unsurprisingly, that has made Americans far more cautious about spending money. Rising commodity prices exacerbate the problem, since they push up inflation and reduce the spending power of wages and salaries.

Macro-economic policy has proved less effective than normal. That’s not for want of trying, though. The US has had zero short-term interest rates for well over two years. It has had two big doses of quantitative easing, the second of which is now ending. Its budget deficit is so big it has led to warnings from the credit-rating agencies, in spite of the dollar’s reserve currency status. And Washington has adopted a policy of benign neglect towards the currency, despite the strong-dollar rhetoric, in the hope that cheaper exports will make up for the squeeze on consumer spending.

Policy, as ever, is geared towards growth because the great existential fear of the Fed, the Treasury and whoever occupies the White House is a return to the 1930s. Back then, the economic malaise could be largely attributed to deflationary economic policies that deepened the recession caused by the popping of the 1920s stock market bubble. The feeble response to today’s growth medicine suggests that the US is structurally far weaker than it was in the 1930s. Tackling these weaknesses will require breaking finance’s stranglehold over the economy and measures to boost ordinary families’ spending power and so cut their reliance on debt. It will require an amnesty for the housing market. Above all, America must rediscover the qualities that originally made it great. That will not be easy.

Decline and fall of the American empire | Business | The Guardian.

The economic statistics that you are about to read are incredibly shocking, but they are also very, very real.  Tonight there are going to be millions of men and women all across America that cannot sleep because they are consumed with anxiety about their financial problems.  Even as you read this, there are a lot of parents out there that are trying to figure out how to explain to their children why their homes are being taken away.  There are also hordes of very hard working Americans that are incredibly frustrated because they have sent out thousands of resumes and yet they can’t seem to get a job interview.  Have you ever been at a point where you couldn’t pay the mortgage or put food on the table for your family?  It can be an absolutely soul-crushing experience.  In fact, there are some cities in the U.S. that have been so utterly devastated by this economy that it seems as though virtually everyone has had the hope sucked right out of them.  The mainstream media is trying to convince all of us that we are in an economic recovery, but that is a lie.  The truth is that we are in the middle of a long-term economic decline and the greatest economy in the history of the world is dying right in front of our eyes.


The average American family is under more economic stress right now than at any other time since the Great Depression.  Just check out the following statistics….

#1 Only 45.4% of Americans had a job during 2010.  The last time the employment level was that low was back in 1983.

#2 Only 66.8% of American men had a job last year.  That was the lowest level that has ever been recorded in U.S. history.

#3 In the United States, one-fourth of all the income is brought in by 1 percentof the people.

#4 Rising prices are putting an incredible amount of stress on American family budgets.  According to John Williams of Shadow Government Statistics, if the U.S. government measured inflation the way that it did before 1980 the inflation rate would be much different.  For example, Williams says that inflation rose at a 9.6 annual rate during the month of February using the old measurement.

#5 In a recent survey conducted by Deloitte Consulting74 percent of Americans said that they planned to slow down their spending in coming months due to rising prices.

#6 The price of U.S. crude oil has risen $20 a barrel over the last two months, and the average price of a gallon of gasoline in America is now about $3.79.  At this point, the average price of gasoline is about one dollar higher than it was one year ago.  Since the average American household goes through about 750 gallons of gas a year, that means that in 2011 American families will spend somewhere around $750 more for gas.  So just what is the average American family supposed to do if a gallon of gasoline soon costs 4 or even 5 dollars a gallon?

#7 The average American now spends approximately 23 percent of his or her income on food and gas.

#8 Incredibly, 60 percent of all the students attending California public schools now qualify for free or reduced-price school lunches.

#9 The number of people on food stamps in the state of North Carolina has almost doubled over the past four years.

#10 Thanks to the globalization of the economy, U.S. workers now must directly compete for jobs with workers in places such as Indonesia.  In Indonesia, full-time workers make as little as two dollars a day.  So how are American workers supposed to compete with that?

#11 U.S. home values have fallen an astounding 6.3 trillion dollars since the peak of the real estate market in 2005.

#12 Back in 2005 at the peak of the housing bubble, the median property tax on a home in the United States was $1614.  Today, even though home values have sunk like a rock, that figure has risen to $1917.

#13 According to the Mortgage Bankers Associationat least 8 million Americans are at least one month behind on their mortgage payments at this point.

#14 31 percent of the homeowners that responded to a recent Rasmussen Reports survey indicated that they are “underwater” on their mortgages.


#15 Two years ago, the average U.S. homeowner that was being foreclosed upon had not made a mortgage payment in 11 months.  Today, the average U.S. homeowner that is being foreclosed upon has not made a mortgage payment in 17 months.

#16 The number of homes that were actually repossessed reached the 1 million mark for the first time ever during 2010.

#17 According to a recent census report, 13% of all the homes in the United States are sitting empty.

#18 According to the U.S. Census, the number of children living in poverty has gone up by about 2 million in just the past 2 years.

