« on: March 22, 2010, 11:22:17 PM »
http://thatsjustplumdumb.com/
index.php/2010/03/bank-for-international-
settlements-bis-how-the-rothschilds-control-
and-dictate-to-the-world/
Here is part of the article.
Bank For International Settlements (BIS): How
The Rothschilds Control And Dictate To The World
by William Dean A. Garner
For decades, people have urged me, pushed me,
prodded me, practically peeled off my skin, pulled
out my eyes, and yanked out my brain to prove it,
i.e. show them the data, the results, the books,
manuals, pamphlets, journals, monographs, voice
and video recordings, all the resources I have
used to make the statements I do about the
Brzezinski Cartel and the Rothschilds.
On the evening of St. Patrick’s Day 2010, I feel
now is the time . . . but with a twist.
The list below shows 165 different ways how The
First Sphere of Influence (Rothschilds and
Brzezinski Cartel) controls the world. One hundred
and sixty-five reasons to believe what I say to be
100% accurate and true.
Each entry is a separate and distinct central
bank, located in a separate and distinct part of
the world. These central banks cover the globe
and know absolutely no boundaries, effectively
erasing borders between even sworn enemies.
The BIS (pronounced BIZZ) is the Rothschild’s
piggy bank, a veritable deep-pit mine, the
equivalent of quadrillions of dollars.
quadrillion quad·ril’lion adj.
1. The cardinal number equal to 1015.
2. Chiefly British. Septillion.
What’s the significance of having a central bank
within a country and why should you concern
yourself, your family and colleagues?
Central banks are illegally created PRIVATE banks
that are owned by the Rothschild banking family.
The family has been around for more than 230
years and has slithered its way into each country
on this planet, threatened every world leader and
their governments and cabinets with physical and
economic death and destruction, and then
emplaced their own people in these central banks
to control and manage each country’s
pocketbook. Worse, the Rothschilds also control
the machinations of each government at the
macro level, not concerning themselves with the
daily vicissitudes of our individual personal lives.
Except when we get too far out of line.
The grand plan of The First Sphere of Influence is
to create a global mononation. Please do not
confuse this with the term globalization.
Mononation and globalization couldn’t be more
different in concept, scope and purpose.
Mononation is one state. It has one government.
One set of laws for all ordinary citizens, no laws
for the elite. Globalization refers to
communicating, trading, interacting, etc. among
separate, different, independent, sovereign
countries.
The grand plan of The First Sphere of Influence
is to create a global mononation.
Our own Federal Reserve is an illegally emplaced
private bank that is directly responsible for
creating all the US’s depressions, recessions, and
the inflation and deflation of our dollar. The Fed
controls the printing of our own currency, and
then charges the US government interest on those
loans. The interest is growing each year, making
it difficult if not impossible for our government to
pay it. How do we pay this interest? By the US
Personal Income Tax. This tax goes to the
Rothschild family.
In the coming months, as I continue to gather
intel and write a book about The First Sphere of
Influence, I will share more and more. For now, I
kindly ask that you read each of the 165 lines
below. One hundred and sixty-five reasons to
believe my intel. You can click on each bank and
visit its website. I’ve seen each one. They’re real.
And they’re one of the reasons why each country
is in such deep debt to this insidious family, the
Rothschilds.
By the way, if you’re curious what the US debt is
to the BIS, please refer to the table at the end of
this article, taken from the latest statistical
results provided by the Joint External Debt Hub,
which receives data from the BIS, International
Monetary Fund, World Bank, and the Organization
for Economic Cooperation and Development.
BIS Offices
Representative Office for Asia and the Pacific
78th floor, Two International Finance Centre
8 Finance Street, Central
Hong Kong
Special Administrative Region of the People’s
Republic of China
Telephone: (+852) 2878 7100
Fax: (+852) 2878 7123
Representative Office for the Americas
Torre Chapultepec
Rubén Darío 281 – 17th floor
Col. Bosque de Chapultepec
Del. Miguel Hidalgo
11580 México, D.F.
México
Telephone: (+52) 55 91380290
Fax: (+52) 55 91380299
http://cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php?topic=16937.0 _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
For the first time in 170 years the British Parliament is going to debate how money is created. Amazing! Debate will be broadcast live on Thursday, Nov. 20, starting between 12:30 and 1 pm GMT, or 07:30 EST on the Parliament channel:
From the chief economics editor of the Financial Times:
Quote:
April 24, 2014 1:32 pm
Strip private banks of their power to create money
By Martin Wolf
The giant hole at the heart of our market economies needs to be plugged
Printing counterfeit banknotes is illegal, but creating private money is not. The interdependence between the state and the businesses that can do this is the source of much of the instability of our economies. It could – and should – be terminated.
I explained how this works two weeks ago. Banks create deposits as a byproduct of their lending. In the UK, such deposits make up about 97 per cent of the money supply. Some people object that deposits are not money but only transferable private debts. Yet the public views the banks’ imitation money as electronic cash: a safe source of purchasing power.
Banking is therefore not a normal market activity, because it provides two linked public goods: money and the payments network. On one side of banks’ balance sheets lie risky assets; on the other lie liabilities the public thinks safe. This is why central banks act as lenders of last resort and governments provide deposit insurance and equity injections. It is also why banking is heavily regulated. Yet credit cycles are still hugely destabilising.
What is to be done? A minimum response would leave this industry largely as it is but both tighten regulation and insist that a bigger proportion of the balance sheet be financed with equity or credibly loss-absorbing debt. I discussed this approach last week. Higher capital is the recommendation made by Anat Admati of Stanford and Martin Hellwig of the Max Planck Institute in The Bankers’ New Clothes.
A maximum response would be to give the state a monopoly on money creation. One of the most important such proposals was in the Chicago Plan, advanced in the 1930s by, among others, a great economist, Irving Fisher. Its core was the requirement for 100 per cent reserves against deposits. Fisher argued that this would greatly reduce business cycles, end bank runs and drastically reduce public debt. A 2012 study by International Monetary Fund staff suggests this plan could work well.
Similar ideas have come from Laurence Kotlikoff of Boston University in Jimmy Stewart is Dead, and Andrew Jackson and Ben Dyson in Modernising Money. Here is the outline of the latter system.
First, the state, not banks, would create all transactions money, just as it creates cash today. Customers would own the money in transaction accounts, and would pay the banks a fee for managing them.
Second, banks could offer investment accounts, which would provide loans. But they could only loan money actually invested by customers. They would be stopped from creating such accounts out of thin air and so would become the intermediaries that many wrongly believe they now are. Holdings in such accounts could not be reassigned as a means of payment. Holders of investment accounts would be vulnerable to losses. Regulators might impose equity requirements and other prudential rules against such accounts.
Third, the central bank would create new money as needed to promote non-inflationary growth. Decisions on money creation would, as now, be taken by a committee independent of government.
Finally, the new money would be injected into the economy in four possible ways: to finance government spending, in place of taxes or borrowing; to make direct payments to citizens; to redeem outstanding debts, public or private; or to make new loans through banks or other intermediaries. All such mechanisms could (and should) be made as transparent as one might wish.
The transition to a system in which money creation is separated from financial intermediation would be feasible, albeit complex. But it would bring huge advantages. It would be possible to increase the money supply without encouraging people to borrow to the hilt. It would end “too big to fail” in banking. It would also transfer seignorage – the benefits from creating money – to the public. In 2013, for example, sterling M1 (transactions money) was 80 per cent of gross domestic product. If the central bank decided this could grow at 5 per cent a year, the government could run a fiscal deficit of 4 per cent of GDP without borrowing or taxing. The right might decide to cut taxes, the left to raise spending. The choice would be political, as it should be.
Opponents will argue that the economy would die for lack of credit. I was once sympathetic to that argument. But only about 10 per cent of UK bank lending has financed business investment in sectors other than commercial property. We could find other ways of funding this.
Our financial system is so unstable because the state first allowed it to create almost all the money in the economy and was then forced to insure it when performing that function. This is a giant hole at the heart of our market economies. It could be closed by separating the provision of money, rightly a function of the state, from the provision of finance, a function of the private sector.
This will not happen now. But remember the possibility. When the next crisis comes – and it surely will – we need to be ready.
It’s easy to run a scam and game the system for profit, so long as your cartel ‘friends’ are all in on the fraud, and a green light from your corrupt government. Welcome to America’s ‘White Collar Banana Republic’….
By now, you should be aware of how energy markets are manipulated by Wall Street and London’s financial creatures and their Seven Sisters. The U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission admits as much – that JP Morgan has massively manipulated energy markets in California and the Midwest, stealing tens of millions of dollars in over payments from numerous grid operators between September 2010 and June 2011.
It’s all in days work for those who consider themselves the rulers of a planetary fiefdom.
Here’s how they game the other markets…
1-Banks-Steal-Money
Banks and Energy Companies Rig Currency and Other Markets
Washington’s Blog
It has long been known that currency markets are massively rigged. And see this, this, and this.
But the banks not only shared confidential information with each other … they also shared it with a giant oil company.
Bloomberg reports this week:
With revenue of almost $400 billion last year and operations in about 80 countries, BP trades large quantities of currency each day. Traders at the company regularly received valuable information from counterparts at some of the world’s biggest banks — including tips about forthcoming trades, details of confidential client business and discussions of stop-losses, the trigger points for a flurry of buying or selling — according to four traders with direct knowledge of the practice.
***
“The Cartel” that was set up by Usher [the former JPMorgan Chase trader at the center of a global investigation into corruption in the foreign-exchange market] and included dealers at JPMorgan, Citigroup Inc. (C), Barclays Plc and UBS Group AG. (UBSN)
The information offered an insight into currency moves minutes, sometimes hours before they happened.
***
Usher participated in at least one chat room with [Andrew White, a currency trader at oil company BP].
***
In the clubby, lightly regulated world of foreign exchange, traders passed around tips to their circle of trusted contacts like candy. The victims: mutual-fund investors, pensioners and day traders who took the other side of a transaction at a lower price than they would have if they had the same information.
***
Within hours of regulators announcing probes, the chats between BP and the banks were shut down, people with knowledge of the matter said. Soon after, a compliance officer was placed on the desk for the first time, one of them said.
***
[BP’s] trading unit’s primary role is to manage the firm’s exposure to financial risks, including fluctuations in interest rates and foreign exchange, according to the company’s website. Unlike at most corporations, it also is run as a profit center, which means that in addition to hedging risks, traders can place their own bets on the direction of markets.
***
In an undated message seen by Bloomberg News, a trader at a bank told BP he would be buying U.S. dollars against Australian dollars at the WM/Reuters fix at 4 p.m. in London, the one-minute window during which traders around the world exchange billions of dollars of currency on behalf of pension funds and asset managers. The message was received at BP about 30 minutes before the fix. By tipping his hand, the sender was telling BP about a potential fall in the Australian currency.
At about 3 p.m. in London on a different afternoon, BP traders were informed that banks were selling dollars against the yen at 4 p.m. In a third message, this one arriving as the oil company’s traders drank their first coffee of the morning, a trader at a bank said he had just sold a quantity of an emerging-market currency, to whom and the price he received.
The four banks in the Cartel controlled about 45 percent of the global spot-currency market, according to a survey by Euromoney Institutional Investor Plc, so information about their plans was valuable. Some days they worked together to push around the 4 p.m. fix, settlements with the banks show.
***
Sometimes they also agreed to work together to push exchange rates around to boost their profits –- something they called “double-teaming.”
The collateral damage of their actions and those of other traders was the $30 trillion held in investment funds around the world whose daily value is calculated based on the 4 p.m. WM/Reuters benchmark. Passive funds managing $3 trillion transact at the fix, so their investors lost or gained depending on how much the rates were manipulated.
Derivatives Are Manipulated
Runaway derivatives – especially credit default swaps (CDS) – were one of the main causes of the 2008 financial crisis. Congress never fixed the problem, and actually made it worse.
The big banks have long manipulated derivatives … a $1,200 Trillion Dollar market.
Indeed, many trillions of dollars of derivatives are being manipulated in the exact same same way that interest rates are fixed (see below) … through gamed self-reporting.
Reuters noted in September:
A Manhattan federal judge said on Thursday that investors may pursue a lawsuit accusing 12 major banks of violating antitrust law by fixing prices and restraining competition in the roughly $21 trillion market for credit default swaps.
***
“The complaint provides a chronology of behavior that would probably not result from chance, coincidence, independent responses to common stimuli, or mere interdependence,” [Judge] Cote said.
