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Sunday, July 31, 2011

A GALLERY OF FAKE DEAD BIN LADENS

www.whatreallyhappened.com

Pakistan actually shot the man claimed to be bin Laden.
At about 1:20 a.m. local time a Pakistani helicopter was shot down by unknown people in the Sikandarabad area of Abbotabad. The Pakistani forces launched a search operation in the nearby area and encountered with a group of unknown armed people. A fire exchange followed between the two sides. When the fire exchange ended, the Pakistani forces arrested some Arab women and kids as well some other armed people who later confessed to the Pakistani forces they were with Osama Bin laden when the fire was exchanged and Bin Laden was killed in the firing.


The first fake photo, used by Reuters' and the British Press.

US Senator Scott Brown confirmed that this was the image he was shown as part of an official US government briefing to the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Brown, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, suggested he had viewed them as part of an official briefing, and he argued that they were too graphic to be released to the public and could inflame terrorists.

Oops.

Brown later acknowledged that he had fallen victim to a hoax, apparently the same doctored images that were making the rounds on the Internet.

And here is how the fake was made!

The mouth and beard from a photo of the real Bin Laden in the mid 80s was photoshopped onto the head of another dead man.

"If at first you don't succeed, lie, lie again!" -- Motto of the White House


Another photo that was leaked onto the net following the collapse of the first fake. The White House strategy appears to have been to "test" the fakes with leaks, then go with the first image that appeared to fool everyone. This one did not.

Ignoring the bullet hole this guy looks very healthy for ten years of dialysis. The nose is also too narrow. But the main reason to disregard this as another likely fake is simple. This image is tainted green to make it look like a night vision image, yet the soldier at right is looking off left, apparently able to see just fine without night vision goggles. And finally, there is something missing from this image that should be there (besides night vision goggles).


There is an illumination source to the upper right of the camera taking this image. You can see the resulting shadows on the jaw line and cheek of the soldier. More to the point, there is clearly a shadow from the soldier's face extending left from his face and falling on the floor and the side of "Osama's" face. Yet there is no trace of a similar shadow from the face of "Osama" above the beard near the right eye. And didn't the White House say "Osama" was shot above the LEFT eye?

Source image for the second fake is found; a clip from the movie "Blackhawk Down."


Flipped left to right

And merged with another fake bin Laden.

Source image for the second fake is found; a clip from the movie "Blackhawk Down."

The people who want to send your children off to die in wars on Israel's enemies are nothing is not persistent. After the above Blackhawk Down failed, they tried once more.


This is a simple morph, again exposed when the original source image was located by a WRH reader.

The real Osama Bin Laden ...

... died of natural causes in December 2001.

News of Bin Laden's Death and Funeral 10 days ago Islamabad - A prominent official in the Afghan Taliban movement announced yesterday the death of Osama bin Laden, the chief of Al-Qaeda organization, stating that bin Laden suffered serious complications in the lungs and died a natural and quiet death. The official, who asked to remain anonymous, stated to The Observer of Pakistan that he had himself attended the funeral of bin Laden and saw his face prior to burial in Tora Bora 10 days ago. He mentioned that 30 of Al-Qaeda fighters attended the burial as well as members of his family and some friends from the Taleban. In the farewell ceremony to his final rest guns were fired in the air. The official stated that it is difficult to pinpoint the burial location of bin Laden because according to the Wahhabi tradition no mark is left by the grave. He stressed that it is unlikely that the American forces would ever uncover any traces of bin Laden.

Even Fox News reported Bin Laden was dead in 2001 ... until it was decided that a live Bon Laden was more useful to the war hawks than a dead one!

In 2007, shortly before her own assassination, Benazir Bhutton confirmed that Osama Bin Laden was dead.

[The Youtube video in the following link is no longer available: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwgi28bemZM&feature=player_embedded]


The above is from the last known video of the real Bin Laden, just weeks before his death. Note the indications on his skin of the effects from dialysis.

Every Bin Laden shown on TV since then has been a phony to justify wars, TSA, and the loss of your civil protections.




In one notorious case, the FBI simply took the face from a Spanish politician, photoshopped it, and claimed it was Bin Laden.

In another case, the CIA openly admitted making fake Bin Laden videos.

Finally, a photo used to support the claim that a 24 (or 29; the story kept changing) year old woman was Bin Laden's wife, the Daily Mail published the following photo.


Click for larger image

Take a close look at the fingers in the Daily Mail photo of the passport. This is another photoshop creation and a very clumsy one at that. The face seems to be an overlay as well and not part of the actual image of the passport.

Fool me once ...

Common sense will tell you that if you have real evidence of a real event, you do not need, nor would you risk, using a fake piece of evidence, because of the fake is exposed, doubnt is cast on the real evidence. So, if the US Government is showing phony bin Laden photos to the Senater Armed Services Committee, it means all the evidence must be fake.

Source: http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/galleryoffakebinladens.php

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

One World, One Money: The Quest for a Single Global Currency

By Carl Teichrib (www.forcingchange.org), July 12, 2011

NOTE: This report was originally published in late 2007 in Forcing Change, and was reprinted as a chapter in the book, A Single Global Currency (Icfai University Press, 2009). Since it was first released, there have been numerous developments in the quest for a single global currency. One World, One Money, although a few years old, is an essential read in that it provides a framework to understanding this critical monetary agenda.

Forcing Change is a highly documented, monthly journal on globalization, tackling economic, social, religious and political changes driving the move towards “One World.” Your membership into FC allows this intensity of research to continue.

“A global economy requires a global currency.” – Paul Volcker, former Chair of the US Federal Reserve.[1]

—————-

“I fully support a single global currency.”

Flabbergasted, I waited for an explanation.

“That way farmers in Africa get the same pay as farmers in North America, and workers in Asia would receive the same as their counterparts in Europe and elsewhere.”

Hmmm…an interesting perspective. I asked the gentleman sitting across the lunch table; “Have you ever seriously studied banking or the historical role of money?”

His response to the negative didn’t surprise me; after all, wage equality and production values are not currency issues per se, albeit currency matters do play a role. Much of our lunch hour, therefore, was spent reviewing the relationship between money, banking, and power.

This provocative discussion, enjoyed over a steaming bowl of soup, took place at the annual meeting of a multi-million dollar Christian-based relief organization. And the person I was dining with wasn’t just an interested attendee; he was a board member representing a significant regional arm of this organization. Granted, he was only one man in a large administrative structure, but his decisions – combined with other board members – impact projects around the globe. Thus, I found his supportive statement for a world currency even more disturbing; here was an individual involved in economic decisions that impacted projects around the globe, yet he didn’t understand what he was asking for.

During the course of our lunch-hour, it was obvious that he had no conception of the incredible power-shift that would occur under such a scheme, a shift that would effectively create a global master of untouchable proportions. All he could see was an international-sized band-aid solution, “a single global currency,” to address the problem of world poverty.

I replayed this conversation after returning home, perplexed by the ease in which a person with the right motives was willing to embrace such a risky venture. Turning to the banking and economics section of my library, I thumbed through a variety of books and documents in an attempt to wrap my mind around this thorny issue. A number of interesting quotes jumped from the pages.

“The great struggle of history has been for the control over money. It is almost tautological to affirm that to control the production and distribution of money is to control the wealth, resources, and people of the world.” – Jack Weatherford, anthropologist and author.[2]

“The control of money and credit strikes at the very heart of national sovereignty.” – A.W. Clausen, President of Bank of America, in a response to the suggestion of a global central bank. [Clausen later became the President of the World Bank].[3]

“Once a nation parts with control of its currency and credit, it matters not who makes that nation’s laws.” – W.L. Mackenzie King, [former Prime Minister of Canada].[4]

All of this brings up an interesting question: Does the world need a global central bank? If you want a single world currency, it requires an international banking structure armed with a monetary policy on a planetary scale. Essentially, the requirement for a single global currency is a bank that has power over all countries, kindred, and tongues. Under such an arrangement, national monetary sovereignty – including democratic actions to change a nation’s economic/monetary direction via the ballot box – would effectively cease to exist.

This stripping of national control by a global monetary regime was couched as a positive development in a 1988 article published in The Economist. Looking to curb government-led monetary mismanagement, a problem that seems to plague every nation-state, the article suggested a radical re-arrangement: the creation of a dominant, global currency called the Phoenix. Country-level decision making, under the Phoenix, would disappear under a world central bank.

