This is a 25-page Word document, a contribution from a long-term reader and contributor. It’s a long read, something that’s been put together carefully over time, and if you’re up to reading it through it will prove a genuine revelation. This is the stuff you will never hear on CNN or even Fox.
According to the Peak Oil theory, after a reservoir has been depleted by half of its total volume, the output begins to plateau or remain constant for some unknown period. At some later time (which is unpredictable) the output begins a permanent decline of variable duration (which is also unpredictable) until the remaining quantity of oil is no longer economically feasible to extract with current technology. Therefore, Peak Oil Theory does not state that the earth is running out of oil. It states that the earth is running out of inexpensive oil, otherwise known as conventional oil – the high-grade oil that comes out by drilling on land and requires minimal refinement costs.
(The current high price of oil is a result of futures manipulation by the Boyz on Wall Street. The price will fall to anywhere between $90–$120 in time for the US election- but, if US attacks, or Israel attacks Iran, all bets are off).
At some point the home usage of the exporting nation becomes greater than their oil output. At that point, in a matter of weeks, their exports become zero. Increasingly exporters will begin to hoard, and deliberately produce less for the export markets. The US is a large deliberate hoarder, (undrilled known reserves, - they intend to be the last man standing)
What this means is that there is enough total oil (conventional plus non-conventional) say for the next 100 years, but that does not matter. What really matters is how much conventional oil reservoirs remain for global marketing, because this is the lowest cost oil to produce. In other words, Peak Oil is concerned with how much crude we can produce and refine per given day per dollar.
The United States reached its peak oil period in the early 1970s. Ever since that time, it has relied more and more on foreign oil imports. Interestingly, since that time the US have also relied more and more on imported goods, while both consumer and federal debt have ballooned. According to many independent (and unbiased) oil experts, the world will soon have reached, or may already have reached this peak oil period, causing even more dependence on exploration for non-conventional oil.
Over the past two decades, new conventional oil finds around the world have been far and few. And what was once thought as large finds have turned out to yield much less than first thought. Throughout this period oil demand has continued to increase. It has especially strengthened over the past few years due to the rapid expansion of Asia .
As demand has increased and new finds have diminished, OPEC has fudged oil reserves data for many years, causing concerns about Peak Oil to remain hidden up until recently. As a result, oil prices have soared. And this has made exploration for non-conventional oil not only more feasible, but mandatory. Consequently, over the past few years, the world has become increasingly reliant on more non-conventional oil sources, such as tar and oil sands and deep water drilling. These are considered non-conventional sources because they require large expenditures of money and energy to produce finished petroleum products. Three variables – increased demand and decreased supplies of conventional oil, and speculation by Wall Street entities on unregulated futures markets, have been the main forces responsible for record oil prices. Wall Street parasitic entities speculating in the futures markets are causing global starvation to feed their greed. Over the past year, oil has also risen due to the inflationary effects from the Federal Reserve, which has weakened the dollar. The dollar-oil link explains many things.
Oil industry giants such as Exxon continue to insist that we have plenty of oil for decades, but then add that more investments are needed for offshore exploration. What they are really saying is that higher oil prices are due to Peak Oil – the decline in conventional oil reservoirs, which is forcing companies to focus on non-conventional oil. They use word games to hide the truth because they realise any possibility of Peak Oil will cause a push for alternative energy, which would threaten their monopoly. OPEC plays the same game. Washington goes along with these fantasies as well for a much bigger reason – to preserve the dollar-oil link.
As long as the world is dependent on oil, the dollar remains backed by crude since you can only buy it with the dollar (with one rare exception to be mentioned shortly). This dollar-oil link helps keep the dollar as the universal currency. And because the entire world must use the dollar, you can understand how that dilutes the inflationary effects seen in America due to the Fed’s printing presses.
Thus, the dollar-oil link ensures the Fed’s inflation machine is spread throughout the globe. Without the dollar’s link to oil, the inflation seen in America would be much more severe. The holding of dollars internationally ensures the export globally of US Fed engineered inflation, which returns to bite the ass of Global Populations, with higher commodity prices. China, for example prints masses of its own currency in order to buy dollars to buy oil which it in turn subsidises for its own population, thus destroying the supply - demand equations. These subsidies serve to keep the global demand-price high.
The subsidies will be removed shortly when the Wall Street boyz take their profits on oil (having delivered a wake-up call to all nations politicians, of both the effects of Peak Oil, and their awesome Global Power to arbitrarily exterminate nations) and move to the next bubble. People, this was/is, a dry run, a test, the actual Global Financial War is scheduled for a few years time, when the boyz, who are now rapidly moving their operational base from the west, which they have proven themselves capable of bringing to its knees, to the fledgling South East Asian Bourses
This is the secret that virtually no one realises. It is not a conspiracy. It is a fact. The conspiracies lie in the military-industrial complex that has grown up in the US in order to project the military power globally to protect this dollar-oil link. And the few in Washington who realise it are never going to admit it. But consider why it is that America has such good relations with the Saudis. After all, it was President Nixon who negotiated with the Saudi Royal family to demand dollar payments for oil shortly after severing the finally link to the gold standard. (Or rather it was Kissinger, of CFR, Trilateral and Bilderberg affiliations, in the back of a taxi who came up with the proposals of mutual convenience for the two countries, - an altogether brilliant concept that ensured Americas global domination for decades to come, and when explored in detail, explains so much of todays global machinations.)
Soon after all of OPEC followed suit. In exchange for the dollar-oil link, the Saudi Royal family receives the protection of the U.S. military. This is why the Saudis are rarely criticised by Washington . They have earned a blanket exception for virtually anything they do, including involvement in terrorism and yes, even including holding down oil output.
The Saudis know well that they have a good deal of control over the fate of the U.S. economy. Given the fact that Iran has now created an oil exchange that accepts only the Euro, this is why Iran wants nuclear weapons – and why Russia is willing to supply them, and why Russia and China use their UN veto so frequently. But The U.S. will attack to defend the $-oil link and the global hegemony that it provides. These are dangerous times.
The Iranian Oil Bourse establishing Euro-based pricing of oil opened on February 17th 2008 is based off the island of Kisch and houses offices of 100 Iranian and foreign companies, and may have devastating effects on the US dollar.
