CHINA NUCLEAR OPTION!! SELLING TRILLIONS U.S TREASURIES!

NATIONAL DEBT TOPS $22,000,000,000,000.00!!!

Ellen Brown: Still Leftist After All These Years

I devote an entire department to the fiat money Greenback lawyer Ellen Brown. She doesn’t understand economics. She also doesn’t understand historical documentation. I proved this in 2010. You can read the proof here.

She still publishes articles on her website. Occasionally, they are picked up by Left-wing sites. The article I analyze here is an example. It was posted on Truthdig. Truthdig is a Leftist site.

Incredibly, people who regard themselves as conservatives cite her as an authority. In the case of Max Kaiser, he actually brings her on his show. He has been doing this for a decade.

GOVERNMENT-FUNDED HIGHER EDUCATION

She is a big promoter of government-subsidized higher education. She thinks higher education should be free of charge to the masses.

Read the entire article

Why Is Bitcoin a Big Deal?

Why is bitcoin considered such a big deal? Why has it grabbed so much mind-share, and why is it skyrocketing? And why is the cryptocurrency sector going bonkers?

The short answer is that cryptocurrency is the first major innovation in money in 300+ years, back when central banks first emerged in the late 1600s as centralized clearing houses for international payments and sole issuers of national bank notes/currency.

(Those who trace central banking to the Bank of Amsterdam’s founding in 1609 might say it’s the first major innovation in 400 years.)

Why is it an innovation? There are four basic reasons:

1. It’s a form of private-sector issued money. It is not issued or controlled by any government or central bank.

2. It is structured in a completely different manner than conventional central-bank issued currency: it is a digital form of money that is issued as payment for those who maintain the database (the blockchain) on their privately owned computers. Since the blockchain is distributed over numerous computers, it is decentralized and distributed rather than centralized.

3. It enables trusted transactions between parties without requiring the services of an intermediary, i.e.a bank which acts as a trusted clearing house for transactions.

4. In the case of the first cryptocurrency, bitcoin, its issuance of tokens (coins) is limited by its design to 21 million coins. No central authority can issue more bitcoins, nor does the structure of the bitcoin blockchain allow for further issuance.

Read the entire article

Negative Interest Rates: Reaganomics in Full Reverse

Striking Similarities to 2008 Crisis

The Implosion Is Near: Signs Of The Bubble’s Last Days

The central banks of the world are massively and insouciantly pursuing financial instability. That’s the inherent result of the 68 straight months of zero money market rates that have been forced into the global financial system by the Fed and its confederates at the BOJ, ECB and BOE. ZIRP fuels endless carry trades and the harvesting of every manner of profit spread between negligible “funding” costs and positive yields and returns on a wide spectrum of risk assets.

Moreover, this central bank sponsored regime of ZIRP and money market pegging contains a built-in accelerator. As carry trade speculators drive asset prices steadily higher and fixed income spreads steadily thinner—- fear and short interest is driven out of the casino, making buying on the dips ever more profitable and less risky. Indeed, the explicit promise by central banks that the money market rate will remain frozen for the duration and that ample warning of any change in rate policy will be “transparently” announced is the single worst policy imaginable from the point of view of financial stability. It means that the speculator’s worst nightmare—–suddenly going “upside down” due to a sharp spike in funding costs—-is eliminated by central bank writ.

Stated differently, ZIRP systematically dismantles the market’s natural stability mechanisms. One natural deterrent to excessive financial gambling, for example, is the cost of hedging a speculator’s portfolio of “risk assets” against a broad market plunge. In an honest market environment, hedging costs consume a high share of profits, thereby sharply limiting risk appetites and the amount of capital attracted to speculative trading.

By contrast, an extended regime of ZIRP, coupled with the central banks’ perceived “put” under risk assets, drives the cost of “downside insurance” to negligible levels because S&P 500 put writers are emboldened and subsidized to pick up nickels (i.e. options premium) in front of a benign central bank steamroller. This ultra-cheap downside insurance, in turn, attracts ever larger inflows of speculative capital to the casino.

This corrosive game has been underway ever since the Greenspan Fed panicked on Black Monday in October 1987 and flooded the stock market with liquidity. It is now such an endemic feature of Wall Street that it is falsely assumed to be the normal order of things. But, then, would anyone have been picking up nickels in front of the Volcker steamroller?