The defendants include Bank of America Corp, Barclays Plc, BNP Paribas SA, Citigroup Inc , Credit Suisse Group AG, Deutsche Bank AG , Goldman Sachs Group Inc, HSBC Holdings Plc , JPMorgan Chase & Co, Morgan Stanley, Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc and UBS AG.
Other defendants are the International Swaps and Derivatives Association and Markit Ltd, which provides credit derivative pricing services.
***
U.S. and European regulators have probed potential anticompetitive activity in CDS. In July 2013, the European Commission accused many of the defendants of colluding to block new CDS exchanges from entering the market.
***
“The financial crisis hardly explains the alleged secret meetings and coordinated actions,” the judge wrote. “Nor does it explain why ISDA and Markit simultaneously reversed course.”
In other words, the big banks are continuing to fix prices for CDS in secret meetings … and have torpedoed the more open and transparent CDS exchanges that Congress mandated.
And today, the managing director at Graham Fisher & Co. (Joshua Rosner) said that the big banks are frontrunning CDS trades … and manipulating decisions on whether a the party “insured” by CDS has defaulted on its obligations, thus triggering an “event” requiring payment on the CDS.
By way of analogy, whether or not an insurance company pays to rebuild a house which has burned to the ground may turn on whether it finds the fire was arson or accidental.
This is a big deal … while hundreds of thousands of dollars might be at stake in the home fire example, many tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars ride on whether or not a country like Greece is determined to have suffered a CDS-triggering event.
Rosner notes:
The potential use of CDS to artificially manipulate corporate solvency, the imbalances in the amounts of CDS outstanding relative to referenced debt and ongoing allegations that ISDA’s Determinations Committee is deeply conflicted and “operates as a quasi-Star Chamber or cartel”, are finally being scrutinized.
As one source recently suggested, “It would be a surprise if determinations of default, made by a committee of interested parties, don’t lead to findings of manipulation similar to those found in LIBOR and FOREX”.
***
The fact that Pimco’s Chief Investment Officer criticized the determination that Greece had not triggered its CDS, even though Pimco was part of the unanimous vote making that determination, is profoundly troubling to say the least.
***
The fact that the [ISDA’s Determinations Committees] has no obligation to “research, investigate, supplement or verify the accuracy of information on which a determination is based” and members “may have an inherent conflict of interest in the outcome of any determinations” only adds credence to suggestions that the “CDS market is being manipulated and gerrymandered by the all-powerful investment banks”.
Energy markets are manipulated as well…
For example, oil prices have been manipulated for many years.
And the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission says that JP Morgan has massively manipulated energy markets in California and the Midwest, obtaining tens of millions of dollars in overpayments from grid operators between September 2010 and June 2011.
And Pulitzer prize-winning reporter David Cay Johnston noted in May that Wall Street is trying to launch Enron 2.0.
Commodities Are Manipulated
The big banks and government agencies have been conspiring to manipulate commodities prices for decades.
The big banks are taking over important aspects of the physical economy – including uranium mining, petroleum products, aluminum, ownership and operation of airports, toll roads, ports, and electricity – to manipulate market prices.
And they are using these physical assets to massively manipulate commodities prices … scalping consumers of many billions of dollars each year. (More from Matt Taibbi, FDL and Elizabeth Warren.)
Gold and Silver Are Manipulated
Last month, Switzerland’s financial regulator (FINMA) found “serious misconduct” and a “clear attempt to manipulate precious metals benchmarks” by UBS employees in precious metals trading, particularly with silver.
Reuters reports:
Swiss regulator FINMA said on Wednesday that it found a “clear attempt” to manipulate precious metals benchmarks during its investigation into precious metals and foreign exchange trading at UBS …
Gold and silver prices have been “fixed” in daily conference calls by the powers-that-be.
Bloomberg reported last year:
It is the participating banks themselves that administer the gold and silver benchmarks.
So are prices being manipulated? Let’s take a look at the evidence. In his book “The Gold Cartel,” commodity analyst Dimitri Speck combines minute-by-minute data from most of 1993 through 2012 to show how gold prices move on an average day (see attached charts). He finds that the spot price of gold tends to drop sharply around the London evening fixing (10 a.m. New York time). A similar, if less pronounced, drop in price occurs around the London morning fixing. The same daily declines can be seen in silver prices from 1998 through 2012.
For both commodities there were, on average, no comparable price changes at any other time of the day. These patterns are consistent with manipulation in both markets.
Interest Rates Are Manipulated
Bloomberg reported in January:
Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc was ordered to pay $50 million by a federal judge in Connecticut over claims that it rigged the London interbank offered rate.
RBS Securities Japan Ltd. in April pleaded guilty to wire frauda s part of a settlement of more than $600 million with U.S and U.K. regulators over Libor manipulation, according to court filings. U.S. District Judge Michael P. Shea in New Haventoday sentenced the Tokyo-based unit of RBS, Britain’s biggest publicly owned lender, to pay the agreed-upon fine, according to a Justice Department statement.
Global investigations into banks’ attempts to manipulate the benchmarks for profit have led to fines and settlements for lenders including RBS, Barclays Plc, UBS AG and Rabobank Groep.
RBS was among six companies fined a record 1.7 billion euros ($2.3 billion) by the European Union last month for rigging interest rates linked to Libor. The combined fines for manipulating yen Libor and Euribor, the benchmark money-market rate for the euro, are the largest-ever EU cartel penalties.
Global fines for rate-rigging have reached $6 billion since June 2012 as authorities around the world probe whether traders worked together to fix Libor, meant to reflect the interest rate at which banks lend to each other, to benefit their own trading positions.
To put the Libor interest rate scandal in perspective:
The big banks have conspired for years to rig interest rates … upon which $800 trillion in assets are pegged
This was the largest insider trading scandal ever … and the largest financial scam in world history
Local governments got ripped off bigtime by the Libor manipulation
Even though RBS and a handful of other banks have been fined for interest rate manipulation, Libor is still being manipulated. No wonder … the fines are pocket change – the cost of doing business – for the big banks
Everything Can Be Manipulated through High-Frequency Trading
Traders with high-tech computers can manipulate stocks, bonds, options, currencies and commodities. And see this.
Manipulating Numerous Markets In Myriad Ways
The big banks and other giants manipulate numerous markets in myriad ways, for example:
Engaging in mafia-style big-rigging fraud against local governments. See this, this and this
Shaving money off of virtually every pension transaction they handled over the course of decades, stealing collectively billions of dollars from pensions worldwide. Details here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here
Charging “storage fees” to store gold bullion … without even buying or storing any gold . And raiding allocated gold accounts
Committing massive and pervasive fraud both when they initiated mortgage loans and when they foreclosed on them (and see this)
Pledging the same mortgage multiple times to different buyers. See this, this, this, this and this. This would be like selling your car, and collecting money from 10 different buyers for the same car
Cheating homeowners by gaming laws meant to protect people from unfair foreclosure
Pushing investments which they knew were terrible, and then betting against the same investments to make money for themselves. See this, this, this, this and this
Engaging in unlawful “frontrunning” to manipulate markets. See this, this, this, this, this and this
Engaging in unlawful “Wash Trades” to manipulate asset prices. See this, this and this
Otherwise manipulating markets. And see this
Participating in various Ponzi schemes
Charging veterans unlawful mortgage fees
Cooking their books (and see this)
Bribing and bullying ratings agencies to inflate ratings on their risky investments
The Big Picture
The experts say that big banks will keep manipulating markets unless and until their executives are thrown in jail for fraud.
Why? Because the system is rigged to allow the big banks to commit continuous and massive fraud, and then to pay small fines as the “cost of doing business”. As Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz noted years ago:
“The system is set so that even if you’re caught, the penalty is just a small number relative to what you walk home with.
The fine is just a cost of doing business. It’s like a parking fine. Sometimes you make a decision to park knowing that you might get a fine because going around the corner to the parking lot takes you too much time.”
Indeed, Reuters pointed out recently:
Switzerland’s regulator FINMA ordered UBS, the country’s biggest bank, to pay 134 million francs ($139 million) after it found serious misconduct in both foreign exchange and precious metals trading. It also capped bonuses for dealers in both units at twice their basic salary for two years.
Capping bonuses at twice base salary? That’s not a punishment … it’s an incentive.
Experts say that we have to prosecute fraud or else the economy won’t ever really stabilize.
But the government is doing the exact opposite. Indeed, the Justice Department has announced it will go easy on big banks, and always settles prosecutions for pennies on the dollar (a form of stealth bailout. It is also arguably one of the main causes of the double dip in housing. And there is no change in the air.)
Indeed, the government doesn’t even force the banks to admit any guilt as part of their settlements. In fact:
“The banks have been allowed to investigate themselves,” one source familiar with the investigation told Reuters. “The investigated decide what they want to investigate, what they admit to, and how much they will pay.
Wall Street has manipulated virtually every other market as well – both in the financial sector and the real economy – and broken virtually every law on the books.
And they will keep on doing so until the Department of Justice grows a pair.
The criminality and blatant manipulation will grow and spread and metastasize – taking over and killing off more and more of the economy – until Wall Street executives are finally thrown in jail.
It’s that simple…
THANK YOU TO THE TEAM AT WASHINGTON’S BLOG FOR ASSEMBLING THIS ANALYSIS _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
The global financial crisis took the vast majority of the economics profession by surprise. Though there were individual mainstream economists -- such as Robert Shiller and Joseph Stiglitz -- who claim to have warned of the crisis, no mainstream economic model foresaw anything like what eventuated in 2007. In fact, mainstream model predictions led to politicians being advised to expect tranquil economic conditions ahead. The OECD’s advice in its June 2007 Economic Outlook was typical:
"Indeed, the current economic situation is in many ways better than what we have experienced in years. Against that background, we have stuck to the rebalancing scenario.Our central forecast remains indeed quite benign: a soft landing in the United States, a strong and sustained recovery in Europe, a solid trajectory in Japan and buoyant activity in China and India. In line with recent trends, sustained growth in OECD economies would be underpinned by strong job creation and falling unemployment.” (“OECD forecasts gentle turn for global economy”)
After being so disastrously wrong, one might expect that this modeling approach would now be subject to serious revision. But while New Keynesian DSGE model-builders are starting to add “financial frictions” to their repertoire of factors that prevent the economy from almost instantly attaining a competitive equilibrium (as in New Classical models), the core paradigm — of an economy which, left to its own devices, will ultimately reach equilibrium, and in which money and financial institutions generally play non-essential roles — has not been challenged.
Instead, the challenge that is occurring in academic institutions is the survival of the handful of proponents of an alternative paradigm — one that sees capitalism as fundamentally both unstable and monetary. Before the crisis, economists who followed that broad tradition — including myself — were largely ignored by the mainstream. After the crisis, the mainstream could have accepted that this perspective has merit, and made more room for it in the academic curriculum. But instead, what little space was devoted to alternative approaches to economics has been reduced.
- See more at: http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2014/08/27/time-for-a-copernican-re volution-in-economics/
Joined: 30 Jul 2006 Posts: 6060 Location: East London
Posted: Wed Mar 11, 2015 12:15 am Post subject:
Here's an email from Walter Burien. The information is really staggering; he has been putting it out for years, but needless to say it's totally ignored by the MSM, and it goes over the average persons head, in the unlikely event that they even hear about it.
Though this refers to the States, I expect the same situation rules here:
It is a listing of about 4,200 CAFRs. All are 2013 reports.
There are approximately 184,000 local government operations, each produces it own financial report each year so 4,200 is but a small fraction of the local government CAFR or AFR reports prepared each year.
A CAFR (Comprehensive Annual Financial Report) is your local government's "Statement of Net Worth" from the beginning of that City, County, State, School District, Enterprise, government entity.
Budget reports have been exclusively spoon fed the population for the last several decades. There is a BIG difference between a local government's statement of net worth (the CAFR) and a 1-Year selectively presented Budget report.
You could have a city crying they are in the red short 100 million dollars needing to raise taxes, but if you looked at the corresponding CAFR report for the same city and noted ALL aspects of what was contained therein, you may just see the same city is 1.5 billion in the Black.
Picture the Budget you may have for operating your house. Let's say it was $45,000 this year. You apply $45,000 to cover the cost of $45,000.