(Currently all three major oil markets (WTI, NYMEX, IPE) trade barrels of oil in US dollars. (Futures on Comex) Consequently any country buying oil needs dollars to pay for it. This enables the US Federal Reserve to issue huge volumes of dollars to meet increasing demand for oil. In return oil producing nations invest dollar proceeds in US treasury bills, allowing for the current US budget deficit. This ever increasing foreign demand for US T bills serves to keep US T bill interest rates (yields) low. (The time will come when foreign gov’ts refuse to purchase low yielding T Bills in the face of a collapsing $, and will seek to negotiate with oil producers another method of payment, - maybe a “basket currency” - at that point the US economy collapses, and global financial chaos marches with the horsemen of the apocalypse. The recent G8 heads of state meeting was an absolute travesty, seemingly concerning itself with Zimbabwe, and CO2 emissions, while the 4 horsemen saddled up.)
Unlike other bourses, the IOB relies on a peer-to-peer trading model, using the Internet. IOB has been in the works for several years and encountered many hurdles on the way, the last of which are severed underwater internet cables creating an Internet outage throughout the Middle East days before the IOB’s opening and prompting conspiracy theories. In recent years the US has outfitted some of its submarines with the capability to splice optical fibre underwater so these theories may not be far-fetched.
Having the world’s second largest oil reserves of 136 gigabarrels, Iran will likely extend its influence on financial markets through the IOB. Although under-reported by the media, this historical shift and its consequences should be watched closely, and is THE REASON FOR US AGGRESSION AGAINST IRAN. (Recent US headlines of political softening towards Iran could be dis-information, time will tell.)
As Iran realizes, severing the dollar-oil link is the easiest way to destroy the U.S. And any nation that tries to do this will be dealt with accordingly. Saddam Hussein tried to sell oil accepting only the Euro in 2000 and we know what happened to him. As well, any committed push to transition the U.S. into alternative energy threatens to destroy the global enslavement caused by the dollar-oil link. Alternative energy will come. But it will come slowly and Washington will make sure of this.
With these facts in mind, consider the hawkish statements from the ECB on interest rates and the rise of the Euro against the dollar in the last 2 years. This is the EUs bid for global parity with the dollar in the arena of oil denomination. It is a high risk game. The high interest rates, sold to a gullible public as a fight against inflation, run the risk of collapsing the EU economy and splitting the club med countries, plus Ireland, away from the continental core.
Read this
Recent US pressure has forced French companies to withdraw from contracts with Iran.
In the UN chambers, Russia and China continue to veto US and UK proposals for hitting Iran. China plays a dangerous game, - The US is Chinas largest market, thus China would not want to enfeeble the US to a marked degree, merely a slap on the wrist at this stage, however, going into the future, with a temporarily weaker US, caused deliberately by the One World Order Conspirators, who strongly influence Wall Street and the Fed, China will increasingly seek reunification with Taiwan. It will be interesting, given US defence agreements with Taiwan, and also watching Japanese reactions.
And Senior Chinese Officials scold the US Administration for Total Economic Mismanagement
Let’s take a more detailed look at the previously mentioned, “Global Machinations”
Sudan, - Darfur!
What’s at stake in the battle for Darfur? Control over oil, lots and lots of oil.
With its more than $1.3 trillion in mainly US dollar reserves at the People`s Bank of China, Beijing is engaging in active petroleum geopolitics. Africa is a major focus, and in Africa, the central region between Sudan and Chad is priority. This is defining a major new front in what, since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, is a new Cold War between Washington and Beijing over control of major oil sources. So far Beijing has played its cards a bit more cleverly than Washington. Darfur is a major battleground in this high-stakes contest for oil control, and the western media, paid for via Washington, plays religion as its cause. It has precious little to do with religion.
Beijing has embarked on a series of initiatives designed to secure long-term raw materials sources from one of the planet’s most endowed regions – the African subcontinent. Today China draws an estimated 30% of its crude oil from Africa. That explains an extraordinary series of diplomatic initiatives which have left Washington furious. China is using no-strings-attached dollar credits to gain access to Africa’s vast raw material wealth, leaving Washington’s typical control game via the World Bank and IMF out in the cold. Who needs the painful medicine of the IMF when China gives easy terms and builds roads and schools too?
In November 2006, Beijing hosted an extraordinary summit of 40 African heads of state. They literally rolled out the red carpet for the heads of among others Algeria, Nigeria, Mali, Angola, Central African Republic, Zambia, South Africa.
China has been generous in dispensing its soft loans, with no interest or outright grants to some of the poorest debtor states of Africa. The loans have gone to infrastructure including highways, hospitals, and schools, a stark contrast to the brutal austerity demands of the IMF and World Bank. In 2006 China committed more than $8 billion to Nigeria, Angola and Mozambique, versus $2.3 billion to all sub-Saharan Africa from the World Bank. Unlike the World Bank, a de facto arm of US foreign economic policy, China shrewdly attaches no strings to its loans.
This oil-related Chinese diplomacy has led to the bizarre accusation from Washington that Beijing is trying to “secure oil at the sources,” something Washington foreign policy has itself been preoccupied with for at least a Century.
No source of oil has been more the focus of China-US oil conflict of late than Sudan, home of Darfur.
Beijing’s China National Petroleum Company, CNPC, is Sudan’s largest foreign investor, with some $5 billion in oil field development. Since 1999 China has invested at least $15 billion in Sudan. It owns 50% of an oil refinery near Khartoum with the Sudan government. The oil fields are concentrated in the south, site of a long-simmering civil war, partly financed covertly by the United States, to break the south from the Islamic Khartoum-centred north.
details in the text are opaque, but the comments are interesting, seems MI6 may have been involved.
