Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Financial terrorism suspected in 2008 economic crash

Editor's Note: My eyes are burning from this smoke screen.

source
Bill Gertz --The Washington Times

Evidence outlined in a Pentagon contractor report suggests that financial subversion carried out by unknown parties, such as terrorists or hostile nations, contributed to the 2008 economic crash by covertly using vulnerabilities in the U.S. financial system.

The unclassified 2009 report “Economic Warfare: Risks and Responses” by financial analyst Kevin D. Freeman, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Times, states that “a three-phased attack was planned and is in the process against the United States economy.”

While economic analysts and a final report from the federal government's Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission blame the crash on such economic factors as high-risk mortgage lending practices and poor federal regulation and supervision, the Pentagon contractor adds a new element: “outside forces,” a factor the commission did not examine.

“There is sufficient justification to question whether outside forces triggered, capitalized upon or magnified the economic difficulties of 2008,” the report says, explaining that those domestic economic factors would have caused a “normal downturn” but not the “near collapse” of the global economic system that took place.

Suspects include financial enemies in Middle Eastern states, Islamic terrorists, hostile members of the Chinese military, or government and organized crime groups in Russia, Venezuela or Iran. Chinese military officials publicly have suggested using economic warfare against the U.S.

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Food prices to skyrocket, riots could follow, suggests USDA

Dees Illustration
Jonathan Benson
Natural News

When the upswing in commodity prices eventually makes its way throughout the food system in mid-to-late 2011, food prices are sure to spike with levels potentially reaching those of 2008, announced U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) economist Ephraim Leibtag at the agency's annual Outlook Forum. And if conditions escalate rapidly, there is also the potential for food riots and other civil unrest.

The USDA is predicting a 3.5 percent increase in food prices in 2011, which is about twice the overall inflation rate but less than the 2008 increase, according to a recent Reuters report. In 2008, food prices rose 5.5 percent, which represents the highest increase since 1990. But the possibility of food prices dramatically rising in 2011 like they did in 2008 is a definite possibility.

"Given that it's still earlier in the year, I'm prone to be conservative on the side of the forecast," said Leibtag. "It's a possibility," he added, concerning the likelihood of massive inflation in food costs like was seen in 2008.

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Bernanke warns on oil price 'threat'

AFP

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke on Tuesday warned "sustained rises" in oil prices could potentially threaten US growth and spark dangerous price rises, as he eyed the turmoil in the Middle East.

Bernanke told Congress he still believed unrest in Libya and elsewhere in the oil-rich region would result in "temporary" and "modest" increases in US prices, but acknowledged greater risks remain.

"The most likely outcome is that the recent rise in commodity prices will lead to, at most, a temporary and relatively modest increase in US consumer price inflation," the central bank chief told lawmakers.

"That said, sustained rises in the prices of oil and other commodities would represent a threat both to economic growth and to overall price stability."

He added there was a particular risk from unrest pushing up expectations of future price rises.

© AFP -- Published at Activist Post with license

China's holdings of US debt larger than reported

WASHINGTON (AFP) – China's holdings of US bonds reached $1.16 trillion at the end of December, almost $270 billion more than previously estimated, new data showed Monday.

Beijing, which has converted much of a huge trade surplus with the United States over the past two decades into buying up US treasuries and other securities, held 26.1 percent of the total of $4.44 trillion held by foreigners, the Treasury said.

The figures came as the US government recalculated its data on foreign holdings of US securities from June 2010.

Chinese-held Treasuries have fallen since hitting a high of $1.18 trillion in October, under the revised figures. Japan remained by far the second largest holder of US government debt, with $882 billion in December, around $1.3 billion less than original estimates.

Britain was third at $272.1 billion.

Your Incredible Shrinking Paycheck

Before I started writing this column on why paychecks are likely to keep shrinking even if unemployment starts to inch down, I consulted Google to see if the term Marxism was trending upward. It was and has been ever since the end of December, the conclusion of a year in which workers' share of the U.S. economic pie shrank to the smallest piece ever: 54.4% of GDP, down from about 60% in the 1970s.