#19 According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average length of unemployment in the U.S. is now an all-time record 39 weeks.

#20 There are 10% fewer “middle class jobs” in the United States today than there were a decade ago.

#21 The United States has lost an average of 50,000 manufacturing jobs per month since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.

#22 Half of all American workers now earn $505 or less per week.

#23 Total U.S. credit card debt is more than 8 times larger than it was just 30 years ago.

#24 Americans now owe more than $904 billion on student loans, which is a new all-time record high.

#25 Average household debt in the United States has now reached a level of 136% of average household income.  In China, average household debt is only 17% of average household income.

#26 A staggering 25 percent of all American adults now have a credit score below 599.

#27 1.5 million Americans filed for bankruptcy in 2010.  That represented the fourth yearly increase in bankruptcy filings in a row.

#28 Over the last decade, the number of Americans without health insurance has risen from about 38 million to about 52 million.

#29 One study found that approximately 41 percent of working age Americans either have medical bill problems or are currently paying off medical debt.

#30 According to a report published in The American Journal of Medicine, medical bills are a major factor in more than 60 percent of all personal bankruptcies in the United States.  Of those bankruptcies that were caused by medical bills, approximately 75 percent of them involved individuals that actually did have health insurance.

#31 Back in 1965, only one out of every 50 Americans was on Medicaid.  Today,one out of every 6 Americans is on Medicaid.

#32 According to the Federal Reserve, between 2007 and 2009 median household net worth in the United States fell by 23 percent.

#33 The Federal Reserve also says that median household debt in the United States has risen to $75,600.


#34 According to the Economic Policy Institute, almost 25 percent of all U.S. households now have zero net worth or negative net worth.  Back in 2007, that number was just 18.6 percent.

#35 During this most recent economic downturn, employee compensation in the United States has been the lowest that it has been relative to gross domestic product in over 50 years.

35 Statistics That Show The Average American Family Has Been Broke Down, Tore Down, Beat Down, Busted And Disgusted By This Economy – BlackListedNews.com.

O'ahu - Honolulu - Pearl Harbor: USS Missouri ...

Image by wallyg via Flickr

Simon Black

March 22, 2011
Denver, Colorado, USA

Have you ever seen the devastation from a BGM-109 Tomahawk cruise missile? It’s beyond description. Standing in the impact area, it’s as if nothing has ever existed there before.

It’s naive to think that something with so much destructive power is unlikely to cause ‘collateral damage.’ I can only imagine the consequences of 159 and counting, the amount of force that has been unleashed in Libya as yet by western governments.

This morning, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates shrugged off any implication that military strikes are responsible for significant civilian casualties in Libya… while at the same time playing down America’s role and the timeline for continued action.

This is insane. You are either at war, or you are not. Warfare requires clearly defined objectives, competent generals, and well-resourced fighting forces… it cannot be waged with half-measures and stammering equivocation.

Yet, here we are again, watching bureaucrats tap dance in front of voters, playing down the long-term ramifications of engagement and outright rejecting the idea of regime change as an intended objective.

They feel 100% justified in their decision to wage a half war without getting their hands dirty, rejecting any consequences to civilians, all under the auspices of protecting civilians… but only Libyan civilians.

Much praise has been heaped on Barack Obama, Nicolas Sarkozy, and the UN Security Council for their ‘political courage,’ taking action in the face of popular backlash to defend Libyans.

“Political courage” is an oxymoron. Everything these people do is for their professional gain, to be reelected, and the fallout of these decisions costs lives and economic misfortune. The cost of the munitions alone so far is over a quarter billion dollars, let alone the human cost.

Barack Obama himself said in 2002, “What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks… to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income — to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression. That’s what I’m opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.”

Sounds great. Spoken like a true Nobel Laureate.

The intellectual dishonesty and hypocrisy involved is phenomenal.  The UN Security Council resolution (#1973) which ‘authorized’ this invasion, expresses condemnation for Qadaffi’s deleterious actions against his own people…

… nevermind that the exact same thing is happening in Bahrain (which produces only 10% of Libya’s oil) where the US Navy’s 5th Fleet is headquartered with front row seats to the show;

… nevermind that governments have hardly uttered a word about the situation in Bahrain or Saudi Arabia;

… nevermind that the western world has proven itself incompetent at regime change after the occupations of both Iraq and Afghanistan;

… nevermind that 10-years of warfare have worn out the spirit and morale of fighting forces to the point that they are twisted into taking trophy photos of dead civilians like a 16-point buck;

… nevermind that you can’t just step in, bomb some targets, step out, and expect a peaceful, stable, democratic, pro-Western society to materialize out of thin air;

… nevermind that the coalition forces lack the moral authority to cherry pick which countries to invade and which civilian populations to ignore.

When they lack moral authority, they simply create it out of thin air. Politicians and bureaucrats equate morality with legality. If something is legal, it must be just… and if it’s not legal, they’ll pass a law or resolution making it legal… and hence just.