Well, let's say you spend $50,000 and are now $5,000 in the red. Do you go knocking on your neighbor's door saying: "I'm in trouble, my house budget was $45,000 and I spent $50,000, can I borrow $5,000?" NO YOU WOULD NOT!
You would look at your statement of Net Worth. There let's say your "over-all" income was $225,000 per year, you had been investing successfully for 50-years and had a portfolio balance of 1.7 million dollars, etc.. and had a net worth of 2.3 million when all was considered.
To meet the $5,000 shortfall of your house budget, you would pull from your other sources of income or assets to make up the $5,000 shortfall on your budget this year. In fact with all things being considered, that $5,000 would be pocket change to you.
Local governments for the last 65-years + have been playing the shell game of spoon feeding Budget reports to the taxpayers while NEVER a mention of their Annual Financial Report (CAFR or AFR).
Keep in mind, just like the Budget you set for your house, when anyone looks at it, they will be able to account for every nickel, dime and penny applied and spent. So if you have a deficit or a surplus for the year that is all the viewer will see. If that was all the viewer saw, and you had a $5,000 shortfall, then the viewer would think you were $5,000 in the hole.
Now if you showed the viewer your Statement of Net Worth, the viewer would then think and say to you: "Damn, you are well off!"
Thus, here we have all of our local governments playing the "Silence is Golden" rule spoon feeding the taxpayer budget reports with never a mention of their AFR or CAFR, and my has it been golden for them at the taxpayer's expense over the last half a century..
Download a few of those CAFRs relevant to your location that you will find on the example Listings page. Share with others from your community and REQUIRE your local talking heads from the News Media to direct their viewers to them for review and comment.
As noted those 4,200 example CAFRs are but a few, a small percentage of the total completed each year. To get the BIGGEST WAKE UP CALL of your life, think "scope" and "size" of the "collective" totals from all. Between local and Federal they OWN IT ALL by investment.
On a last note: Government was NOT supposed to operate at a profit. How did they get around that pesky little rule? Well, if any local government operation say made a hundred million dollar profit for the year or expected to do the same for the next ten-years, they would create a "liability" account, move the hundred million over to the liability account and then "Poof", there goes a hundred million dollar profit now designated as a liability on the balance sheets.
So LOOK VERY CAREFULLY at those many liability accounts listed. Are they truly genuine or are they "Parking Zones" for wealth obtained?
Being that there are many CAFRs and AFRs for local governments that are not in the Example listing, a good way to find those is through a Google search. It is important to use quotes. An example of what to put on the search line to pull up CAFRs say for Burbank, CA would be to put on the search line the following using quotes:
"The City of Burbank" CA "Annual Financial Report"
In doing so it will pull up the hits to view or download it if available via the Internet. You can do the same for any State, County, School District, University, College, Special District, Enterprise Authority, etc.
Hope the above helps you and please share with all that you know.
Provided FYI from,
Walter Burien - CAFR1
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'Icelandic government suggests removing the power of commercial banks to create money and handing it to the central bank:
celand's government is considering a revolutionary monetary proposal - removing the power of commercial banks to create money and handing it to the central bank.
The proposal, which would be a turnaround in the history of modern finance, was part of a report written by a lawmaker from the ruling centrist Progress Party, Frosti Sigurjonsson, entitled "A better monetary system for Iceland".
"The findings will be an important contribution to the upcoming discussion, here and elsewhere, on money creation and monetary policy," Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson said.
The report, commissioned by the premier, is aimed at putting an end to a monetary system in place through a slew of financial crises, including the latest one in 2008.
According to a study by four central bankers, the country has had "over 20 instances of financial crises of different types" since 1875, with "six serious multiple financial crisis episodes occurring every 15 years on average".
Mr Sigurjonsson said the problem each time arose from ballooning credit during a strong economic cycle.
He argued the central bank was unable to contain the credit boom, allowing inflation to rise and sparking exaggerated risk-taking and speculation, the threat of bank collapse and costly state interventions.
In Iceland, as in other modern market economies, the central bank controls the creation of banknotes and coins but not the creation of all money, which occurs as soon as a commercial bank offers a line of credit.
The central bank can only try to influence the money supply with its monetary policy tools.
Under the so-called Sovereign Money proposal, the country's central bank would become the only creator of money.
"Crucially, the power to create money is kept separate from the power to decide how that new money is used," Mr Sigurjonsson wrote in the proposal.
"As with the state budget, the parliament will debate the government's proposal for allocation of new money," he wrote.
Banks would continue to manage accounts and payments, and would serve as intermediaries between savers and lenders.
Mr Sigurjonsson, a businessman and economist, was one of the masterminds behind Iceland's household debt relief programme launched in May 2014 and aimed at helping the many Icelanders whose finances were strangled by inflation-indexed mortgages signed before the 2008 financial crisis.
The small Nordic country was hit hard as the crash of US investment bank Lehman Brothers caused the collapse of its three largest banks.
Iceland then became the first western European nation in 25 years to appeal to the International Monetary Fund to save its battered economy.
Its GDP fell by 5.1pc in 2009 and 3.1pc in 2010 before it started rising again.'
Good old smart, gutsy Iceland! _________________ 'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.
Paying a high price for too many elites and their ‘frivolous cravings’
By SATYAJIT DAS
Nowadays many countries’ social and political structure relies on debt-driven consumption and increasing levels of entitlements.
Blame the policy makers. To drive economic growth, boost living standards, and manage growing inequality, policy makers have used debt and monetary tools to create economic activity. This has resulted in excessive borrowing and imbalances in global trade and capital.
Governments played a part, too, allowing the buildup of social entitlements to win or maintain office. Private companies also encouraged the growth of employee benefits to avoid immediate pressure on wages as well as boost current earnings and share prices.
But such expensive commitments were rarely fully funded.
Rather than deal with the fundamental issues, policy makers substituted public spending, financed by government debt or central banks, to boost demand. Strong growth and higher inflation, they hoped or believed, would correct the problems.
The current state of affairs echoes Archaeologist Arthur Demarest’s observation about the Mayan civilization: “Society had evolved too many elites, all demanding exotic baubles…all needed quetzal feathers, jade, obsidian, fine chert, and animal furs. Nobility is expensive, non-productive and parasitic, siphoning away too much of society’s energy to satisfy its frivolous cravings.”
Seven years into this crisis, the level of debt in major economies has increased. Global imbalances have decreased, but primarily as a result of slower economic growth. Countries such as China and Germany are reluctant to inflate their domestic economies, moving away from their export-driven model. Major borrowers, such as the U.S., refuse to reduce spending and bring their public finances into order. Enthusiasm for fundamental financial reform has dissipated, driven by concern that lower credit growth will decrease economic growth.
Policy makers refused to acknowledge that available fiscal and monetary policy tools cannot address the underlying problems. They repeatedly use complex jargon, obscure mathematics and tired ideologies to disguise their failures and limitations. Perhaps, as the writer G. K. Chesterton suggested: “It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It is that they can’t see the problem.”
The policies, now centered around debt monetization entailing zero interest-rates and quantitative easing (QE), have potentially destructive side effects.
Punishing frugality and thrift, and rewarding borrowing, profligacy, excess, and waste.
The resultant loss of purchasing power effectively represents a tax on holders of money and sovereign debt. It redistributes real resources from savers to borrowers and the issuer of the currency, resulting in diminution of wealth over time.
Debt monetization also creates moral hazards. Low rates and easy availability of credit reduces market discipline. Borrowers face less pressure to cut back on their debts. Low borrowing costs allow unproductive investment to be maintained. It reduces incentives for governments to bring public finances under control.
Ultimately, the policies being used to manage the debt crisis punish frugality and thrift, and reward borrowing, profligacy, excess, and waste.
The policies might have been defensible if successful. But evidence to date suggests that policy makers are unlikely to succeed. The Bank for International Settlements and other central bankers now stress the limits to monetary policy in boosting economic growth without addressing the underlying issues.
Ordinary people fear the consequences on their lives from the Great Unraveling. The political and social response is likely to be volatile. It was the fear and disaffection of middle-class citizens who had lost their savings in the Great Depression that gave rise to fascism.
Governments have shown little willingness to inform the electorate about the magnitude of the economic problems, the lack of solutions, and cost of possible corrective actions. Politicians have taken regard of historian Simon Schama’s comment that no one ever won an election by telling voters it had come to the end of its “providential allotment of inexhaustible plenty.” In a moment of unusual candor, Prime Minister of Luxembourg and Head of the Euro-Group Jean-Claude Junker stated: “We all know what to do, we just don’t know how to get re-elected after we have done it.”
Precious political and economic capital has been wasted with inadequate policies that have side effects and decrease chances of a recovery. For policy makers everywhere, to paraphrase Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the “permanent lie [has become] the only safe form of existence.”
'....“Today I am coming to the floor not to talk about Democrats or Republicans,” Warren began her speech, “but to talk about a third group that also wields tremendous power in Washington—Citigroup.” With that, Warren turned Citi into exactly the kind of villain so many people suspect lurks in the backrooms of the Capitol. In one particularly striking moment, she connected nine top government officials—including Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew—directly to the megabank. She invoked Teddy Roosevelt, her favorite trust-busting president, who took on the big corporations of his day.
“There is a lot of talk coming from Citigroup about how Dodd-Frank isn’t perfect,” Warren continued. “So let me say this to anyone who is listening at Citi. I agree with you, Dodd-Frank isn’t perfect.” She paused, then spoke very slowly and emphatically: “It should have broken you into pieces........”
By golly, there ARE decent leaders in the US (though extremely few and far between). _________________ 'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.
'The World’s interconnected Private Banking Cartel fundamental fraud starts with the creation of money from nothing, i.e. a model for eternal stealth expropriation in which all liabilities are passed on to The People and the profits are kept in the Private Banking Cartel. It was legalized and institutionalized with the creation of the private Bank of England in 1694 (along with its industrial East-India company colonial complex). In the case that the central bank is owned by The People, as in the case of The Bank of Canada, its role of creating money has been taken away and given to the private commercial banksters. The only remaining state owned bank that creates money is the State Bank of North Dakota.
Rocco Galati challenges role of Bank of Canada in latest case
Maverick lawyer argues that the [People’s] central bank should provide interest-free money for infrastructure
CBC News Posted: May 08, 2015 3:32 PM ET Last Updated: May 08, 2015 4:12 PM ET
The lawyer best known for stopping the Supreme Court appointment of Judge Marc Nadon has turned his sights on the Bank of Canada.
Rocco Galati has taken on a case for a group called the Committee for Monetary and Economic Reform, or COMER, which wants the central bank to return to the practice of lending federal and provincial governments interest-free money for infrastructure.
"They felt it was important in the face of the financial sector meltdown in 2008, the banking meltdown, and the drastic reduction and elimination of human capital infrastructure such as health care, universities and basically the stuff that the Bank of Canada from 1938 to 1974 funded," Galati said in an interview with CBC's The Exchange with Amanda Lange.
His clients have been dismissed as conspiracy theorists, but Galati argues the law is there to support their case.
The Bank of Canada was set up in 1935 in the wake of the Great Depression to provide a means for settling international accounts and to provide interest-free loans to government to finance infrastructure investments.
History of infrastructure funding
Projects like the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Trans-Canada highway were funded in this way, and the central bank also underwrote Canada's Second World War effort as well as the building of hospitals and universities.
But in 1974, the central bank stopped providing interest-free loans to government so it could join the Bank for International Settlements, a kind of central bank of central banks.
Galati argues that from then on private banks became government's lender, contravening the act that established the central bank.
He has launched legal action, beginning in 2011, to rule on the constitutionality of the central bank's current role. His argument is that private banks are dictating the terms of Canadian debt, usurping the role of the Bank of Canada.
Is government bound by original act?
"My hope is that the court declare that the government is bound by the legislation and cannot simply hand over that decision-making to foreign private bankers," Galati said.
"What the government then does is up to the government, but they can't simply arbitrarily say 'no never again' when the law is there and the history of the reason for creating the Bank of Canada is there."
The Committee for Monetary and Economic Reform takes the view that having the Bank of Canada provide funding would eliminate interest payments on the national debt — a huge burden for the Canadian taxpayer.
Galati agrees the case is a strange and quixotic one, but he's built a career on holding the government to the law.
"It wasn't arcane for me, it's in the law," he said.
And he acknowledged it will probably earn him few friends. He'll never be made a judge or even sit on a law faculty. And it will be a long fight.