No wonder Marx is back in fashion. It's been more than 100 years since the German philosopher predicted that capitalism's voraciousness would be its undoing - as bosses invest more in new technologies to make things more cheaply and efficiently and less in workers themselves, who, deprived of fair wages, would eventually rise up and revolt. That hasn't happened, of course, though depressed wages certainly contributed to the revolution in Egypt, not to mention lots of other instances of public unrest over the past few years. But the fact that wages in the U.S. and most other rich countries have been falling since the 1970s and went off a cliff after the recent financial crisis is going to become a more pressing economic and political concern. Just think how hard it will be for Obama to sell himself in 2012 if salaries are still falling. (See 25 people to blame for the financial crisis.)

And fall they have, to an extent not seen since the 1930s. Labor Department figures show that from 2007 to 2009, more than half the full-time workers who lost jobs and then found new work took pay cuts. A depressing 36% had to take positions paying 20% less than the ones they lost.

The drop in wages occurs in part because unemployment rose so sharply and widely after the crisis and has remained higher for longer than in past recessions. Both factors have led to a disconnect between labor supply and demand that makes it tough for workers to negotiate better deals. Forget about driving a hard bargain with a new boss. Most of us feel lucky just to have bosses, and we work as hard as we can to keep them happy - as the productivity figures emphatically show.

Yet even if unemployment starts to ease, it's unclear whether labor's portion of the pie will stop shrinking. The global headwinds may be too strong. Just as Marx predicted, technology-driven productivity is increasing not just in manufacturing but also in services. Even the financial wizards that caused the crisis aren't immune. While trading volumes and the size of global markets have increased dramatically in the past 20 years, Wall Street still employs roughly the same number of people. If you've ever watched a trader working a three-screen Bloomberg terminal flashing hundreds of prices in dozens of countries, you'll understand why. (See TIME's Wall Street covers.)

The other megatrend of our age, the rise of emerging markets, will also continue to put pressure on U.S. wages. According to Goldman Sachs, more than 70 million people in developing countries become middle-class consumers each year. That's great for us in some ways, because it means they'll have money to buy goods made by companies in the rich world. But it also means they'll have the skills necessary to do our jobs. A lot of Wall Street data crunching, for example, is now done in India, and the number of high-end strategy jobs in fields like consulting is increasing there too.

The latter trend is gaining on the former. A recent study by Capital Economics found that from 2002 to 2008, employment abroad by U.S. multinationals abroad 22.6%, while employment at home increased by a mere 4.9%. What's good for U.S. companies and what's good for U.S. labor and wages are no longer always the same thing. The discrepancy may become an increasingly contentious political issue.

The best way to mitigate the fallout - which may include the rise of ugly populist politics - is to focus on social mobility. While rich-country wages will be increasingly compressed across the board, those at the top of the socioeconomic scale will feel the pressure much less. The goal, then, should be to push more people upward. Portable pensions and health care reform would help by allowing laid-off workers with skills to move more easily to places where they can command good jobs. Creative retraining programs would help as well. Denmark provides a good example: when companies there shed workers because of outsourcing, the government continues to pay those workers for two years, but on a declining scale and only with the promise that they attend retraining programs for jobs in higher-growth industries.

None of these are easy or quick solutions to shrinking wages. But they are a lot better than the Marxist alternative.

See people protesting the bank bailouts.

See which businesses are bucking the recession.

View this article on Time.com

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Detroit Lives: Part 1

Once the fourth-largest metropolis in America—some have called it the Death of the American Dream. Today, the young people of the Motor City are making it their own DIY paradise where rules are second to passion and creativity. They are creating the new Detroit on their own terms, against real adversity. We put our boots on and went exploring.

Inside Job Director Charles Ferguson With Charlie Rose: "It's A Wall Street Government"

Interview was recorded Friday, two days before the Oscar win for Inside Job.

PBS Video - Director Charles Ferguson with Charlie Rose - Feb. 25, 2011

  • "The systemic corruption of the United States by the financial services industry..."