This is the way they operate– using regulatory technicalities to wrap themselves in a blanket of righteousness in order to execute their agenda. As Tacitus said, “the more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.”

Illegal, immoral acts made just | Sovereign Man: Finance, lifestyle design, Offshore Business and Expat news.

Hon. Paul Hellyer, P.C.
Former Canadian Minister of National Defence

The world financial system is a total fraud. It is one gargantuan Ponzi scheme, no better than the one Bernie Madoff used to swindle his friends and neighbors, and thousands of times worse if you add up the total number of victims it has ripped off over countless generations.



The principal difference between the two schemes is that Madoff was acting outside the law while the international banking cartel has persuaded generation after generation of monarchs, presidents and prime ministers to provide legislative protection for their larceny.

The banks Ponzi scheme is alarmingly simple. They lend the same money to several people or institutions at the same time and collect interest on it from each. What the banks really lend, however, is their credit, and what they take back in compensation for that privilege is a debt that must be repaid with interest.

The number of times they lend the same money is called leverage. The practice is as old as the hills but for our purposes we can start with the goldsmiths of Lombard Street in London, England, who accepted deposits for which they issued certificates redeemable on demand. They paid their depositors a nominal interest rate on the understanding that they could lend the money to their customers at higher interest rates. They soon found that they could lend more than they had in their vaults because only a few depositors came in to redeem their gold or silver at any one time. It was a scam. It was illegal. Nevertheless they got away with it for a long while and the scam was legitimized when the Bank of England was chartered to help King William finance his war. Rich people subscribed £1,200,000 in gold and silver, as capital, to found the bank, which then was lent to the government at 8 percent. To show his appreciation the King allowed the bank to print £1,200,000 in banknotes and lend them at high interest rates. In effect, the bank was allowed to lend the same money twice – once to the government and once to the people.

Over the years, due to the avarice of the banks and the complicity of the politicians, that ratio has increased dramatically. In the early days of the 20th century, federal chartered U.S. banks were required to keep gold reserves of 25 percent. That means they were allowed to lend the same money four times. I remember when Canadian banks were required to maintain a cash reserve of 8 percent. That means they were allowed to lend the same money 12½ times.

Today, thanks to Milton Friedman’s irrational flip-flop from being a proponent of 100% cash reserves to the opposite extreme of zero reserves, and the adoption of his ideas by the major central banks of the world in 1974, multiples have increased dramatically – in some cases to as much as 20 to 1 or more. Banks only keep enough cash to meet day-to-day demands for those few customers who go in and request it, and consequently the fraud is virtually total.


The system works this way. Suppose that you want to borrow $35,000 to buy a new car. You visit your friendly banker and ask for a loan. He or she will ask you for collateral – some stocks, bonds, a second mortgage on your house or cottage or, if you are unable to supply any of these, the co-signature of a well-to-do friend or relative. When the collateral requirement is satisfied you will be asked to sign a note for the principal amount with an agreed rate of interest.

When the paperwork is complete, and the note signed, your banker will make an entry on the bank’s computer and, presto, a $35,000 credit will appear in your account which you can use to buy your car. The important point is that seconds earlier that money did not exist. It was created out of thin air – so to speak.

The banking equation is a species of double-entry bookkeeping where your note becomes an asset on the bank’s books, and the new money that was deposited to your account is a liability. The profit for the bank comes from the difference between the low rate of interest, if any, you would be paid on your deposit if you didn’t spend the borrowed money immediately, and the much higher rate you would be obliged to pay on your note – the technical term is “the spread.”

At some point, however, you have to pay off your note and any interest owing. And not only you but everyone else who has borrowed “money” from banks – including governments which, by the way, own the right to print money but that have irresponsibly handed the right over to an elite group of private bankers. Anyone who defaults is in big trouble. Individuals who default will have the assets they pledged as collateral seized by the bank. A government that is in danger of defaulting, will be forced to borrow from the International Monetary Fund, which will then tell that government how to run its affairs including cutting back on services and selling off public assets to the international vulture capitalists.


In reality, then, the banks have turned the world into one humongous pawn shop. You hock your stocks, bonds, house, business, rich mother-in-law or country and the bank(s) will give you a loan based on the value of the collateral.

A world system where all the money is created as debt is a perpetual disaster in the making. It is like a giant balloon that the banks pump full of debt. The balloon gets larger and larger until the debt load becomes too heavy to carry, and then it is like a balloon with a pin stuck in it. The system crashes and thousands or sometimes millions of innocent people lose their jobs, homes, farms and businesses.

Almost any high school student should be able to see that any monetary system based on debt creation is totally insane. The total world debt, mathematically, is always tending toward infinity – and there is no possible way of paying it off. The real money (legal tender) to do so doesn’t exist. And the real economy that depends on cash to grow shifts into low gear whenever the supply of credit money dries up.

Not surprisingly, there have been 25 recessions and depressions in the United States since 1890. In several cases, including the Great Depression of the 1930s and the current Great Recession, the evidence indicates that the meltdown was anticipated by a few insiders who helped trigger the catastrophe.