“There would be no such thing, for instance, as a national monetary policy. The world phoenix supply would be fixed by a new central bank, descended perhaps from the IMF. The world inflation rate – and hence, within narrow margins, each national inflation rate – would be in its charge. Each country could use taxes and public spending to offset temporary falls in demand, but it would have to borrow rather than print money to finance its budget deficit. With no recourse to the inflation tax, governments and their creditors would be forced to judge their borrowing and lending plans more carefully than they do today. This means a big loss of economic sovereignty, but the trends that make the phoenix so appealing are taking that sovereignty away in any case.”[5]

The idea of dismantling economic decision-making at the national level was criticized by former Canadian Member of Parliament, Paul Hellyer, in 1994. Discussing a similar proposal to that of the Phoenix, Hellyer warned that under such a global currency platform, “the interests of citizens, of individual countries must be subordinate…to the interests of international finance.”[6]

“…[countries] would no longer be able to pursue any kind of independent policy. Sovereignty over the most powerful of all economic tools would be turned to an international monster…A world bank run by a world kingship of international appointees collectively not accountable to anyone? Heavenly days!”[7]

Unknown to my lunchtime counterpart, the idea of a single global currency has been quietly batted around in banking and economist circles for decades – slowly gaining momentum since the Second World War.[8]

Bancor and Beyond

In 1943, economist Alvin Hansen suggested an international-economic approach to the problem of world peace. Even though Hansen’s primary interest was in promoting full employment and the development of “backward countries” in the coming post-war years, his suggestion rested on creating an International Exchange Fund (IEF) alongside an International Bank. This IEF “would facilitate the provision of adequate exchange, and especially promote adjustments leading to international equilibrium…”[9]

“International equilibrium” in exchange rates effectively means the creation of a unified world currency system. Hansen also recognized the political importance of this move, and linked world federalism with his global monetary structure: “for the preservation of peace and the promotion of healthy international political relations.”[10]

That same year British economist John Maynard Keynes put together a plan for a world currency. This proposal was introduced during the run-up to the 1944 Bretton Woods conference, the gathering of Allied powers for the purpose of creating a new economy in the post-war era (Bretton Woods birthed the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development). Touching on Keynes’ monumental concept, former chairman of the United States Federal Reserve, Paul Volcker wrote,

“It contemplated the creation of a new synthetic international money apart from the gold that countries already held in their reserves; his proposed name for it, bancor, combined the word for bank with the French word for gold.”[11]

Behind the scenes the United States of America also had a world currency proposal for the Bretton Woods meeting, directed through Henry Morgenthau Jr. and designed by US Treasury Department official, Harry Dexter White [who would later be accused of being a Soviet asset[12]. Like the British/Keynes idea, the American plan envisioned a global monetary unit tentatively named the Unitas.[13]

Robert Mundell, the Canadian economist who developed the Optimal Currency Area theory – a concept that leverages commonality among neighbouring countries to formulate a regional currency – commented on the political interactions that surrounded this 1944 event.

“President Franklin D. Roosevelt directed his secretary of the treasury, Henry Morgenthau Jr., to make plans for a world currency. Both the American and British plans at Bretton Woods included provisions for a world currency. The American plan named it unitas; the British plan named it bancor. It was never implemented for political reasons that had to do with American politics. Months before the Bretton Woods conference, the Americans withdrew their proposal for a world currency and when the British, as Lord Robbins tells us, brought up the issue, ‘the Americans changed the subject.’ The year 1944 was a presidential election year, and isolationist forces and the next Congress might have resisted an idea that might have been interpreted as sacrificing a degree of sovereignty.”[14]

Although the White/Keynes initiatives never materialized, the Bretton Woods system did allow one currency to move into a dominant world position: The US dollar. Business and financial historian, John Steele Gordon, provides some contextual insights.

“Germany and Japan lay in ruins. Roosevelt’s assistant Harry Hopkins, flying over Berlin shortly after the war, called it, ‘a modern Carthage.’ The Soviet Union, although greatly strengthened geopolitically, had lost a greater percentage of its population than any other country, and had had much of its most productive areas laid waste by combat. Britain and France were militarily and financially exhausted (Britain, by one estimate, expended about one-quarter of its total national wealth on the war). Their great colonial empires would soon melt away.

The vast territory of the United States and its industrial base, however, had been untouched by the war. Its productive capacity had been hugely increased and its population enriched. Its economy, by far the largest on earth before the war, now produced fully 50 percent of the world’s gross product. Eighty percent of the world’s monetary gold belonged to the United States; most of the rest was stored in the vaults beneath the New York Federal Reserve bank. Under the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944, the dollar, convertible into gold by central banks, would be the world’s primary reserve currency and the basis of world trade in the future.” [15]

In the years following the great conflict, nations found themselves amassing comparatively large dollar reserves in order to participate in the international economy. The American greenback had become the de facto global currency, with the underlying promise of gold.

However, due to a series of inter-connected changes in the world economy during the late 1950s and early 1960s – the rising value of European currencies, the growing concern over US balance of payments and trade, and the inflationary accumulation of US reserves – central banks started to cash in dollars for gold.[16] Martin Mayer, in his classic The Bankers, noted, “…it is hard to fathom the faith of the European (and American) monetary experts who believed that the world could safely entrust the creation of its reserve assets to the proprietors of a printing press in Washington.”[17]

With the monetary cracks widening in the economic landscape, central bankers and financial ministers from the Western nations formed a powerful new club, the Group of Ten, with the task of re-vamping the international reserve structure.[18] Starting in 1963 and continuing through 1969 with a series of high-level meetings, the Group decisively recommended the creation of a new reserve asset that would operate through the International Monetary Fund (IMF).[19] It was the birth of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs).[20]

Initially based on a fraction of gold – similar to the US dollar – the SDR floundered only a few years later when US President Nixon closed the gold window. Unable to properly manage its own financial house, the gatekeeper for the world’s reserve supply collapsed the Bretton Woods system of gold convertibility. This resulted in the re-fashioning of the SDR around a basket of currencies, and the asset subsequently slid into relative obscurity as an IMF “unit of account.”[21]

Nevertheless, the creation of SDRs in the late 1960s opened the door to revisit the one-world currency discussion that had started with Bretton Woods. In 1968 Robert Mundell gave a presentation to the US Congress Joint Economic Committee titled Plan for a World Currency. Mundell was straightforward, “It is clear in what direction we need to move. We need to construct, out of all the assets currently used by the monetary authorities, a new world currency.”[22]

This desire to move towards a single global currency was also evident during a 1969 conference hosted by the US Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. Held at Melvin Village, New Hampshire, this meeting witnessed an interesting debate centered on the one-world concept.

“Let me turn from digging away at the opposition to something more positive, and start with the best and worst of international monetary systems. The first-best, in my judgment, is a world money with a world monetary authority.”[23] – Charles P. Kindleberger.

“I am utopian. I would like to see a world with a single money. Unlike Mr. Kindleberger, I would like to see it without a central monetary authority…A world monetary authority is a politically irresponsible authority which does not have a representative relation to the people of the world. At best, it is a benevolent dictatorship of ‘experts’ chosen in an arbitrary way and subject only very indirectly if at all to any effective political process. A world money with a world authority is, I believe, the worst best and not the first best on both political and economic grounds. On the other hand, a unified world money without a monetary authority would be a pretty good system…”[24] – Milton Friedman.

Obviously, a recognized single world currency didn’t materialize through the creation of Special Drawing Rights. Nor did the visions of Mundell or Kindleberger come to pass. However, the IMF accounting unit – which is still functioning and based on a basket of US dollars, yens, pounds, and euros – has slowly gained in acceptance. In the 2003-2004 Annual Report for the Bank for International Settlements (often dubbed the world’s “central bank for central bankers”), it was announced that shareholders would receive dividend payments based on SDRs. And the International Postal Union, a specialized agency of the United Nations, employs the SDR in its operations.

Not surprisingly, the SDR concept is still seen as a potential embryo for a one-world currency. In 2006, the president of the Single Global Currency Association wrote the following: “Someday, the four currencies in the basket will be collapsed into one, the Single Global Currency, and SDRs will disappear.”[25]

World Money and Crisis Requirements

During the mid-1970s, talk of instituting a single world currency was overshadowed by a new, yet interlocking global agenda: a “new international economic order.”[26] The objective of this movement – which emanated from Algeria and found support through the Group of Non-Aligned Countries[27] – was to change the post-gold, Bretton Woods arrangement into a more socialist oriented model.

The Club of Rome, an elite group of eminent leaders, also supported this effort. In 1976 it fleshed out what this “new international economic order” would look like. According to the Club, the world’s social, political, cultural, and economic composition needed to be re-aligned under a sweeping system of international management. Monetarily, this included a world reserve asset similar to SDRs but more “attractive,” promotion of regional monetary integration, the creation of a World Treasury agency, and international taxation powers – all with the aim of progressing “towards a world-wide monetary system.”[28]

How would citizens come to accept such radical changes? The Club of Rome understood the historical mechanism needed: Crisis.[29]

By the early 1980s, the move toward a new international economic order had essentially imploded, due in part to national differences and an overall lack in world political power via the developing countries. However, the desire to birth a global currency was still moving behind the scenes, and the person who re-ignited the idea would later become the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and Chairman of the US National Intelligence Council.

In 1984, during another Federal Reserve Bank of Boston conference, Harvard Professor and Council on Foreign Relations member, Richard N. Cooper, overturned the tables by laying out a revolutionary scheme for a new world monetary arrangement.

“I have put forward a radical alternative scheme for the next century: the creation of a common currency for all the industrial democracies with a common monetary policy and a joint Bank of Issue to determine that monetary policy…This proposal is far too radical for the near future, but it could provide a ‘vision’ or goal which can guide interim steps…”[30]

Cooper’s plan was radical, calling for a world currency around 2010. Other conference participants, such as Lord Eric Roll (then Chairman of Warburg & Co) and Ariel Buira (then Deputy Director, Bank of Mexico) favourably commented on Cooper’s plan, with Buira noting that “objections to such a scheme would appear to be largely political.”[31] In the summer of 1984, the CFR published Cooper’s proposal in its journal, Foreign Affairs. Interest in the topic had been resurrected.

Four short years later, after the market setbacks of 1987, The Economist published a cover story on the suggested Phoenix world currency. Like the mythical firebird that arises out of the ashes of destruction, this international currency would likewise emerge from the chaos of crisis. As the article noted, it would take “several more big exchange-rate upsets, a few more stockmarket crashes and probably a slump or two” before politicians would accept the Phoenix and secede monetary power to a higher authority. In the end, national monetary policies would no longer exist, and a supranational central bank would run the show. Looking forward to this development, The Economist anticipated a start-up date: 2018.[32]

Since the 1980s, other voices have added support to the single global currency movement. Consider some quotes,

1998:

“…the transition to a single currency for the entire world could come with a speed that might surprise many. The world might easily move from having almost 200 currencies today to having one within a decade, and twenty-five years from now, historians would wonder why it took so long to eliminate the Babel of currencies which existed in the twentieth century.” – Bryan Taylor, Chief Economist at Global Financial Data.[33]

1999:

“National currencies are a phenomenon of the twentieth century; supranational currencies are the solution for the future.” – Ricardo Hausmann, Chief Economist, Inter-American Development Bank.[34]

2001:

“When VISA was founded twenty-five years ago, the founders saw the world as needing a Single Global Currency for exchange. Everything we’ve done from a global perspective has been about trying to put one piece in place after another to fulfill that global vision.” – Sarah Perry, Director of VISA’s Strategic Investment Program.[35]

2004:

“…if the global market economy is to thrive over the decades ahead, a global currency seems the logical concomitant.” – Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator for the Financial Times, former senior economist at the World Bank.[36]

In 2007, the Council on Foreign Relations published an article in its May/June issue with the provocative title “The End of National Currency.” [Note: on the cover the article is titled "One World, Too Many Monies."]