"Well, most struggles to enforce the law are. I mean, often, I've had cases that have gone 12 years, successfully at the end of the day, because the government simply wants to ignore the law," he said.
"That's the system we have, and when they do, the only people that can force them to abide by the law are the courts."
Marc Nadon case
Last year when Prime Minister Stephen Harper nominated Nadon to the Supreme Court, Galati stepped in, saying the move broke the rules. Few expected him to win. But in a surprise decision, he did.
"I saw an attempt to pervert and subvert our independent judiciary, which is the last bastion of balancing the rights of the citizens against the rights of the government and making sure that the government doesn't turn into a dictatorship," he said. "If you can stack the court and corrupt the judiciary, well, that's it."
Galati said he believes Parliament has become ineffective in checking the power of government and the courts are the only recourse.
One of the greatest con jobs in history was convincing ordinary people that Central Bankers care about the “economy” or Main Street. Aside from the complete lack of relevance that Banksters have for Main Street from a professional perspective (more on this in a moment), for example, when do you think was the last time that Janet Yellen or her ilk spent an evening with non-banker/financial types? Years ago? Decades ago? Yellen lives in a super-affluent, gated part of Washington DC. And even within that subset of the US population she lives in a higher echelon: her entourage of security annoys her wealthy neighbors… though I suspect part of the annoyance stems from jealousy. Regard professional significance… why would Janet Yellen care about ordinary people? They’re just data points in her financial models. Ordinary people didn’t place her at the Fed (the big banks did). And they didn’t place her as Fed Chair (the financial/ political elite did… with the express intent of gaining future favors). Most Central Bankers came up from the Too Big To Fails/Jail or Primary Dealers (or they are academics like Yellen or Bernanke who get their first taste of the “real world” when they’re literally running the financial system). Literally their entire personal net worth… their professional clout… and their sense of accomplishment was derived from working at these organizations. And somehow they’re supposed to give a hoot about Joe the Plumber or Bob the Boilermaker? They don’t even deal with those people face to face when they have a problem with their homes. “Hello this is Mario Draghi… the man who controls the currency in your economy… could you please come fix the sink?” This is why Yellen, Draghi and the like can say with a straight face that they can spent trillions to bail out/prop up banks without batting an eyelid. It’s why no one who committed fraud went to jail. It’s why lying and cheating in the financial system is allowed… even applauded… because the ones lying and cheating are the same people who picked out/ promoted the regulators. Today most Central Banks are sporting leverage ratios that would put Lehman Brothers (pre-crisis) to shame. So the next time something breaks in the financial system… it won’t be just individual banks going belly up. It will be entire countries. What’s happened in Cyprus and Greece is coming to your neighborhood… wherever you are.'
'The Case to "Reinstate" the Bank of Canada:
http://www.socred.org/blogs/view/the-case-to-reinstate-the-bank-of-can ada _________________ 'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.
Joined: 30 Jul 2006 Posts: 6060 Location: East London
Posted: Fri May 29, 2015 12:58 pm Post subject:
POSITIVE MONEY
'On Tuesday 26th of May, Positive Money finally got to hand in 12,119 signatures to the Prime Minister, calling for money creation to be used in the public interest. Supporters travelled from around the UK to take part. They were joined by Green Party leader Natalie Bennett.
Ian Chan, Positive Money supporter, recounts the day:
“At the front of No.10 the scene was set for the handover of the 2 large boxes we carried with us… After all our efforts ( I got a haircut especially) I was a bit disappointed that Dave himself didn’t come to answer the door - this time round! It won’t be the last time we come knocking and next time it won’t be so easy to ignore us: momentum is building. More and more people are realising what a game changer money creation is. We now need a big push to call for a money commission to be set up in Parliament so we can have a proper debate about the financial system we need."
David Clarke, Policy and Advocacy Adviser:
"The success of our petition to the Prime Minister is a sign that the Positive Money message resonates with a lot of people. We believe that we can build a strong consensus around the need for greater scrutiny of how money and credit is organised - which is why we are calling for a money commission to be established by the UK Parliament. A money commission would investigate the damaging effect of so much money circulating in the financial system and property market without any connection to the real economy. And most importantly, it would look at the case for transitioning to a sovereign money system."
Thank you to everyone who signed our petition and to those supporters who made it down to Westminster. It was a great day for the Positive Money campaign!
Would you like to get more involved with our campaign to reform the money system? Find out how here ( http://www.positivemoney.org/join-us/ ) or email Dora at dora@positivemoney.org _________________ 'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.
'An astonishing $32 trillion in securities changes hands every year with no net positive impact for investors, charges Vanguard Group Founder John Bogle.
Meanwhile, corporate finance — the reason Wall Street exists — is just a tiny slice of the total business. The nation's big investment banks probably could work for less than a week and take the rest of the year off with no real effect on the economy.
"The job of finance is to provide capital to companies. We do it to the tune of $250 billion a year in IPOs and secondary offerings," Bogle told Time in an interview.
"What else do we do? We encourage investors to trade about $32 trillion a year. So the way I calculate it, 99% of what we do in this industry is people trading with one another, with a gain only to the middleman. It's a waste of resources."
Rent seekers
It's a lot of money, $32 trillion. Nearly double the entire U.S. economy moving from one pocket to another, with a toll-taker in the middle. Most people refer to them as "stock brokers," but let's call them what they are — toll-takers and rent-seekers.
Rent-seeking as an occupation is as old as the hills. In exchange for working to build up credentials and relative fluency in the arcane rules of an industry, one gets to stand back from actual work and just collect money.
Ostensibly, the job of a financial adviser is to provide advice. Do you actually get that from your broker? It is worth anything?
Research shows, over and over, that stock brokers can't do much of anything demonstrably valuable. They don't know which stocks will go up or down and when. They don't know which asset classes will outperform this year or next.
Nobody knows. That's the point. If you're among that small cadre of extremely high-level traders who can throw loads of cash at a short-term fluke, fantastic. If you have a mind for numbers like Warren Buffett that allows you to buy companies on the cheap and hold them forever, excellent.
If you're a normal retirement investor trying to get from A to B and retire on time, well, you have a really big problem to face: The toll-taker wants your money.
Dead weight
So he needs you to trade — a lot. Because that's how stock brokers make money. Not by doling out retirement advice, but by ensuring that your account is active and churning commissions on behalf of them and their employers.
What's a highway with no traffic on it? If you're a toll-taker, it's a money loser. So Wall Street's rent-seekers need traffic in the form of regular trading. An account that sits invested for months at a time with no trades is dead weight to them.
Nevertheless, as Bogle maintains, doing nothing is the key. "Don't do something, just stand there!" he has often said.
A portfolio indexing approach to investing codifies Bogle's time-tested and effective way of investing for retirement — without lining the pockets of toll-taking stock brokers along the way.'
As Oxfam warns that global wealth inequality is spiraling out of control, we ask why the Rothschilds and Rockefellers are missing from the business magazine’s definitive annual guide…with some startling revelations
This is a House of Rothschilds maxim, widely attributed to banking tycoon Mayer Amschel Rothschild in 1838 and said to be a founding principle for the highly corrupt banking and political system we have today. Along with the Rockefellers, the Rothschild dynasty is estimated to be worth well over a trillion dollars. How are these powerful families linked to the ongoing crisis of global wealth inequality, why are so many people unaware of their existence, and why doesn’t Forbes ever mention them in their annual list of the world’s wealthiest people?
“Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws.“
AMSCHEL ROTHCHILDS
Global wealth inequality is out of control, and it’s no accident
In January 2014, Oxfam announced that the richest 85 people on the planet share a combined wealth of $110 trillion. The figure was based on Forbes’s rich list 2013, and it equates to 65 times the total wealth of the entire bottom half (3.5 billion) of the world’s population. While some deluded commentators welcomed this as “fantastic news,” the rest of us were disgusted. Winnie Byanyima, Oxfam’s executive director, said at the time: “It is staggering that in the 21st Century, half of the world’s population own no more than a tiny elite whose numbers could all fit comfortably on a double-decker bus.”
Two months later, following Oxfam’s calculation and having published the new 2014 rich list, Forbes journalist Kasia Morena did some fact-checking. She found that the number of billionaires owning the same as the poorest 3.5 billion had dropped from 85 to 67: which demonstrates an enormous widening of the global inequality gap in just one year.
Fast-forward to 2015, and another Oxfam investigation. The anti-poverty charity warned in January that if nothing is done to tackle global wealth inequality- by forcing corporations to pay their taxes and closing off-shore tax havens, for example- the richest 1% will own more than everybody else in the world combined by 2016. In a paper called Wealth: Having it all and wanting more, Oxfam outlined how the richest 1 percent have seen their share of global wealth increase from 44% in 2009 to 48% in 2014, and will likely surpass 50% in 2016. Winnie Byanyima again warned that the explosion in inequality is holding back the fight against global poverty at a time when one in nine people do not have enough to eat, and more than a billion people still live on less than $1.25 a day.
The organization also outlined how 20 percent of billionaires around the world have interests in the financial and insurance sectors, a group that saw their cash wealth increase by 11 percent in the last 12 months. Billionaires listed as having interests in the pharmaceutical and healthcaresectors saw their collective net worth increase by 47 percent, and the industry spent more than $500 million lobbying policy makers in Washington and Brussels in 2013 alone.
“Do we really want to live in a world where the one percent own more than the rest of us combined?” Byanyima asked. “The scale of global inequality is quite simply staggering, and despite the issues shooting up the global agenda, the gap between the richest and the rest is widening fast.”
Meet the people who own 50% (and counting) of the world’s wealth
Here is Forbes’s (real-time) list of the 66 billionaires who (officially) own half of all global assets, and will soon own more than the rest of Earth’s seven billion population combined. They range from CEOs of large corporations to oil and gas tycoons and Silicon valley entrepreneurs. The list details name, net worth, percentage change since the 2015 results, their age, industry and nationality. Bill Gates is ranked first at $469 billion, and James Simons at #66 with the $14 billion he made from hedge funds.
But where are the world’s Royal families? And more to the point, where are the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers? These two families have an unimaginable amount of wealth that surpasses the trillion mark- they are the only trillionaires in the world, and yet they are missing from Forbes’s list every single year, along with the handful of other men commonly believed to own our politicians, our media, our corporations, our scientists, and even our money supply.
Five of the most powerful and wealthiest men in the world belong to the Rothschild and Rockefeller dynasties. How much power do they hold, and why do we hear so little of them?
Five of the most powerful and wealthiest men in the world belong to the Rothschild and Rockefeller dynasties. How much power do they hold, and why do we hear so little of them?
The Rothschild and Rockefeller Dynasties: With great power comes great secrecy
Forbes’s rich list doesn’t include members of Royal families or dictators who hold their wealth through a position of power, or who control the riches of their country. In this way, the real people pulling the strings are able to work in absolute secrecy without any media attention at all (unless it is carefully-constructed positive propaganda, like this article on the philanthropy of the Rothschilds, of course). Forbes’s policy to exclude heads of state from the rich list explains why the Queen of England is absent, although nobody has the slightest idea of her wealth in any case: her shareholdings remain hidden behind Bank of England Nominee accounts. As the Guardian newspaper reported in May 2002: ‘The reason for the wild variations in valuations of her private wealth can be pinned on the secrecy over her portfolio of share investments…Her subjects have no way of knowing through a public register of interests where she, as their head of state, chooses to invest her money. Unlike [British politicians and Lords], the Queen does not have to annually declare her interests and as a result her subjects cannot question her or know about potential conflicts of interests…’
The same can be said for the Rothschilds and Rockerfellers, whose European forebears were richer than any Royal family at the time. The families are believed to have set up and own the Federal Reserve (G Edward Griffin’s The Creature From Jekyll Island and this research by journalist Dean Henderson are recommended reading if you want to get deeper into this topic). Could this be why the families, whose power in manipulating global affairs for the past few hundred years cannot be underestimated, are protected by Forbes’s ‘don’t even go there’ policy? Retired management consultant Gaylon Ross Sr, author of Who’s Who of the Global Elite, was apparently told in 1998 that the combined wealth of the Rockefeller family was approx $11 trillion and the Rothschilds $100 trillion…what might that figure have reached 17 years later? One can hardly begin to imagine, but maybe money isn’t the most important thing to your average trillionaire, anyway…
“The only problem with wealth is, what do you do with it?” was a rhetorical question posed by none other than John D. Rockefeller. Well, if Aaron Russo’s testimony is to be believed, all the Rockefeller riches in the world certainly won’t be used to benefit the human race…
Russo’s Rockefeller revelations: False flags, power grabs, and an enslaved population
Russo, a film-maker and activist who directed America: From Freedom to Fascism, claimed that Nick Rockefeller told him about ‘an event that would allow us to invade Afghanistan and Iraq’ some eleven months before 9/11, and foretold the fact that the ‘War on Terror’ would be a hoax wherein soldiers would be looking in caves for non-existent enemies (see video). In the interview, Russo claims that he first met lawyer Nick Rockefeller after being introduced by a mutual attorney friend. The two men hit it off, and later down the line Rockefeller apparently confided in Russo privately what his family had planned for the world: never-ending war, global population reduction, economic collapse, widespread chaos and disorder on such a scale that people would actually welcome the ultimate ‘solution’: a one-world government. He was speaking in October 2000, and most of his predictions have now come to pass- including 9/11 and the subsequent War on Terror.