Read the entire article

Chinese Rating Agency Cuts US Sovereign Credit Rating, October 17, 2013

Nullify the Fed! Arizona Constitutional Tender Bill on the Governor’s Desk for a Signature

The Arizona state senate concurred with the house on Senate Bill by a vote of 18-0, sending the legislation to Governor Jan Brewer’s desk for a signature. SB1439, the Constitutional Tender Act, allows businesses and the state government to accept payments in gold or silver. It specifies that legal tender in Arizona consists of all of the following:

1. Legal Tender authorized by Congress.
2. Specie (containing gold or silver) coin issued at any time by the U.S. government.
3. Any other specie that a court of competent jurisdiction rules by a final, unappealable order to be within the scope of state authority to make legal tender.

The bill previously passed the state senate by a vote of 17-11. Since there was a House amendment which tightened up some of the language, constitutionally, the bill needed one final vote on the floor of the State Senate before going to Jan Brewer’s desk for a signature.

BACKGROUND INFORMATION

Currently all debts and taxes in Arizona and the rest of the United States are either paid with Federal Reserve Notes (dollars) which were authorized as legal tender by Congress, or with coins issued by the U.S. Treasury — very few of which have gold or silver in them.

The United States Constitution states in Article I, Section 10, “No State shall…make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts.” The Constitutional tender act is a big step towards that constitutional requirement which has been ignored for a long time in every state of the country. Such a tactic would achieve the desired goal of abolishing the Federal Reserve system by attacking it from the bottom up – pulling the rug out from under it by working to make its functions irrelevant at the State and local level.

Read the entire article

The National Debt and Federal Budget Deficit Deconstructed

'No truth on extent of US indebtedness'

What If the National Debt Were Your Debt?

There’s Never Been a Worse Time to Buy a House

Despite the media’s repeated claim that inventory is lower-than-ever, the shadow inventory of distressed homes (that’s set to come onto the market) will take a sizable chunk out of prices and increase the number of future defaults. There’s probably never been a worse time to buy a house. A “60 month” backlog of foreclosures means that there’s 5 years of distressed homes in the pipeline.

Who knows how low prices will go? Here’s an excerpt from a post at Calculated Risk:

“January Home Price Index Shows Sixth Consecutive Monthly Decline: [CoreLogic January Home Price Index report] shows national home prices, including distressed sales, declined on a year-over-year basis by 3.1 percent in January 2012 and by 1.0 percent compared to December 2011, the sixth consecutive monthly decline.”

According to last week’s Case-Shiller report, housing prices fell to their lowest point since the bubble burst.(down 34 percent) But the data in that report only goes to December 2011. This new report covers January, 2012, and it shows that prices have slipped even more. And this is BEFORE the wave of foreclosures hits the market.

Fortunately, President Obama has devised a plan that will reduce the number of foreclosures, shore up dwindling home equity, and keep as many victims of this banking scam in their homes as possible.

How? By providing lavish subsidies to the same group of bottomfeeding card-sharks who triggered the crisis to begin with. Don’t believe me? Just look at this.

It’s so frustrating to watch Obama go through all these contortions when the solution is right there at his fingertips. Just reduce the principle on underwater mortgages and hit the reset button. That’s all there is to it. Make the people who caused the crisis, pay for it. That’s how you fix housing and get (some) justice for the victims at the very same time.

Feds’ Creative Accounting Masks Trillions in Unfunded Liabilities

How does the government get away with not reporting liabilities that it requires private companies to report? It simply exempts itself from those rules. Thus, while GM and other corporations, operating under accrual-based accounting, must account for retirement promises, “the government follows ‘obligation-based’ accounting standards, which require the recognition of future promises not when they become material but only when they are legally binding,” Lawrence explains.

Essentially, even though the government has promised $33.8 trillion worth of benefits to current and future retirees, it only has to report those liabilities when the bills come due because it always has the option of reducing or terminating them prior to that time.

That Medicare is subject to the whims of politicians is quite obvious. The terms of Medicare coverage change from time to time, and projected savings from lower future payments to healthcare providers are one of the key means by which ObamaCare allegedly will reduce the deficit in the coming years.

