If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

Thursday, April 22, 2010

Ron Paul - My Battle Against The Fed

Presented by Ron Paul at the "Birth and Death of the Fed" conference at Jekyll Island, Georgia, 27 Febuary 2010. Includes an introduction by Mises Institute founder and chairman Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., and closing remarks by Institute president Douglas E. French.

My Battle Against The Fed

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Renaissance 2.0 - The Emerging Global Empire

It describes The Emerging Global Empire or what has come to be called the new world order or new world economic order. The primary force driving this is the simple math of the bond market, debt-based money. Please pass this along because it’s critical that more people start learning how this drives the world…governments do not.

This lesson hopefully paints the strategic picture on what’s happening in the world so we can correctly interpret the endless stories the media pumps out, rather than being stuck in false paradigms, like the left vs. right political paradigm. Once this strategic perspective is understood, then it’s easy to understand how hundreds of random stories that seem to make no sense in the left vs. right political paradigm actually make a TON of sense. Stories like these: a Harvard billionaire taking over Chile, the government’s response to the crash of 2008, increasing govt debt, Goldman Sachs taking over Greece, British banks pressuring Iceland, the US military presence in 75% of all countries, the G2 relationship, JPM Chase destroying municipalities and funding the destruction of Apalachia while its CEO Jamie Dimon gets setup as the next Treasury Secretary to get ready to steal even more from Americans, and many many more. All of a sudden after lesson 5 the world becomes a lot clearer.

Then after this lesson, the series will start imagining a different, brighter future than the one illustrated in this lesson.

Renaissance 2.0: Lesson 5 (part 1 of 2) - The Emerging Global Empire


Renaissance 2.0: Lesson 5 (part 2 of 2) - The Emerging Global Empire

Saturday, April 17, 2010

BREAKING! Goldman Sachs Sued by SEC for Fraud Tied to CDOs


April 16 (Bloomberg) -- Goldman Sachs Group Inc. was sued by U.S. regulators for fraud tied to collateralized debt obligations that contributed to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. The firm’s shares tumbled as much as 16 percent and financial stocks slumped.

Goldman Sachs misstated and omitted key facts about a financial product tied to subprime mortgages as the U.S. housing market was starting to falter, the Securities and Exchange Commission said in a statement today. The SEC also sued Fabrice Tourre, a Goldman Sachs vice president.

“The product was new and complex but the deception and conflicts are old and simple,” SEC Enforcement Director Robert Khuzami said in the statement. “Goldman wrongly permitted a client that was betting against the mortgage market to heavily influence which mortgage securities to include in an investment portfolio, while telling other investors that the securities were selected by an independent, objective third party.”

The SEC alleged that Goldman Sachs, led by Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein, 55, structured and marketed CDOs that hinged on the performance of subprime mortgage-backed securities. The New York-based firm failed to disclose to investors that hedge fund Paulson & Co. was betting against the CDO, known as Abacus, and influenced the selection of securities for the portfolio, the SEC said. Paulson wasn’t accused of wrongdoing.

Continue reading - Goldman Sachs Sued by SEC for Fraud Tied to CDOs

SEC Press Release

Friday, April 16, 2010

Peter Schiff: Why The Meltdown Should Have Surprised No One

This is one of the best economics lecture that no one should have missed presented by Austrian economist, Peter Schiff. In addition, I have included a clip showing the dire predictions he made during 2006-2007 before the occurrence of the financial meltdown as mentioned in the lecture called "Peter Schiff Was Right". Take a back seat and enjoy the lecture. Highly recommended!

Peter Schiff - Why The Meltdown Should Have Surprised No One


Peter Schiff Was Right

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Fed Shouldn’t Reveal Crisis Loans, Banks Vow to Tell High Court


April 14 (Bloomberg) -- The biggest U.S. commercial banks will take their fight against disclosure of Federal Reserve lending in 2008 to the Supreme Court if necessary, the top lawyer for an industry-owned group said.

Continued legal appeals will delay or block the first public look at details of the central bank’s $2 trillion in emergency lending during the 2008 financial crisis. The Clearing House Association LLC, a group that includes Bank of America Corp. and JPMorgan Chase & Co., joined the Fed in defense of a lawsuit brought by Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News, seeking release of records related to four Fed lending programs.

The U.S. Court of Appeals in Manhattan ruled March 19 that the central bank must release the documents. A three-judge panel of the appellate court rejected the Fed’s argument that disclosure would stigmatize borrowers and discourage banks from seeking emergency help.

“Our member banks are very concerned about real-time disclosure of information that could cause a run on the banks,” said Paul Saltzman, the group’s general counsel, in an interview yesterday. “We’re not going to let the Second Circuit opinion stand without seeking a review.”

Regardless of whether the Fed appeals, the Clearing House will take the next legal step by asking for a review by the full appellate court, Saltzman, 49, said at his office in New York. If the ruling is unfavorable, the bank group will petition the Supreme Court, he said.