Benn Steil, the Director of International Economics at the CFR, wrote that national money systems should be abandoned, “Since economic development outside the process of globalization is not longer possible…”[37] Stated even more succinctly, “Monetary nationalism is simply incompatible with globalization.”[38] And, “In order to globalize safely, countries should abandon monetary nationalism and abolish unwanted currencies…”[39] This is quite a leap.

In bringing us to this next stage, Steil pinpointed the hinge-crisis that could swing the world toward a new monetary order – the weakening state of the US dollar at the global level.

“…the dollar’s privileged status as today’s global money is not heaven-bestowed. The dollar is ultimately just another money supported only by faith that others will willingly accept it in the future in return for the same sort of valuable things it bought in the past. This puts a great burden on the institutions of the U.S. government to validate that faith. And those institutions, unfortunately, are failing to shoulder that burden. Reckless U.S. fiscal policy is undermining the dollar’s position even as the currency’s role as a global money is expanding…

…In the absence of long-term fiscal prudence, the United States risks undermining the faith foreigners have placed in its management of the dollar…”[40]

What becomes of the American economy, and the overall financial world, if faith in the US dollar collapses quickly? Or, instead of a rapid dump of dollars, it’s slowly seeped out of foreign reserves and replaced by gold, Swiss franks, euros, and/or yen? When is the tipping point reached for the globally inflated US dollar?

Steil reminds us; “There is no way effectively to insure against the unwinding of global imbalances should China, with over a trillion dollars of reserves, and other countries with dollar-rich central banks come to fear the unbearable lightness of their holdings.”[41]

All of this underscores a strategic reality that can be summed up in three words: Crisis equals opportunity. As banking mogul A.W. Clausen once said, “new comprehensive politico-economic systems across peoples almost always arise out of conquest or common crisis…”[42]

Robert Mundell also views crisis as the starting point for change. In a May 2007 lecture, Mundell related, “International monetary reform usual becomes possible only in response to a felt need and the threat of a global crisis.” This Nobel Prize winner also pointed his finger to the possible trigger event, saying that the “global crisis would have to involve the dollar,” and that a world currency should be viewed as “a contingency” to a global dollar disaster.[43]

With a similar crisis in mind, Benn Steil offers what appears to be an altruistic solution. In order to avert the crisis, all that nations need to do is relinquish sovereignty before the problem become insurmountable.

“Governments must let go of the fatal notion that nationhood requires them to make and control the money used in their territory. National currencies and global markets simply do not mix; together they make a deadly brew of currency crisis and geopolitical tension and create ready pretexts for damaging protectionism.”[44]

So how should monetary sovereignty by expunged? Steil candidly asserts that the world needs to re-group itself into three regional monetary units: the Dollar, the Euro, and a new Asian currency.[45] This proposal mirrors the work of Robert Mundell, who has been lecturing on a new international monetary unit based on the US Dollar, Euro, and Yen. Under Mundell’s plan these three currencies would form the basis of a world currency unit called the DEY, and the International Monetary Fund would be its manager – essentially replacing the SDR program.[46]

The Importance of Regional Currency Regions

The implementation of Mundell’s plan may not be too distant as major currency blocks, led by Europe’s success with the euro, are forming in different parts of the globe. Nations in South America, Africa, and South-eastern Asia are all looking to create regional currency zones.[47]

The Middle East too is travelling this road. The Gulf Cooperation Council – which is made up of six Persian Gulf countries, including Kuwait and Saudi Arabia – launched their regional common market in early 2008,[48] and anticipate a GCC monetary zone by 2010[49] (NOTE: 2017 is now the date being discussed).

Bankers and economists in North American are also flirting with ideas of currency integration. For years the concept of a North American monetary system has cropped up in central banking circles, with the Amero as the suggested name for the new continental currency.[50] And if not the Amero, then some believe that the US dollar should become the tri-national staple. In May 1999, economist Judy Shelton suggested the dollarization of North America to the US House Committee on Banking and Financial Services.[51]

But how do regional monetary blocks play into a Single Global Currency? Morrison Bonpasse, President of the Single Global Currency Association (SGCA), a group of economists working toward a world currency, answers that question; “The monetary unions of the twenty-first century, and those which survived the twentieth, are the milestones on the path to the future, and to the Global Monetary Union.”[52]

Bonpasse elaborates, “Thanks to the success of the European and other monetary unions, we now know how to create and maintain the 3-Gs: a Global Monetary Union, with a Global Central Bank and a Single Global Currency.”[53]

“The world is ready to begin preparing for a Single Global Currency, just as Europe prepared for the euro and as the Arabian Gulf countries are preparing for their common currency. After the goal of a Single Global Currency is established by countries representing a significant proportion of the world’s GDP, then the project can be pursued like its regional predecessors.”[54]

Simply put, the regional model becomes the steppingstone to a one-world currency. However, the problem of nationalism prevails. Discussing this roadblock, Bonpasse writes,

“The task can be stated quite simply: how to move from the current 147 currencies to 1. Developing the political will to overcome the residual strength of nationalism is the major challenge for the movement to a 3-G world. As with the implementation of the euro, the economics and politics of monetary union are inextricably bound together; and the logic of both point toward the 3-G world.

The question now is not whether the world will adopt a Single Global Currency but When? and How smooth, inexpensive, and planful OR rough, costly and chaotic will the journey be?[55]

To the internationalist mind, national sovereignty is the overriding obstacle to a unified global order. Therefore, if a Global Central Bank and world currency is to exist, some other political arrangements will have to be formed. Robert Mundell understood this political problem when giving a lecture in 2003 titled, “The International Monetary System and the Case for a World Currency.”

His response was frank: “a global single currency could not be achieved without a global government. To enforce a single currency would involve big problems of organization.”[56]

But this reality isn’t stopping the SGCA and others of like mind from progressive planning. As Bonpasse asserts, “It is now time to seriously pursue the goal of a Single Global Currency as managed by a Global Central Bank within a Global Monetary Union.”[57]

What would a Global Central Bank look like? The closest comparison we can make today is the Bank for International Settlements, an impermeable institution based in Basel, Switzerland.

Here are a few points to ponder, taken from the BIS Charter, regarding the untouchable nature of this banking powerhouse,

- The BIS is “immune from all taxation” including “all taxes on the Bank’s capital, reserves or profits…”[58]

- The BIS headquarters, its branch offices, and any building used by the BIS are inviolable to national government officials, including national police officers.[59]

- Officials of the BIS have international diplomatic immunity, including immunity from arrest or imprisonment, “save in flagrant cases of criminal offence.” BIS board and staff members have a host of other special perks, including immigration and tax benefits that the average person can only dream of.[60]

The BIS China branch has an especially powerful provision:

“The Bank shall not be subject to any form of financial or banking supervision or obliged to implement any form of accounting standard, or to comply with any form of licensing or registration requirement.”[61]

Is this what the world needs – another ultra elite, unaccountable, unapproachable, untouchable banking monarchy – a Global Central Bank that acts as the world king?

Unfortunately, too few people understand the power and influence exerted by central banks. Steven Solomon, in his large volume on central banking, details this reality in its broader context,

“Central bankers’ fingerprints are everywhere behind the daily financial headlines: the rise and fall of interest rates, the ups and downs of the dollar, the emergency rescue of a crashing stock market or a nation in crisis. But they themselves are rarely seen or understood except by an elite minority.”[62]

Solomon went on to describe global central bankers, and the BIS in particular, as “international freemasonry” – a cozy club whose dealings are hidden behind the veil of specialized transactions, technical lingo, and extraordinary influence.

Amazingly, the Single Global Currency Association suggests the Global Central Bank would operate “with open governance,” where “every decision is exposed to the Internet eyes of billions of people.”[63]

The argument against this vision of transparency is too overwhelming: Utilizing current and historic central banks as a model, it’s evident that a Global Central Bank would operate beyond anyone’s reach.

Concerning a headquarters for the Global Central Bank, Bonpasse suggests Basel, Zurich, or Geneva. “Switzerland has a reputation for sound money, and locating the GCB in Switzerland just might be the necessary incentive for that country to join the Global Monetary Union as a member.”[64]

“The governing structure of the GCB should be relatively easy to design, given the available, successful models of the US Federal Reserve, European Central Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Bank, United Nations, and associated organizations such as the World Health Organization. Not everyone is happy with the structure of all those organizations, but it’s a negotiable political question…”[65]

He’s right: it is a political question. This was evident to Richard Cooper when he brought up the idea of a global central bank and currency at the 1984 Federal Reserve Bank of Boston conference.

“The idea is so far from being politically feasible at present – in its call for a real pooling of monetary sovereignty – that it will require many years of consideration before people become accustomed to the idea.”[66]

Knowing this, Cooper still put forward a specific timetable: “This one-currency regime is much too radical to envisage in the near future. But it is not too radical to envisage 25 years from now…”[67] Likewise, the SGCA has a date in mind: 2024.

In retrospect Cooper’s timing appears fairly accurate: Twenty-five years after 1984 brings us to 2009, and today the idea of a single global currency is gaining traction through organizations like the SGCA and advocates such as Robert Mundell. Moreover, the Bank for International Settlements has publicly considered the potential for a one-world currency built around regional groupings.[68]

But will all of this “help the farmer in Africa,” or bring wage equality to the worker’s of the world?