US development aid for all Sub-Sahara Africa including Chad, has been cut sharply in recent years while its military aid has risen. Oil and the scramble for strategic raw materials is the clear reason. The region of southern Sudan from the Upper Nile to the borders of Chad is rich in oil. Washington knew that long before the Sudanese government. US oil majors have known about Sudan’s oil wealth since the early 1970’s. In 1979, Jafaar Nimeiry, Sudan head of state, broke with the Soviets and invited Chevron to develop oil in the Sudan. That was perhaps a fatal mistake. UN Ambassador George H.W. Bush had personally told Nimeiry of satellite photos indicating oil in Sudan. Nimeiry took the bait. Wars over oil have been the consequence ever since.
Chevron found big oil reserves in southern Sudan. It spent $1.2 billion finding and testing them. That oil triggered what is called Sudan’s second civil war in 1983. Chevron was the target of repeated attacks and killings and suspended the project in 1984. In 1992, it sold it’s Sudanese oil concessions. Then China began to develop the abandoned Chevron fields in 1999 with notable results.
But Chevron is not far from Darfur today.
Condi Rice’s Chevron is in neighbouring Chad, together with the other US oil giant, ExxonMobil. They’ve just built a $3.7 billion oil pipeline carrying 160,000 barrels/day of oil from Doba in central Chad near Darfur Sudan, via Cameroon to Kribi on the Atlantic Ocean, destined for US refineries.
To do it, they worked with Chad “President for life,” Idriss Deby, a corrupt despot who has been accused of feeding US-supplied arms to the Darfur rebels. Deby joined Washington’s Pan Sahel Initiative run by the Pentagon’s US-European Command, to train his troops to fight “Islamic terrorism.” The majority of the tribes in Darfur region are Islamic.
Supplied with US military aid, training and weapons, in 2004 Deby launched the initial strike that set off the conflict in Darfur, using members of his elite Presidential Guard who originate from the province, providing the men with all terrain vehicles, arms and anti-aircraft guns to Darfur rebels fighting the Khartoum government in the southwest Sudan. The US military support to Deby in fact had been the trigger for the Darfur bloodbath. Khartoum reacted and the ensuing debacle was unleashed in full tragic force.
Washington-backed NGO’s and the US Government claim unproven genocide as a pretext to ultimately bring UN/NATO troops into the oilfields of Darfur and south Sudan. Oil, not human misery, is behind Washington’s new interest in Darfur.
The “Darfur genocide” campaign began in 2003, the same time the Chad-Cameroon pipeline oil began to flow. The US now had a base in Chad to go after Darfur oil and, potentially, co-opt China’s new oil sources. Darfur is strategic, straddling Chad, Central African Republic, Egypt and Libya.
US military objectives in Darfur – and the Horn of Africa more widely – are being served at present by the US and NATO backing of the African Union troops in Darfur. There NATO provides ground and air support for AU troops who are categorised as “neutral” and “peacekeepers.” Sudan is at war on three fronts, each country – Uganda, Chad, and Ethiopia – with a significant US military presence and ongoing US military programs. The war in Sudan involves both US covert operations and US trained “rebel” factions coming in from South Sudan, Chad, Ethiopia and Uganda.
The completion of the US and World Bank-financed oil pipeline from Chad to the Cameroon coast was designed as one part of a far grander Washington scheme to control the oil riches of central Africa from Sudan to the entire Gulf of Guinea.
But Washington’s erstwhile pal, Chad’s President for Life, Idriss Deby, began to get unhappy with his small share of the US-controlled oil profits. When he and the Chad Parliament decided in early 2006 to take more of the oil revenues to finance military operations and beef up its army, new World Bank President, Iraq war architect, Paul Wolfowitz, moved to suspend loans to the country. Then that August, 2006, after Deby had won re-election, he created Chad’s own oil company, SHT, and threatened to expel Chevron and Malaysia’s Petronas for not paying taxes owed, and demanding a 60% share of the Chad oil pipeline. In the end he came to terms with the oil companies, but winds of change were blowing.
Deby also faced growing internal opposition from a Chad rebel group, United Front for Change, known under its French name as FUC, which he claims is being covertly funded by Sudan. This region is a very complex part of the world of war. The FUC has based itself in Darfur.
Into this unstable situation, Beijing has shown up in Chad with a full coffer of aid money in hand. In late January, 2007, Chinese President Hu Jintao made a state visit to Sudan and to Cameroon among other African states. In 2006 China’s leaders visited no less than 48 African states. In August 2006 Beijing hosted Chad’s Foreign Minister for talks and resumption of formal diplomatic ties cut in 1997. China has begun to import oil from Chad as well as Sudan. Not that much oil, but if Beijing has its way, that will soon change.
In April, 2007, Chad’s Foreign Minister announced that talks with China over greater China participation in Chad’s oil development were “progressing well.” He referred to the terms the Chinese seek for oil development, calling them, “much more equal partnerships than those we are used to having.”
The Chinese economic presence in Chad, ironically, may be more effective in calming the fighting and displacement in Darfur than any African Union or UN troop presence ever could. That would not be welcome for some people in Washington and at Chevron headquarters.
These moves are but part of the vast China effort to secure “oil at the source” across Africa. Oil is also the prime factor in US Africa policy today. George W. Bush’s interest in Africa includes a new US base in Sao Tome/Principe 124 miles off the Gulf of Guinea from which it can control Gulf of Guinea oilfields from Angola in the south to Congo, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon and Nigeria. That just happens to be the very same areas where recent Chinese diplomatic and investment activity has focussed.
“West Africa’s oil has become of national strategic interest to us,” stated US Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, Walter Kansteiner already back in 2002. Darfur and Chad are but an extension of the US Iraq policy “with other means” – control of oil everywhere. China is challenging that control “everywhere,” especially in Africa. It amounts to a new undeclared Cold War over oil.
America, with undrilled reserves, is seeking, by whatever means, to control large swathes of the oil carrying geology of this planet, by whatever means, and no number of deaths, starvation, disease, will deter the current administration.
In the last few days, we have seen charges laid at the spurious International Criminal Court, in The Hague, Netherlands, against Omar al-Bashir, the ruling president of Sudan. There is/was hardly any mention in the western press of the ethnic cleansing perpetrated against the Serbs by U.S.-supported leaders like Tudjman and Izetbegovic during and after the U.S.-sponsored wars. Similarly, no mention is made of the ethnic tolerance and diversity that existed in President Milosevic’s Yugoslavia. By 1999, all that was left of Yugoslavia was Montenegro and Serbia. Readers are never told that this rump nation was the only remaining multi-ethnic society among the various former Yugoslav republics, the only place where Serbs, Albanians, Croats, Gorani, Jews, Egyptians, Hungarians, Roma, and numerous other ethnic groups could live together with some measure of security and tolerance.