The central bank contends that 231 pages of daily reports summarizing lending activity, which were prepared by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York for the Fed Board of Governors in Washington, aren’t covered by the FOIA. The statute obliges federal agencies to make government documents available to the press and the public. The suit doesn’t seek money damages.

The Fed released lists on March 31 of assets it acquired in the 2008 bailout of Bear Stearns.

The New York Times Co., the Associated Press and Dow Jones & Co., publisher of the Wall Street Journal, are among media companies that have signed up as friends of the court in support of Bloomberg.

The Fed Board of Governors’ “refusal to disclose the names of borrowers renders public oversight of its actions impossible -- it prevents any assessment of the effectiveness of the Board’s actions and conceals any collusion, corruption, fraud or abuse that might have occurred,” the news organizations said in a letter to the appeals panel.

The case is Bloomberg LP v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, 09-04083, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit (New York).

Continue reading - Fed Shouldn’t Reveal Crisis Loans, Banks Vow to Tell High Court

Richard Dawkins Calls For Arrest of Pope Benedict XVI


RICHARD DAWKINS, the atheist campaigner, is planning a legal ambush to have the Pope arrested during his state visit to Britain “for crimes against humanity”.

Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, the atheist author, have asked human rights lawyers to produce a case for charging Pope Benedict XVI over his alleged cover-up of sexual abuse in the Catholic church.

The pair believe they can exploit the same legal principle used to arrest Augusto Pinochet, the late Chilean dictator, when he visited Britain in 1998.

The Pope was embroiled in new controversy this weekend over a letter he signed arguing that the “good of the universal church” should be considered against the defrocking of an American priest who committed sex offences against two boys. It was dated 1985, when he was in charge of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which deals with sex abuse cases.

Benedict will be in Britain between September 16 and 19, visiting London, Glasgow and Coventry, where he will beatify Cardinal John Henry Newman, the 19th-century theologian.

Dawkins and Hitchens believe the Pope would be unable to claim diplomatic immunity from arrest because, although his tour is categorised as a state visit, he is not the head of a state recognised by the United Nations.

They have commissioned the barrister Geoffrey Robertson and Mark Stephens, a solicitor, to present a justification for legal action.

The lawyers believe they can ask the Crown Prosecution Service to initiate criminal proceedings against the Pope, launch their own civil action against him or refer his case to the International Criminal Court.

Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, said:
This is a man whose first instinct when his priests are caught with their pants down is to cover up the scandal and damn the young victims to silence.

Hitchens, author of God Is Not Great, said:
This man is not above or outside the law. The institutionalised concealment of child rape is a crime under any law and demands not private ceremonies of repentance or church-funded payoffs, but justice and punishment."

Times Online UK - Richard Dawkins Calls For Arrest of Pope Benedict XVI

Friday, April 9, 2010

Sovereign debt crisis at 'boiling point', warns Bank for International Settlements

The Bank for International Settlements does not mince words. Sovereign debt is already starting to cross the danger threshold in the United States, Japan, Britain, and most of Western Europe, threatening to set off a bond crisis at the heart of the global economy.



"The aftermath of the financial crisis is poised to bring a simmering fiscal problem in industrial economies to the boiling point", said the Swiss-based bank for central bankers -- the oldest and most venerable of the world's financial watchdogs. Drastic austerity measures will be needed to head off a compound interest spiral, if it is not already too late for some.

The risk is an "abrupt rise in government bond yields" as investors choke on a surfeit of public debt. "Bond traders are notoriously short-sighted, assuming they can get out before the storm hits: their time horizons are days or weeks, not years or decade. We take a longer and less benign view of current developments," said the study, entitled "The Future of Public Debt", by the bank's chief economist Stephen Cecchetti.

"The question is when markets will start putting pressure on governments, not if. When will investors start demanding a much higher compensation for holding increasingly large amounts of public debt? In some countries, unstable debt dynamics -- in which higher debt levels lead to higher interest rates, which then lead to even higher debt levels -- are already clearly on the horizon."

Official debt figures in the West are "very misleading" since they fail to take in account the contingent liabilities and pension debts that have mushroomed over recent years. "Rapidly ageing populations present a number of countries with the prospect of enormous future costs that are not wholly recognised in current budget projections. The size of these future obligations is anybody's guess," said the report. The BIS lamented the lack of any systematic data on the scale of unfunded IOUs that care-free politicians have handed out like confetti.

Continue reading - Sovereign debt crisis at 'boiling point', warns Bank for International Settlements

BREAKING! Wikileaks Released Collateral Murder Classified Video in Iraq


WikiLeaks has released a classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad -- including two Reuters news staff.

Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success since the time of the attack. The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-site, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded.

The military did not reveal how the Reuters staff were killed, and stated that they did not know how the children were injured.

After demands by Reuters, the incident was investigated and the U.S. military concluded that the actions of the soldiers were in accordance with the law of armed conflict and its own "Rules of Engagement".