In the wake of the Great Depression, the U.S. Senate Banking and Currency Committee Report that became widely known as the Pecora Report on the Practices of Stock Exchanges, indicated that there were insiders who benefitted from the crash. “Legal chicanery and pitch darkness were the banker’s stoutest allies,” Pecora wrote in his memoir. Similar allegations were evident in Charles Ferguson damning documentary “Inside Job,” relating to the 2007-2008 meltdown. These reports, and other historical evidence prove beyond any doubt that much of Wall Street is rotten to the core. It has become one gigantic millstone around the neck of both the American and world economies.


The collateral damage from the recent meltdown has been staggering. The U.S. Bureau of Labor estimated that 8.4 million jobs were lost in the U.S. alone. Most countries experienced similar dramatic losses. The reduction in asset values worldwide has been estimated at $20 trillion U.S. dollars, yet not a single one of the culprits is in jail. You would think that someone would have had the decency to launch a class action for at least $10 trillion against every individual and every organization that contributed to the catastrophe in any way.


It boggles the mind that a system so vulnerable to manipulation would ever have come into existence in the first place. The evolution did not happen by accident. It was not guided by the mythical invisible hand of Adam Smith. On the contrary, for more than a century-and-a-half, it was engineered by the barely visible hand of the Rothschild family and its allies, and since World War II by the Rockefeller family. The two dynasties combined forces to exercise influence on many fronts sheltered by the cloak of secrecy established by the Bilderberg Group.

The long term influence of the banking cartel is incalculable. Their biggest coup was the establishment of the Federal Reserve System in the United States. The big New York banks really didn’t like the idea of genuine competition, so a small group held a secret meeting at the private resort of J.P. Morgan on Jekyll Island, off the coast of Georgia. Their scheme, devised by Paul M. Warburg, and subsequently adopted by Congress, is a legal private monopoly of the U.S. money supply operated for the benefit of the few under the guise of protecting and promoting the public interest.

It is a tribute to the skill of the international bankers that they were able to draft a bill, revise it, change its name and make the few window dressing compromises necessary to get it adopted by Congress just before Christmas when quite a few Representatives must have been dreaming of sugar plum fairies instead of exercising due diligence. Only Charles Lindberg Sr. seemed to grasp the essence of what was going on.

To put it bluntly, the Congress transferred its sovereign constitutional right to create money to the sole custody of a group of private bankers. The magnitude of the hoist is unprecedented in the history of the world – the numbers now are in the high trillions.


Soon after the bill was passed the magnitude of the tragedy began to be recognized. William Jennings Bryan, who acted as Democrat whip, later said: “In my long political career, the one thing I genuinely regret is my part in getting the banking and currency legislation (Federal Reserve Act of 1913) enacted into law.” President Woodrow Wilson, just three years after passage of the Act, wrote: “A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated (in the Federal Reserve System). The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men…. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the civilized world.” But the bill was not repealed; almost 100 years later the sell-out is still the law. This makes you wonder what the people’s representatives have been doing to earn their salaries.

The people in charge of the original deception were very far-seeing. They realized that when future governments had to borrow from them they would need a constant income stream to pay the interest on the bonds. So they persuaded the government to introduce income taxes, first as a temporary measure, but later permanently, so it would be able to meet its obligations to the bondholders. In fiscal year 2005 total individual income taxes in the U.S. totalled $927 billion. Of that amount $352 billion, or 38%, was required just to pay interest on the federal debt. The figure would be higher now.

The banksters, as they were often called, then decided that an independent press might catch on to the chicanery. Oscar Callaway is reported in the Congressional Record of February 9, 1917 as follows.

“In March, 1915, the J.P. Morgan interests, the steel, shipbuilding, and powder interests, and their subsidiary organizations, got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world, and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press of the United States… They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of 25 of the greatest papers. The 25 papers were agreed upon; emissaries were sent to purchase the policy, national and international, of these papers; … an editor was furnished for each paper to properly supervise and edit information regarding the questions of preparedness, militarism, financial policies, and other things of national and international nature considered vital to the interests of the purchasers [and to suppress] everything in opposition to the wishes of the interests served.”


It has been suggested that the Bilderberger Group may have taken a leaf from the Morgan precedent to protect their interests in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. That is impossible to prove because its members are sworn to secrecy, and the press won’t report on its meetings. Could it be mere coincidence that the monetary system, the downside of globalization and the decades-long cover-up of the extraterrestrial presence and technology (especially the clean energy sources that would impact the value of oil stocks), the three subjects of most direct beneficial interests of the banksters, are the three subjects that are avoided like the plague by the mainline press?

I am not willing to go so far as to say that the men behind the international banking system are evil men because their thoughts are private. But Sir Josiah, later Baron Stamp, a former director of the Bank of England, has given us a rare snapshot of the truth.