Serbia subsequently endured 78 days of around-the-clock massive NATO bombing, no mention of how it caused the loss of thousands of lives, injured and maimed thousands more, contaminated much of the land and water with depleted uranium, and destroyed much of the country’s public sector industries and infrastructure-while leaving all the private Western corporate structures perfectly intact. was delineated in detail in the western press.
The Rambouillet Agreement was important for the debate about Kosovo War. However, the whole agreement was not revealed to the public until several months had passed after the beginning of the war and mainstream media reporters seldom if ever were aware of its contents. However, the agreement was leaked onto the Internet about the time when the war started and many non-mainstream reporters and NGO activists were referring to it in their commentaries on war. Since June 1999 when the bombing ended, when the NATO Kosovo Force (KFOR) occupied Kosovo, then an integral part of then-Yugoslavia, Kosovo has been under a United Nations mandate, UN Security Council Resolution 1244. Russia and China also agreed to that mandate, which specifies the role of KFOR to ensure cessation of inter-ethnic fighting and atrocities between the Serb minority population, others and the Kosovo Albanian Islamic majority. Under 1244 Kosovo would remain part of Serbia pending a peaceful resolution of its status. That UN Resolution has been ignored by the US, German and EU parties.
Germany’s and Washington’s prompt recognition of Kosovo’s independence in February 2008, significantly, came days after elections for President in Serbia confirmed pro-Washington Boris Tadic had won a second four year term. With Tadic’s post secured, Washington could count on a compliant Serbian reaction to its support for Kosovo. To date that seems the case. The US strategic agenda for Kosovo is primarily military, and its prime focus is against Russia and for control of oil flows from the Caspian Sea to the Middle East into Western Europe. By declaring its independence, Washington gains a weak state which it can fully control. So long as it remained a part of Serbia, that NATO military control would be politically insecure. Today Kosovo is controlled as a military satrapy of NATO, whose KFOR has 16,000 troops there for a tiny population of 2 millions.
US-NATO military control of Kosovo serves several purposes for Washington’s greater geo-strategic agenda. First it enables greater US control over potential oil and gas pipeline routes into the EU from the Caspian and Middle East as well as control of the transport corridors linking the EU to the Black Sea. It also protects the multi-billion dollar heroin trade, which, significantly, has grown to record dimensions in Afghanistan according to UN narcotics officials, since the US occupation. Kosovo and Albania are major heroin transit routes into Europe. According to a just -released 2008 US State Department annual report on international narcotics traffic, several key drug trafficking routes pass through the Balkans. Kosovo is mentioned as a key point for the transfer of heroin from Turkey and Afghanistan to Western Europe. Those drugs reportedly flow under the watchful eye of the Thaci government.
controlling oil flows and political developments from the oil-rich Middle East to Russia and Western Europe. The current US-led recognition of the self-declared Republic of Kosovo is a continuation of US policy for the Balkans since the 1999 US-led NATO bombing of Serbia, a NATO “out-of-area” deployment never approved by the UN Security Council, allegedly on the premise that Milosevic’s army was on the verge of carrying out a genocidal massacre of Kosovo Albanians.
Some months before the US-led bombing of Serbian targets, a senior US intelligence official in private conversation told Croatian officers in Zagreb about Washington’s strategy for former Yugoslavia. According to these reports, the Pentagon goal was to take control of Kosovo in order to secure a military base to control the entire Southeast European region down to the Middle East oil lands.
The Rambouillet Agreement is the name of a proposed peace agreement between then-Yugoslavia and a delegation representing the ethnic-Albanian majority population of Kosovo. It was drafted by NATO and named for Chateau Rambouillet, where it was initially proposed. The significance of the agreement lies in the fact that Yugoslavia refused to accept it, which NATO used as justification to start the Kosovo War.
Under Rambouillet, Kosovo would have been turned into a NATO colony. Milosevic might have reluctantly agreed to that, so desperate was he to avoid a full-scale NATO onslaught on the rest of Yugoslavia. To be certain that war could not be avoided, however, the U.S. delegation added a remarkable stipulation, demanding that NATO forces and personnel were to have unrestrained access to all of Yugoslavia, unfettered use of its airports, rails, ports, telecommunication services, and airwaves, all free of cost and immune from any jurisdiction by Yugoslav authorities. NATO would also have the option to modify for its own use all of Yugoslavia’s infrastructure including roads, bridges, tunnels, buildings, and utility systems. In effect, not just Kosovo but all of Yugoslavia was to be subjected to an extraterritoriality tantamount to outright colonial occupation.
The Rambouillet Treaty, written by Nato, (US) was designed to guarantee war. After the war, British Lord Gilbert, defence minister of state said in an inquiry by a House committee”
Since its dealings with the Meo tribesmen in Laos during the Vietnam era, the CIA has protected narcotics traffic in key locations in order partly to finance its covert operations. The scale of international narcotics traffic today is such that major US banks such as Citigroup are reported to derive a significant share of their profits from laundering the proceeds.Immediately after the bombing of Serbia in 1999 the Pentagon seized a 1000 acre large parcel of land in Kosovo at Uresevic near the border to Macedonia, and awarded a contract to Halliburton when Dick Cheney was CEO there, to build one of the largest US overseas military bases in the world, Camp Bondsteel, with more than 7000 troops today.
America under Dubbya, who else?
And here
Now, while the Court could not publicly agree to such a request, as it would destroy its international credibility, it would seem that quietly it follows the game plan of the US executive.
and yes, - there are US-Paraguay extradition treaties.
Nothing is what it seems in this world. It is a world of political and media controlled smoke and mirrors. No-one can be believed, all entities in power lie. Power corrupts. The competition for global resources, including narcotics, is intensifying, and will become more bloody.
Let us briefly look at Western Educational Systems.