Though he's cognizant of the fraud, with measured stupidity Ferguson also buys into the Kanjorski-Paulson martial law, blood-in-the-streets, 17th-century-you'll-be-milling-your-own-wheat fear mongering, which as we've detailed and proven on multiple occasions was nothing more than highly granulated hyperbole meant to frighten a financially illiterate Congress and media corps into gentle acquiescence to the demands of their Sith Lords.

Sheila Bair Makes Another Useless Threat: "If the biggest banks can't show they can be resolved in bankruptcy then they should be downsized now"

One requirement of the Dodd-Frank Financial Reform bill is that the big banks are required to file resolution plans, or "living wills," outlining how they could be broken up in the event of failure. In her interview today with Reuters, FDIC chair Sheila Bair says that some of the large, complex institutions, (Citi, Goldman Sachs, et al.) would have to be restructured if they can't come up with a credible resolution plan. Of course, they can't come up with a credible resolution plan that would cause the Federal Bailout Machine to stand down during a crisis -- that's why they're Too Big To Fail.

It is encouraging that Bair is openly pointing out the potential weaknesses of Dodd-Frank, and that she is making threats to do something about the Too Big To Fail problem, but we can easily see this process turning into a long, drawn out wrestling match between the regulators, the banks and their well-armed brigade of lobbyists.

And instead of tackling issues that matter, like size and leverage, we can easily see this devolving into a narrow argument over how to simplify the legal structure of these large institutions. The complex legal structures of the Bank Holding Company, for example, was a problem in 2008, but only because these firms were already so outlandishly large and so dangerously levered in the first place.

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FDIC calls for big bank restructuring

Source - Reuters

(Reuters) - America's big international banks should restructure their operations unless they can prove they can easily be broken up if they start toppling during a financial crisis, said U.S. regulator Sheila Bair.

Multinationals will need to set up more foreign subsidiaries and realign their legal structures to make it easier for regulators to liquidate them if necessary, Bair told the Reuters Future Face of Finance Summit.

"If they can't show they can be resolved in a bankruptcy-like process... then they should be downsized now," said Bair, chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

"There is no reason in the world why they should get some special treatment backstop that other businesses in this country don't have," Bair said.

She also said investors need to accept that they will get lower returns from banks that hold higher capital and run safer operations.

Bair said traditional deposit-taking banks in the United States probably can produce plans for a shutdown, but large multinationals with complex legal structures need to simplify.

"The burden is on them initially to show us that they don't think they need subsidiarization," she said. "They need to give us a plan on how they can be resolved on an international basis without it."

A former general counsel at Bair's agency said there may a tension between banks trying to meet these new regulations and maximizing shareholder value.

Bair made clear she was not advocating that some large banks be broken up now -- only that they need to make structural changes so that they could be broken up if they begin to fail.

Continue reading...

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Madoff: "US is a Ponzi scheme"

Gerald Celente - Oil - Interest Rates - Inflation - Clowns running Washi...

Oil could bust economic bubble

IRS Is Holding $1.1 Billion in Tax Refunds

The IRS announced yesterday (IR-2011-21) that it is holding more than $1.1 billion in tax refunds averaging $640 for 1.1 million people who did not file a federal income tax return for 2007. To collect the money, a 2007 return must be filed by April 18, 2011. IRS Refunds_Page_1 IRS Refunds_Page_2

Madoff Says Entire U.S. Government a `Ponzi Scheme'

Child sex slavery in America

New Airport Scanners Will See Through Bodies

Australia will be trialling x-ray scanners at airports that can provide a crisp image of a persons insides.

Australian customs found 60 pounds of drugs inside the bodies of travelers last year, now legislation is before the Federal Parliament that would allow customs officers to use these new body scanners to view all objects beyond folds of skin instead of sending drug-smuggling suspects to hospitals for internal X-rays ordered by a doctor.

Millimeter-wave and BackScatter body scanners have failed miserably in detecting dangerous weapons; an undercover TSA agent successfully passed through security multiple times with a handgun. Adam Savage from Mythbusters came out and said the “TSA x-rayed my junk, but they missed 12-inch razor blades in my coat”.