“Banking was conceived in iniquity and was born in sin. The Bankers own the earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create money, and with a flick of the pen they will create enough money to buy it back again. However, take that power away from them and all the great fortunes like mine will disappear, and they ought to disappear, for this would be a happier and better world to live in. But if you wish to remain the slaves of Bankers, and pay the cost of your own slavery, let them continue to create money.”


In the latest meltdown of 2007-2008, the Fed acted quickly to prevent the Ponzi pyramid from collapsing completely. It printed trillions of dollars to bail out the banks and a few industries that were highly indebted to banks.

But what did the Fed do for the taxpayers whose money was so wildly diluted to save the banks? Nothing! They were left to fend for themselves. Millions of people lost their jobs, their farms, their houses, their hopes, and their dignity as a result of circumstances beyond their control. The taxpayers bailed out the banks, but got nothing in return.

The same is true of governments who came so quickly to the rescue. As a result of the meltdown their revenues were decreased so they were forced to incur or increase their deficits, as well as to start cutting back on essential services.

The Fed pretended to be helping stimulate the economy by reducing interest rates to near zero. It would be an interesting exercise to find out what happened to all of this low-cost money. It would be a good subject for Congressional attention. How much did the banks use to buy up domestic and foreign assets at fire-sale prices? Was any of it used by financial institutions to try to corner world food markets and raise prices at a time when millions are starving?

No doubt some taxpayers did take advantage of the low interest rates available but were they warned about the old bait and switch game? Anyone who acquires assets with cheap money runs the risk of losing their property when the Fed ultimately raises rates. It’s all part of the boom-bust cycle inherent in our infinitely silly monetary system.

The Economics Profession

What does all this have to say about the economics profession? What it really says isn’t fit to print. Someone once said that if you put 20 economists in a room you will get 21 opinions.

That is not my experience. If you get 20 economists together they are likely to give you one stock answer, or at most two. And if there is one dissenter he or she is likely to be drowned out by the 19, squawking like a flock of parrots the words memorized from what their professors taught them.

I have witnessed this herd-like mentality firsthand. When I was first elected to the House of Commons in 1949 there were only a handful of Keynesians in Ottawa. Twenty years later nearly everyone was a Keynesian including, I am told, Richard Nixon.

At that time there were only a few monetarists around. But they spread like mushrooms and soon dominated the economic landscape. It reached the stage when Keynes was anathema, and it was almost impossible to get a tenured position in a school of economics unless you were part of Milton Friedman’s monetarist revolution.

Apparently little if any thought was given to the possibility that neither Keynes nor Friedman had got it right. The former was a bit closer to reality than the latter, but both theories foundered on the rocks of one inescapable truth. Both assumed that the economic system is self-correcting, yet more than two centuries of experience has demonstrated clearly that it is not! Someone has to be at the tiller charged with steering clear of the shoals and rocks of economic disaster and that person has to be someone who is responsible to the people and not the self-serving boom-busters.

Global Warming

While bank reform is the most urgent problem facing the world today, it is global warming that has equally or even greater long term consequences. It is a total fraud to pretend that we have thirty, forty or fifty years to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. There are reputable scientists who think we may already have crossed the Rubicon. Even if that is true, we can’t roll the clock back; we can only influence the present and the future. Each of the past three decades has been the hottest on record, according to a report released in July 2010 by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The report pulled together data from ten climate change indicators, measured by 160 research groups in 48 countries.

The data shows sea levels are rising; snow cover in the Arctic melts earlier; the average air temperature is rising; ocean surface temperatures have also been rising; the summer sea ice cover is declining; sea air temperature has been rising; for 19 years glaciers have lost mass; land air temperature has been rising – a global trend.

All of this puts the lie to the propaganda of the oil industry aimed at creating doubt about the reliability of scientific data. Taking a leaf from the tobacco industry, which managed to create doubt about the safety of their products years after they privately knew the facts, the oil industry has been attempting to raise doubt about the urgency of replacing fossil fuels with clean energy, and with considerable success. In their case, however, the stakes are higher. It was a tragedy that so many people lost their lives through lack of sound information about the consequences of smoking. In the case of global warming, however, many times more people will have their lives put at risk.

Still the oil cartel is making plans as if nothing is going to change, and that we are going to be stuck with a fatal oil economy for decades until the damage is irreversible. It is too late to begin more offshore drilling. It is too late for new developments in the Alberta oil sands. It is too late for more noisy windmill farms. The transition must start now, with a 10-year deadline.

Is that possible? Of course it’s possible but only with the kind of mobilization essential to win a war for survival. One excuse for inaction has been the lack of money due to government deficits and debt. But that obstacle can be overcome in less than a year if governments and legislatures change the system and exercise their sovereign right to make what is physically possible financially possible. Heaven knows there are millions of unemployed workers worldwide waiting to rise to the challenge.

The other major obstacle has been a lack of consensus on the form of clean energy to use to replace fossil fuels. And that brings me, finally, to the subject of the day, the extraterrestrial presence and technology.