Russo claimed that Rockefeller asked him to be on the Council For Foreign Relations (CFR), but the man who spent his career fighting for freedom and exposing the Fed Reserve supposedly told Rockefeller that he couldn’t possibly go along with these sinister plans for mankind. “As much as I like you Nick, I don’t believe in enslaving people. We’re on opposite sides of the fence,” Russo told Nick. To which Rockefeller apparently replied: “Why do you care about those people? Take care of your own life; do the best you can for you and your family.” Russo concludes: “There was just a lack of caring; it was just cold.”
He goes on, “I used to say what the point, Nick? You have all the money in the world, you have all the power in the world, whats the end goal?” Rockefeller is said to have responded bluntly: “To get everyone chipped.” According to this theory, the families who own the banking system are bored of their wealth, it is no longer enough. To control society itself is the ultimate end-game. According to Russo, Rockefeller told him that a global government would slowly phase out paper money from circulation, with its eventual aim being to microchip the population, turning us all into slaves of the NWO.
These are wild claims indeed, and from a journalistic point of view, they cannot be verified one way or the other. But it’s worth noting that just before Russo died in August 2007, he filmed a moving message to all Americans. In it, he talked about how vital it is for people to continue to resist national ID cards and microchips, and fight for their individual freedoms against those who would enslave us. It’s also worth pointing out that it’s not only activists like Russo and scare-mongering patriots like Alex Jones who have tried to ‘out’ the Rothschilds and Rockefellers. The problem is, all those who do so are silenced.
Ashley Mote, a member of the European Parliament serving British independence party UKIP, asked the following question in Brussels, and retribution was swift: “Mr President, I wish to draw your attention to the Global Security Fund, set up in the early 1990s under the auspices of Jacob Rothschild. This is a Brussels-based fund and it is no ordinary fund: it does not trade, it is not listed and it has a totally different purpose. It is being used for geopolitical engineering purposes, apparently under the guidance of the intelligence services. I have previously asked about the alleged involvement of the European Union’s own intelligence resources in the management of slush funds in offshore accounts, and I still await a reply. To that question I now add another: what are the European Union’s connections to the Global Security Fund and what relationship does it have with European Union institutions?”
This is exactly the kind of question the European public would like an answer to. Yet Mote did not receive one. Instead, the 79 year old politician was sacked from his own party, and later arrested and sent to jail for allegedly claiming false expenses during his time as an MEP. Mote claimed throughout his trial that he was ‘targeted for being anti-Europe’, and said the money he claimed was used to pay third-party whistleblowers in a quest to uncover corruption and fight for democracy and transparency in European politics.
Like everything else relating to the people who really run the show, the truth is out there…but it’s almost impossible to pin down.
Source: True Activist _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
Popular with religious types. The Russian proposal bears similarities to Islamic Finance
This article originally appeared at New Eastern Outlook
A significant debate is underway in Russia since imposition of western financial sanctions on Russian banks and corporations in 2014.
It’s about a proposal presented by the Moscow Patriarchate of the Orthodox Church. The proposal, which resembles Islamic interest-free banking models in many respects, was first unveiled in December 2014 at the depth of the Ruble crisis and oil price free-fall.
This August the idea received a huge boost from the endorsement of the Russian Chamber of Commerce and Industry. It could change history for the better depending on what is done and where it further leads.
Some 20 years ago during the Yeltsin era, within the chaos of Russian hyperinflation and IMF “shock therapy,” the Russian Orthodox Church introduced a similar proposal for interest-free banking as an alternative. During that time a gaggle of liberal pro-free-market Russian economists around Yeltsin, such as Yegor Gaider, prevailed. They instead opened Russia’s state-owned assets to literal plunder by western banks, hedge funds and corporations.
In my first visit to Russia in May 1994 to give a talk at a Russian economic institute on IMF shock therapy, I saw first-hand the lawless mafia, russkaya mafiya, speeding through the near-empty Tverskaya Street near Red Square in new state-of-the-art Mercedes 600 limos without license plates. It was a devastating time in Russia and Washington and the technocrats at the IMF knew exactly what they were doing to foster the chaos.
US sanctions focus attention
By 2014 much has changed in Russia. Most significantly, the infatuation with everything American of two decades ago has understandably vanished. The US Treasury financial sanctions were launched in stages in 1914 against specific individuals around President Putin, specific banks and corporations dependent on foreign credit. They had the effect of forcing a critical rethinking among Russian intellectuals, government officials and in the Kremlin itself.
The Washington attacks, legally-speaking acts of warfare against a sovereign nation, were initiated by the US Treasury’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, the only government finance agency in the world with its own in-house intelligence agency. The Office was created under the pretext of going after and freezing the assets and bank accounts of drug cartels and terrorists, something it seems strangely inept at if we judge from their record regarding groups like ISIS or Al Qaeda in Iraq. It seems to be far better going after “undesireable” countries like Iran and Russia. It has offices around the world, including in Islamabad and Abu Dhabi.
Those US Treasury financial warfare sanctions and the prospect of much worse to come have sparked a deep debate within Russia on how to defend the nation from more attacks. Vulnerability to western sanctions in their banking system has led Russia, like China, to develop an internal Russian version of SWIFT interbank payments. Now the very nature of money and its control is at the heart of the debate.
Unorthodox Orthodox Proposal
In January 2015, in the depth of the financial crisis, with a Ruble at half what it had been months earlier and oil prices in a free-fall as a result of the September 2014 John Kerry-King Abdullah agreement, the Moscow Patriarchate reissued its idea.
Dmitri Lubomudrov, the Orthodox Church’s legal adviser told the media at that time, “We realized we couldn’t stay dependent on the Western financial system, but must develop our own. As with the Islamic system, the Orthodox one will be based not just on legislation, but on Orthodox morality as well, and will be an invitation to businessmen seeking security at a time of crisis.” Among its features would be interest-free credit issuance and prohibition of investment in gambling casinos or such activities going against Church moral values.
Then in early August this year the Orthodox plan for interest-free money creation gained a major added support. Sergei Katyrin, head of the Russian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, after meeting with Vsevolod Chaplin, the senior Orthodox cleric overseeing the project, announced, “The Chamber of Commerce and Industry supports the creation of the Orthodox Financial System… and is ready to provide its platform for detailed and professional discussion of these questions together with the relevant committees of the chamber.” The proposal is aimed at reducing Russia’s reliance on the Western banking system, an essential national economic security requirement.
Much as with Islamic banking models than ban usury, the Orthodox Financial System would not allow interest charges on loans. Participants of the system share risks, profits and losses. Speculative behavior is prohibited, as well as investments in gambling, drugs and other businesses that do not meet Orthodox Christian values. There would be a new low-risk bank or credit organization that controls all transactions, and investment funds or companies that source investors and mediate project financing. It would explicitly avoid operations with active financial risks. Priority would be ensuring financing of the real sector of the economy, its spokesman stated.
Interestingly, Russia’s largest Islamic autonomous republic, Tatarstan, recently introduced Islamic banking into Russia for the first time and it was supported positively by German Gref, CEO of the state-owned Sperbank, Russia’s largest bank. This May, Gref called it a very important instrument amid the current problems with raising funds on international markets. In July Sberbank and the Republic of Tatarstan signed an agreement on cooperation in the field of Islamic financing.
Under Czar Alexander III and his Finance Minister Nikolai Bunge, Russia established the Peasant Land Bank in the beginning of the 1880’s to give interest-free loans to the liberated peasantry that had been freed from serfdom in 1861 by his father, Alexander II and given land. The Land Bank invested in the modernization of Russian agriculture with farmers only paying a small handling charge for credits. The result was such a spectacular rise in Russian wheat, and other cereals that Russia became the world “bread basket” up to outbreak of World War I, exceeding the combined production of the USA, Argentina and Canada by some 25%.
Glazyev proposals
The new prominence of the Orthodox Monetary model in Russian discussions comes at a time when one of Vladimir Putin’s economic advisers, Sergei Glayzev, the person advising the President on Ukraine as well as relations with fellow-members of the Eurasian Economic Union, has presented a plan for enhancing Russia’s national economic and financial security under the quite sensible assumption that the financial sanctions and now military pressures from Washington and NATO are no whimsical accident but a deep-seated strategy of weakening and economically destroying one of the two nations which stand in a way of a globalist US New World Order.
In May 2014, a few weeks after the Obama Administration imposed a series of select sanctions on key Russian individuals, banks and energy companies, striking at the heart of the economy, Glazyev made an interview with the Russian financial paper, Vedomosti, in which he proposed a number of prudent defensive measures. Among them were several which are now policy. This has included a credit and currency swap with China to finance critical imports and a shift to settlement in national currencies–Ruble and RMB; creation of a Russian interbank information exchange system, analogous to SWIFT, for payments and settlements within the Eurasian Economic Union and other partner countries.
A strategic proposal of Glazyev that the state impose a halt on all export of gold, precious metals, and rare earth elements, and that the Central Bank buy up gold mined by foreign companies to build monetary gold reserve strength, was, unfortunately, refused by Central Bank Governor Elvira Nabiullina who told the Duma, “We don’t believe that a moratorium is needed on gold exports. We are able to buy enough gold to diversify our gold and currency reserves.”
Nabiullina has come under criticism from members of the Duma for being far too slow in building the gold reserves of the ruble. Russia today is the world’s second largest gold producer after China, and China has been building its Peoples’ Bank of China gold reserves in recent years at a feverish pace. Western central banks, led by the Federal Reserve, since gold backing for the dollar was abandoned in August, 1971, have done everything, including brazen market manipulation, to discourage gold currency reserves around the world.
Most recently, on September 15 Glazyev presented a new series of economic proposals to the Presidential Russian Security Council to, as he stated it, reduce the vulnerability to western sanctions over the coming five years and achieve foundations for long-term growth and economic sovereignty. Among his proposals were creation of a State Committee on Strategic Planning under the President of the Russian Federation, together with a State Committee for Scientific and Technological Development, modeled on a system created in Iran during the 1990s following the introduction of Western sanctions there.
The first measure, creation of a Committee on Strategic Planning, echoes the highly successful French national Planification model introduced under President Charles de Gaulle, that was credited with transforming France from a stagnant peasant-dominated economy to an advanced, innovative modern industrial nation by the early 1970’s.
In the 1960’s France had a General Commission of the Plan which surveyed the entire economy to identify critical weaknesses that needed attention for overall national development. They would set goals for the coming 5 years. General Commission members were senior civil servants consulting with business leaders, trade unions and other representative groups. Each proposed plan was then sent to the national parliament for voting approval or change.
The crucial difference between France’s 5-year Planification and the Soviet 5-year central planning model was that the French was indicative and not imperative as was the Soviet Five Year Plan. Private or state companies could freely decide to focus on a sector such as railway development knowing the state would encourage the investment with tax incentives or subsidies to lower risk and make it attractive. It was highly successful until the mid-1970’s when the massive oil shocks and increasing Brussels supra-national rule-making made it increasingly difficult to implement.
There are other features to the detailed Glazyev proposal, among the most interesting his proposal to use Central Bank resources to provide targeted lending for businesses and industries by providing them with low interest rates between 1-4 percent, made possible by quantitative easing to the tune of 20 trillion rubles over a five year period. The program also suggests that the state support private business through the creation of “reciprocal obligations” for the purchase of products and services at agreed-upon prices.
30 minute video on gold and silver prices. _________________ 'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Thu Dec 24, 2015 5:16 pm Post subject:
A must watch webcast!
