Two Bloomberg correspondents reported on August 8 that the US Government’s unfunded liabilities rose by $11 trillion last year, “ten times larger than the official deficit”, and are now at an estimated $222 trillion. The authors base their estimates on figures supplied by the Congressional Budget Office. This makes talk about the “fiscal cliff”, as the Bush tax cuts come to an end, a secondary issue. Meanwhile in Germany the Constitutional Court will be told on 12 September that the bailout costs faced by Germany are €2 trillion with a further €1.7 trillion in the pipeline, compared with only €170 billion a year ago.

from goldmoney newsletter

This entry was posted on September 10, 2012 at 7:33 PM and has received 335 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

The whole fake Matrix is laid out below - do you want to take the red pill and wake up or the blue pill and go back to sleep, Neo?

Personally when I read a government, media or big business statement these days my first reaction is to try replacing it by its opposite and see if that feels true. 90% of the time it does. Even if you are skeptical and you think that only one of the issues below is fake doesn't that say an enormous amount about the society that we live in?

(NaturalNews) The "War on Terror" is a complete fabrication. There is no terrorism other than what the government creates in order to sell its agenda of a police state takeover. Click here to read Paul Craig Roberts' article that lays this out in brilliant detail.

The CDC's war on West Nile virus is also a complete fabrication. There is no real West Nile virus threat. (Read article here.) The odds of being killed by West Nile are, much like with "terrorism," even lower than the odds of being killed by a bee sting.

The "economic recovery" of America is a fairy tale. Over the last few days, the federal debt reached a jaw-dropping $16 trillion -- nearly $5 trillion of that debt has been incurred under one person: President Obama. Unemployment is at record highs. Half the population is on federal aid of one form or another. Food stamp costs have skyrocketed.

"Obamacare" is a fiasco. Dubbed the "Affordable Care Act," in reality health insurance costs have vastly increased after the passage of this ill-conceived law.

Bin Laden wasn't killed by U.S. Navy Seals. The war is a fake. The news is faked. The media is completely, utterly faked, running totally fictional stories. CNN is actually an elaborate theater operation, faking sets, locations, sound effects and everything else you can imagine. Don't believe me? Watch this totally faked CNN broadcast from the Gulf War, featuring "journalist" Charles Jaco:
http://tv.naturalnews.com/v.asp?v=B55147E2052701412A47A9F2C9DA754C

The whole thing is so hilarious it's almost an SNL skit! At one point, a fake air raid siren sounds off, indicating a biological weapons attack (total fear mongering on CNN), and one of the guests in the fake studio frantically straps on a HELMET! Yeah, because helmets are the defense of choice against biological attacks, it seems. See if you can actually watch this CNN video and not laugh out loud...

Newspapers run fake news like "organic foods are no healthier than conventional foods." (http://www.naturalnews.com/037065_organic_foods_mainstream_media_psyo...)

The FBI plans and carries out fake terror plots all across the USA (http://www.naturalnews.com/034325_FBI_entrapment_terror_plots.html).

All the ads of Big Pharma are completely faked, promoting dangerous prescription drugs that are approved by the FDA based on faked clinical studied.

The USDA, EPA, FDA, ATF, DEA are all fake operations, actually running their own scams and frauds rather than protecting the American public from anything. We'd all be better off to simply abolish every federal regulator and start over.

The history taught in public schools is wildly faked. The explanations of who killed JFK and MLK are all faked. They don't want you to know real history.

Banking financial instruments are all faked. And the bank RATINGS are utterly faked. It's all complete fiction, and that fiction will soon unravel.

The food you buy is faked, by the way. Fake colors, fake flavors, fake marketing claims on the packaging, and even fake chemical ingredients. All the real nutrients are processed out, leaving "fake food."

Cities are fake ecosystems. City parks are faked with weed killer, pesticides, and non-native plants everywhere. Your tap water faucet is a "fake waterfall" in your kitchen. It's all illusion. Behind the mechanics, there is no real waterfall. It's all a series of electrical pumps and pipes that bring the water to you. Once the electricity stops, the illusion collapses.

The FDIC's insurance of your bank deposits is an illusion. When the banks go bankrupt -- an event that's coming very, very soon -- the FDIC will go bankrupt right along when them. Your deposits will be lost.

Your "pension" is an illusion. It's nothing more than a fabricated promise to pay you some amount of money at some future date. It does not exist in the real world, and it can vanish literally overnight.

Geopolitical lines are also fake. The thick red line that outlines your state on a map doesn't exist in the real world. Drive out there and see for yourself: there is NO LINE. So why do we pretend there is?

AIDS is not real. It's a completely fictional disease used by the CDC to scare everybody into giving it more funding and more power. HIV tests are completely bogus, as even the scientists who run the tests readily admit. (http://www.naturalnews.com/027890_AIDS_test_HIV.html)

The "cure for cancer" is not real, at least not as hyped by the pink ribbon non-profits. They aren't even looking for a cancer cure, folks. It would put the entire cancer industry out of business! (http://www.naturalnews.com/036711_Komen_for_the_Cure_mammography_frau...)