Probably not: it will, however, give unprecedented powers to an international banking cartel, the likes of which has never been seen or experienced before.

As a critic of global banking once wrote, “Money is money, and banking is banking, and neither recognizes any allegiances that don’t bear compound interest.”[69]

———-

Carl Teichrib is editor of Forcing Change, a monthly digest reviewing globalization at a critical level. His reports, articles, and analysis have been utilized by other authors and researchers throughout North America, and abroad.

Endnotes:


[1] As quoted by Morrison Bonpasse, The Single Global Currency (Single Global Currency Association, 2006), p.264.

[2] Jack Weatherford, The History of Money (Crown Publishers, 1997), p.246.

[3] A.W. Clausen, in a 1979 interview with the Freeman Digest, “International Banking,” p.21.

[4] William Lyon Mackenzie King, in a radio address, August 2, 1935. Quote printed in Walter Stewart’s book, Bank Heist (HarperCollins, 1997), p.71.

[5] Cover story, “Get Ready for the Phoenix,” The Economist, January 9, 1988.

[6] Paul Hellyer, Funny Money (Chimo Media, 1994), p.57.

[7] Ibid, pp.57-58.

[8] Paul Volcker raises this point in his co-authored book, Changing Fortunes: The World’s Money and the Threat to American Leadership (Times Books, 1992), p.9. Volcker’s co-author was Toyoo Gyohten. See also, Morrison Bonpasse, The Single Global Currency (Single Global Currency Association, 2006).

[9] Alvin Hansen, “Economic Organization for Peace,” printed in Beyond Victory, edited by Ruth Nanda Anshen (Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1943), p.104.

[10] Ibid. p.106.

[11] Paul Volcker and Toyoo Gyohten, Changing Fortunes: The World’s Money and the Threat to American Leadership (Times Books, 1992), p.9.

[12] For more on this development, see Sacred Secrets: How Soviet Intelligence Operations Changed American History, by Jerrold and Leona Schecter (Brassey’s Inc., 2002).

[13] Morrison Bonpasse, The Single Global Currency (Single Global Currency Association, 2006), p.153.

[14] Robert Mundell, “The Case for a World Currency,” Journal of Policy Modelling, #27, p.458.

[15] John Steele Gordon, An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power (HarperCollins, 2004), pp.361-362.

[16] Brian Tew, The Evolution of the International Monetary System, 1945-81 (Hutchinson, 1977/81), chapter 9 and 10. See also, Martin Mayer, The Bankers (Weybright and Talley, 1974), pp.449-453.

[17] Martin Mayer, The Bankers (Weybright and Talley, 1974), p.450.

[18] In many respects the Group of Ten was developed to override the Board of Executive Directors at the International Monetary Fund. See Tew, The Evolution of the International Monetary System, p.128.

[19] During this same time period, the International Monetary Fund and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development were similarly engaged in finding a solution to the global reserve imbalance.

[20] Brian Tew, The Evolution of the International Monetary System, 1945-81 (Hutchinson, 1977/82), p.131.

[21] Special Drawing Rights fact-sheet, April 2008, International Monetary Fund.

[22] Quoted in The Single Global Currency (Single Global Currency Association, 2006), p.155.

[23] Charles P. Kindleberger, speaking at a Federal Reserve conference. The International Adjustment Mechanism, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, 1969, Conference Series 2, p.105.

[24] Milton Friedman, The International Adjustment Mechanism, pp.18, 117.

[25] Ibid. p.154.

[26] Philip C. Bom, The Coming Century of Commonism: The Beauty and the Beast of Global Governance (Policy Books, 1992), pp.27-53.

[27] See, Reshaping the International Order: A Report to the Club of Rome (E.P. Dutton, 1976), p.4. The oil crisis and OPEC’s role in third-world advocacy played a monumental part in setting the stage for this movement. For more on this development, see Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, The World Challenge (Simon and Schuster, 1980).

[28] Ibid, pp.126-134.

[29] Ibid, p.110.

[30] Richard N. Cooper, “Is there a Need for Reform?” Speech given at a Federal Reserve Bank of Boston conference, May 1984. See, The International Monetary System: Forty Years After Bretton Woods (Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, 1984), pp.37.

[31] Ariel Buira, Discussion, ibid. p.45.

[32] “Get Ready for the Phoenix,” The Economist, January 9, 1988.

[33] Quoted in The Single Global Currency, p.230.

[34] Ricardo Hausmann, “Why the Interest in Reform? Discuss,” Rethinking the International Monetary System (Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, 1999), p.96.

[35] Sarah Perry, Director of VISA’s Strategic Investment Program, as reprinted in The Single Global Currency (Single Global Currency Association, 2006), p.7.

[36] Martin Wolf, writing for the Financial Times, August 3, 2004. Also quoted in The Single Global Currency, p.216. Wolf also stated, “This is a world I am unlikely ever to see. But maybe my children or grandchildren will do so.”

[37] Benn Steil, “The End of National Currency,” Foreign Affairs, May/June 2007, p.95.

[38] Ibid. p.89.

[39] Ibid. p.84.

[40] Ibid. p.93.

[41] Ibid. p.94.

[42] A.W. Clausen, in a 1979 interview with the Freeman Digest, “International Banking,” p.23.

[43] Robert Mundell, “A Decade Later: Asia New Responsibilities in the International Monetary System,” presentation given in Seoul, South Korea, May, 2-3, 2007.

[44] Benn Steil, “The End of National Currency,” Foreign Affairs, May/June 2007, p.84.

[45] Ibid. p.95.

[46] Robert Mundell, “A Decade Later: Asia New Responsibilities in the International Monetary System,” presentation given in Seoul, South Korea, May, 2-3, 2007.

[47] For more information on the formation of regional blocks, see the Bank for International Settlement report, Regional Currency Areas and the Use of Foreign Currencies, September, 2003.

[48] “GCC states to launch joint market today,” Arab Times, online-edition, www.arabtimesonline.com/kuwaitnews/pagesdetails.asp?nid=10186&ccid=12.

[49] Regional Currency Areas and the Use of Foreign Currencies, Bank for International Settlements, September 2003, pp.106-122.

[50] For more information on this topic check out the July, 2007 issue of Forcing Change (www.forcingchange.org), which details the political and economic development of an integrated North America. For more on the Amero, see Herbert G. Grubel, The Case for the Amero: The Economics and Politics of a North American Monetary Union (The Fraser Institute, 1999). On a NAFTA currency, see Michael Chriszt, “Perspectives on a Potential North American Monetary Union,” Economic Review, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, Fourth Quarter, 2000, pp.29-38.

[51] Testimony of Judy Shelton before The United States House of Representatives
Committee On Banking And Financial Services, Hearing on Exchange Rate Stability in International Finance, May 21, 1999.

[52] Morrison Bonpasse, The Single Global Currency (Single Global Currency Association, 2006), p.134.

[53] Ibid. p.229.

[54] Ibid. p.281.

[55] Ibid. p.229.

[56] Robert A. Mundell, “The International Monetary System and the Case for a World Currency,” Leon Kozminski Academy of Entrepreneurship and Management and TIGER, Distinguished Lectures Series Number 12, Warsaw, Poland, 23 October 2003.

[57] The Single Global Currency, p.282.

[58] Constituent Charter of the Bank for International Settlements, point 6. BIS, Basic Texts, pp.4-5.

[59] Agreement between the Swiss Federal Council and the Bank for International Settlements, Article 3. Basic Texts, pp.36-37. See the Host Country Agreement with China, Article 4, Basic Texts, pp.55-56; and the Host Country Agreement with Mexico, Article 5, Basic Texts, pp.74-75.

[60] Agreement between the Swiss Federal Council and the Bank for International Settlements, Section II, Basic Texts, pp.42-48.

[61] Host Country Agreement with China, Article 3, Basic Texts, p.55.

[62] Steven Solomon, The Confidence Game: How Unelected Central Bankers are Governing the Changed World Economy (Simon & Schuster, 1995), p.13.

[63] The Single Global Currency, p.213.

[64] Ibid. p.294.

[65] Ibid. p.295.

[66] Richard N. Cooper, “Is there a Need for Reform?” Speech given at a Federal Reserve Bank of Boston conference, May 1984. See, The International Monetary System: Forty Years After Bretton Woods (Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, 1984), p.34.

[67] Ibid, p.34.

[68] BIS 75th Annual Report, page 151.

[69] Cliff Ford, Blood, Money, and Greed (Western Front, 1998), p.50.

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

From Pamela Geller to Anders Behring Breivik — how Islamophobia turned deadly in Norway

by Paul Woodward on July 23, 2011,
War in Context

When terrorism has a white face it invariably gets marginalized in the popular narrative. The lone wolf, the outsider, the sociopath — in many cases these portraits of misanthropic, isolated individuals who turn to violence are quite accurate.

The Oslo killings, however, should be seen in a different light since there is a wealth of evidence to suggest that the perpetrator of this atrocity, even if it turns out he was acting alone, was very much part of a political movement — a movement whose leading ideologues regularly appear on Fox News and have high public profiles.

Anders Behring Breivik, the 32-year-old Norwegian man widely assumed to be responsible for the mass murder that took place in Oslo yesterday, is being referred to as a Christian fundamentalist in many press reports.

His comments appearing on the political website Document.no suggest however that this is a rather misleading description. His views, as revealed there, are ideological rather than religious with his preeminent focus being his opposition to multiculturalism. (Quotations of Breivik appearing below come from a translation provided by Doug Saunders.)

In the United States, one of the most prominent public faces of the movement to which Breivik belongs is that of the notorious right-wing, pro-Israel, Islamophobic blogger, Pamela Geller, whose principal mouthpiece is Atlas Shrugs.