The Intercept's video channel has published an excellent four-part
film on the bailout negotiations between Syriza and the Troika -- much
of which never made it to the UK's news channels:
By Nicholas Hirst
| 12/4/15, 2:55 PM CET
| Updated 12/4/15, 5:48 PM CET
The largest investment banks, including Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley, have beaten back charges from the European Commission that they colluded to stifle competition in the market for financial derivatives in the run-up to the financial crisis.
The Commission closed an antitrust case Friday against 13 investment banks that was focused on the market for credit default swaps. It continues to probe similar concerns against financial information provider Markit and the International Swaps and Derivatives Association.
It is unusual for the Commission to drop a case at this stage in the proceedings, said Jean-François Bellis, partner at law firm Van Bael & Bellis. “It happens, but it is rare.”
The Commission said its decision was “based on a thorough analysis of all information received from the parties in their replies and during the oral hearing of May 2014, as well as on documents obtained through additional fact finding. The evidence was not sufficiently conclusive to confirm the Commission’s concerns.”
None of the banks cooperated with the Commission in exchange for leniency, making the case harder to investigate.
The Commission opened the probe in 2011 and in 2013 accused the parties of agreeing to block Deutsche Börse and Chicago Mercantile Exchange from entering the market for credit default swaps between 2006 and 2009.
When charging the firms, the Commission took the unusual step of naming them: Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Barclays, Bear Stearns, BNP Paribas, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Royal Bank of Scotland and UBS.
Authors:
Nicholas Hirst
0nce again the Big Banks get away with their criminal conspiracies. _________________ 'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.
Seems 'William the Ba*tard' (or 'Conqueror', as he's generally referred to) has a heck of a lot to answer for....
#TGBMS – THE GREATEST GANGSTER STORY EVER TOLD?
http://roguemale.org/2016/01/29/tgbms-the-greatest-gangster-story-ever -told/ _________________ 'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Tue Feb 16, 2016 11:39 pm Post subject:
THE BIGGEST SWINDLE; PROFIT WITHOUT INVESTMENT
Bernie Madoff was a piker. WorldCom and Enron were run of the mill accounting jugglers. The Savings and Loan scandal involved numerous businesses. The Federal Reserve is an embezzler in a class by itself.
Every dollar in circulation has been created as the principal of a 'loan' made by a transfer of a Treasury security (as collateral) to the FRBNY. If any consideration were put up by the Fed, there would not be an increase in the amount of money in circulation. The money is actually created as a book-entry in an accounting ledger. The 'loan' is a scam.
The Fed runs a Ponzi scheme. The understanding is to pay back the principal of a deficit security plus interest. The interest is never created; it does not exist. The contract is impossible to culminate. Any contract that is impossible to culminate is an act of fraud. A contract based upon fraud is void from its inception. It conveys no immunity; it grants no authority. All Ponzi schemes have the same termination. [The fractional reserve scheme by commercial banks does not alter this FR mathematical fact.]
The only way to pay the interest is to issue more securities and pay the interest from the principal thus created. The result is paying interest on the interest. If you wondered why the national debt is increasing at an exponential rate, now you know.
The deficit security transferred to the FRBNY is sold at auction (as a percentage of a roll-over security). If the money received was credited to the government (as is the money from roll-over securities), it would have to be used to purchase securities. If securities were purchased with such funds, it would eliminate any increase of money in circulation (inflation). It would also eliminate any increase in the national debt. This obviously does not occur.
The accounting and handling of the annual $9 trillion in auctioned Marketable securities is EXCLUSIVELY by the FRBNY. Ref. 31 CFR 375.3. These accounts have never been audited.
All profit of the Fed legally belongs to the government.
If the money ( $3 billion daily) does not go to the government, where does the money go ?
Hint: Who controlled the security before it was auctioned ?
In the event of a vote in favour of Brexit, The Governor of the Bank of England Dr. Mark Carney reassured the British public: “we will do everything in our power to discharge our responsibility to achieve monetary stability and financial stability…”
Carney intimated that “financial instability” and “poor economic outcomes” are associated with the Brexit process: a rather unsubtle message to investors, brokers as well as speculators. He also warned MPs that Brexit could lead to an exodus of banks and financial institutions from the City of London.
“[There is no] blanket assurance that there would not be issues in the short term with respect to financial stability and that potential reduction in financial stability could be associated – and normally would be associated – with poor economic outcomes, as we have seen in the past”.
The governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney (image right) is a former official of Goldman Sachs, the World’s foremost “institutional speculator”. He spent thirteen years with Goldman before heading the Bank of Canada.
At the time of his 2013 appointment to the Bank of England, he was not a citizen of the United Kingdom: Mark Carney was the first foreigner to occupy that position since the founding of the Governor and Company of the Bank of England in 1694.
Were there powerful interests involved in the recruitment of the Governor of the BoE? Who was behind Carney’s candidacy? At the time of his appointment, the issue of U.K. “sovereignty” and Carney’s citizenship were hushed up by the British media.
Brexit and Financial Instability
Carney was fully aware that an “authoritative statement” pertaining to “financial stability” would have an immediate impact on financial markets. On whose behalf was he acting when he made those statements?
Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg has accused Mark Carney, of “speculative statements”:
“It is speculative and beneath the dignity of the Bank of England. To be making speculative pro-EU comments.”
The Goldman Sachs Report
In February, Goldman Sachs warned that in the case of Brexit, the pound sterling “could lose 20 per cent of its value” Mark Carney’s statements at the House of Commons not only point in the same direction, they also provide legitimacy and “credibility” to Goldman’s assessment.
As an institutional speculator, Goldman’s intent is to influence expectations regarding financial markets (backed by authoritative statements from the Bank of England).
Coinciding with Carney’s recent statements, Goldman Sachs released a report on the detrimental economic and financial impacts of Brexit:
“However, given the substantial unpredictability regarding the UK’s post-Brexit trading and regulatory arrangements, quite how damaging Brexit would be in the long term is subject to a great deal of uncertainty. Arguably of more immediate concern is the effect that the uncertainty itself would have on UK growth.
The EU Treaty sets out a two-year timeframe for departure. During this period, the UK government would have to negotiate the terms upon which it could continue to trade with EU countries…
Some of these trade negotiations and many of the regulatory/legal decisions would be relatively straightforward. But many would not. …
During this period, UK-based businesses would face considerable uncertainty: exporting companies would not know the terms on which they would be able to supply export markets abroad once Brexit is complete; importing companies would not know the terms on which they would be able to import; and all companies would be confronted with increased regulatory/legal uncertainty. (Excerpts of report)
Carney dismissed the claims of Goldman in early February. But now he supports them.
Where do Mark Carney’s statements originate, from the Bank of England or from Goldman Sachs, his former employer?
Goldman is known to be the World’s foremost “institutional speculator”. Foreknowledge of statements and decisions by central banks are often used by financial institutions in speculative operations. Inside knowledge and connections are part of this process, they are the “bread and butter” of the “institutional speculator”.
The important question which the British media has not addressed: what is the relationship between Mark Carney and Goldman Sachs.
The Goldman Trojan Horse
Is there a Trojan Horse within the Bank of England with Goldman Sachs sitting on the inside?
While Carney was appointed by Her Majesty, unofficially, he still has “links” to Goldman Sachs.
Is he in conflict of interest?
Next time there’s a financial meltdown, your money could be rescuing Goldman Sachs.
Yes, thanks to a new deal struck by Mark Carney, the former Goldman man now running the Bank of England, the US investment bank could end up enjoying the next round of British taxpayer bailout money. (The Independent, 20 August 2015)
Moreover, several key senior positions within the Bank of England are held by former Goldman officials. Mark Carney was appointed in 2013. The following year (2014), Dr. Ben Broadbent, a Senior Economist for Goldman Sachs was appointed Deputy Governor in charge of Monetary Policy.
Bankers from Goldman are strewn across key policy-making arenas across the world like no other financial institution.
As well as the Governor of the Bank of England, his deputy Ben Broadbent is ex Goldman, as were two previous Monetary Policy Committee members, David Walton and Sushil Wadhwani.
Across the Channel, European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi is a Goldman man, while in the US, Goldmanites make up a quarter of the Federal Reserve system’s regional presidents. (Ibid).
Concluding Remarks
Central Banks are complicit in the manipulation of financial markets including stock markets, commodities, gold and currency markets, not to mention the oil and energy markets which have been the object of a carefully engineered “pump and dump” speculative onslaught.
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Mon Jun 20, 2016 12:16 am Post subject:
Economics of Good and Evil: The Quest for Economic Meaning from Gilgamesh to Wall Street Hardcover – 16 Jun 2011
by Tomas Sedlacek
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0199767203/
Why economics is failing to serve society
By Malcolm Shearmur on 4 Mar. 2014
The Economics of Good and Evil is an attempt to put the human factor back into economics. Sedlacek reviews the evolution of thinking about economic questions since the Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest surviving work of literature. He runs through the Hebrew tradition, the ancient Greeks, Christian thinkers, Descartes and the Enlightenment, to today’s maths-dominated practice. He asks why it is that ethics and morals, such a central part of economic thinking until the end of the 19th century and even Keynes, should today be almost entirely absent from mainstream economics.
Sedlacek argues that modern economic theories are as much myths as the fables about the Greek gods. In other words, they are not true, even if they have something true to say about the world. The problem today, in Sedlacek’s view, is that too many economists believe that the rational models developed to make sense of economic phenomena are more than mental constructs and actually reflect the reality. This, coupled with the view that the discipline’s reliance on maths makes it more scientific, precise and meaningful than other social sciences, has harmed the credibility of economics and more importantly, society itself. After the failure of economics to predict or prevent the financial crisis that began in 2008, it is high time, Sedlacek argues, for it to abandon its imperial claim, reassess what it can learn from history, philosophy, psychology, theology and sociology, and come back down to earth.
The overall case is clearly made, even if the argument meanders at times. This is a good book for the generalist with an interest in economics.
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Economics of Good and Evil: The Quest for Economic Meaning from Gilgamesh to Wall Street
'....She also supports the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall, separating depository banking from speculative investment banking; the breakup of megabanks into smaller banks; federal postal banks to service the unbanked and under-banked; and the formation of publicly-owned banks at the state and local level.
As with Sanders' economic proposals, her plan has been challenged as unrealistic. Where will Congress find the money?
But Stein argues that the funds can be found. Going beyond Bernie, she calls for large cuts to the bloated military budget, which makes up 55% of federal discretionary spending; and progressive taxation, ensuring that the wealthy pay their fair share. Most controversial, however, is her plan to tap up the Federal Reserve. Pointing to the massive sums the Fed produced out of the blue to bail out Wall Street, she says the same resources used to save the perpetrators of the crisis could be made available to its Main Street victims, beginning with the students robbed of their futures by massive student debt..
It Couldn't Be Done Until It Was
Is tapping up the Fed realistic? Putting aside for the moment the mechanics of pulling it off, the central bank has indeed revealed that it has virtually limitless resources, as seen in the radical "emergency measures" taken since 2008.
The Fed first surprised Congress when it effectively "bought" AIG, a private insurance company, for $80 billion. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi remarked, "Many of us were . . . taken aback when the Fed had $80 billion to invest -- to put into AIG just out of the blue. All of a sudden we wake up one morning and AIG has received $80 billion from the Fed. So of course we're saying, Where's this money come from?"
The response was, "Oh, we have it. And not only that, we have more."
How much more was revealed in 2011, after an amendment by Sen. Bernie Sanders to the 2010 Wall Street reform law prompted the Government Accounting Office to conduct the first top-to-bottom audit of the Federal Reserve. It revealed that the Fed had provided a whopping $16 trillion in secret loans to bail out American and foreign banks and businesses during the economic crisis. "This is a clear case of socialism for the rich and rugged, you're-on-your-own individualism for everyone else," said Sanders in a press release.
Then there was the shocker of "quantitative easing" (QE), an unconventional monetary policy in which the central bank creates new money electronically to buy financial assets such as Treasury securities and mortgage-backed securities (many of them "toxic") from the banks. Critics said QE couldn't be done because it would lead to hyperinflation. But it was done, and that dire result has not occurred.
Unfortunately, the economic stimulus that QE was supposed to trigger hasn't occurred either. QE has failed because the money has gotten no further than the balance sheets of private banks. To stimulate the demand that will jumpstart the economy, new money needs to get into the real economy and the pockets of consumers.