Vaccine mythology is completely faked. It's all a fairy tale. There is no immunity granted by the injection of "attenuated" viral strains combined with stealth cancer viruses and chemical adjuvants. Vaccines are "medical theater" that don't even work. The "vaccine science" is all faked by the drug companies, and this is now a matter a public record from whistleblower scientists who worked on those vaccines and took part in spiking the clinical blood samples with animal antibodies! (http://www.naturalnews.com/036417_Glaxo_Merck_fraud.html)

Airport security is fake. It's all "security theater." All the TSA molestations in the world still haven't caught a single terrorist.

Government power is an illusion. It's all a bluff. The government only has power because people believe it does. Hence the need for costumes (uniforms) and sparkly, shiny objects (badges) to mesmerize the gullible masses.

Entitlements are an illusion which will soon end. The U.S. government is now $16 trillion in debt, meaning the money the government has been spending is FAKE. When reality comes due, entitlement programs will collapse.

The stock market as a fair investment device is faked. As the Facebook IPO proved, Wall Street is really just a rigged game for insiders to loot gullible investors.

Your DVD player is faked. Remember when VCRs simply played the tape when you inserted the tape? Now your DVD player has to connect to the "cloud" somewhere, download updates, reboot, decode, sync, run a bunch of algorithms and then if you're lucky it actually plays a movie. But this entire process is "virtual" (digital) and not real (analog).

In fact, your email doesn't exist. Your saved files and documents don't exist. The web page you're reading right now doesn't exist. Your bank account doesn't exist. One electromagnetic pulse burst is all it would take to wipe out all electronic devices (and most data storage) across the country. Imagine your entire Facebook history, Twitter history and email history wiped clean in a microsecond. (For many, that wouldn't be such a bad thing, actually.)

Most of your life is played out in a virtual world, almost as if you were an animated character in a computer simulation... something like The Matrix.

You are living in a dream world, Neo.

So what's real?

• Physical books. No batteries required.
• Family, including pets.
• Dirt (soil).
• Gardening, permaculture, seeds.
• Gold and silver.
• Consciousness, free will, awareness.
• The sun. Warmth and light. Energy for life.
• Liquid water. Perhaps the most miraculous substance in the universe.
• Honeybees, insects and pollinators.
• Sea salt. Minerals. Elements for health.
• Love, compassion, forgiveness, humility.
• Firearms, hammers and other purely mechanical devices that don't need "firmware" to operate.

Words of wisdom from the Health Ranger

• Start trading your VIRTUAL things for REAL things. At the moment, for example, you can "spend" your virtual electronic money (in your electronic bank account) in order to buy real things such as seeds, garden tools and silver.

• Do not put all your eggs in the "virtual" basket. Even if you think your financial assets are diversified by being held in different funds or banks, they're all still 100% virtual! (Fiat money isn't REAL.)

• Make yourself learn how to navigate reality. Instead of playing Farmville, grow a real garden with real dirt and real seeds. Learn real skills and familiarize yourself with the real (natural) world. Turn off your GPS and learn to read a map, for starters.

• Kill your TV! There is nothing more stupid, insidious and mind-numbing than the TV. Nothing will separate you from reality faster than television. If you have cable TV, cancel it. If you have satellite TV, disconnect it. Remove this insidious technology from your life or it will dominate your mind, your beliefs, your emotions and your reactions to everything that happens in the world. Television is a pathway to total zombification. It's not just the ads either; the programs are also laced with propaganda, violence, perversion and negative influence.

And keep reading NaturalNews.com and other alternative news websites. We are the last safe harbor of truthful information left on the planet. We aim to report what's REAL, not the fictions peddled by the delusional institutions that attempt to dominate your mind and stuff it full of falsehoods.

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/037093_fairy_tales_delusion_real_world.html#ixzz264BhE9RB

from http://www.naturalnews.com/037093_fairy_tales_delusion_real_world.html

This entry was posted on September 10, 2012 at 10:43 AM and has received 442 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

A recent audit of the Federal Reserve reveals that between December 2007 and June 2010 they gave major banks worldwide more than $16 trillion at 0% interest. That is more that the entire US national debt. The Federal Reserve likes to refer to these secret bailouts as an all-inclusive loan program, but virtually none of the money has been returned and it was loaned out at 0% interest. Sounds like a gift to me.

In late 2008, the TARP Bailout bill was passed and loans of $800 billion were given to failing banks and companies. That was a blatant lie considering the fact that Goldman Sachs alone received 814 billion dollars. As is turns out, the Federal Reserve donated $2.5 trillion to Citigroup, while Morgan Stanley received $2.04 trillion. The Royal Bank of Scotland and Deutsche Bank, a German bank, split about a trillion and numerous other banks received hefty chunks of the $16 trillion.