The Millimeter-wave scanner can (supposedly) detect metal objects but is incapable of detecting plastics or liquid objects. The BackScatter can detect metal objects and some plastics but both are only capable of seeing through clothing and not folds of skin. This new scanner is a hospital-grade full-body scanner, the same method used for bone fractures and mammograms.
The scanners that will most likely roll out first are called Digital Radiography Scanners (DRS) that are being mass produced and ready to roll out as soon as governments decide to use them. They are currently used in some airports, mining and correctional facilities in a few countries, however this scanner is relatively new in U.S., Britain and Australia.

These types of x-ray machines are much more hazardous to the human organism than both of the millimeter-wave and backscatter combined. Radiography and Tomography machines are potentially deadly as they emit deep penetrating ionizing x-rays, through the human body. Researches find CT scanners will cause 29,000 cancers and kill nearly 15,000 Americans from diagnostic tests done in 2007.

Forget about scanners looking at your ‘junk’, in the near future we will all be zapped with deadly-doses of radiation for the sake of fatherland

How We Lost our Economy, the Constitution and our Civil Liberties

The Perfidy of Government: Evidence v. Denial

By paul craig roberts


This essay is about three recent books that explain how we lost our economy, the Constitution and our civil liberties, and how peace lost out to war.

Matt Taibbi is the best -- certainly the most entertaining -- financial/political reporter in the country. There is no better book than Griftopia (2010) to which to turn to understand how stupidity, greed, and criminality, spread evenly among policymakers and Wall Street, created the financial crisis that has left Americans overburdened with both private and public debt. Taibbi walks the reader through the fraudulent financial instruments that littered the American, British, and European financial communities with toxic waste. He has figured it all out, and what in other hands might be an arcane account for MBAs is, in Taibbi's hands, a highly readable and entertaining story.

For the first 65 pages, Taibbi entertains the reader with the inability of the public and politicians to focus on any reality. The financial story begins on page 65 with Fed chairman Alan Greenspan undermining the Glass-Steagall Act leading to its repeal by three political stooges, Gramm-Leach-Bliley. This set the stage for the banksters to leverage debt upon debt until the house of cards collapsed. When Brooksley Born, head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, attempted to do her regulatory job and regulate derivatives, the Federal Reserve, Treasury, and Securities and Exchange Commission got her bounced out of office. To make certain that no other regulator could protect the financial system and its participants from what was coming, Congress deregulated the derivatives markets by passing the Commodity Futures Modernization Act.

As an Ayn Randian mentality of a self-regulating private sector crowded out prudence, the media cheered. Taibbi captures the era in a sentence: "In was in the immediate wake of all these historically disastrous moves -- printing 1.7 trillion new dollars in the middle of a massive stock bubble, dismantling the Glass-Steagall Act, deregulating the derivatives market, blowing off his regulatory authority in the middle of an era of rampant fraud -- that Greenspan was upheld by the mainstream financial and political press as a hero of almost Caesarian nature. In February 1999, Time magazine put him on the cover."

Mortgage securitization allows lenders such as banks to issue mortgages that can be sold to third parties. Instead of making money from the interest from mortgages in its portfolio, the bank issues mortgages for a fee and sells the mortgages. The mortgages are then combined with mortgages sold by other lenders and resold to investors. This development resulted in lenders being less interested in the credit-worthiness of borrowers.

In order to assure investors about credit-worthiness and to appeal to risk-tolerant hedge funds, the next development was to take a pool of mortgages of varying credit-worthiness and to organize them into three tranches. The mortgages were separated into AAA, B grade, and high-risk stuff. The triple A tranche could be sold to pension funds and institutional investors. Hedge funds would take the high-risk tranche for the high-interest rate that they offered, intending to get rid of the mortgages before they had time to go bad. The middle tranche was the one hard to sell. The interest rate on the B-grade tranche was not high enough to appeal to hedge funds, and pension funds were restricted to investment grade.

So what did the banks do? Well, they lumped together all the B-grade tranches and started the process all over. The best of the lot were turned into -- you guessed it -- AAA, then came the B grade, and then the worst of the lot became the third tranche. And then the process was repeated.