Consequently, WikiLeaks has released the classified Rules of Engagement for 2006, 2007 and 2008, revealing these rules before, during, and after the killings.

WikiLeaks has released both the original 38 minutes video and a shorter version with an initial analysis. Subtitles have been added to both versions from the radio transmissions.

WikiLeaks obtained this video as well as supporting documents from a number of military whistleblowers. WikiLeaks goes to great lengths to verify the authenticity of the information it receives. We have analyzed the information about this incident from a variety of source material. We have spoken to witnesses and journalists directly involved in the incident.

WikiLeaks wants to ensure that all the leaked information it receives gets the attention it deserves. In this particular case, some of the people killed were journalists that were simply doing their jobs: putting their lives at risk in order to report on war. Iraq is a very dangerous place for journalists: from 2003- 2009, 139 journalists were killed while doing their work.

http://collateralmurder.com/

New York Times Coverage - Video Shows U.S Killing of Reuters Employees

6 MILLION VIEWS AND COUNTING (Shorter Version)


Full Version

Thursday, April 8, 2010

Open Your Eyes

Open your eyes to spark a consciousness revolution.

Open Your Eyes

Sunday, April 4, 2010

Money as Debt II - Promises Unleashed

Bailouts, stimulus packages, debt piled upon debt, where will it all end?

How did we get into a situation where there has never been more material wealth & productivity and yet everyone is in debt to bankers?

And now, all of a sudden, the bankers have no money and we the taxpayers, have to rescue them by going even further into debt!

Money as Debt II Explores the baffling, fraudulent and destructive arithmetic of the money system that holds us hostage to a forever growing DEBT...and how we might evolve beyond it into a new era.

Money as Debt II Promises Unleashed (1 of 8)


Money as Debt II Promises Unleashed (2 of 8)


Money as Debt II Promises Unleashed (3 of 8)


Money as Debt II Promises Unleashed (4 of 8)


Money as Debt II Promises Unleashed (5 of 8)


Money as Debt II Promises Unleashed (6 of 8)


Money as Debt II Promises Unleashed (7 of 8)


Money as Debt II Promises Unleashed (8 of 8)

The Strange New World of Nanoscience

Where and what is nano? How will it shape our future? Nanoscience is the study of phenomena and manipulation of materials at the nanoscale, where properties differ significantly from those at a larger scale. The strange world of nanoscience - it can take you into atoms and beyond the stars.

The strange new world of Nanoscience, narrated by Stephen Fry

Saturday, April 3, 2010

Looting Main Street


How the nation's biggest banks are ripping off American cities with the same predatory deals that brought down Greece.

If you want to know what life in the Third World is like, just ask Lisa Pack, an administrative assistant who works in the roads and transportation department in Jefferson County, Alabama. Pack got rudely introduced to life in post-crisis America last August, when word came down that she and 1,000 of her fellow public employees would have to take a little unpaid vacation for a while. The county, it turned out, was more than $5 billion in debt — meaning that courthouses, jails and sheriff's precincts had to be closed so that Wall Street banks could be paid.

As public services in and around Birmingham were stripped to the bone, Pack struggled to support her family on a weekly unemployment check of $260. Nearly a fourth of that went to pay for her health insurance, which the county no longer covered. She also fielded calls from laid-off co-workers who had it even tougher. "I'd be on the phone sometimes until two in the morning," she says. "I had to talk more than one person out of suicide. For some of the men supporting families, it was so hard — foreclosure, bankruptcy. I'd go to bed at night, and I'd be in tears."

Homes stood empty, businesses were boarded up, and parts of already-blighted Birmingham began to take on the feel of a ghost town. There were also a few bills that were unique to the area — like the $64 sewer bill that Pack and her family paid each month. "Yeah, it went up about 400 percent just over the past few years," she says.

The sewer bill, in fact, is what cost Pack and her co-workers their jobs. In 1996, the average monthly sewer bill for a family of four in Birmingham was only $14.71 — but that was before the county decided to build an elaborate new sewer system with the help of out-of-state financial wizards with names like Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase. The result was a monstrous pile of borrowed money that the county used to build, in essence, the world's grandest toilet — "the Taj Mahal of sewer-treatment plants" is how one county worker put it. What happened here in Jefferson County would turn out to be the perfect metaphor for the peculiar alchemy of modern oligarchical capitalism: A mob of corrupt local officials and morally absent financiers got together to build a giant device that converted human shit into billions of dollars of profit for Wall Street — and misery for people like Lisa Pack.

Continue reading - Looting Main Street

"In a complete subversion of free-market principles, they [the banks] take no risk, score deals based on political influence rather than competition, keep consumers in the dark — and walk away with big money. And even if the regulators manage to catch up with them billions of dollars later, the banks just pay a small fine and move on to the next scam. This isn't capitalism. It's nomadic thievery."