Why QE Hasn't Worked, and What Would
The goal of QE as currently implemented is to return inflation to target levels by increasing private sector borrowing. But today, as economist Richard Koo explains, individuals and businesses are paying down debt rather than taking out new loans. They are doing this although credit is very cheap, because they need to rectify their debt-ridden balance sheets in order to stay afloat. Koo calls it a "balance sheet recession."
As the Bank of England recently acknowledged, the vast majority of the money supply is now created by banks when they make loans. Money is created when loans are made, and it is extinguished when they are paid off. When loan repayment exceeds borrowing, the money supply "deflates" or shrinks. New money then needs to be injected to fill the breach. Currently, the only way to get new money into the economy is for someone to borrow it into existence; and since the private sector is not borrowing, the public sector must, just to replace what has been lost in debt repayment. But government borrowing from the private sector means running up interest charges and hitting deficit limits.
The alternative is to do what governments arguably should have been doing all along: issue the money directly to fund their budgets......' _________________ 'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.
'Most Americans have no idea that the U.S. government once issued debt-free money directly into circulation. America once thrived under a debt-free monetary system, and we can do it again. The truth is that the United States is a sovereign nation and it does not need to borrow money from anyone. Back in the days of JFK, Federal Reserve Notes were not the only currency in circulation. Under JFK (at at various other times), a limited number of debt-free United States Notes were issued by the U.S. Treasury and spent by the U.S. government without any new debt being created. In fact, each bill said “United States Note” right at the top. Unfortunately, United States Notes are not being issued today. If you stop right now and pull a dollar out of your wallet, what does it say right at the top? It says “Federal Reserve Note”. Normally, the way our current system works is that whenever more Federal Reserve Notes are created more debt is also created. This debt-based monetary system is systematically destroying the wealth of this nation. But it does not have to be this way. The truth is that the U.S. government still has the power under the U.S. Constitution to issue debt-free money, and we need to educate the American people about this.
Posted below are pictures of the front and the back of a United States Note printed in 1963 while JFK was president….
Notice that there is a red seal instead of a green seal on the front, and it says “United States Note” rather than “Federal Reserve Note”.
According to Wikipedia, United States Notes were issued directly into circulation by the U.S. Treasury and they were first used during the Civil War….
They were originally issued directly into circulation by the U.S. Treasury to pay expenses incurred by the Union during the American Civil War. Over the next century, the legislation governing these notes was modified many times and numerous versions have been issued by the Treasury.
So why are we using debt-based Federal Reserve Notes today instead of debt-free United States Notes?
It seems rather stupid, doesn’t it?
Well, that is what Thomas Edison thought too.
Thomas Edison was once quoted in the New York Times as saying the following….
That is to say, under the old way any time we wish to add to the national wealth we are compelled to add to the national debt.
Now, that is what Henry Ford wants to prevent. He thinks it is stupid, and so do I, that for the loan of $30,000,000 of their own money the people of the United States should be compelled to pay $66,000,000 — that is what it amounts to, with interest. People who will not turn a shovelful of dirt nor contribute a pound of material will collect more money from the United States than will the people who supply the material and do the work. That is the terrible thing about interest. In all our great bond issues the interest is always greater than the principal. All of the great public works cost more than twice the actual cost, on that account. Under the present system of doing business we simply add 120 to 150 per cent, to the stated cost.
But here is the point: If our nation can issue a dollar bond, it can issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good makes the bill good.
Our current debt-based monetary system was devised by greedy bankers that wanted to make huge profits by creating money out of thin air and lending it to the U.S. government at interest.
Sadly, the vast majority of the American people have no idea how money is actually created in this nation.
In a previous article about money and debt, I explained how more government debt is created whenever the U.S. government puts more money into circulation….
When the government wants more money, the U.S. government swaps U.S. Treasury bonds for “Federal Reserve notes”, thus creating more government debt. Usually the money isn’t even printed up – most of the time it is just electronically credited to the government. The Federal Reserve creates these “Federal Reserve notes” out of thin air. These Federal Reserve notes are backed by nothing and have no intrinsic value of their own.
When each new Federal Reserve Note is created, the interest owed by the federal government on that new Federal Reserve Note is not also created at the same time.
So the amount of government debt that is created actually exceeds the amount of money that is created.
Isn’t that a stupid system?
The U.S. Constitution says that the federal government is the one that should actually be issuing our money.
In particular, according to Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, it is the U.S. Congress that has been given the responsibility to “coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures”.
So why is a private central banking cartel issuing our money?
As is the case with so many other issues, we desperately need to get back to the way the U.S. Constitution says that we should be doing things.
The debt-based Federal Reserve system is literally stealing the future from our children and our grandchildren.
Back in 1910, a couple years prior to the passage of the Federal Reserve Act, the national debt was only about $2.6 billion.
A little over 100 years later, our national debt is now more than 5000 times larger.
So why don’t we just admit that this system simply does not work?
Our current debt-based monetary system also requires very high personal income taxes to pay for it.
In fact, it is no accident that the personal income tax was introduced at about the same time that the Federal Reserve system originally came into existence.
Our children, our grandchildren and many generations after that are facing a lifetime of debt slavery because of us.
As I have written about previously, if the federal government began right at this moment to repay the U.S. national debt at a rate of one dollar per second, it would take over 440,000 years to pay off the national debt.
Neither the Republicans or the Democrats are proposing any solutions to this problem. Rather, both parties are only trying to slow down the rate at which we are going into even more debt.
But the truth is that the federal government does not have to go into a single penny of additional debt.
How could this be?
It is not too complicated.
If Congress took back the power over our currency and started issuing debt-free money a lot of our problems could be fixed.
A basic plan would look something like this….
#1) The U.S. Congress votes to take back all of the functions that it has delegated to the Federal Reserve and begins to issue debt-free United States Notes. These United States Notes would have the exact same value as existing Federal Reserve Notes, and over time all existing Federal Reserve Notes would be taken out of circulation.
#2) The U.S. Congress nationalizes all debt held by the Federal Reserve. That would instantly reduce the national debt by 1.6 trillion dollars. In fact, there are a few members of Congress that have already proposed this.
#3) A Constitutional amendment is passed limiting future U.S. government deficits to a reasonable percentage of GDP. Any future deficits would not be funded by borrowing. Rather, future deficits would be funded by newly created United States Notes. Therefore, the federal government would never again accumulate another penny of debt.
And it would be important to inject new money into the economy from time to time. When existing money is destroyed or when the population grows it is important to inject a certain amount of new money into the system in order to avoid deflation.
#4) The existing national debt would be very slowly paid off with newly created United States Notes. The U.S. government spent over 454 billion dollars on interest on the national debt during fiscal year 2011, and over time this expense would go to zero.
If the national debt is paid off slowly enough, it would not create too much inflation. I believe that it could be paid off gradually over 50 years without shocking the economy too much.
There are some that would object to any measure that would ever cause a small amount of inflation, but my contention is that we have created a $15 trillion dollar debt mess for future generations, and it would be absolutely criminal to pass that legacy on to them.
We created this mess, and it is our responsibility to clean it up.
While there is certainly a danger that we would have a limited amount of inflation under a debt-free monetary system such as the one described above, the reality is that we are absolutely guaranteed inflation under the Federal Reserve system.
Most Americans believe that inflation is a fact of life, but the sad truth is that the United States has only had a major, ongoing problem with inflation since the Federal Reserve was created back in 1913.
If you do not believe this, just check out this chart.
Sadly, the U.S. dollar has lost well over 95 percent of its value since the Federal Reserve was created.
So, yes, there would be a need for strict monetary discipline under a debt-free monetary system, but it would be hard to do worse than the Federal Reserve has already been doing.
And Congress could always slow down inflation using other methods. For example, raising the reserve requirements for banks (which should be done anyway) would help keep inflation in check.
If the above proposals were adopted, the end result would be something that we could all live with. The Federal Reserve system would be abolished, the national debt burden on future generations would be wiped out, the economy would not have to go through a devastating economic collapse that could last a decade or longer, and we could eventually make a fairly smooth transition to “hard money” if we wanted to after the national debt is gone.
Is there any other proposal out there that does all of those things?
There are many out there that would dispute some of the points above, and debate is good. By engaging in debate, we can hopefully help educate the American people about the nature of money.
The key is to get rid of our current debt-based Federal Reserve Notes and replace them with debt-free United States Notes.
The American people need to understand that it is a lie that the U.S. government “must” borrow money from somebody else.
When the U.S. government borrows money, it slowly transfers wealth from the American people to those that lent it.
At this point, we have created a financial nightmare for future generations that is unlike anything the world has ever seen before. We owe it to future generations to eliminate the debt problem without destroying the United States economy. Adopting debt-free money would allow us to do that.
But sadly, neither political party is even talking about debt-free money. In fact, most of the politicians in both political parties probably do not even know what debt-free money is.
So we need to get the American people educated about these things. Because if we stay on the course that we are currently on, an economic collapse is inevitable.' _________________ 'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Fri Aug 12, 2016 11:23 am Post subject:
by email wrote:
How Hitler was able to finance the rise of the the Third Reich. Where did the money came from? The answer is very simple. Hitler took control of the money creation and allocation process. He merely removed private banking from the mix and took control of the money supply.
There was no conspiracy about this; he just did the most logical thing in monetary policy, which is: create a completely State owned Banking system. Once Hitler had complete control of the money supply, he could create just the right amounts and target that money at the industries that he wanted to develop.
Inflation is avoided because he is stacking the money against newly
created physical assets. But let's be clear; he was a complete psychopath and was planning the take over of Europe and the extermination of millions of innocent people. That said, he proved a point that state controlled banking driven by a clearly defined plan, can release the potential of a nation.
We have seen this also in China, and we are now starting to see the effect of carefully directed State Banking in India as well under Modi.
He who controls the creation and allocation of the money supply, controls
the country. The Corporation of the City of London and all of its
inhabitants control the creation and allocation of the money supply, ipso
facto, they control the UK. The same is true of Wall Street in the USA.
Today, seven out of 23 of the UK’s Cabinet are former city executives or
consultants, including the Prime Minister. What a surprise.
Here is an article extract from last month:
"New Cabinet Corrupted by Design?
Out of the 23 government cabinet ministers under and including Theresa May, 7 are former City/Financial Services related folk. May was 18 years in the financial services sector including 6 years at the Bank of England. (Her husband works in investment banking.) Philip Hammond, Chancellor of the Exchequer (although in manufacturing for a short while, he became a consultant to the World Bank). Amber Rudd, Home Secretary (JP Morgan and various Venture Capitalists). James Brokenshire, Northern Ireland (Lawyer advising City firms). Andrea Leadsom, Environment Secretary (18 years in investment banking). Sajid Javid, Communities and Local Government (VP at Chase Manhattan). Alun Cairns, Wales (Lloyds Banking Group). The banks rule the western world. Do you think this is going to end with so many banking puppets in the Cabinet? Our former Chancellor actively lobbied on behalf of HSBC executives to protect them from prosecution."
In addition, still we have The City Remembrancer by invitation of the
Speaker, but in practice by invitation of the Prime Minister.
The UK is controlled by a small number of City executives, and that is why
the UK will, for the foreseeable future, not have a government that is in
control of the UK’s money supply, and therefore no control at all.
Mark my words, the only future that is worth contemplating for the British
people is one where the Government creates a completely State Owned
Banking system, and regulates the City out of existence. Anything less
than that is not democracy.
Joined: 30 Jul 2006 Posts: 6060 Location: East London
Posted: Thu Aug 18, 2016 1:29 pm Post subject:
PETITION: CREATE MONEY FOR PEOPLE, NOT FINANCIAL MARKETS:
http://act.positivemoney.org/page/s/create-money-for-people _________________ 'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.
Chris Johnes argues that getting a job is not necessarily a route out of poverty. Rising costs and falling real wages means that having a job won’t necessarily allow you to make ends meet. What’s worse, the auterity programme is hitting low-income households disproportionately hardest. We must, therefore, rethink the prevailing attitude towards taxes and social justice.
As Europe remains stuck in a prolonged period of economic gloom, it is no longer surprising that many of us are getting poorer and are living more insecure lives. Indeed, in the UK we are, on average, getting poorer to a sufficient degree that the poverty line (based on average incomes) has fallen, apparently lifting some children out of poverty (but I suspect not many of them have noticed). At the same time, inequality is growing. Citizens on lower incomes are being hit twice as hard as services they need more than richer individuals are cut, and as tax rises – mainly VAT – hit them hardest.