This was bad enough, but even worse was happening. Many of the triple A and B grade mortgages had that rating only because of fraudulent credit scores and rating agencies assigning investment grade ratings to lower grade mortgages. Everyone was focused on short-term profits, from the lenders who churned out mortgages for fees to hedge funds that had no intention of holding the high-risk tranches beyond the short-run. You can see how toxic waste was spread throughout the financial system.

Then it became possible to "insure" the AAA mortgages (many of which were not AAA). Once this happened, financial institutions that were required to maintain reserves against deposits or to capitalize obligations, such as insurance policies, could now substitute higher-paying mortgage derivatives for U.S. Treasury notes and still meet their reserve requirements for a ready cash reserve. Treasury notes are so liquid that they are considered the equivalent of cash, and insured AAA-securitized mortgages acquired similar status.

AIG became the big provider of "insurance" in an operation run by Joe Cassano. Cassano's "insurance" product is called a credit default swap. It is not insurance, because AIG did not set aside capital to pay any claims. And claims there would be. Not only were the AAA mortgages that were being insured littered with toxic waste, investment banks and hedge funds could purchase swaps against mortgages that they did not even own. As Taibbi puts it, people were gambling in a casino in which gamblers did not have to cover their bets or own the financial instruments that they were insuring.

While Cassano was collecting fees for bets that he could not cover, Win Neuger on the other side of AIG was lending the insurance giant's long-term portfolio of sound investments to short-sellers for a fee.

Short-selling works like this: A short-seller thinks a company's stock price is going to fall in value. He borrows the stock from AIG by putting up collateral equal to its market price the day the stock is borrowed plus a small fee, sells the stock, pockets the money and waits for the stock to fall. If his hunch or inside information is correct, and the stock falls in value, he buys the stock and returns it to AIG, pocketing the difference in the two prices.

Normally, people who lend stock to short-sellers are content with the fee and with the interest on the collateral (cash) invested in safe instruments like Treasury bills. The lender of the stock cannot take any risk with the cash collateral, because the cash must be returned to the short-seller when he returns the borrowed stock.

Once, however, toxic waste got AAA ratings plus insurance from Cassano, higher-paying insured investment grade toxic waste could displace of US Treasuries as a place for Neuger to hold the short-sellers' collateral. You can see the untenable position into which Cassano and Neuger put AIG.

Enter Goldman Sachs as a buyer of swaps from Cassano and a borrower of stocks from Neuger. Once the real estate bubble that the crazed Federal Reserve had caused popped, all the fraud that had been disguised by rising real estate prices appeared in its naked glory. AIG couldn't cover Cassano's swaps, and it could not return the collateral to short-sellers that Neuger had invested, unknowingly, in toxic waste.

This was the origin of the TARP bailout, which was perceived by Goldman Sachs (whose former executives, as Taibbi relates, controlled the U.S. Treasury, financial regulatory agencies, and the Federal Reserve) as an opportunity not merely to have U.S. taxpayers make good on its exploitation of AIG, but also to fund with free capital supplied by hapless taxpayers more money-making opportunities for "banks too big to fail."

As Taibbi shows, Goldman Sachs had yet more ruin to bring to Americans. Goldman Sachs managed to get the position limits that regulation imposed on speculators in order to prevent speculation from taking over commodity markets (for example, grains, metals, and oil) secretly repealed. This allowed Goldman Sachs to create a new product, index speculation, which brought hundreds of billions into commodities markets and drove up the price of gasoline in 2008 to $4.50 per gallon despite the fact that there was no change in supply or consumer demand. It was entirely a profit rip-off from speculation in oil futures contracts.

From here on Taibbi's book really rolls. If the U.S. had a media worthy of the name, instead of mere shills for private oligarchs and propagandists for government, Matt Taibbi would be the editor of an independent Wall Street Journal with a regiment of investigative reporters. Then Americans would have a prospect of reclaiming their country and their economy.