There is a deliberate policy followed in the US, and the UK, (I haven’t looked at Europe) of dumbing down the population through the education of children, and the media for the adult population.
More and more quangos interfering in personal freedoms, with ever more banal recommendations, - ever more banal news casts, that seek to hide global problems, and banal programming of “entertainment””The conditioning of Modern American Society began with John Dewy, a Psychologist, a Fabian Socialist, and “The Father of Progressive Education”. Dewy used the psychology developed by Leipzig and Wilhelm Wundt, and believed that through a stimulus-response approach, (like Pavlov) students could be conditioned to a new social order”
Read “The Leipzig Connection. The Systematic Destruction of American Education”, by Lionni and Klass.
Or read the following link.This is a 738 page pdf and may take some time
Google “B F Skinner” and “Skinnerian methods”The techniques demonstrated in the above publications have been adapted by this current Fabian/labour government in the UK. Past school exam papers are all available on line. Compare for yourselves.
Current practice is to modulize the learning process, shallow as it is, and proceed through these modules over a period of many months.
I can run a mile in well under 4 minutes, if I am allowed to run at intervals of 60 yards every other day over several months, but I would be useless in a proper mile run competition, as present school leavers are for current employment conditions.
This disgusting Fabian State has progressively undermined the authority of parents, teachers, the police, and most other structures of civil authority, to the point where society is on the point of collapse in many areas. At the same time, the Fabian Executive have pushed through legislation that while eliminating long held freedoms of the majority, has systematically elevated the Executive beyond the reach of the laws of the land. This is all following the rules laid out in Brussels for the “rights” of EU Executives.
Ultimately a Fabian State will be a “Failed State”, under UN current definitions!
Incompetent state structures have been put in place, at monumental expense, to substitute for the State Destroyed structures, those of the “family”, primarily, and continue to grow their legal mandate for ever more state intrusion into the personal lives of the citizens, all in the name of social cohesion, which the Fabian thought processes have set out to, and succeeded in, destroying/undermining in the first place.
This is well planned, and has been quite deliberate, and is well outlined in many excellent blogs.
Control, and privacy intrusion feature strongly.
In the overall planning process, which is becoming more and more evident, the brainwashed, deliberately dumbed down sheeple will be conscripted, chipped, and killed, and will always suffer, and probably never know the reason.
It is for this reason that ultimately the internet will become controlled, and we will be unable to speak like this. Governments in the west are working towards such ends. Freedoms are legislated away on a weekly basis.
Now to spread the basis of thought. Consider this:-
Eight Ideal Conditions for The Flowering of Autocracy
The three fictional works I have described, when combined with those rare political writers who approach autocratic form from the point of view of technology (Jacques Ellul, Ivan Illich, Guy Debord, Herbert Marcuse), begin to yield a system of preconditions from which we can expect monolithic systems of control to emerge. These may be institutional autocracies or dictatorships. For the moment, it will be simpler to use the dictatorship model.
Imagine that like some kind of science fiction dictator you intended to rule the world. You would probably have pinned over your desk a list something like this:
Eliminate personal knowledge.
Make it hard for people to know about themselves, how they function, what a human being is, or how a human fits into wider, natural systems. This will make it, impossible for the human to separate natural from artificial, real from unreal. You provide the answers to all questions.
Eliminate points of comparison.
Comparisons can be found in earlier societies, older language forms and cultural artefacts, including print media. Eliminate or museumize indigenous cultures, wilderness and nonhuman life forms. Re-create internal human experience—instincts, thoughts, and spontaneous, varied feelings—so that it will not evoke the past
Separate people from each other.
Reduce interpersonal communication through life-styles that emphasise separateness. When people gather together, be sure it is for a prearranged experience that occupies all their attention at once. Spectator sports are excellent, so are circuses, elections, and any spectacles in which focus is outward and interpersonal exchange is subordinated to mass experience.
Unify experience, especially encouraging mental experience at the expense of sensory experience.
Separate people’s minds from their bodies, as in sense-deprivation experiments, thus clearing the mental channel for implantation. Idealise the mind. Sensory experience cannot be eliminated totally, so it should be driven into narrow areas. An emphasis on sex as opposed to sense may be useful because it is powerful enough to pass for the whole thing and it has a placebo effect.
Occupy the -mind.
Once people are isolated in their minds, fill the brain with prearranged experience and thought. Content is less important than the fact of the mind being filled. Free-roaming thought is to be discouraged at all costs, because it is difficult to control.
Encourage drug use.
Recognise that total repression is impossible and so expressions of revolt must be contained on the personal level. Drugs will fill in the cracks of dissatisfaction, making people unresponsive to organised expressions of resistance.
Centralise knowledge and information.
Having isolated people from each other and minds from bodies; eliminated points of comparison; discouraged sensory experience; and invented technologies to unify and control experience, speak. At this point whatever comes from outside will enter directly into all brains at the same time with great power and believability.
Redefine happiness and the meaning of life in terms of new and increasingly uprooted philosophy.
Once you’ve established the prior seven conditions, this one is easy. Anything makes sense in a void. All channels are open, receptive and unquestioning. Formal mind structuring is simple. Most important, avoid naturalistic philosophies, they lead to uncontrollable awareness. The least resistible philosophies are the most arbitrary ones, those that make sense only in terms of themselves.
An Example:-
Separate people from each other.
Reduce interpersonal communication through life-styles that emphasise separateness. When people gather together, be sure it is for a prearranged experience that occupies all their attention at once. Spectator sports are excellent, so are circuses, elections, and any spectacles in which focus is outward and interpersonal exchange is subordinated to mass experience.
Demonise tobacco smoking and smokers. Prohibit smoking in ALL public venues.
At first glance, this might appear to be off topic; the connection is not immediately obvious. Please let me cite a few examples:
A coffee house, a social gathering place, morphs into an Internet cafe, where people sit alone, at individual computers.
Bingo parlours close, even those that provide separate, walled-off sections for smokers and non-smokers. In addition to depriving people of social interaction, it also deprives social service organisations of a source of funding.
Witness the current demise of the English Pub The traditional/socialising - talking shop of white English indigines. “To Let” signs everywhere.