The Extraterrestrial Presence and Technology

It is a fraud for the U.S. government to pretend that it is not interested in UFOs. In fact, it has been a matter of high and probably pre-eminent interest for decades.

An early Canadian ufologist, Wilbert Smith, who was a senior employee at the Department of Transport, where I became minister not long after his retirement, wrote a top secret memorandum to the Controller of Communications dated November 21, 1950 asking permission to set up a group to study the geomagnetic aspects of UFOs propulsion systems.

As part of his memorandum Smith said that he had made discreet enquiries through the Canadian embassy staff in Washington where he obtained the following information.

(a) The matter is the most highly classified subject in the United States Government, rating higher even than the H-bomb.
(b) Flying saucers exist.
(c) Their modus operandi is unknown but concentrated effort is being made by a small group, headed by Doctor Vannevar Bush.
(d) The entire matter is considered by the United States authorities to be of tremendous significance.

So, Dr. Vannevar Bush, one of America’s pre-eminent scientists, and a team of experts he had assembled, were already working on back-engineering by 1950. (Back-engineering is the combined art and science of analyzing an object, in this case parts of a crashed vehicle, in order to determine its characteristics for possible replication or adaptation.)

Many people who are interested in the subject of UFOs use one of the Roswell crashes of July 1947 as their starting line. Recent evidence, however, confirms that the U.S. Army Air Corps was in the crash retrieval business before that. Paola Harris, on July 5, 2010 interviewed two men, Jose Padilla and Reme Baca, aged 9 and 7 at the time, who witnessed a saucer crash on Padilla land near San Antonio, New Mexico, in August 1945. In her new book Exopolitics: Stargate to a New Reality, Paola gives the detailed account of what these men saw as children, the actual crash, the creatures’ appearance, the pieces of the craft they took, the military clean up, and an in-depth analysis of the significance of the case.

I had the opportunity to chat with Reme Baca by telephone recently and the thing that stuck in my mind was that when Sgt. Avila came to ask Mr. Padilla’s permission to enter his land to retrieve the “object,” he referred to it as “an experimental weather balloon.” That was exactly the same ruse that Brigadier General Roger Ramey used in reference to the Roswell incident two years later. Apparently there was a considerable lack of imagination on the Army’s part.

In later years the Air Force, that had succeeded the Army Air Corps, became much more sophisticated in its misinformation and disinformation techniques. These include having the Star Visitors portrayed in movies as sinister beings that we should be fearful of – probably without justification.

Another fascinating case that Paola brought to my attention not long ago was that of Charles Hall, the physicist and information technology professional, who worked as an airman meteorologist at the USAF bombing and gunnery range at Indian Springs, Nevada, in the 1960s.

Charles worked in close contact with Tall Whites, a species that I had been previously unfamiliar with. Over a period of months he learned to lose his fear of the aliens who lived, worked and played on Air Force property.

In a two-hour telephone conversation he gave me many of the characteristics of the Whites, described the scout ships in which they travelled and said most of them were assembled in the U.S. Furthermore, he talked about the mother ship arriving on the nights of the full moon and sliding into its hangar cut into the side of a mountain nearby.


It was all fascinating stuff that included the fact that the Tall Whites were working closely with the USAF and exchanging technology in the mid-1960s. So it is very difficult to imagine how much has been achieved in 60 years of back-engineering alien technology that was much more advanced than our own. There is no doubt that myriad scientists, technicians, and many of America’s most advanced aircraft and weapons corporations must have achieved what would have been classified as miracles just a few years ago.

It is alleged that the U.S. engineers working in one of the vast underground facilities have built vehicles that are virtually indistinguishable from those of other planets. If this is true, to what purpose will they be put, and will it be for good purposes or military purposes?

The area of discovery that is most relevant to this presentation, however, is the question of exotic energy sources. Years ago it was reported that both zero point and cold fusion energy had been developed. These are energy sources that could facilitate the 10-year target date and not only revolutionalize the world for the better, but help preserve it as a happy habitat for Earthlings.

In the unlikely event that these sources are not yet commercially viable, all we would have to do is ask one of the friendly species to help us and they would because they are deeply concerned about our stewardship. In the event that we are still treating them as enemy aliens, and doing our best to shoot them down, we would have to curb our lust of conflict and adopt an acceptable level of intergalactic civility.

Better People

The third essential change is for us as individuals. A just and peaceful world is not possible when it is riddled with graft, fraud and corruption of all kinds. Greed is king and mammon rules the world.

Institutions have to change too. For centuries major religions have been selling their alleged superiority or exclusiveness at the point of a sword, leading to the deaths of thousands of innocents. The three Abrahamic religions, for example, all claim the inside route to paradise. Mathematically that is impossible. It is far more probable, mathematically, that they are all wrong and that the truth is larger and more inclusive.