Charlie Savage is a summa cum laude graduate of Harvard with a Master's degree in law from Yale. As a Boston Globe reporter, he documented the Bush-Cheney-Yoo-Bybee-et.al. destruction of U.S. civil liberties and the constitutional separation of powers as they occurred during the reign of the 43rd president of the United States. Savage draws on this disillusioning experience to give us another important book, Takeover (2007). Savage documents completely how American civil liberty was destroyed by Dick Cheney and the traitors he was able to place in key positions in the Bush regime.

President George Bush, an inconsequential person, gloried in the increase in his power that the Cheney forces and the Federalist Society achieved by a fabricated doctrine of "inherent power" that allegedly resides in the presidency. This power, its tyrannical advocates assert, places the President above Congress, the Judiciary, and the law itself during times of war. The advocates of this doctrine used war to advance their claims, but actually believe that the President, as long as he is a Republican, is, in fact, a Caesar who is unaccountable.

Savage is a clear, masterful writer. He shows that the Bush/Cheney traitors have left Americans with an executive branch that is unaccountable to statutory law, treaties, international law such as the Geneva Conventions, and Congress. What one reads in Takeover is not opinion but documented fact. There is no better way for gullible flag-waving Americans to sober up than to read Takeover.

Anyone who has any remaining faith in the U.S. government after reading the Taibbi and Savage books will lose it completely when they read James W. Douglass' JFK And The Unspeakable (2008). Douglass' book is more gripping than the best thriller or murder mystery; yet, it is based on hard evidence documented in 100 pages of footnotes. Douglass presents the solution to the greatest murder mystery of the 20th century -- that of President John F. Kennedy.

Douglass is not the first to take on this task. Millions of people in the U.S. and abroad have been convinced by years of investigation by many competent researchers that President Kennedy was murdered by his own government. What differentiates Douglass book is that he proves it several times over with official government documents that have been declassified in the years that have passed, with personal and careful interviews with eye-witnesses whose testimony was excluded from the Warren Commission's report and whose mouths where shut by threats that silenced them into old age when they had nothing left to lose, and with circumstantial evidence that is so overwhelming that it could not be a mere coincidence.

In brief, JFK, who began political life as a cold warrior was brought face-to-face with reality in the Cuban missile crisis when the U.S. military insisted that the crisis be resolved by military attack on Cuba and a first-strike nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. Kennedy found his intelligence and humanity isolated within his own government and turned via back channels to Soviet leader Khrushchev for help.

Khrushchev sensed sincerity in JFK's plea and withdrew the Soviet nuclear missiles from Cuba in exchange for Kennedy's promise that the US would not invade Cuba. Kennedy added the promise to remove U.S. strategic missiles from Turkey in six months but not as a public part of the deal.

The U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and even the Secret Service entrusted with the protection of the president concluded that JFK was soft on communism and a national security threat.

Kennedy had not gone along with the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, calling off the U.S. air support. He had nixed the Operation Northwoods project conceived by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to conduct black ops terrorist operations against American citizens in Miami and Washington D.C., to hijack and shoot down American airliners ("real and simulated"), to strafe and bomb Cuban refugee ships headed for Florida and to blame it all on Castro in order to create public support for "regime change" in Cuba.

When Kennedy signed the nuclear test ban treaty with Khrushchev, it brought him more condemnation from within his own government. In the eyes of the Joint Chiefs, the CIA, and the Secret Service, America had a national security risk in the White House who was selling out the country to Soviet deceptiveness.

The decision was made to eliminate the security risk. Douglass presents in fascinating detail every inch of the story. I can't reproduce it here. Suffice it to say that Oswald was on both the CIA and FBI payrolls. He was set up as the patsy without realizing it until he was in the Dallas jail where he was shot by Jack Ruby, another CIA asset.

The FBI at headquarters level was not part of the plot, although local offices were infiltrated by the CIA. The CIA had set the assassination up so that the patsy, Oswald, was linked to a KGB assassin and to Castro. The goal was to use Kennedy's murder to enrage the American public and to attack Cuba and the Soviet Union. I know, it sounds to naive Americans like a far-fetched conspiracy theory, but I have never seen a better proven case.