 

“This is a clear case of socialism for the rich and rugged, you’re-on-your-own individualism for everyone else.”- Bernie Sanders (I-VT)

 

When you have conservative Republican stalwarts like Jim DeMint(R-SC) and Ron Paul(R-TX) as well as self identified Democratic socialists like Bernie Sanders all fighting against the Federal Reserve, you know that it is no longer an issue of Right versus Left. When you have every single member of the Republican Party in Congress and progressive Congressmen like Dennis Kucinich sponsoring a bill to audit the Federal Reserve, you realize that the Federal Reserve is an entity onto itself, which has no oversight and no accountability.

 

The list of institutions that received the most money from the Federal Reserve can be found on page 131of the GAO Audit and are as follows..

 

Citigroup: $2.5 trillion ($2,500,000,000,000)
Morgan Stanley: $2.04 trillion ($2,040,000,000,000)
Merrill Lynch: $1.949 trillion ($1,949,000,000,000)
Bank of America: $1.344 trillion ($1,344,000,000,000)
Barclays PLC (United Kingdom): $868 billion ($868,000,000,000)
Bear Sterns: $853 billion ($853,000,000,000)
Goldman Sachs: $814 billion ($814,000,000,000)
Royal Bank of Scotland (UK): $541 billion ($541,000,000,000)
JP Morgan Chase: $391 billion ($391,000,000,000)
Deutsche Bank (Germany): $354 billion ($354,000,000,000)
UBS (Switzerland): $287 billion ($287,000,000,000)
Credit Suisse (Switzerland): $262 billion ($262,000,000,000)
Lehman Brothers: $183 billion ($183,000,000,000)
Bank of Scotland (United Kingdom): $181 billion ($181,000,000,000)
BNP Paribas (France): $175 billion ($175,000,000,000)
and many many more including banks in Belgium of all places

This entry was posted on September 10, 2012 at 10:36 AM and has received 380 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

Drones are cheap and easy to program - hard to tell what people will do with them ...

At last year’s Paris Air Show, some of the hottest aircraft were the autonomous unmanned helicopters—a few of them small enough to carry in one hand—that would allow military buyers to put a camera in the sky anywhere, anytime. Manufactured by major defense contractors, and ranging in design from a single-bladed camcopter to four-bladed multicopters, these drones were being sold as the future of warfare at prices in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

In May, at a different trade show, similar aircraft were once again the most buzzed-about items on display. But this wasn’t another exhibition of military hardware; instead, it was the Hobby Expo China in Beijing, where Chinese manufacturers demo their newest and coolest toys. Companies like Shenzhen-based DJI Innovations are selling drones with the same capability as the military ones, sometimes for less than $1,000. These Chinese firms, in turn, are competing with even cheaper drones created by amateurs around the world, who share their designs for free in communities online. It’s safe to say that drones are the first technology in history where the toy industry and hobbyists are beating the military-industrial complex at its own game.

...
Today, all the sensors required to make a functioning autopilot have become radically smaller and radically cheaper. Gyroscopes, which measure rates of rotation; magnetometers, which function as digital compasses; pressure sensors, which measure atmospheric pressure to calculate altitude; accelerometers, to measure the force of gravity—all the capabilities of these technologies are now embedded in tiny chips that you can buy at RadioShack. Indeed, some of the newest sensors combine three-axis accelerometers, gyros, and magnetometers (nine sensors in all), plus a temperature gauge and a processor, into one little package that costs about $17.

Meanwhile, the brain of an autopilot—the “embedded computer,” or single-chip microprocessor, that steers the plane based on input from all the sensors—has undergone an even more impressive transformation, thanks to the rise of the smartphone. Once Apple’s iPhone showed that fluid and fast visual interfaces on touchscreens were what people wanted, the same insatiable demand for computational power that kicked in with the graphical user interface of desktop computers came to phones. But unlike the desktop, these mini supercomputers also needed to use as little power as possible. The result was a shift to the hyperefficient “reduced instruction set computing” architectures—led by British chip designer ARM, which now dominates the single-chip industry—driving the performance gains of our smartphones and tablets. As it turns out, these chips are also perfect for drones: Fast and power-efficient processors mean that they can go beyond simply following a preprogrammed mission and start to think for themselves.

And the smartphone-drone connection goes far beyond the processors. These days, a standard smartphone has a full suite of sophisticated inertial sensors to detect its position, a feature that’s integrated into everything from games to maps and augmented reality. The demand for higher-quality cameras in phones has launched a similar revolution in image-capture chips, which are used in drones. The need for smaller, better GPS in phones has brought the same technology to drones, too, such that GPS performance that cost tens of thousands of dollars in the 1990s can be had for as little as $10 in a thumbnail-sized device. The same goes for wireless radio modules, memory, and batteries.