Ancient and modern history both suggest that there is no hope of a just and peaceful world unless all religions, and those with no religion, forget their differences and start working together to build the Kingdom of God on Earth. I define this as a world where every child can expect food to eat, clean water to drink, adequate clothing to wear, a roof overhead, access to medical support and enough education to be able to determine how best he or she can serve humankind positively, with dignity and self-fulfillment.


What a wonderful world that would be! But it would require a 180-degree change in policies and priorities and a serious effort to apply the Golden Rule that all religions claim as a common thread.

The application of the Golden Rule would mean an end to empire building, and the pursuit of military power and advantage. The U.S., for example, would have to stop being its own worst enemy. The declaration of the war on terror was the biggest strategic blunder I have seen.

On the 11th day of September 2001, following the attacks on the World Trade Center, the United States enjoyed the sympathy of the world, including Arab states and populations. The threat from al-Qaeda was limited and quite within the potential of police and intelligence operations to cope with.

The situation changed dramatically with the launch of a war on Iraq. The goodwill began to evaporate overnight. Soon, instead of a few dozens insurgents the numbers of young Muslims willing to die for their cause multiplied to thousands and a great chasm of hate and mistrust enveloped much of the world.

The U.S. has consistently refused to be even-handed in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, and the Israelis deceive themselves, and the world, when they claim to be the victims. For a long while peace has been within their grasp if they could have agreed to a just settlement, and establishment of a vibrant Palestinian state. But a handful of fundamentalists have always succeeded in disrupting the peace process because they are not willing to accept the great Rabbi Hillel’s admonition. “So always treat others the way you would like them to treat you; that is the message of the Law and the Prophets.” Meanwhile the peace and stability of the world remains in jeopardy.

The world community must adopt principles and practices that override fundamentalists of any stripe whether they be Christian, Muslim, Jewish or Economic. In addition, religious people should pay more attention to their holy books. There is nothing in the Bible that would legitimize a preventive war, with its carpet bombing, or the launch of a drone or missile intended to kill one person when there is risk that innocent bystanders will also die. Similarly, there is nothing in the Qur’an that would justify suicide bombing that results in the random death of innocents.

Global Hope

If you get the impression that the world is going to hell in a hand basket you have heard me correctly. But it doesn’t need to be so. There are remedies but they involve massive change in the areas discussed – none of which are even on the political radar at present. There is light at the end of the tunnel but, as Sir John Quinton, a former chairman of Barclay’s Bank said, “Bankers sometimes look on politicians as people who, when they see light at the end of the tunnel, order more tunnel.”

What we are really talking about is restoring democracy to countries that not only claim they have it, but also take pride in trying to export it, even though they don’t really qualify as democratic as defined in the dictionary. In Webster’s it is: “government in which supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them or their elected representatives.” To begin, Wall Street has been the dominant power in the U.S. for decades, and still is. Add to that the fact that the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, the President of the United States, does not have the security clearance for a number of projects controlled by troops under his command, and you have to conclude that the U.S. is not really a democracy.


The same can be said about Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany and myriad countries that are really puppets of the International Financial System. In each case the real interests of citizen voters is subjugated to the demands of international finance.

There is a sad irony in reading U.S. history of the pre-revolutionary and revolutionary days. Historians often attribute the revolution to the tax on tea. On the other hand, “[Benjamin] Franklin cited restrictions upon paper money as one of the main reasons for the alienation of the American provinces from the mother country.” The U.S. won the revolutionary war but then lost the next critical one when it adopted the British banking system instead of pursuing the better model their provinces had been experimenting with.

For the U.S. now to inflict the British practice on countries around the world, using the International Monetary Fund and World Bank as enforcers, is comparable to the King’s edict that gave birth to the United States. So the financial chains of oppression have to be broken and freedom restored to citizens everywhere.

It’s time to forget the tea party and address the critically important issues facing the U.S. and the world. All of these issues are non-partisan by definition and deserve the attention and support of all genuine patriots without distinction of race, color, religion or political affiliation – both in the U.S. and worldwide. We must unite to preserve and enhance the beautiful satellite that is our birthright.

An Agenda for Action

The first and most urgent project is to clip the wings of the bankers and democratize the money-creation function. In the U.S. the Federal Reserve System must be abolished and its alleged function of regulating the money supply be assumed by the federal government or an agency under its direct control. The most powerful and valuable tool in the economic arsenal must be available to the representatives of the people who can be held responsible for their success or failure.

Some monetary reformers recommend that governments create 100% of new money in a debt free form, greenbacks or equivalent. In the interests of a fast and smooth transition I am suggesting that a ratio of 34% government-created money to 66% bank-created money would work satisfactorily. Banks would be required to maintain 34% cash reserves against their deposits.

The important thing is that governments must immediately create the large sums necessary to balance their budgets and get their economies running at maximum output again. I am talking about an infusion of perhaps $10 trillion U.S. dollar equivalent to start and more if needed to get economies up to speed and to reduce unemployment worldwide by at least half, with the creation of millions of new jobs.