The poster below shows a recent event which she backed, along with Robert Spencer who operates Jihad Watch.

The World War Two iconography they employ — battleships, tanks and squadrons of bombers — makes it clear that they regard their campaign against “Islamization” as a kind of war. One of the battles in that war played out in Oslo yesterday.

Breivik, who probably sees himself as one of SIOE’s “freedom fighters,” describes himself as a cultural conservative and anti-Marxist liberal. In his comments at Document.no, he says little about his religious beliefs and seems to see his Christian identity primarily as a cultural identity. He writes:

I myself am a Protestant and baptized / confirmed to me by my own free will when I was 15

But today’s Protestant church is a joke. Priests in jeans who march for Palestine and churches that look like the minimalist shopping centers. I am a supporter of an indirect collective conversion of the Protestant church back to the Catholic. In the meantime, I vote for the most conservative candidates in church elections.

The only thing that can save the Protestant church is to go back to basics.

Breivik is much more specific in identifying the sources from whom he takes his own ideological direction: Robert Spencer, Fjordman, Atlas [Pamela Geller], Analekta [Informatics], Gates of Vienna, The Brussels Journal, and The Religion of Peace.

These are the preeminent voices promoting fear and hatred of Islam across Europe and America. But they also form — at least in Breivik’s mind — the “epicenter” of “political analysis” on the threat posed to cultural conservatives by multiculturalism in Europe and America. He recommends Fjordman’s book, “Defeating Eurabia,” as “the perfect Christmas gift for family and friends.”

Do any of the leaders of Stop Islamization of America (SIOA) and Stop Islamization of Europe (SIOE) advocate that their “freedom fighters” should adopt violent tactics such as those employed by Breivik? Perhaps not. Indeed, I have little doubt that in the coming days we will hear many vociferous disavowals of their having any association with the Norwegian. But have no doubt, while they might have a sincere revulsion for Breivik’s actions, they cannot so easily disassociate themselves from the ideas that drove him to murder almost a hundred innocent people.

Two years ago, Breivik called on fellow Norwegians to form a youth action group “that represents our ideological platform (anti-racist but critical of multiculturalism / Islamization etc).” He saw the group developing as part of Stop Islamization of Europe or as a new group that would model itself on SIOE and the English Defense League.

“For me it is very hypocritical to treat Muslims, Nazis and Marxists differ[ently]. They are all supporters of hate-ideologies,” Breivik writes. There is a whiff of the Bush doctrine here — that we should not differentiate between terrorists and those who harbor them. There’s also a hint of Bin Laden’s idea of the near enemy and the far enemy.

Breivik argues that cultural conservatives should not identify their main opponents as Jihadists, but instead should focus their attention on those he regards as the “facilitators” of Jihadists, namely, the proponents of multiculturalism. Hence his vehement opposition to Norway’s Labour Party and its leader, Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg.

Those in the anti-Islam movement who now want to distance themselves from Breivik will proclaim that they are opponents of hatred and maybe that’s true — but that’s how he sees himself too: as a man dedicating his life to combating the “hate ideologies.”

As the last decade has demonstrated, whether it’s on the level of governments or individuals, those who take up a banner in the name of a crusade against hatred have a surprising willingness to employ violence in pursuit of that goal.

Source: www.warincontext.org


Wednesday, July 13, 2011

BANKERS GONE WILD - HOW THE US GOVERNMENT HELPED WALL STREET GANG-RAPE AMERICA'S MIDDLE CLASS

BANKERS GONE WILD!

A PRIMER ON HOW WALL STREET PULLED OFF THE GREATEST MORTGAGE INVESTMENT SWINDLE IN HISTORY WITH THE ASSISTANCE OF THE US GOVERNMENT!
by Michael Rivero

BREAKING: 11-09-10 GREENSPAN ADMITS ON VIDEO FRAUD AND CRIMINALITY IN US BANKING SYSTEM!


1. SOME HISTORY

This story begins back before the United States was the United States.

The original thirteen colonies printed their own currency, and it worked very well at empowering commerce and turning the young America into a powerful growing economy, free of the poverty and unemployment that even then crippled London. But the bankers of Europe, long used to private banks issuing the public currencies, were horrified by the
American approach and saw it as a threat to their deeply cherished religious belief that the gods intended for the bankers to have all the wealth of the world. So, the Bank of England lobbied King George III to impose the Currency Act on the colonies, which forbade the colonies to use their own money and required them to borrow their lawful tender from the Bank of England, at interest.

It took only a few years for this scheme to reduce the formerly prosperous and productive colonies down to the poverty and unemployment typical of London at the same time period, as depicted in the literature of Charles Dickens, among others.

While the state-run American schools teach that the revolution was about the Stamp act and the Tea tax, it was primarily the rage created by the enforced impoverishment of the Currency Act which fueled the rebellion. Why the Currency Act is not mentioned in the public schools will become apparent further on.

2. THE ORIGINAL AMERICAN ECONOMY

Following the American Revolution, the Founding Fathers reverted back to the system which had worked so well before the Currency Act.

As the above diagram shows, the Founding Fathers of this nation set up a simple economic system that did not rely on a private central bank. Government issued the public currency and spent it into circulation where it was used by the public free of interest. Then the money was taxed back into the government's hands, then to be re-spent back into circulation. For each fiscal year the money issued equaled the money collected. Nothing was lost. The dollar was based on a weight measure of silver, which meant the value of a dollar was fixed and not subject to the whims of government or bankers.

3. THE FIRST BANK OF THE UNITED STATES

This is a system which has worked very well for the civil population throughout history. It made the new nation immediately prosperous. This alarmed the European banking clans, which feared the American inspiration might spread to other nations (as it did to France in 1793). Where Britain's military might failed, politics succeeded and spurred on by Alexander Hamilton, the first Bank of the United States was granted a 20 year charter in 1791. Almost immediately, the spiraling debt in the government budget, championed as necessary for international commerce by Hamilton, began to drain the livelihood of ordinary Americans. The furor over the debt was one of many issues that led to the famous duel between Hamilton and Aaron Burr which resulted in Hamilton's death on July 11, 1804. As a side note, the pistols which were used in the duel are today in the possession of J. P. Morgan Chase & Co. Hamilton continues to be lionized by the private banking cartels he championed.

"Everything predicted by the enemies of banks, in the beginning, is now coming to pass. We are to be ruined now by the deluge of bank paper. It is cruel that such revolutions in private fortunes should be at the mercy of avaricious adventurers, who, instead of employing their capital, if any they have, in manufactures, commerce, and other useful pursuits, make it an instrument to burden all the interchanges of property with their swindling profits, profits which are the price of no useful industry of theirs." --Thomas Jefferson

By 1811, the owners of the First Bank of the United States had become rich while ruining the lives of ordinary Americans. Congress had prudently limited the charter of the bank to 20 years and it expired in 1811. A move to re-charter the bank failed due to public opposition.

"The Bank of the United States is one of the most deadly hostilities existing, against the principles and form of our Constitution. An institution like this, penetrating by its branches every part of the Union, acting by command and in phalanx, may, in a critical moment, upset the government. I deem no government safe which is under the vassalage of any self-constituted authorities, or any other authority than that of the nation, or its regular functionaries. What an obstruction could not this bank of the United States, with all its branch banks, be in time of war! It might dictate to us the peace we should accept, or withdraw its aids. Ought we then to give further growth to an institution so powerful, so hostile?" --Thomas Jefferson

4. THE WAR OF 1812

The following year, with the conclusion of Britain's wars with Napoleon, the Bank of England demanded King George re-invade the United States to force them back into the clutches of private central banking, this time with the Bank of England. Thus was initiated the war of 1812, a war like any other war; created and waged for profit.

5. THE SECOND BANK OF THE UNITED STATES

The war of 1812 failed, and again political and monetary pressure succeeded where military force had failed, and in 1816, President Madison chartered a Second Bank of the United States, in part to deal with the expenses created defending the nation from Britain a second time and the runaway inflation caused by private banks issuing their own banknotes without restraint. Like the First Bank of the United States, the second one was granted a 20 year charter. By the time the charter was due to expire, the nation was once again struggling with debt and poverty while the bankers were growing richer every day.

As a result, Andrew Jackson opposed the renewal of the bank charter and made it a major platform of his campaign in 1832.

"Gentlemen, I have had men watching you for a long time and I am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the bank. You tell me that if I take the deposits from the bank and annul its charter, I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves. I intend to rout you out, and by the Eternal God, I will rout you out." -- Andrew Jackson

In 1835, an unemployed painter, Richard Lawrence, attempted to shoot President Jackson twice, with both pistols failing to fire. Lawrence gave as his reason for the attack that with the President dead, money would be more plentiful, an obvious reference to Jackson's veto of the re-chartering of the Second Bank of the United States. As a footnote, following the loss of its charter, the Second Bank of the United States attempted to continue as an ordinary bank, but went bankrupt in 1841.

6. THE PRIVATE CENTRAL BANK ECONOMY

The following diagram shows the principle difference with the central bank system as opposed to the original economic system of the United States.

As you can see, the main difference between the economic system created by the Founding Fathers and the current system is that the control of the printing presses has been given over to the private central bank. The government no longer prints up and spends the money it needs to operate, but BORROWS the money from the private central bank, at interest! Then the money is spent into circulation and winds its way through the population, and is then collected back in taxes. But here is the problem. Taxes now have to collect back MORE money than the government spent in order to pay the interest back to the private central bank. Over time, relentlessly, the private central bank is acquiring wealth from the population, in essence charging the people a fee for doing what the government itself originally did for free. That is the major difference between the economic system created by the nation's founders (the reason we fought a war to be free of the Bank of England) and the system we have today.