It creates an “us vs. them” crack in the social fabric. Instead of a non-hostile division between smokers and Non-smokers, it creates hostility between smokers and ANTI-smokers. (Smoking is bad, therefore smokers are bad people.)
More thoughts on the ongoing indoctrination.
Propaganda NOW AND THEN by Gilles D’Amrey
BushCo. and Rove INNOCULATES the United States citizens against the words that describe them, rendering our language MEANINGLESS. 1984, Orwell.
‘.Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, took the techniques he learned in the CPI directly to Madison Avenue and became an outspoken proponent of propaganda as a tool for democratic government. ‘It was, of course, the astounding success of propaganda during the war that opened the eyes of the intelligent few in all departments of life to the possibilities of regimenting the public mind,’ wrote Bernays in his 1928 bombshell Propaganda. ‘It was only natural, after the war ended, that intelligent persons should ask themselves whether it was not possible to apply a similar technique to the problems of peace.”
The intelligent few….regimenting the public mind… Edward Bernays [1891-1995] is also known as the Father of Spin (6) and the godfather of modern public relations (the “father” of public relations is Ivy Lee whose firm, Ivy Lee & T.J. Ross, was hired for $25,000 a year by the German conglomerate, I.G. Farben, which invited him to meet Hitler and Goebbels. His son, James Lee went to work for Farben in Berlin.)
The Institute for Propaganda Analysis, founded in 1937 to educate the public about the nature of propaganda, identified “seven basic propaganda devices: Name-Calling, Glittering Generality, Transfer, Testimonial, Plain Folks, Card Stacking, and Band Wagon.”
The techniques of Glittering Generality and Name-Calling are of particular interest as they are the two faces of the device that allows the forming of the public mind by manipulating, “guiding” people’s emotions. The former relies on positive words such as freedom, democracy, liberty, patriotism, civilisation, peace-loving country or people, etc. — all words that have been extensively repeated in the past few weeks by officials and main media alike — that have a potent commonality; that is, their meaning differs according to different people but they have a positive connotation. In reverse, Name-Calling emphasises the negative, thus rousing fear, intolerance, profound dislike, even hate in people. Words like evil-doers, terrorists, fundamentalists, ethnic-cleansing, genocide — and depending on the circumstances, socialist, queer, gay, communist, liberal, radical, etc. — help create the “enemy.” These “good names” and “bad names” are used deliberately and strategically to manipulate public opinion in order to achieve a specific goal (sell a product, create or cancel a policy or a law (cf. the Patriot Act of October 2001), go to war, discredit dissenters, etc.)
Goebbels, the mastermind of the Nazi propaganda machine was said to have read the publications of the Institute for Propaganda Analysis and carefully studied the techniques used by Madison Avenue.
We’ve come a long way since the 1930s and those studies. The techniques have been refined and perfected. Goebbels used to say that “Domination of the street [was] the first step to state power.” Today, the first step to state power is domination of the media; a media, utterly controlled by mega-corporations, that takes advantage of the collective ignorance to disseminate the manipulated messages. In the past, dissenters like Mark Twain, Henry David Thoreau or Randolph Bourne were vilified and silenced. Today, they are mostly ignored or easily discredited in a few words. Here is an example in a recent article published in The New York Times, “Counterpoint to Unity: Dissent” (note the usage of the words Unity (Glittering Generality) and Dissent (Name-Calling):
This is worthy of study
You should now be aware of the manipulations 24/7, and 7/7, and be able to form some sort of defence.
If you pull a false flag act, we won’t believe you
Enough on the failings of western education and society. Denied as they are by all politicians, they are well documented, and available.
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I would now like to re-visit the economic themes mentioned earlier, in relation to oil.
Neoclassical Economics, - the overwhelming predominant strain, still cannot adequately explain economic growth. Two errors are interconnected.
The Economist Robert Solow wrote a paper, “A Contribution to the Theory of Economic Growth”, Feb, 1956..
This is now the basis of the standard model by which neoclassical economics explains growth. His model gave a far superior explanation to previous models, but it also created a myth that proved just as misleading as the models it replaced. Solow was awarded a Nobel Prize..
In the same year, Hubbert published his ground breaking paper on Peak Oil.
The judges got the wrong guy.
In the 1950s, economists believed that economic growth could be explained by rising inputs of capital and labour. Solows models showed that growth could not be explained by merely these two, and therefor there must be something else.
He took a formula called the “Cobb-Douglas” functions, that had previously been used in Micro Economics, at Company level, and applied those functions to the US economy as a whole.
Throughout his adapted models, Solow assigned critical assumptions to the value of labour and capital in the Cobb-Douglas models.
Feeding these assumptions into the model, Solow then tested them against the actual performance of the US Economy. What he found was that the actual growth of the economy vastly exceeded his predictions.
The difference between his predictions and reality was vast, but this did not trouble Solow or the swathes of classical economists who used his models. The discrepancy was explained as “the effects of technical advances”, and was known as the Solow Residual, and there it ended.
Amazingly, this situation stood until the late 1970s. At that time, after the first Oil Shock, the German Physicist Professor Reiner Kummel of the University of Wurzburg realised the error in Solow, Cobb Douglas models, and decided to investigate. “If an influential discipline like economics ignores the first and second laws of thermodynamics, which are effectively the construction of this universe, then it must be corrected”.
Together with two respected German economists, Professor Wolfgang Eichhorn and Dr Dietmar Lindenberger, Kummel set out to devise a model that would give appropriate weight to “Energy”, and explain economic growth more accurately.
Solows models only valued energy according to the input cost of that energy, not the joules of energy released by the input.
Energy costs in the GDP had remained at 5% of GDP for decades, and this had been used by Solow models, which assumed therefore that a 1% increase in energy input would translate into a 0.05% increase in GDP
Kummel converted all the various inputs of energy into petajoules per year.
The difficulty then was to work out the relative weights of factors that were measured in un-related units, - apples and pears. He developed a new production function called LINEX, to replace the Cobb-Douglas, which normalised the various factors of production.
Linex was then applied to the German and Japanese economies. The actual results almost entirely eliminated the Solow Residual. They showed that the importance of “Energy” in calculating GDP was TEN TIMES greater than that implied by Solow.