Is this likely to cause massive inflation, as the financial cartel will immediately allege, because it is one of its longest running and most successful bugbears? The answer to their phony phonetics is a resounding “no.” As any economist should know, it is the amount of money that is created that influences prices, and not who prints it. So as long as governments limit what economists call “the multiplier effect” there will be no problem.

Certainly the present system has been inflationary. A 1950 U.S. dollar is only worth 7.5 cents today. A common sense monetary system should produce better results than that. So there is no reason why the banking system should not be fundamentally reformed – at once!

There are four other actions that I think we, the people of the world should demand of our politicians.

1. A law must be passed at once to prohibit all politicians, candidates for political office and political parties from accepting money from any financial institution as well as make it a criminal offense for any such institution either directly or indirectly to offer it.
2. World leaders must adopt a 10-year time frame to reduce greenhouse emissions by 90 percent.
3. That will only be possible if the U.S. discloses its knowledge of the ET presence and technology, and what has been accomplished in 60 years of back-engineering.
4. The U.N. should declare 2012 the year of forgiveness and reconciliation – a new era of cooperation and (agape) love between races, tribes, religions, nations, and regions both mondial and intergalactic. We have so much to learn from our star visitors in many areas including medicine and food production.

So the U.S. must relinquish its privileged position as the center of “the loop” as part of a new kind of leadership in creating the better world we all dream of.

International Finance vs. The People of the World

None of this vision of a just and peaceful world will be possible unless the all-pervasive power of the international banks has been broken. In 1999 I wrote a book in which I said the next world war would be between the banks and the people of the world. There have been skirmishes for centuries and, so far, the banks have always come out on top. They are now taking advantage of the recent meltdown, and the resulting sovereign debt crisis to line up their heavy artillery including the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Federal Reserve System and the Bank for International Settlements for a final conclusive battle.

As always the aim of the game is to rob the people of the world of their sovereign right to govern their own affairs, and to entrench the power of the international banks, their elite industrial allies and a small cabal of military insiders who run the world as their private fiefdom. The word “unjust” is too small a word by far to describe what they are up to.

If any skeptics think I am overstating the case don’t take my word for it. Go to www.victoryfortheworld.net and read some of the books that can be used as references. A hundred pages of The Web of Debt, for example, setting out the history of money, will probably be enough to make you sick at your stomach. I stopped reading it at night because if often made me so angry I couldn’t sleep.


I entered politics more than 60 years ago because I thought recessions were quite unnecessary. They were monetary phenomena with a relatively easy fix. I have made hundreds of speeches on the subject and convinced a few thousand people. But never the movers and shakers. And the mainline press were less than helpful. They were so jaundiced that they were not interested in a maverick speaking truth to power. So it was always a case of David vs. Goliath, to use a Biblical analogy.

Now, for the first time, the power exists to turn the tables and go for the jugular. The internet is providing power to the people that they have never enjoyed before. The young people of the world, in concert with the thousands of their parents and others who care about the state of the world can use the power of social networking to effect a miracle on their own behalf and that of succeeding generations.

The valiant people of Tunisia and Egypt have shown the way by achieving what was believed to be impossible. We share their euphoria. At the same time they, and we, must acknowledge that it is only the beginning. Real freedom will only be possible when they have escaped from the tyranny of international banks, and Wall Street is no longer able to manipulate the price of their daily bread.

A good start might be to distribute a million copies of this speech and translate it into a number of languages. Then the rising generation can bombard the barricades through their social networks. Regime change is not necessary except for leaders who refuse to see the light. But concerned citizens of the world should band together and rattle the cages of all federal politicians. Tell them bluntly that they must vigorously support the above agenda or face inevitable defeat at the next election. It is a simple message, but the only one they understand.

At a press conference on March 29, 2001 announcing the U.S. was backing out of the Kyoto Protocol, President George W. Bush said, “A friend is someone who tells you the truth.” That is what I have been doing today. It is a message of global hope for every race, color, religion and nationality in the world and of peaceful relations with visitors from other realms.

Victory for the World.

“I am convinced that the existence of too-big-to-fail financial institutions poses the greatest risk to the US economy,” Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank President Thomas Hoenig said.

“They must be broken up. We must make sure that large financial organizations are not in position to hold the US economy hostage. We must not allow organisations operating under the safety net to pursue high-risk activities and we cannot let large organisations put our financial system at risk.”

Mr Hoenig also argues that the most sweeping overhaul of US financial regulation since the Great Depression won’t prevent the largest banks from taking excessive risks and increasing market share.

“In my view, it is even worse than before the crisis,” he said. “As well-intentioned as the Dodd-Frank Act may be, it will not improve outcome.

The Dodd-Frank Act created a resolution authority to unwind the largest financial institutions. It also adopted the Volcker rule, which aims at reducing the odds that banks will make risky investments and put their federally-insured deposits at risk.

The Fed chief called for “Glass Steagall-type” provisions – referring to post-Depression prohibitions that forbade deposit-taking commercial banks from engaging in the riskier activities normally confined to the investment sector.

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