Less well known is that Social Security is just as dependent on politicians’ good graces for its continuation. Although many people still cling to the illusion that the taxes they pay into the program during their working years guarantee them a pension in their retirement, the fact is that the government is under absolutely no obligation to pay one thin dime in retirement benefits to anyone, regardless of the amount of taxes he has paid into the system. As the Supreme Court put it in a 1960 ruling (Flemming v. Nestor), the “entitlement to Social Security benefits is not a contractual right” and can be modified or rescinded at will. This, too, should be clear from the number times the tax rate, retirement age, and other terms of the program have changed over the years.

“Is it acceptable,” asks Lawrence, “that our leaders are able to promise trillions of dollars to the voters but do not have to recognize the cost because their promises can be rescinded?”

Our Depraved Future of Debt Slavery

There have been many forms of “debt slavery” throughout history, and almost everyone is chained to the oppressive financial, corporatist system now in one way or another. Although, this fact has not even remotely sunk in for millions of people who, unfortunately, have absolutely no clue how bad it can get. The real issue here, however, is not necessarily what people will have to do to survive the upcoming storms. Rather, it is what they will be forced to do to remain a functioning part of the system under threat of excessive monetary punishment, physical confinement or violence to them and/or those close to them. So, one must be financially/coercively attached to the system to be a “debt slave”.

If you are allowed to voluntarily downsize your living standards and retain some freedom of movement/action, then you are not really a slave. And that's not meant to demean the existential struggle of the chronically unemployed and/or homeless people living on the streets or in the subway, whose numbers are bound to increase and many of whom will die of sickness, cold and hunger, but it's hard to say that they are “attached” to our economic system of complicity and coerced participation. The most obvious way this slavish attachment forms is through personal debts/obligations.

That’s why it’s very important to pay off your mortgage(s), car loans, student loans, outstanding balances on past bills, etc., throw away your credit cards and generally avoid taking on debt at all costs. However, that is not a panacea for avoiding debt slavery by any means. One reason is that, as mentioned in Part I, creditors and third party debt collectors may literally conjure up debts for people who never agreed to take on those debts, by failing to account for payments, illegally jacking up interest rates, retro-actively inserting penalty clauses and other similar tactics. Or, they may simply doctor up brand new “contracts” that never existed.

The U.S. financial industry and government “regulators”, at both the federal and state level, have already taken the first steps towards such practices through the illegal transfer of mortgage titles in the MERS system and the “robosigning” of fraudulent loan documents by law firms employed by the major banks, which sought to “prove” ownership of such titles and therefore the right to foreclose. Once these illegal foreclosures came to the mainstream public’s attention, the federal government launched a sham investigation and effectively forced state attorney generals and prosecutors to go along with a tiny and symbolic settlement, which will primarily be funded by taxpayer money.

The slave masters will especially require the unwavering support of civil servants tasked with carrying out orders of oppression from above. In Greece, we recently witnessed the country’s largest police union issue a statement of its intention to refuse to continue aiding the elites in the enslavement of the Greek people, and even threatened to issue symbolic arrest warrants for Troika officials stationed in the country. It is not hard to imagine similar occurrences in Portugal, Spain, Italy and even Ireland, as their policemen and women are squeezed of pensions and salaries, and forced to face the reality of their role as slaves to the system.

Your Wages Will Be Cut In Half!

Debt Crisis-News Analysis

The Party’s Over, The Bubble Has Burst, Let’s clean Up The Mess

The Party’s over for America, the greed bubble fueled by excessive debt has finally burst. Its time to clean up the mess started by the Bush/Cheney administration, perpetuated by the Obama/Biden administration and which is now a deserted ballroom ~ strewn with broken dreams, broken promises and economic devastation.

As 2011 crawls to a close, the true reckoning of the financial devastation wrought by the policies of the Clinton and Bush administrations and perpetuated by the Obama administration have yet to be fully revealed ~ but the economic devastation by these political actions and inaction is now fully felt and experienced by millions of Americans.

Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz, Vanity Fair, brilliantly summarized this devastation on December 25, 2011 ~ “It has now been almost five years since the bursting of the housing bubble, and four years since the onset of the recession. There are 6.6 million fewer jobs in the United States than there were four years ago. Some 23 million Americans who would like to work full-time cannot get a job. Almost half of those who are unemployed have been unemployed long-term. Wages are falling-the real income of a typical American household is now below the level it was in 1997... The Bush and Obama administrations justified a bailout on the grounds that only if the banks were handed money without limit-and without conditions-could the economy recover….The banks got their bailout. Some of the money went to bonuses. Little of it went to lending. And the economy didn’t really recover ~ output is barely greater than it was before the crisis, and the job situation is bleak. The diagnosis of our condition and the prescription that followed from it were incorrect … In the end, bank managers looked out for themselves and did what they are accustomed to doing..“ Read full article ~

Stiglitz correctly makes this important point ~ “The fact is the economy in the years before the current crisis was fundamentally weak, with the bubble, and the unsustainable consumption to which it gave rise, acting as life support. Without these, unemployment would have been high. It was absurd to think that fixing the banking system could by itself restore the economy to health. Bringing the economy back to “where it was” does nothing to address the underlying problems.”

Brother, Can You Spare A Trillion?: Government Gone Wild!

Had Enough?

Does our Federal Government really have the consent of the governed? Are the American people well represented? Over 80% of the citizens of this Country were opposed to the bail-out of Wall Street and the Large Banks, and yet we bailed them out anyway. In fact, we now learn that the $700 Billion TARP program which was jammed through Congress, in spite of overwhelming voter opposition, was just a drop in the bucket compared to the Trillions that the Federal Reserve Bank, without oversight, doled out to the large banks and financial concerns. Senator Sanders found $15 Trillion in a limited audit of the FED, and Bloomberg’s FOIA request found $7 Trillion of almost zero interest loans. PEOPLE: WAKE UP! If you or I could borrow trillions for free, and use it to speculate in the market (with a government backstop), or invest in government bonds, we would be rich too. This is the largest fraud/wealth transfer in the history of democracy, and yet very few people are connecting the dots and realizing that these bail-outs are the reason why the prices of food and gasoline have gone up relentlessly. We should be marching in the streets, but, alas, most people are too busy trying to earn a living.

Charles Hugh Smith has it exactly right. The bail-outs, and their claimed "necessity", are the BIG LIE method of propaganda. Letting over leveraged institutions fail, and letting the system cleanse itself, would have been painful but we would be in recovery by now (see: Iceland). The bail-outs did not benefit the American people, the bail-outs benefited the banking interests and their employees, the Washington, DC politicians. We were threatened that there would be martial law if TARP was not approved. The Government story is that we would have had a second great depression without the bailouts. I say – NONSENSE. Nothing in this world is too big to fail (think Soviet Union) and the cost of not letting things fail is exactly what we are currently burdened with. THE BAIL-OUTS CREATE INFLATION. The banks make lending mistakes, we pay in the form of higher inflation because the FED prints money to cover those mistakes.

A working list of examples of the government ignoring "the will of the people":

Most Americans are Anti-War and yet we have multiple undeclared wars in progress.

President Obama won because he spoke Anti-War themes, yet he has not delivered.

Also, the wars are enormously expensive and are a large part of the budget problems we are having.

The finances of the Federal Government are completely out of control and the deficit and debts are at historic levels which can only lead to economic chaos and massive inflation.

Most Americans are opposed to Torture, Rendition, Extra-Judicial Killings and Guantanamo, yet they continue.

Most Americans think we should mind our own business and not be an Empire, yet we continue to behave like an Empire. Furthermore, we cannot afford to be an Empire.

Most Americans believe we should take care of our own first, and yet foreign aid and the cost of foreign entanglements are a huge budget item.

Most Americans believe the Federal Government employees should live by the same rules that they do, yet Congress and the Senate are exempt from insider trading laws.

Most Americans oppose special treatment for the banks and the "too big to fail" doctrine and yet it is still in place.

Most Americans believe in the right of habeus corpus and trial by jury, yet the government has taken and is taking actions to eliminate these rights in order to keep us "secure".

Most Americans believe that in fighting evil, it is important not to become evil.
That is, principles trump methods. The beauty of the American ideal is that it is based upon principles and fairness. When we compromise on these principles we harm ourselves.