What is starting to unravel, however, is the cosy consensus between the main political parties that getting a job offers a route out of poverty. We have seen a growing bank of evidence which is starting to show quite how fragile life is for those in low paid work. For those in low paid work with less predictable incomes (on zero-hours contracts, for example), it is even more precarious.
A combination of rising costs and falling (real) wages has pushed many people to a situation where one more “shock” – a broken boiler or cooker, a high car repair bill – can push them into debt, or into the increasingly common “heat or eat” dilemma. And a very large number of people in this position (60 per cent of those below the poverty line) live in households where at least one person is working. Many jobs today do not pay enough, and more and more part-time and temporary jobs replace permanent full-time jobs, which the kind that actually bring stable incomes.
Cuts have not only hit direct benefit payments, but also many of the other services (such as childcare, youth clubs, advice services) that families on low incomes – working and not working – have relied on, adding to a further loss of income.
Simultaneously, the prices of essentials have been rising, especially food and fuel, and more and more working families have had to resort to claiming Housing Benefit, a step that is becoming less of an option as the Housing Benefit and, from April 2013, overall benefit caps kick in.
So, even if it is difficult to see how people can escape from poverty without working, it is also increasingly difficult to claim with any degree of understanding that work is the route out of poverty. Lots of jobs which are essential to our society and economy – and indeed to bigger business – need wider support. This is recognised to a degree by government (via Working Tax Credits, and from 2013 onwards Universal Credit), but also, to a degree, by the slowly growing number of (mainly large) employers who are looking to pay a Living Wage.
If life is getting tougher for those at the bottom of the income scale what’s going on elsewhere?
One of the most marked impacts of the economic downturn across most northern economies has been a growth in inequality. This is certainly true across the UK, where deficit reduction has been overwhelmingly managed by cuts in spending rather than tax rises – and the main tool of increased tax is a regressive one, VAT. So the economic downturn has hit those without work, and those working on low incomes hardest, and the government’s reaction to deficit management has reinforced that trend.
This is patently unjust: without over-emphasising the old (but still true) mantra that those who created the crisis are not paying for it, there is now wave after wave of problems hitting people on lower incomes, with the troubles faced by those in low-paid work becoming increasingly serious.
This is not healthy for them, or for the millions of children growing up in hard-working but highly stressed and struggling households. And it is definitely not healthy for our wider economic position, as millions of pounds of consumer spending are squeezed out of the economy, and as the gaps in society widen, throwing social cohesion out of the window.
We can, of course, change this. The UK remains the sixth wealthiest state on the planet. Yet political choices about tackling the deficit have added to wider economic woes. There are, undeniably, alternative ways to close the deficit, that don’t hit the poorest hardest, which is why Oxfam has recently released a report called “The Perfect Storm”, calling on the government to rethink their deficit reduction policies.
However, for this to happen, we need to re-think debates about tax. As long as tax remains taboo – and politicians who wish to fund progressive social programmes feel forced to conceal their intentions with so-called “stealth taxes” – the case for social justice remains woefully undersold. Instead we need to be more open about saying that a fairer society – and some degree of economic recovery – means fairer tax systems, and a more equitable way of tackling the deficit. And we can start by tackling with greater determination the widespread problem of tax avoidance, which is used mostly by the very wealthy to avoid their responsibilities, and is fundamentally undermining government finances, and thus the welfare of very many of our fellow citizens.
Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the British Politics and Policy blog, nor of the London School of Economics. Please read our comments policy before posting.
About the author
Chris Johnes is the Director for UK Poverty at Oxfam.
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June 28th, 2012|Chris Johnes, Economy and Society|7 Comments
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7 Comments
We can’t go on pretending that poverty is solved by getting a job – Snapzu World News November 15, 2016 at 12:18 am - Reply
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We can’t go on pretending that poverty is solved by getting a job – Snapzu Politics November 15, 2016 at 12:10 am - Reply
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We can’t go on pretending that poverty is solved by getting a job | British Politics and Policy at LSE | kickingthecat September 18, 2016 at 7:20 pm - Reply
[…] http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/poverty-jobs-johnes/ […]
Josh August 3, 2016 at 7:20 am - Reply
Isn’t an increase in salary for Directors/Chief Executives from £97k to £112k a change of +15% not +37%?
Rachel July 18, 2016 at 8:47 am - Reply
Mickey, I presume with that attitude you also don’t claim benefits either, if you did then that would make you a hypocrite. Why should other people work to make you richer? Where do you think money for benefits comes from? If you don’t want to make other people richer, why don’t you set up your own business or is that too much like hard work.
Phil July 17, 2016 at 9:18 pm - Reply
Working brings self-esteem but our country has laws that benefit the greed of the wealthiest. The bankers and equity release firms must pay for their mistakes by being tried in a court of law. And when it becomes an illegal act to offshore funds through tax avoidance let the guillotine fall on all these evil people.
mickey July 9, 2016 at 11:49 pm - Reply
This is why i dont work why should i work to make some ass richer.
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'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
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Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Tue May 02, 2017 11:27 am Post subject:
Totalitarian bankster M.O.
TonyGosling wrote:
by email wrote:
How Hitler was able to finance the rise of the the Third Reich. Where did the money came from? The answer is very simple. Hitler took control of the money creation and allocation process. He merely removed private banking from the mix and took control of the money supply.
There was no conspiracy about this; he just did the most logical thing in monetary policy, which is: create a completely State owned Banking system. Once Hitler had complete control of the money supply, he could create just the right amounts and target that money at the industries that he wanted to develop.
Inflation is avoided because he is stacking the money against newly
created physical assets. But let's be clear; he was a complete psychopath and was planning the take over of Europe and the extermination of millions of innocent people. That said, he proved a point that state controlled banking driven by a clearly defined plan, can release the potential of a nation.
We have seen this also in China, and we are now starting to see the effect of carefully directed State Banking in India as well under Modi.
He who controls the creation and allocation of the money supply, controls
the country. The Corporation of the City of London and all of its
inhabitants control the creation and allocation of the money supply, ipso
facto, they control the UK. The same is true of Wall Street in the USA.
Today, seven out of 23 of the UK’s Cabinet are former city executives or
consultants, including the Prime Minister. What a surprise.
Here is an article extract from last month:
"New Cabinet Corrupted by Design?
Out of the 23 government cabinet ministers under and including Theresa May, 7 are former City/Financial Services related folk. May was 18 years in the financial services sector including 6 years at the Bank of England. (Her husband works in investment banking.) Philip Hammond, Chancellor of the Exchequer (although in manufacturing for a short while, he became a consultant to the World Bank). Amber Rudd, Home Secretary (JP Morgan and various Venture Capitalists). James Brokenshire, Northern Ireland (Lawyer advising City firms). Andrea Leadsom, Environment Secretary (18 years in investment banking). Sajid Javid, Communities and Local Government (VP at Chase Manhattan). Alun Cairns, Wales (Lloyds Banking Group). The banks rule the western world. Do you think this is going to end with so many banking puppets in the Cabinet? Our former Chancellor actively lobbied on behalf of HSBC executives to protect them from prosecution."
In addition, still we have The City Remembrancer by invitation of the
Speaker, but in practice by invitation of the Prime Minister.
The UK is controlled by a small number of City executives, and that is why
the UK will, for the foreseeable future, not have a government that is in
control of the UK’s money supply, and therefore no control at all.
Mark my words, the only future that is worth contemplating for the British
people is one where the Government creates a completely State Owned
Banking system, and regulates the City out of existence. Anything less
than that is not democracy.
Wednesday 17 May 2017 05.45 BST
Last modified on Wednesday 17 May 2017 11.09 BST
How is this acceptable? A multimillionaire City asset manager has pledged to spend up to £700,000 on ousting Labour MPs who campaigned against Brexit. Jeremy Hosking will use his money to ensure that there is as little parliamentary opposition to a hard Brexit as possible. Why should multimillionaires be allowed to try to buy political results?
Allowed? That’s too soft a word. It is enabled by our pathetic, antiquated and anti-democratic rules on political spending. Hosking claims he wants to secure “the sovereign future of this independent-minded democracy”. But there is no greater threat to sovereignty, independence or democracy than the power money wields over our politics.
The great British Brexit robbery: how our democracy was hijacked
Read more
There are three categories of concern here. The first is transparent political funding, such as Hosking’s. Then there is opaque funding, that the Electoral Commission has so far failed to prevent: a shocking example has been uncovered by Peter Geoghegan and Adam Ramsay of openDemocracy.
We already know that a vast payment was made by Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist party (DUP) for a newspaper advertisement urging people to vote for Brexit. Remarkably, this ad was not circulated in Northern Ireland, but only in England and Scotland.
This might suggest that someone was making use of Northern Ireland’s secrecy regime. Political donations there remain hidden from view. Funders wishing to disguise their identities can use Northern Ireland as a back channel into UK politics. After sustained pressure, the DUP revealed that the money came from a donation of £425,622, passed through an organisation called the Constitutional Research Council.
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Billionaire Robert Mercer Photograph: Oliver Contreras/Washington Post via Getty Images
But the original source remains a mystery. Though electoral law in Great Britain states that “a donation of more than £500 cannot be accepted … if the donation is from a source that cannot be identified”, the DUP claims that it doesn’t need to know who provided this money. All we know about the Constitutional Research Council is that it’s run by a man called Richard Cook, who lives in a small house outside Glasgow. He seems unlikely to have been the original source. What else do we know about him? OpenDemocracy discovered that in 2013 he helped found a company called Five Star Investments, 75% of which was owned by Prince Nawwaf al-Saud, former head of Saudi Arabian intelligence. Nawwaf’s son is currently the Saudi ambassador to the UK.
There is currently no known connection between these facts, and Cook has denied any foreign funding for the CRC. But he has not yet answered calls from openDemocracy or the Guardian. Though the Electoral Commission was asked 11 months ago to investigate, it has done nothing.
This story resonates with the deeply troubling revelations by Carole Cadwalladr in the Observer, which suggest that the US billionaire Robert Mercer may have played a questionable role in our EU referendum. Thanks to the Observer, the Electoral Commission is investigating. But if it discovers any breaches of the rules, the penalties are feeble. The monumental decision this country has taken, which may have been unduly influenced by the forces Cadwalladr describes, will not be reversed.
The third issue is political funding that operates in a different sphere. It’s not illegal, it’s worse than that: there are no effective rules of any kind. This is the use of dark money that seeks not to influence elections directly, but to change the broader political landscape. Dark money is funding used, without public knowledge, by front groups.
There are various ways in which it is spent. One of them is “astroturfing”: the creation of fake grassroots movements. Pioneered by the tobacco companies, this later became a crucial strategy for fossil fuel companies trying to prevent action on climate change, and biotech firms trying to get their products on the market. It was a major component of the Tea Party movement in the United States, whose real members were coordinated by a group called Americans for Prosperity.
Another outlet for dark money is the organisations that call themselves thinktanks, but look to me like covertly funded lobbyists. The less transparent they are, the greater their presence in the media.
The research group Transparify ranks these “thinktanks” by their openness about their funding. The Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), the Adam Smith Institute and Policy Exchange, for example, are rated as “highly opaque”: they refuse to reveal any information about who sponsors them. But they are all over the BBC – the Today programme , Question Time and the rest – and other media.
‘Dark money’ is threat to integrity of UK elections, say leading academics
Read more
The industry whose funding we know most about, thanks to a legal settlement that forced open its archives, is tobacco. We now know, for example, that the IEA has been sponsored by tobacco companies since 1963. It has received regular payments from British American Tobacco, Imperial Tobacco, Japan Tobacco International and Philip Morris International, which has described the institute as one of the groups that would “establish an echo chamber for [Philip Morris] messages”.
Last week the IEA published a report inveighing against the UK’s smoking ban and tobacco packaging law. This was picked up across the media, but with never a word about the institute’s funding. Apart from the BBC’s editorial guidelines, which are routinely flouted, there are no rules of any kind to prevent or reveal such conflicts of interest. .
Is this democracy? Is this sovereignty? No. It’s the replacement of informed political choice with an onslaught of corporate propaganda and fake facts, which, as we don’t have 100 years between elections to check and refute, we have little chance of resisting.
Why has there been no effective action on climate change? Why are we choking on air pollution? Why is the junk food industry able to exploit our children? Because governments and their agencies have rolled over and let such people make a mockery of informed consent.
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