It is because we have been sold back into the debt slavery of a private central bank that the history of the Currency Act and its impact on the American Revolution is marginalized in the state-controlled schools. We are brainwashed into believing that the Revolution was about soggy tea!

\"If the debt which the banking companies owe be a blessing to anybody, it is to themselves alone, who are realizing a solid interest of eight or ten per cent on it. As to the public, these companies have banished all our gold and silver medium, which, before their institution, we had without interest, which never could have perished in our hands, and would have been our salvation now in the hour of war; instead of which they have given us two hundred million of froth and bubble, on which we are to pay them heavy interest, until it shall vanish into air... We are warranted, then, in affirming that this parody on the principle of 'a public debt being a public blessing,' and its mutation into the blessing of private instead of public debts, is as ridiculous as the original principle itself. In both cases, the truth is, that capital may be produced by industry, and accumulated by economy; but jugglers only will propose to create it by legerdemain tricks with paper." --Thomas Jefferson

7. SILVER MONEY VERSUS PAPER MONEY

But the banks were still constrained by the Coinage Act of 1792, which defined a dollar as 371.25 grains of pure silver, matching the common silver currency in use around the world at the time, or that weight of gold which would match in value 371.25 grains of pure silver, 24.75 grains, 1/15 the weight of the silver in a silver dollar.

US Silver Dollar US Gold Dollar (same scale)

It wasn't the coin that was the money, but the metal the coin contained.

Of course, carrying around large amounts of silver was difficult, so paper certificates were issued, both silver and gold certificate, as a convenience. But those paper certificates were not the money. They were claim checks. They were accepted as items of value because you could walk down to the banks and turn the claim checks in for the appropriate amount of silver or gold. But the metal was the money, not the engraved coins and not the paper.

The bankers could only loan out as much money, based on silver or gold, as they had the silver and gold to cover in their vaults. The adherence to gold and silver as a unit of value was a major limitation on the banker's activities.

8. CIVIL WAR AND LINCOLN'S GREENBACK

Then in 1861, the Confederacy broke free of the United States. Abraham Lincoln sought financing from the bankers for the war effort, but balked at the usurious high interest rates the banks demanded. Declaring that he would not enslave the white people to the bankers to free the black people, Abraham Lincoln exercised his Presidential Authority to issue a new government currency; the greenback.

However in order to make the currency work and to cover the escalating costs of the War, Lincoln was forced to abandon convertibility, meaning that the paper notes became the money and were not convertible to silver or gold (despite the flood of silver from the Comstock strike of 1857, which eventually led to Nevada's rapid statehood and Federal taxation in 1864). While there was inflation at the time, the government-issued currency, free of interest to a private bank, worked well during the war years, and Abraham Lincoln declared his intention to keep issuing the Greenbacks after the war's conclusion. This did not please the world's bankers at all.

An 1865 London Times editorial directed against Lincoln's debt-free Greenbacks said it all:

"If that mischievous financial policy which had its origin in the North American Republic during the late war in that country, should become indurated down to a fixture, then that Government will furnish its own money without cost. It will pay off its debts and be without debt. It will become prosperous beyond precedent in the history of the civilized governments of the world. The brains and wealth of all countries will go to North America. That government must be destroyed or it will destroy every monarchy on the globe."

Following Abraham Lincoln's assassination, Congress voted to end the Greenbacks, but did not restore convertibility. Banks could issue notes without regard to actual bullion reserves and a period of intense post-war inflation and speculation resulted.

THE BANKERS MANIFESTO

Congressman Charles A. Lindbergh, Sr. revealed the Bankers Manifesto of 1892 to the U.S. Congress somewhere between 1907 and 1917. The source was an article written by Louis Even and published in United States Bankers Magazine 1892.

We (the bankers) must proceed with caution and guard every move made, for the lower order of people are already showing signs of restless commotion. Prudence will therefore show a policy of apparently yielding to the popular will until our plans are so far consummated that we can declare our designs without fear of any organized resistance.

Organizations in the United States should be carefully watched by our trusted men, and we must take immediate steps to control these organizations in our interest or disrupt them.

At the coming Omaha convention to be held July 4, 1892, our men must attend and direct its movement or else there will be set on foot such antagonism to our designs as may require force to overcome.

This at the present time would be premature. We are not yet ready for such a crisis. Capital must protect itself in every possible manner through combination (conspiracy) and legislation.

The courts must be called to our aid, debts must be collected, bonds and mortgages foreclosed as rapidly as possible.

When, through the process of law, the common people have lost their homes, they will be more tractable and easily governed through the influence of the strong arm of the government applied to a central power of imperial wealth under the control of the leading financiers.

People without homes will not quarrel with their leaders. History repeats itself in regular cycles.
This truth is well known among our principal men who are engaged in forming an imperialism of the world. While they are doing this, the people must be kept in a state of political antagonism.

The question of tariff reform must be urged through the organization known as the Democratic Party, and the question of protection with the reciprocity must be forced to view through the Republican Party.

By thus dividing voters, we can get them to expend their energies in fighting over questions of no importance to us, except as teachers to the common herd. Thus, by discrete actions, we can secure all that has been so generously planned and successfully accomplished.

9. THE GOLD STANDARD

In 1900 President McKinley kept a campaign promise to bring back convertibility by signing the Gold Standard Act, making the Gold Standard the basis for all US currency, even though much of the coinage issued remained silver. McKinley did this because of the public perception that the US Banking system was weak and corrupted, and because the gold strikes in California, Alaska, and Colorado bolstered the US Treasury's stock of that metal.

One year later, President McKinley was assassinated by Leon Czolosz, who explained his attack at his execution saying,"I killed the President because he was the enemy of the good people – the good working people."

10. THE FEDERAL RESERVE

In 1910, a group of private bankers met at a private island named Jekyll Island to plan the imposition of yet another private central bank on the people of the United States. As part of the ruse, they abandoned the unpopular name "Bank of the United States" and chose the name Federal Reserve to grant themselves the illusion that this was a government agency, when in point of fact it is just another privately owned central bank. Pretenses to the contrary notwithstanding, the Federal Reserve is no more "Federal" than Federal Express. It is a privately owned bank. Three years later, in 1913, Congress voted the Federal Reserve act and President Wilson signed it, redeeming a campaign promise to his financial backers. Six years later, as his Presidency came to a close, Woodrow Wilson wrote.

“I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is now controlled by its system of credit.We are no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.” -- Woodrow Wilson 1919

Because of the earlier disasters with 20 year charters, the Federal Reserve was granted a 100 year charter due to expire in 2013. A later Congress amended the Federal Reserve act to make the charter permanent.

11. THE CRASH OF 1929

For a while, the new Federal Reserve was still bound by the requirements of the Gold Standard. Under the law, they were required to have enough gold on hand to redeem 40% of the paper notes they had issued. The Federal Reserve claimed that this requirement limited their ability to deal with the financial crash of 1929, and after years of lobbying, finally persuaded incoming President Franklin Roosevelt to abandon the gold standard entirely in 1933 and to confiscate all gold and gold certificates in order to make the gold available to the US Government for war funding purposes.

In looking back at the crash of 1929 it became obvious that reckless speculation had created the over-valued market bubble, while easy credit for buying stocks on margin drew in working-class people; people who did not have risk capital to play with, to form each succeeding layer of a rapidly-building pyramid doomed to eventual collapse. In the wake of the melt-down, Congress passed the Banking Act of 1933, otherwise known as the Glass-Steagall Act, which created the FDIC to restore public confidence in the banks and stop the runs. Glass-Steagall also included a ban on bank holding companies from owning other financial institutions, which was seen as a major contributing factor to the reckless speculation which precipitated the crash.

12. JOHN F. KENNEDY

The Federal Reserve completed their plan for the economic subjugation of the American people in 1964, one year after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Silver coin and certificates were still in general use; money that came from the government and was used free of interest. Since the money was something of value and owned by whoever held it, the banks made no profit off of the use of that money and more to the point, could not manipulate its value.

Then President John F. Kennedy signed Executive Order 11110 on June 4th, 1963. This order authorized the Treasury to issue a new government currency, the US Note, based on silver in Fort Knox, recycled from the huge magnets used in early Uranium enrichment at Oak Ridge. This allowed the Kennedy administration to purchase four billion dollars worth of goods and services without having to borrow the money from the Federal Reserve, and signaled Kennedy's intention to restore the nations' economic system to the model used by the Founding Fathers.

John F. Kennedy's United States Note.

Five months later, John Kennedy was assassinated and his US Notes withdrawn from circulation. The Warren Commission, now widely acknowledged to have been a cover-up, included as a member John J. McCloy, President of Chase Manhattan Bank and President of the World Bank.

13. THE END OF SILVER MONEY.

The following year, all silver coins and silver certificates were withdrawn from circulation. The media proclaimed the new clad coinage and the Federal Reserve Notes to be just as good as the silver money, and the entrapment of the American people was complete. From then on, all currency in circulation was worth what the private central bank said it was worth, and over time, it has been declared worth less and less. Just see how many "dollar" notes it takes to buy an original US Silver Dollar today!

14. THE TRAP OF THE FEDERAL RESERVE

Unlike the economic system of value instituted by the Founding Fathers, the Federal Reserve System is a debt-based economy. All money, whether issued through the government, or by member banks to the public, is the result of a loan from that Private Central Bank. And therein lies the trap, because the moment that first Federal Reserve Note went into circulation, more money is owed to the banking system than actually exists! The debt can never be paid off.

The system perpetuates only so long as an ever-larger group of new borrowers can be found to create new money to pay the interest on the old money. That is what makes it a pyramid. More money is created out of thin air in response to a loan, but the total debt still exceeds the total money supply. That is why the government and media always talk about the “growth” of the economy. “Growth” may sound like a good thing to the unenlightened, but in a debt-based economy, “growth” means “nation and its people deeper in debt-slavery". And because it is a pyramid, if the economy does not grow, that is, if more new debt cannot be created to service the interest on the old debt, the pyramid collapses, which is what is happening now.