In short, this new generation of cheap, small drones is essentially a fleet of flying smartphones. More and more, autopilot electronics look just like smartphone electronics, simply running different software. The technical and economic advantages of coattailing on the economies of scale of the trillion-dollar mobile-phone industry are astounding. If you want to understand why the personal-drone revolution is happening now, look no farther than your pocket.

more at
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/06/ff_drones/?utm_source=Contextly&utm_medium=RelatedLinks&utm_campaign=Previous

This entry was posted on September 4, 2012 at 9:40 PM and has received 2200 views. There are currently 1 comments. Print this entry.

How different are both major parties? No matter how we vote Reality always wins in the end...

Compare and contrast the platforms of the Republicans and Democrats with the Reality Party:

     The two major parties both propose that the colossal machine of everyday life in America can not only run indefinitely, but continue expanding, and include ever more member people who trade ever more schwag. All that is required, they say, is twiddling the settings of the machine, to get it back to running smoothly as it did in the good old days before the mystifying crash of 2008. They disagree slightly on which dials to twiddle. Reality knows we have entered along-term compressive economic contraction; that there is no way we can persist in the current living arrangement; and that the necessary outcome to avoid immense human suffering can be described as the downscaling and re-localizing of everything we do.

 

     The two major parties regard the rule of law as optional, especially in money matters. Neither party has any will to interfere with a broad array of financial rackets that range from the blatant manipulation of markets, interest rates, and currencies to computerized front-running thievery, traffic in booby-trapped derivatives and counterfeit shorts, pervasive accounting fraud, channel stuffing, irregularities in central bank bullion leasing, flagrant confiscation of private accounts, municipal bond-rigging flimflams, "private equity" looting operations, offshore banking dodges, and untold other scams, rip-offs, and cons that have crippled the basic functions of finance, namely: price discovery, currency as a reliable store of value, and the allocation of surplus wealth for productive purpose. Reality knows that the absence of the rule of law is suicidal. Reality is incapable of pretending that it doesn't matter. Reality provides work-arounds for intractably dishonest political arrangements: civil war and revolution. Both are invoked out of extreme desperation and have unpredictable outcomes. Like Reality itself, they are what they are.

 

     The two major parties pretend that so-called "entitlement" programs can be simultaneously reformed, improved, and abolished - that is, you can have your cake and eat it (with ice cream) at the same time you throw it in the garbage. Reality rejects this incoherent juggling act and proposes that Americans better just make other arrangements for old age, routine medical care, and daily bread. This implies cultural as much as economic transformation and it will occur emergently no matter what empty promises anyone makes. People who want to get food at regular intervals will have to find some way to make themselves useful to others. Medicine will return to the local clinic model and doctors will have to find another motivation for practice besides the acquisition of German automobiles. Old people will have to prevail upon their offspring for care and protection, and they will be expected to play a useful role in the household or community in return if they are able-bodied.

 

     The two major parties both proclaim that the USA is verging on "energy independence." Both parties are lying. Reality knows that the shale oil "game changer" is a mirage. By 2014, the "sweet spots" of the Bakken will deplete faster than new wells can be drilled, and the impairments of banking will constrict the supply of capital investment for that hypothetical future drilling. All the deregulation in the world will not alter the fact that future oil is expensive, exists in places where it is hard to work, and entails unappetizing geopolitical contingencies. Reality favors letting go of automobile-based living and the adoption of walkable communities connected by inland waterways and railroads.

 

      The two major parties believe that the foreign wars are good for business as long as you can minimize the casualties on our side and keep war news off the TV. Reality knows that war as currently practiced by the US Military is a failure if 1.) you can't control the terrain in the foreign theater of operations, and 2.) you can't control the behavior of the foreign population. Notice that we can't do either of those things in Afghanistan or the sundry other places where the US military might be found today. The two major parties also favor the application of war-time "security" operations on the US public inside our borders - i.e. spying, data harvesting, monitoring of cell phone and bank records., et cetera - contrary to what US law and the constitution says. Reality believes that, if the rule of law remains optional, the time will come when American government officials who authorized these activities may be dragged from their command centers and hanged from traffic signals by a citizenry pushed too far.

 

     Mitt Romney and Barack Obama would label Reality a "terrorist movement" if they could and seek to blow it up with predator drones. But Reality is harder to stamp out than truth, which can be shouted down, papered over, fudged, outlawed, etch-a-sketched, exiled, and reviled. Reality is everywhere. It lurks inside and outside the doors of the phony-baloney convention vaudeville shows in its cloak of invisibility, ready to work its hoodoo on the feckless, the fatuous, and the wicked. Reality is America's last best hope. Join the Reality Party.

from http://kunstler.com/blog/2012/09/join-up.html

This entry was posted on September 3, 2012 at 7:14 PM and has received 352 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

In many places in the US every car moving on certain roads is tracked by license plate reading cameras. And the car's driver and passengers photographed. The data is not restricted to suspected criminals, unless you believe that every citizen is potentially a criminal... And all the data is kept for future searches, for years into the future. Just in case the government needs some evidence of you wrong doing, driving in a suspicious pattern. Maybe going by a "known" drug area or a "known" anti-government group.