After JFK's assassination, J. Edgar Hoover clued in Lyndon Johnson that the linkages of Oswald to the KGB and Cuba were fabricated by the CIA.

The problem for President Johnson was that the CIA had assassinated Kennedy in a manner that was too transparent. The CIA had overdone its setup of Oswald, for example, to the point that it was transparently a CIA operation.

What to do? If Johnson ordered the arrest of the CIA operatives responsible, the responsibility rose high up into the ranks. What would be the effect on the American public during a difficult time of the cold war if they learned that they could not trust their own government not to murder their own president? In addition, liberals were concerned that if the truth came out, Americans' trust in their government would evaporate. Heaven forbid!

Johnson made the decision to cover up the crime and that was the task assigned to the Warren Commission.

J. Edgar Hoover knew the truth, but went along with the cover-up.

Johnson and Earl Warren were thinking short-run and did not understand the unintended consequences of the cover-up. They thought that by blaming Oswald as a lone deranged assassin, that they had done service by eliminating the CIA plot to implicate Cuba and the Soviet Union. Johnson did not realize that he had handed the U.S. government over to the CIA, and that he would soon be involved in an escalating war in Vietnam -- a war that JFK had ordered wound down -- which would deny him a second term.

Evidence continues to pile up that the Warren Commission covered up JFK's murder by a conspiracy within the U.S. government. In his multi-volume, Inside The Assassination Records Review Board, Douglas P. Horne, Chief Analyst for Military Records, Assassination Records Review Board, provides voluminous incontrovertible evidence that fraud was introduced into the autopsy reports that served as the basis for the Warren Commission's conclusion that JFK was shot from behind by a lone gunman.

Out of JFK's assassination came Robert Kennedy's assassination, the Oklahoma City bombing, Waco, and 9/11.

Niels Harrit, a professor of nano-chemistry at the University of Copenhagen, together with U.S. physicists and engineers published a paper in the Open Chemical Physics Journal in 2009 that proves that nano-thermite was used to bring down the World Trade Center towers.

In the U.S. this startling finding is unreported except on 9/11 truth sites. The researchers say that in the dust from the World Trade Towers destruction they found unreacted nano-thermite, some of which they tested to confirm their identification. The researchers say that they have enough of the unreacted nano-thermite left for others to examine.

There have been no takers in America. Not a single U.S. physics department, most of which are totally dependent on federal government grants, will touch the subject.

The campaign that has been organized against the finding of Harrit and his associates is that the dust has not been in certified custody, and the explosive material could have been added. This claim overlooks that nano-thermite is a material that is not available to anyone except the U.S. military.

In America today the financial press says we cannot believe Taibbi. Law professors hoping for elevation to the federal bench say we cannot believe Savage. The mainstream media and some left-wing Internet sites say we can't believe Douglass.

It is in this disbelief of hard evidence that America is dissolving.

http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Perfidy-of-Government-by-paul-craig-roberts-110228-405.html

Huge COMEX Silver Supply Squeeze Developing

As the December 2010 COMEX silver contracts approached maturity, a higher than normal number of contracts were not closed out before the first day of notice for delivery. In theory, potentially all of these open contracts could have ended up being called for delivery. While a number of short sellers absorbed their losses by purchasing an offsetting long contract, the amount of silver that was needed for physical delivery did stress available COMEX inventories.

As a result, in November and December 2010 the price of silver jumped more than 30%.

This same pattern looks like it will repeat for the maturing March 2011 COMEX silver contracts. This time, however, the potential supply squeeze is much larger.

February 28 is the first day of notice for delivery of the March contracts. Normally, parties not wanting delivery would have closed out their contract long before then. At the COMEX close on February 22, there were still 50,848 open March 2011 silver contracts, representing a potential liability to deliver 254.24 million ounces of silver by the end of March. The COMEX registered silver inventories available to cover deliveries totaled only 41.91 million ounces. Even including customer inventories that are stored at the COMEX, which are only eligible to deliver against COMEX contracts if the owners so choose (and most do not), the total is only 102.35 million ounces.