The results were published, “The Need to Reintegrate the Natural Sciences with Economics”, Bio Science, Aug. 2001, - Charles Hall, Dietmar Lindenberger, Reiner Kummel, Tim Kroeger and Wolfgang Eiichhorn..
In interview, Kummel said ”Understanding the paramount importance of energy in the economy is the modern equivalent of the revelation that the earth goes round the sun, not the other way round. Yet most economists and politicians who take their advice still believe the sun goes round the earth, and this translates to bad policy. The practical impact of this is profound. Because the price of energy does not relate to its productive power, we are wasting the most productive power on earth!”
Professor Robert Ayres took Kummels work a step further, to include advances in thermodynamic efficiency that had been achieved during the 20th century.
Power stations in 1900 were 4% efficient in the conversion of input energy to output electrical energy, while power stations in 2000 were 35% efficient. Similarly with internal combustion engines.
He realised that advances in efficiency led to lower costs and prices, which in turn stimulated demand, boosted profits and raised investment, so leading to fresh advances in efficiency. A positive feedback loop, an idea used widely in economics.
Ayres and his co-authors spent years researching historical rates of thermodynamic efficiency in the main energy consuming sectors, and created an index to measure “useful work” in the economy, fed these into his model, based on Kummels LINEX function, producing forecasts that matched actual economic growth in America and Japan for the entire 20th century, without recalibration, almost perfectly.
Robert U Ayres, Benjamin Wart. “Accounting for Growth: The Role of Physical Work, Structural Changes and Economic Dynamics”. Feb 2004.
Ayres models correlation with reality is 14 times higher than the original Solow models.
And the bigger the correlation, the bigger the trouble, the dislocation, the food crises, the economic collapse, when peak oil finally becomes the entirety of the four horsemen of the apocalypse.While it is my assertion that todays oil price has a significant element of futures manipulation content, and should therefor fall given the amount of political interest being shown, should prices of this magnitude persist, the standard of living for western economies would rapidly fall to levels last seen in 1910. And this via food shortages, transport blockades, strikes, breakdown of government and municipal functions, rioting, mass unemployment, fuel rationing,……………………………………..! in a time period of 2 to 3 years.The speculators have given the planet a wake-up call. At best we are single digit years away from declining output of liquid hydrocarbons. No western nation has a coherent energy policy that seeks effectively to mitigate the effects of Peak Oil, let alone to replace the energy of these liquid hydrocarbons from other sources/technologies, particularly in transportation, except perhaps Israel, and I doubt their ability to achieve the changes in time
And yet politicians insist on debating false flags such as “climate change”, Kyoto, CO2 emissions, little realising that the four horsemen are making their plans.
A compliant, supine media is similarly silent on this topic, indeed they continue to bang the drum on CO2, climate change, etc.
You have to wonder!The global financial crisis, which will reach fever pitch by this winter, has been planned for decades by shadowy parties, and implemented in the main by cheer leader Alan Greenspan, ex of the US Fed.
In stark contrast to his economic writings before he joined the Fed, once appointed, he was not only the major campaigner for the repeal of the Glass Seagal act, which was finally repealed in 1999, which separated banking and brokerage businesses, but also the main promoter of Fiat currency issuance excesses. In his final years, his refusal to undertake the Feds legislated financial entity oversight obligations amounted to criminal malfeasance.With the repeal of the Glass Seagal Act, Wall Street entities were free to wage their financial alchemy through various financial instruments, accompanied by volumous praise from Greenspan, throughout the globe, with the consequences we see today.
This is not to lay the entire blame on the USA, banksters throughout the world were equally culpable in dangerous lending practices.National Economists, well knew the consequences of the over issuance of fiat currencies, and this over issuance, via the dollar/oil bridge, has been exported globally, creating global inflation. No voices were raised in alarm, one of the first to realise the problems was, ironically Fidel Castro, in 2003.Earlier in his career, Greenspan proclaimed, “Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth”. He therefore knew EXACTLY what he was proposing when he came out in favour of tax cuts at a time when the US was going to be funding a forever war.Alan Greenspan knows the truth. He did not follow it as public policy, nonetheless, he knows:“In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold. If everyone decided, for example, to convert all his bank deposits to silver, copper, or any other good, and thereafter declined to accept checks as payment for goods, bank deposits would lose their purchasing power and government-created bank credit would be worthless as a claim on goods. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists’ tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists’ antagonism toward the gold standard.” [Alan Greenspan, Gold and Economic Freedom (1966)]The “Federal Reserve” is a not “Federal.” It is private - and Greenspan personally assured the destruction of the housing market when he blew this bubble up to its massive climax.I remember well the day he gave the speech that lit the fuse. He effectively said:
“If you’re in a 30 year mortgage, you’re a fool…adjustable rate mortgages are the path to riches.”
The FED has been feeding us bogus numbers. All of the numbers released by the government relative to the economy are false – chosen to create appearances and outcomes, not chosen based in reality. The entire government has become politicised, and the truth is only revealed when it’s too late to do anything about it.
Greenspan lied about the actual rate of inflation, which it has recently been revealed by Richard Fisher, the President of the Dallas Federal Reserve, was actually a half point higher than the government was telling us at the time they were driving mortgage lending rates to zero.
At a time when the Fed SHOULD have been taking away the punchbowl - Greenspan made a personal appeal to be reckless with your home financing and flip into a three year or five year ARM - borrow against your equity - and spend it.
Read this from Greenspan in his earlier days
This financial alchemy, coupled with oil futures speculation by the usual culprits, the global warming carbon credit trading scams by the same culprits, and the consequent food price rises, (via “bio-fuels”and the grain stores in the arctic circle, as a counter to the terminator seeds of Monsanto et al, bringing global food crises, and furthering US hegemony, we begin to see the game plan evolving.
This last week has been a revelation in the financial markets of both the US and the UK.
The collapse and seizure of Indymac in the US by the authorities, with queues of deposit holders in the streets bringing memories of Northern Rock.