The same is true in London, UK and much of Europe

Check your calendar, perhaps you missed something, the year might be 1984...

Tag readers are cameras that can be stationary, mounted on poles or traffic signals. Also they can be put on cruisers and vehicles. They can also be hidden.  Their function is to take images of passing vehicles, and they have an extraordinary capacity technologically to be able to do so, and to use optical character recognition to identify the license plate number. The images may include optionally images of the occupants, the driver and passengers, as well. It takes that data, along with the GPS location of the vehicle, the date, the time, etc., and then stores it, matches up the data, and can send it to a centralized data warehousing center where they can log, historically, the movement of your own vehicle as it has passed through and silently triggered any one of the many thousands of tag readers that over the past few years have been put in place without very much public discussion or debate.

TG: Where are they? Cities and towns and everywhere at this point?

CM: Yes. In fact, the federal government has, over the past number of years, embarked on a campaign to use federal funds to either subsidize or to give money for tag readers ostensibly for law enforcement purposes all across the country. In Utah, they were presented in much of the same way that the government and law enforcement presents these surveillance technologies; they roll them out as an innocuous way to take a snapshot of passing vehicles and compare them to a stolen vehicle list. Well, yeah, that’s part of what it does, but then in Utah they came to understand that that was only a fraction of the functionality of the tag readers that were being offered to them for free.  And they expressed shock that the government was actually intending to take a historical record of all the cars that passed through on their interstate and send it off to a data warehouse, which is physically located in Northern Virginia, in Merrifield.

TG: Right. Because the data warehouse in Virginia would be really concerned about stolen cars in Utah, right?

CM: Well, exactly. And you know, one of the great concerns, or a number of important elements here -- there are virtually no real hard restrictions on the retention of this data, or on the use of the data. And when you aggregate it, the real risk to privacy, the greatest risk to privacy comes through both the historic accumulation of data so that it’s not just a snapshot, but actually a history.

But also, when you aggregate it and cross-reference it with other information such as a person’s credit card transactions, what they purchased, when they purchased and why, you can really create a comprehensive profile of a person’s activities, their associations, even really a personality profile on them. Imagine, they know more about you than you probably know about yourself when they take into consideration your movements, your purchases as reflected in card databases, your credit card transactions, each of which record the time, location, nature of your transactions. And that and your cell phone data, well, what’s left?
...

When you aggregate this information and know, for example, who has been parked near an abortion clinic, who has attended a political organizing meeting, and for an individual, what are the chain of activities that you have engaged in? That information does not belong to the government. That is just a clear violation, an intrusion of personal privacy.

There is always a pretext, there is always an explanation.  There is always some boogie man to turn to, a threat of violence. All of the counterintelligence program disruption activities of the Civil Rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s and 1970 period, early ‘70s were justified by the government as necessary to prevent acts of violence, and to further law enforcement.  So that’s what they do here.  They say, “Look, this can help prevent acts of violence. If we knew this, we could prevent a terrorist attack  If we knew this, we could prevent lawlessness, we could track stolen vehicles.” There are a lot of pretexts for it.

But ultimately, when you look at the design of these systems, the systems are really massive intelligence networks. A lot of these uses do not require the massive retention and data warehousing that municipalities in the federal government are engaged in. If you look to identify whether a vehicle that just passed a tag reader, for example, is a stolen vehicle, they can send in an alert and have an officer pull it over.  You don’t need to capture and record every single vehicle’s license plates and possibly the photos of the occupants, and then move that into a data warehouse for archiving purposes.  That’s not necessary.

Full article at alternet

This entry was posted on September 1, 2012 at 6:50 PM and has received 400 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

Ok I understand why the army needs to buy hundreds of thousands of bullets, but the Social Security Administration and DHS? Are they expecting to go to war with Syria? Or are they planning to fight people closer to home...

Why Does The U.S. Government Need So Much Ammunition?

In my previous article, I also noted that the U.S. government appears to be very rapidly making preparations for something really big. This week, it was revealed that the Social Security Administration plans to buy 174,000 hollow point bullets which will be delivered to 41 different locations all over America.

 

Now why in the world does the Social Security Administration need 174,000 bullets? And why do they need hollow point bullets?  Those bullets are designed to cause as much damage to internal organs as possible.

 

But of course this is only the latest in a series of very large purchases of ammunition by U.S. government agencies.  The following is from a recent article by Paul Joseph Watson....

Back in March, Homeland Security purchased 450 million rounds of .40-caliber hollow point bullets that are designed to expand upon entry and cause maximum organ damage, prompting questions as to why the DHS needed such a large amount of powerful bullets merely for training purposes.

 

This was followed by another DHS solicitation asking for a further 750 million rounds of assorted bullets, including 357 mag rounds that are able to penetrate walls.