During COMEX trading hours on February 22, there were 124,000 March 2011 silver contracts traded—almost 2-1/2 times the number of open contracts! This is almost unprecedented volatility!

Here’s what I suspect happened to cause such a huge trading volume that day. The price of silver had been rising significantly for the past several trading days, reaching successive 31-year high price records (ignoring inflation). The US markets were closed on February 21 for Presidents’ Day. In trading in Asian and European markets early on February 22, the price of silver passed $34.00. If this price were maintained, then a large number of short sellers would get margin calls when the COMEX market opened on February 22. That could have forced leveraged short sellers to put up additional cash, physical silver, or to buy long contracts to close out their short positions. Any of these actions would likely have the effect of pushing silver prices up even higher.

It appears that a massive effort was mounted to drive drown COMEX silver prices on February 22 in order to avoid or reduce the margin calls to leveraged short sellers. This strategy was successful to a degree in that the price of silver dropped to just below $33.00 at one point on the COMEX. The temporary drop encouraged some owners of long positions to liquidate and take profits, further helping to push the price down.

However, the price suppression effort was not successful at pushing down the silver price below the February 18 COMEX close. Once it became clear that the manipulation was losing steam, buyers jumped back into the market on February 23. During COMEX trading hours, the price of silver reached as high as $33.75. Trading was extremely volatile, with 1% swings up and down occurring within a matter of minutes.

Several hedge funds, seeing how easy it was to make a short-term profit in silver squeezing COMEX short sellers last November and December, are likely to repeat the tactic with the maturing March contracts—but on a greater scale.

If the price of silver from now through the end of March were to rise by 30% again, that would put the price around $43. But, if there is a larger supply squeeze underway, the price could go much higher.

Already we are seeing several physical silver wholesalers using a two-tier silver spot price system. If you want to sell to them, they are using spot prices derived from COMEX and other markets. On the other side, if you wish to purchase physical metals from them, they are quoting a selling spot price that is 5-10 cents higher than their buying spot price.

The mainstream media is reporting that stock market prices and most commodities (with the exception of gold) fell on February 22 as a result of concerns about unrest in countries in the Middle East and North Africa that could lead to reduced supplies of petroleum. The unrest is sparked in part by soaring food prices (which the US government pretends is not occurring) in addition to political factors. But this news does not give you a clear picture of what is really going on in the silver (and gold) markets.

Expect both gold and silver prices to become much more volatile in the coming weeks. Don’t be surprised if silver prices move across a $2-3 range within a 24-hour period. In the past week, our company has enjoyed a significant increase in demand for physical silver. Thus far we have been able to make immediate or short-term delivery of most forms of silver. That could change quickly. At last report, the Perth Mint was telling buyers that they would have to wait until at least April to receive delivery of newly manufactured silver ingots.

Even though silver prices are now near 31-year highs and gold is near its highest prices ever, I still consider both of them to be at bargain levels compared to what I expect to see by the end of March. Silver will outperform gold, but both will do well versus the US dollar and all currencies.

Patrick HellerPatrick A. Heller owns Liberty Coin Service in Lansing, Michigan and writes “Liberty’s Outlook,” a monthly newsletter covering rare coins and precious metals. Past issues can be found online at http://www.libertycoinservice.com/ Pat Heller is also the gold market commentator for Numismatic News. Past columns online at http://numismaster.com/ under “News & Articles”. His bimonthly columns on collectibles can also be read at http://www.lansingbusinessmonthly.com under “Articles” and “Department Columns.”His radio show “Things You ‘Know’ That Just Aren’t So, And Important News You Need To Know” can be heard at 8:45 AM Wednesday mornings on 1320-AM WILS in Lansing (which streams live and becomes part of the audio and text archives posted at http://www.1320wils.com.

Inside Job Trailer #1 - Former Fed Governor Frederic Mishkin Is Corrupt

Inside Job Trailer: Iceland and $124K of nothingness.

Mishkin will live to regret the day he agreed to this interview.

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Here's the official trailer...

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GLOBAL WARMING HOAX PART 1

GLOBAL WARMING HOAX PART 1

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