The Federal Reserve System is designed to suck the real wealth out of the nation and put it in the pockets of the bankers, and now that they have succeeded, the system is breaking down, too cash-poor to operate efficiently, just as it did in the colonies in the early 1770s under the Bank of England. The system is broken because the bankers have all the wealth, and absent a new source of wealth to pay the bankers’ interest charges and fees, the system is locking up.

Of course, it is all paper debts and make-believe obligations. The money owed to the bankers by the government never existed in the first place. It’s just part of the scam by which the bankers enslave the world, which is the real essence of banking; to hold nations and people perpetually in debt-servitude or indentured service, with the government bribed to not take action to ameliorate the situation!

“This is the very essence of the banking industry; to make us all, whether we be nations or individuals, slaves to debt!”



15. DEREGULATION AS THE DOORWAY TO DISASTER

In 1999, the Gramm-Leach-Blily repealed the provision of the Glass-Steagall act that prohibited bank holding companies from owning other financial institutions, and dropped the barrier that separated banks and investment houses, allowing them to engage in each others business. This created a repeat of the exact same financial environment that had led to the crash of 1929. Those politicians who had championed deregulation, like Senator John McCain (a veteran of the Keating S&L Scandal of the 1980s), avoided keeping any oversight over the recently unchained financial system to ensure that past crimes were not being repeated. As a result, almost immediately after the repeal of Glass-Steagall, the banks and investment houses began to acquire and "flip" homes, to drive the prices up.

The reason for the flipping should be obvious. Banks make their money off of interest on loans. The more people are forced to borrow, the more they have to work to pay the banks back. From a bank's point of view, a house that sells for only a few thousand dollars is useless. The ideal is that same house costing so much that a borrower will spend 30 years working off that paper debt, often paying the banks many times more in interest than the house itself originally cost.

From 1999 through 2006 housing prices soared. Adjustable-rate mortgages became the norm, with low lead-in teaser rates to draw in new borrowers. Aiding the process was the US Government itself, which baited the trap with an $8000 tax credit for first-time home buyers.

16. MORTGAGES AS INVESTMENT DEVICES

Let us start by looking at how Mortgage companies worked up into the mid 2000s.


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In a normal mortgage, the lender, who is a member bank of the Federal Reserve system, prints up a bunch of cash (or enters the amount of the loan into a computerized bank account) to loan to the mortgage applicant. This is not a joke; the money the bank hands to you to buy a house, or car, or iPod, is created out of thin air the moment you sign the loan agreement, credit card slip, or mortgage papers.

Admit it; you thought the money for loans came from the bank's depositors, didn't you! Because after all, that's what you were taught in the state-controlled schools as a child! And they would never lie to you, would they?

"If the people understood the rank injustice of our money and banking system, there would be a revolution before morning" -- President Andrew Jackson

The mortgage lender, who is allowed to print up the money they loan out (up to a legally defined limit), makes their profit from the borrower, who is not allowed to print up the money he or she hands back to the bank, but must trade their labor for money with which to pay the banker. Because of compound interest, the mortgage borrower actually repays the banker many times the original cost of the home!

Let us say that you take out a $100,000 mortgage over 30 years at 8% interest. That works out to $733.76 per month, which does not seem too bad (until you start adding in insurance and property taxes, but that is another story). $733.76 per month is $8,805.12 per year. Over 30 years that comes out to $264,153.60 paid out to the banker! In other words, while the builder of the house earns $100,000 after buying the land. buying materials. and building the house, the banker earns $164,153.60 purely for having the right, granted by the US Government, to run a printing press! If you or I created money the same way, we would be thrown in jail for counterfeiting!

Remember that from an investor's point of view, the value of a home is not the home itself, but the debt the home creates and shackled the homeowner to, worth many times the cost of the actual house! That debt, which is pure profit, is sold to Americans as the "American Dream"; to work 30 years to pay the bankers many times what the house actually cost! (Some dream). Fortunes were being made and the politicians were neck deep in the greed.

But there was a new wrinkle.


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Starting in 2006, Wall Street operators got the ideas of taking debt obligations, and collecting them together to sell to other investors. The mortgage lenders would take their mortgages and "bundle" them, then sell the entire bundle for a flat fee. The advantage was that the mortgage lender recovered his money in a single large lump, while the investor buying the bundled mortgages would accept their return on investment over the lifetime of the mortgages. For long-term investors such as investment banks and pension funds, this was an ideal investment so long as all the mortgages were paid on time every month. The investment looked sound as long as real-estate prices kept soaring, and nobody was taking too close a look at the individual mortgages. Because the banks and mortgage companies were passing the mortgages onto outside parties, there was little incentive to look too closely at the borrowers, while financial incentives encouraged the mortgage writers to over-inflate earnings and home values on the applications to push the deals through.

The mortgage bundlers, drunk on the instant profits falling like manna from heaven, started taking some reckless steps. Mortgage analysis companies like Clayton Holdings were reporting to the clients at the big banks that many of the so-called sub prime mortgages did not meet basic underwriting requirements, either for the private banks or for the three "F"s, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and FHA. But the mortgage bundlers blended the sub prime with prime mortgages and sold off the bundles as "Mortgage Backed Securities" or "Collateralized Debt Obligations". In other words, the mortgage bundlers knew many of the mortgages in those bundles were not going to perform well, but did not tell the investors who bought them, then invested in "derivatives", basically betting those MBS and CDOs would fail!

17. IT ISN'T THE FORECLOSURES, IT'S THE FRAUD!

"I suddenly realized I had joined the wrong mob." -- Lucky Luciano, comparing Wall Street to the Mafia

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The problem is that some of the mortgage bundlers were greedy! They needed more mortgages to feed the giant mortgage-backed-security bubble they were inflating. So they started luring in borrowers with borderline credit into "sub-prime" mortgages. Since members of the US Congress were invested in the very companies that were reaping giant profits on those mortgage-backed-securities, Congress voted through an $8000 tax credit for first-time home buyers to bait them into the scheme! But still there were not enough new mortgages. Investors were clamoring for more mortgage-backed-securities to buy. Then the bankers had an inspiration. They realized that while you can only sell a house to one owner at a time, you can in theory sell the mortgage over and over, since it is a piece of easily copied paper or more likely a computer record in MERS, the Mortgage Electronic Registration System, a computer system created to evade title transfer fees and to speed up the churning of the mortgages as they shuffled from one investment company to another! MERS initially helped conceal the over-selling of mortgages, but eventually the scam became known, and numerous major banks have been exposed for selling the same mortgage into multiple mortgage-backed securities, generating vast profits for the bundlers.

Now, from the point of view of the mortgage bundlers, they might not have seen this as a fraud. Nobody wants to see themselves as a villain, and the bundlers may have decided they were simply following the reserve system of banking to the next level.

Under the reserve system of banking, for every real dollar in deposits you have in the vaults, you can create and loan out 8, or 10, or 30, depending on the current reserve requirement imposed by the top bank, the Federal Reserve System. The mortgage bundlers may have decided that for every real mortgage they held, they could create 3, or 4 , or in one case 20 out of thin air with which to collateralize the investment package. As long as everyone does not come in to get the actual mortgages at the same time, the system would work the way the reserve money supply does in the banks, in which only enough real money is on hand to cover expected transactions with customers, and the rest for the bankers to play with out in investment land.

While this "reserve" approach to mortgages may have looked okay to the bankers, who saw the world through money-colored glasses, it is in fact a crime! In February 2009 CNBC broke the story that many of the mortgage bundlers had pledged individual mortgages as collateral over and over into different CDOs, when legally, they can be pledged as collateral only once.










Chris Whalen tells CNBC's Larry Kudlow that Bear Stearns will be exposed as having sold the same loan to different investors on numerous occasions.

This is why many homes are being foreclosed on by more than one bank at a time.


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But there is another problem with over-selling mortgages. For every copy of a mortgage bundled into an investment, there is an investor expecting a mortgage payment every month. Obviously the home buyer, who has signed only one mortgage, is making only one mortgage payment. For the extra copies of that mortgage there are no monthly payments coming in. As long as only a few mortgages in the bundle are underperforming, nobody noticed, but as the jobs left America and more and more home buyers started to fall behind, the risk that the over-selling scheme would be exposed to public scrutiny and condemnation (not to mention arrest and prosecution) began to be apparent!

18. MERS

Because mortgages were changing hands so many times, the regulatory fees for a transfer became a major cost factor for the mortgage bundlers. To get around the fees and generally speed up the process, a system was created called the Mortgage Electronic Registration System, or MERS. All notes were transferred into MERS legal ownership and then could be assigned and reassigned willy-nilly all over the financial system without the usual paperwork and fees.

By mid 2008 the wheels were starting to come off the boom times. The automatic interest rate increases on those adjustable-rate mortgages started kicking in, and due to the high prime-rate at the time, those increases in monthly payments were enormous, with no increases in salaries and wages to cover them! The US Government, at the same time it had taken the chains off of Wall Street had continued a policy of tax credits that encouraged American corporations to offshore high-paying manufacturing jobs. Caught between a rock and a hard place, between higher mortgage payments and declining wages and salaries, Americans started defaulting and the banks started foreclosing.

19. THE MELT-DOWN

And here is where the system began to really break down. Because the mortgages and titles had been traded around in the creation of the mortgage-backed securities, the companies servicing the mortgages (i.e. collecting the payments) could not locate the actual mortgage note. In the cases where the same mortgage had been pledged as collateral on more than one mortgage-backed security, the paperwork trail led to more than one owner-of-record.