Now why in the world would the government need over a billion rounds of ammunition? If it was the U.S. military I could understand this.  You can burn through a whole lot of ammunition fighting wars. But this makes no sense - unless they believe that big trouble is coming.

 

Personally, I wouldn't blame them for getting prepared.  Our economy continues to fall apart and there are signs of social decay everywhere around us. The American people are more frustrated and more angry than at any other time in modern history.  This upcoming election is only going to cause Americans to become even more angry and even more divided.

 

All it would take is just the right "spark" to cause this country to erupt. It could be the upcoming election. It could be the collapse of the financial system. Or it might be something else. But the conditions are definitely there for it to happen.

 

Unfortunately, the American public is never told to prepare because authorities never want "to panic" the general population. So don't wait for someone to come on the television and announce that a crisis is happening. If you wait that long, it will be too late. Instead, open up your eyes and think for yourself.

 

We all need to work hard to get prepared for the coming crisis while we still can. As you can see, Wall Street insiders, the U.S. government and the central banks of the world are busy getting prepared. Don't put your head in the sand. The warning signs are there and time is running out.

From http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/startling-evidence-that-central-banks-and-wall-street-insiders-are-rapidly-preparing-for-something-big

This entry was posted on August 17, 2012 at 7:12 PM and has received 823 views. There are currently 2 comments. Print this entry.

It certainly seems to me that the financial markets and some countries are going to collapse soon. But have banks and governments been preparing on the QT too?

Are The Government & The Big Banks Quietly Preparing For Imminent Financial Collapse?
08/15/2012

Something really strange appears to be happening. All over the globe, governments and big banks are acting as if they are anticipating an imminent financial collapse. Unfortunately, we are not privy to the quiet conversations that are taking place in corporate boardrooms and in the halls of power in places such as Washington D.C. and London, so all we can do is try to make sense of all the clues that are all around us.

Of course it is completely possible to misinterpret these clues, but sticking our heads in the sand is not going to do any good either. Last week, it was revealed that the U.S. government has been secretly directing five of the biggest banks in America "to develop plans for staving off collapse" for the last two years. By itself, that wouldn't be that big of a deal. But when you add that piece to the dozens of other clues of imminent financial collapse, a very troubling picture begins to emerge....

Over the past 12 months, hundreds of banking executives have been resigning, corporate insiders have been selling off enormous amounts of stock, and I have been personally told that a significant number of Wall Street bankers have been shopping for "prepper properties" in rural communities this summer. Meanwhile, there have been reports that the U.S. government has been stockpiling food and ammunition, and Barack Obama has been signing a whole bunch of executive orders that would potentially be implemented in the event of a major meltdown of society. So what does all of this mean?

It could mean something or it could mean nothing. What we do know is that a financial collapse is coming at some point. Over the past 40 years, the total amount of all debt in the United States has grown from about 2 trillion dollars to nearly 55 trillion dollars. That is a recipe for financial Armageddon, and it is inevitable that this gigantic bubble of debt is going to burst at some point.

 

In normal times, the U.S. government does not tell major banks to "develop plans for staving off collapse".

But according to a recent Reuters article, that is apparently exactly what has been happening....
U.S. regulators directed five of the country's biggest banks, including Bank of America Corp and Goldman Sachs Group Inc, to develop plans for staving off collapse if they faced serious problems, emphasizing that the banks could not count on government help.

The two-year-old program, which has been largely secret until now, is in addition to the "living wills" the banks crafted to help regulators dismantle them if they actually do fail. It shows how hard regulators are working to ensure that banks have plans for worst-case scenarios and can act rationally in times of distress.

Does it seem odd to anyone else that only five really big banks got such a warning? And why keep it secret from the American public?

Does the federal government actually expect such a collapse to happen?

 

If federal officials do expect a financial collapse to occur, they would not be the only ones. An increasing number of very respected economists are speaking about the coming financial collapse as if there is a certain inevitability about it.

For example, check out the following quote from a recent Money Morning article....

Richard Duncan, formerly of the World Bank and chief economist at Blackhorse Asset Mgmt., says America's $16 trillion federal debt has escalated into a "death spiral," as he told CNBC.

 

And it could result in a depression so severe that he doesn't "think our civilization could survive it." A former World Bank executive is warning that our civilization might not survive what is coming? That is pretty chilling.

Economist Nouriel Roubini says that he believes that the coming crisis will be even worse than 2008....

"Worse because like 2008 you will have an economic and financial crisis but unlike 2008, you are running out of policy bullets. In 2008, you could cut rates; do QE1, QE2; you could do fiscal stimulus; you could backstop/ringfence/guarantee banks and everybody else. Today, more QEs are becoming less and less effective because the problems are of solvency not liquidity. Fiscal deficits are already so large and you cannot bail out the banks because 1) there is a political opposition to it; and 2) governments are near-insolvent - they cannot bailout themselves let alone their banks. The problem is that we are running out of policy rabbits to pull out of the hat!"

Across the pond, many European officials are echoing similar sentiments. What Nigel Farage told King World News the other day is very ominous.... Today MEP (Member European Parliament) Nigel Farage spoke with King World News about what he described as the possibility of, “a really dramatic banking collapse.” Farage also warned that central planners want to enslave and imprison people inside of a ‘New Order,’ and he described the situation as “horrifying.”

The situation in Europe continues to get worse and worse. The authorities in Europe have come out with "solution" after "solution", and yet unemployment continues to skyrocket and economic conditions in the EU have deteriorated very steadily over the past 12 months.

If all of that was not bad enough, there are an increasing number of indications that Germany is actually considering leaving the euro. Needless to say, that would be a complete and total disaster for the rest of the eurozone.
Of course there are any number of ways that the financial crisis in Europe could potentially play out.

But all of the realistic scenarios would be very bad for the global economy. Meanwhile, our resources are dwindling, war in the Middle East could erupt at any moment and our planet is becoming increasingly unstable. The following is from a recent article by Paul B. Farrell on Marketwatch.com....

Fasten your seat belts, soon we’ll all be shocked out of denial. Some unpredictable black swan. A global wake-up call will trigger the Pentagon’s prediction in Fortune a decade ago at the launch of the Iraq War: “By 2020 ... an ancient pattern of desperate, all-out wars over food, water, and energy supplies is emerging ... warfare defining human life.”

It is almost as if a "perfect storm" is brewing.
Of course the historic drought that is ravaging food production in the United States this summer is not helping matters either. Another summer or two like this one and we could be looking at a return of Dust Bowl conditions.

Anyone that is watching what is going on in the world and is not concerned at all about what is happening is simply being delusional

Recently, a "team of scientists, economists, and geopolitical analysts" examined the current state of the global economic system and the conclusions they reached were absolutely staggering.... One member of this team, Chris Martenson, a pathologist and former VP of a Fortune 300 company, explains their findings:

"We found an identical pattern in our debt, total credit market, and money supply that guarantees they're going to fail. This pattern is nearly the same as in any pyramid scheme, one that escalates exponentially fast before it collapses. Governments around the globe are chiefly responsible.

"And what's really disturbing about these findings is that the pattern isn't limited to our economy. We found the same catastrophic pattern in our energy, food, and water systems as well."

According to Martenson: "These systems could all implode at the same time. Food, water, energy, money. Everything."

Hmmmm - it sounds like they have been reading The Economic Collapse Blog. The truth is that a massive worldwide financial collapse is coming. It is inevitable, and it is going to be extremely painful. So what do you think about all of this?

From

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/are-the-government-and-the-big-banks-quietly-preparing-for-an-imminent-financial-collapse

This entry was posted on August 17, 2012 at 6:21 PM and has received 358 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

Interesting analysis from Internation Man of how the collapse may play out in some countries. We have already seen many of these 11 stages in Argentina after the 2001 collapse. And now in Greece. The first 3 stages have already occured in US, UK and other Western countries with large debt levels. So this is a possible roadmap of collapse in these countries too.

Without a drastic change in public awareness of what is really going on and a corresponding change in political will to ameliorate the predicaments that we are in. (I don't say solve problems because the situations we are in don't have complete solutions to avoid all pain - we can reduce the total pain experienced by addressing the issues now or we can put off the pain for a while with the promise of greater pains later)

With all the study and thought that are required to make sense out of how the Great Unraveling will play out, we seldom take time to think of what it will be like on the other side. Those of us who are, by nature, long-term thinkers and/or optimistic, have a vague picture in mind of a rebirth of libertarian thinking, and a vibrant economy. However, we tend not to think too much more about these hopes than that, because we are caught up in the Great Unraveling itself - a very time-consuming topic.

The other day, an associate whom I like to think of as having a decent, if not holistic, view of the present depression, commented to me, "I wish we could just have the crash tomorrow and everything that goes with it, so that, next year, we can get back to normal."

Oops ... maybe his expectations are a bit more simplified than I thought. And, if others share his view, possibly the topic needs a bit of fleshing-out. While it may not be ready to be a prime topic of the ongoing conversation, possibly an outline of what may happen after all the fireworks have gone off would be in order.

Ten Years Down and Ten Years Up

Economic wizard (and favourite 'Uncle') Harry Schultz stated back in the early 2000's that what he anticipated was "ten years down and ten years up." At the time, many thought that his projection was extremely prolonged. I didn't think so. People do commonly seem to take the view that, once the various crashes have taken place, we simply walk out into the sun, brush the dirt off the knees of our trousers, and, with a spring in our step, walk into the bright new day.

However, a depression is not at all like that. It is more like a town after a hurricane has hit. The storm may have been swift, but the recovery is not. Power lines are down. Roads are blocked. Homes and stores have been destroyed. Having personally been highly involved in the reconstruction of a small country after the devastation wrought by a category five hurricane, I can attest that, even if the population is hardworking and motivated (which they were), the task of rebuilding is monumental, and the time period required to achieve it is prolonged.