By the end of the year, it had become apparent that a massive fraud had been committed by the mortgage bundlers, and that a great many of the mortgage-backed securities held by investors and pension funds were in fact without collateral. While the mortgages were being paid and returns on the investment paid, nobody noticed. But as homes started to default it became apparent that investors did not in fact have any collateral behind most of those collateralized debt obligations! Lawsuits followed by investors trying to recover money from the banks. In a telling move, the US Government has moved to protect the banks!


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20. TARP AND THE BAILOUTS

Those mortgage-backed securities with multiply-assigned mortgages ARE the "Toxic Assets" Congress was screaming about when they forced the Troubled Asset Relief Program through Congress in the fall of 2008, despite overwhelming public opposition. The mortgage bundlers had stuck key financial institutions with fraudulent mortgage-backed securities, and Congress voted to loot the public to purchase the useless paper and hide it from public scrutiny. Why? Because the members of the US Congress had their own fortunes invested in those fraudulent mortgage-backed securities. Had the institutions collapsed, members of Congress would have been ruined as well. So they saved their own investments by dropping the losses on the American people!

This is why, even though the public opposed TARP, members of Congress were so happy when the bill finally was forced through the Congress.

Commercial real estate was caught up in the mortgage-backed securities mania, and eventually the US Government used $3 trillion in taxpayer funds to deal with that growing catastrophe!

In other cases, the Federal Government has been exposed as intentionally concealing the scale of the losses from the American taxpayer, even to the point of hiding billions in bailout payments, further fueling speculation that the major "Too Big To Fail" banks have indeed already failed and are technically insolvent.

We are not talking about a few crooked bankers, but a system-wide culture of criminality that makes Bernie Madoff-with-the-loot, the NASDAQ founder who swindled his own investors for $65 billion, look like a choir boy!

This brings us to the interesting sidebar of John McCain's candidacy for President. All seemed to be going well for him until in a move that surprised many political observes, McCain chose as his Vice President Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. McCain's claim that he needed a female Vice President seemed reasonable, but there were far more qualified women out there such as Hawaii's Governor Linda Lingle, who was not even contacted by McCain's campaign. In hindsight, it almost seemed McCain was intentionally destroying the credibility of his own campaign, and now a possible motive surfaces. If it was already known that the mortgage-back securities had become toxic assets, and that the taxpayer was going to be made to foot the bill, what better plan for the Republicans that had created the mess to drop the task of screwing the American people onto the Democrats, including a man willing to do anything to be America's first black President! And it appears to have worked as the same Republicans that created this financial mess appear poised for a mid-term return to control of the White House.

21. FORECLOSURE-GATE

But while the US Government using taxpayer money was buying back the fraudulent uncollateralized mortgage bundles, the holders of the genuine mortgages were still faced with a problem. The trail of documents through MERS was a hopeless rats' nest! Mortgage Service companies were forced to go into court without all the required documents, and judges, failing to see the actual debt note or title before them,. were starting to throw foreclosure cases out! Representative Marcy Kaput got up in Congress advising homeowners to demand the foreclosers to prove they owned the actual loan!

So a new creature came into being, the "Foreclosure Document Mill", small start-up companies which for a fee would "re-create" missing paperwork to allow the foreclosures to pass a judge's scrutiny. But the foreclosure mills were also faced with the confusion in the MERS system and under pressure to perform, were hiring virtually anybody willing to engage in a little "gray" paperwork, hiring Wall Mart floor walkers, former beauticians, factory workers, and putting them in offices with no formal training to process foreclosure paperwork. According to one whistle blower, workers who produced large amounts of "re-created" documents were rewarded with cars and jewelry! Computerized processing systems cranked out foreclosure lawsuit paperwork by the reams!

The problem was that nobody was checking to see if the documents were actually correct or accurate, or if the people being foreclosed were actually behind in their payments.Even worse, lawyers were walking into court with foreclosure documents they knew were forged! The rush was on to file as quickly as possible ahead of the expected backlog of cases hitting the courts. In at least two known cases, foreclosure proceedings were started against home owners who did not even have mortgages! Companies that contracted to serve the legal papers on the homeowners never delivered those papers and many people were unaware they had been foreclosed on until the Sheriff showed up to change the locks!

22. INTENTIONAL FRAUD

The corporate media is still trying to say this is all a bunch of simple errors for which nobody should be held accountable, but already testimony is surfacing that major banks like Citicorp knew exactly what they were doing and that very well the investments they were selling at huge profit were really junk!

MERS itself has come under scrutiny, both because it is clearly a device to evade government fees and regulation, and secondly because no legislative body approved its creation and implementation into the home mortgage system. There has been no review of the system by any outside party.

That massive fraud did take place is beyond doubt, and the US Government in connivance with the bankers, conspired both to conceal the true nature of the cause of the economic crash and to dump trillions in dollars in losses on the American taxpayer. And behind it all remains the core problem that lenders and home-owners often do not know where the notes and titles are to be found!

But with individual mortgages being sold out as many as 20 different times, the mortgage bundlers faced a huge problem. Every home payment made has to be repaid to the investor in the MBS for every time that mortgage was resold, that is to say for every dollar paid by the home-owner, the mortgage bundler is on the hook for up to $20 owed to the holders of the mortgage backed securities. In that context, the banks have a huge motive to foreclose on homes to limit the losses on those oversubscribed mortgage backed securities! Once the home is foreclosed, payments on those over-subscribed mortgage backed securities stop and the criminals who over-sold those mortgages are off the hook. It is not unlike the Mel Brooks movie "The Producers" in which the producers intentionally choose what they think is a terrible script, "Springtime for Hitler", which they hope will close the first night. The producers then over-subscribe the investment in the play by 1000%. 100% is spent producing the show, with the other 900% to be pocketed after the show fails and the investors, unaware of the extra shares in the show, accept their losses and leave.



In the film, the play is a surprise hit and the producers go to jail. Hopefully, the same thing will happen to the financial companies who played the same game. If the over-selling of mortgages into mortgage backed securities was intentional, and given how many different financial companies did it, this seems certain, then the same financial institutions that profited from the selling of mortgage backed securities intended to crash the housing market to cover their escape. They took mortgages and sold them as mortgage-backed securities over and over again, then foreclosed the properties to end their obligations to the over-subscribed mortgage backed securities. This is why nobody cared whether home buyers were actually qualified for the mortgages, as the mortgages were never intended to be repaid, only foreclosed on!

However, the investors and especially the foreign banks that bought those over-subscribed mortgage-backed-securities are not quietly accepting their losses! Bank of America is being sued by PIMCO, the New York Fed, and several European banks. Two class-action suits have been filed against the owners of MERS. Sooner or later the fraudulent over-selling of those bundled mortgages must come out. And the bankers will stand exposed as the criminals they really are.

23. SEARCHING FOR A WAY OUT

So, how do we fix this mess? MERS is a Gordian Knot of trails between lender and borrower and holder of the titles. Sorting through the mess, even if possible, will take years both in the computer files and in the courts.

The only solution I can think of (short of armed rebellion and guillotining the culprits) is rather drastic, and not even original with me. In Tom Clancy's book "Debt of Honor" a stock market crash is exacerbated when the computer systems used to track transactions are sabotaged. That seems a good metaphor for the runaway mortgage-backed Securities market compounded by MERS allowing (or fraudulent bankers causing) mortgages to be placed in multiple investment bundles. The inspiration in the book is a phrase heard often in science;"If you didn't write it down, it did not happen!" And in the book, the solution is to simply discard everything that happened after the last good record and restart the machinery at that point. The stock market re-opens with the last good trade before the computers were sabotaged and everybody goes home happy, eventually.

Of course, real life will not be that simple. The mortgage bundlers have made fortunes off of these deals. If they can claim innocent victim of a computer error, then they will not be willing to surrender the fortunes they made; they will resist any solution that involves losing their profits, no matter how ill-gotten they may be. They are quite happy with the world as it is now.

The Government will not, indeed cannot ever admit error, even though, like the Gulf Oil Disaster and the Bernie Madoff scandal, the government's job was to prevent this from happening, not bait more victims into the scam with a tax credit.But having swindled the American people out of trillions of dollars to buy back and conceal the fraudulent non-collateralized mortgage securities, the US Government is now clearly an accessory to the crime, if after-the-fact. The original fraud with the mortgage-backed securities was covered up ahead of the 2008 election, and it appears Obama is trying to do the same for the 2010 elections, announcing a Federal criminal investigation which will supposedly look into the bankers' possible illegal activity, but in reality is intended to block criminal investigations already underway in all 50 states. CNBC reports that Congress may simply retro-actively declare the fraud to be legal, ending all investigations and indemnifying the bankers from criminal prosecutions.

That the relentless looting of the public treasury to cover-up this disaster has harmed the nation is beyond doubt. Trillions that might have paid for new schools and roads and hospitals has vanished into the black hole of Wall Street, to buy up bad paper and feed it to the shredder before the public finds out that once again, as is typical of a fascist economy, the poor are made to pay for all! People without mortgages, people who have never bought a home, are all harmed by this disaster. We are all victims of the rampant and reckless greed that consumes the money addicts in the halls of power. 43 million Americans are on food Stamps, and according to Barron's Magazine(October 11, 2010), unemployment is at 22%, which is depression levels. Meanwhile, Wall Street executives will collect bonuses this year totaling 8% of all the US cash in circulation!

Ultimately, the homes taken by MERS must be restored to their rightful owners. The people who bought what they thought were honestly foreclosed homes in good faith must of course be compensated and provided with equivalent properties. Beyond that, it is time to take a close look at the true nature of banks, especially the Federal Reserve, and to understand that banks do not serve the public, they serve only themselves!

"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs."
Thomas Jefferson, (Attributed)
3rd president of US (1743 - 1826)




THE US GOVERNMENT TOOK YOUR JOBS SO THE BANKS COULD TAKE YOUR HOMES TO COVER THE COSTS OF THEIR MORTGAGE-BACKED SECURITY FRAUD