I see the period after the various crashes very differently from those who anticipate immediate recovery symptoms. This is not because I imagine myself a visionary; my view is based on history. If we look at the economic collapses of the past, (inclusive of their possible knock-on effects, such as hyperinflation and destruction of the currency), from the fall of the Roman Empire to Weimar Germany, to Argentina and Zimbabwe - take your pick - the pattern is extremely similar.

So, let's have a look at that pattern and ask ourselves if the present situation might not play out much the same (except far worse and more prolonged, as the conditions that led to this particular depression have been more extreme). The various stages are likely to be a given, but the various factors within each stage are a bit more uncertain. In every major economic collapse, some combination of these factors takes place.

Also, consider that the stages themselves are like dominoes - they almost always fall in order. The reason? Details change in history, but human nature remains the same. The same knee-jerk reactions by people will repeat themselves over and over. (As an example, we are now experiencing a decline in exports from the First World. I believe that a repeat of the disastrous Smoot-Hawley Tariff of the 1930's will be passed in America, which undoubtedly would trigger increased hardship for Americans.)

Stages of The Crash

The stages are laid out below. The first three have already occurred.

1 INITIAL CRASHES

• Crash of the residential property market
• Crash of the commercial property market
• Crash of the stock market

2 INITIAL KNOCK-ON EFFECTS OF CRASHES

• Loss of homes
• Loss of jobs
• Inflation

3 IMMEDIATE ACTIONS BY GOVERNMENT

• Bailouts for select groups
• Dramatic increase of debt
• Politicians going in the opposite direction of a real solution

The first knee-jerk reaction began immediately, with the Government attempting to "make the problem go away" as quickly as possible. Almost invariably, at this stage, the corrective strategy is hastily prepared and shortsighted, assuring further deterioration of the economy.

In this stage, the politicians on both sides fail to focus on a real solution. Instead, their primary focuses are, first, to avoid a painful real solution, and, second, to engage in finger-pointing, each political party blaming the other for the problem. The problem worsens steadily until one of the next series of major dominoes falls. This is usually sudden and triggers the toppling of other dominoes.

4 SECOND WAVE OF CRASHES

• Major crash in stock market
• Currency plummets
• Increased bankruptcies
• Increased unemployment

5 INTERNATIONAL TRADING PARTNERS REACT

• Foreign countries refuse to accept more debt
• Foreign trade slows dramatically

At this point, the Government introduces dramatic change, such as ill-conceived protectionism, which backfires almost immediately.

6 GOVERNMENT INSTITUTES DESPERATE SELF-DESTRUCTIVE MEASURES

• Defaults on debt
• Restrictive tariffs on imports
• Currency controls

7 ECONOMY REACTS IN LOCKSTEP TO GOVERNMENT ACTIONS

• Hyperinflation - dramatic increase in food and fuel costs
• Massive unemployment
• Extensive foreclosures
• Extensive bankruptcies

At this point, the dominoes are tumbling quickly, and a rapid unraveling of control is about to take place.

8 SYSTEMIC COLLAPSE

• Bank closures
• Extensive homelessness
• Food and fuel shortages
• Electric power becomes sporadic, blackouts common

As these factors unravel, the public mood turns to a combination of blind fear and anger.

9 SOCIAL COLLAPSE

• Crime rises dramatically (particularly street crime)
• Food riots
• Tax revolts
• Squatters' rebellions

10 MARTIAL LAW

• Creation of special army to address "domestic terrorism"
• Random killings become commonplace

At first, the authorities focus mostly on violent subjugation and arrests; then, as prisons quickly become hopelessly overcrowded, camps become the norm. Soon, these too become unmanageable, particularly as a result of high cost of food and manpower. At that point, the solution turns to the killing of anyone who is suspected of a crime and, more frequently, anyone who is not submissive. (This will not resemble the Gestapo of the late 1930's. It will be less organized and more chaotic.)

11 REVOLUTION

If revolution is to occur, it will happen at this point. Many people will feel that they have nothing to lose, and anger will be at its peak. If revolution does take place, it will not be an organized movement as such. It will be spontaneous, and breakouts will manifest themselves like popcorn popping, largely at random, with ever-increasing frequency. At some point, it may possibly evolve into something more organized.

The above article concludes the assessment of the first phase of the Greater Depression - the downward wave. Next week's article will explore the upward wave - the Recovery.

From http://www.internationalman.com/global-perspectives/after-the-storm-the-11-stages-of-the-crash

This entry was posted on August 14, 2012 at 5:33 PM and has received 439 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

Tony Robbins explains that the 15 trillion dollar deficit is too big to pay down by just taking all the money from the rich people and corporations, let alone just increasing their taxes. Spending will need to be cut too.

This entry was posted on August 12, 2012 at 9:13 PM and has received 649 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.