The frantic efforts of Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke to support Freddy and Fannie, at, ultimately the taxpayers expense, which led to high opera in the Senate Banking Committee, where Senator Christopher Dodd, Senate Banking Committee Chairman, and Senator Richard Shelby mauled Paulson over his proposals to provide taxpayer backing to Freddy and Fannie.
Fannie Mae slid 27 percent, its biggest drop since at least 1980, to $7.07 in New York Stock Exchange composite trading, bringing its slump in the past week to 60 percent. Freddie Mac fell 26 percent to $5.26, and is down 61 percent from a week ago. These slumps represented the opinion of the markets on Paulsons proposals!
Following Bernankes public statement the banking stocks should rally, in order that they could sell equity to raise fresh capital to strengthen their balance sheets, a list was published by the SEC, showing stocks that could NOT be shorted for the week commencing 21st July 2008. The SEC said the order could be extended, but for no longer than 30 days from commencement. This would ensure a massive short covering rally in those stocks, and would help in the re-financing efforts.
Ironically, the list comprises those institutions most guilty of naked short selling other institutions!
BNP Paribas Securities Corp
Bank of America Corp
Barclays PLC
Citigroup Inc
Credit Suisse Group
Daiwa Securities Group Inc
Deutsche Bank Group AG
Allianz SE
Goldman Sachs Group Inc
Royal Bank ADS
HSBC Holdings Plc ADS
JPMorgan Chase & Co
Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc
Merrill Lynch & Co Inc
Mizuho Financial Group Inc
Morgan Stanley
UBS AG
Freddie Mac
Fannie Mae
There is a strong matri-linear line from the Rothschilds family to Barclays, who in turn have shareholdings in most of the above.
J P Morgan employs ex UK PM Tony Blair as an adviser.
Citigroup has a history of drug money laundering for the CIA
Deutsche Bank, - difficult, they are traded on many foreign bourses.
Goldman Sachs, - enough said.
All goodfellas!
The institutions that are being protected by the rule changes are mainly the primary dealers.
And the primary dealers are the only conduits for the original sale of government debt such as treasury bills and bonds to the rest of the world. They are a vital component of the government’s operating cash flow. If they were to decay into a state where they could no longer fulfil this function, then what?
Two Plus Two Equals Four
Financial companies are desperate for capital but their stock prices are so low that any issuance would be dilution death for the companies. The government is desperately trying to keep the financial system together. Add that up and you get the possibility of a great manipulation.
How would the government engineer a rally in financial stocks so that these companies can sell stock to raise capital at a reasonable or at least palatable dilution level?
It might go something like this.
Since financial stocks are in such trouble they have heavy short interest; this is natural and well known and can be used to their advantage. A clever “berry” might think to introduce confusing rules that raise the cost of borrowing short stock and temporarily confuse shorts into covering and not shorting more. And this is precisely what the SEC did.
It seems innocuous to most folks, but it put stock loan desks and dealers in complete disarray. New short sellers could find no stock to borrow and many existing short sellers were forced to cover as the technical rules forced allocation of loans at much higher costs.
For example, the rebate rate on Fannie Mae (FNM) the day before the SEC announcement was 1%; the day after it was -5%. Many who were short the stock were forced to cover, thus driving the stock price up.
But this alone would only drive stock prices up so much. The clever berry needs a catalyst, one that would force panic buying into now truncated supply.
It just so happened that the new SEC rules came conveniently the day before many of these financial companies were to report earnings. If just some how these earnings were really good the match would be lit on the kindling.
So far banks have miraculously come through on their end of things. Wells Fargo (WFC) and JPMorgan (JPM) reported better than expected beaten down earnings. Things must be getting better just as the companies need capital.
What a coincidence.
But if you look at how the banks “beat” their earnings the coincidence becomes clear. WFC took the unprecedented step of extending charge-off acknowledgment from 120 days to 160 days. This allowed the bank to move less capital to loan loss reserves and report better than expected horrible earnings. And JPM was even more aggressive. It actually lowered its loan loss reserves quarter to quarter.
The list of financial companies where shorting regulations are being enforced/enhanced is precisely the banks and dealers (and FNM/Freddie Mac (FRE)) that have access to the Fed’s balance sheet (dealers through the PDCF and FNM/FRE through the recently-allowed access to the discount window). So we can speculate on the nature of the ”coincidence”: Perhaps the Fed is getting worried about the value of all that collateral these dealers have posted to the Fed balance sheet and must boost the capital of these companies to protect that value.
And now on cue FRE, a $5 billion market capitalization company wants/needs to issue $10 billion in new stock? Doesn’t that sound a little crazy? Well get ready for others to do the same because the banking system needs capital desperately and the government is there to help.
But help at the expense of who?
My, oh My!!!!
As long as the investment banks and brokers were making money engaging in naked shorting of stocks, there was no problem. However, when the bears began using the tactic against the big financials, it became time to selectively enforce the existing regulations on naked short selling!
.
This was viewed by most commenters as outrageous, the Fed was effectively deciding which banks would be thrown to the dogs, and which banks would be saved!
Predictably, this raised howls of protest, and demands for equal protection from short sellers, from all the other Banks in the US.
In a letter to Mr. Cox [the SEC chairman], the American Bankers Association, a trade group that represents the interests of 8,500 banks, said it fears short sellers will now focus on banks not covered by the new rules, many of which are already big targets of short sellers.
The Financial Services Roundtable, an organisation that represents 100 of the largest U.S. financial companies, also asked the SEC to extend the order. It wants to have all financial-services companies covered in the second week.
The absolute financial corruption evidenced on Wall Street this last week provoked this comment.
The collection of ne’er do wells, clueless dolts, political hacks, and oh, let’s just be blunt and call them what they are — total Idiots — expands into an ever larger circle.
While the Republic burns due to the unsavoury combination of incompetence, ideological rigidity, and crony capitalism, the fools and assclowns seem ever more determined to avoid any personal responsibility for the damages they have wrought. Instead, they flail about blindly, blaming everything and everyone — except their own horrific negligence.
This is financial incompetence writ on a scale far grander than anything seen for centuries.
As a nation, our institutions have failed us: Under Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve slept through the most reckless and irresponsible expansion of bank lending in history for reasons of ideological purity. His opposition to the Fed’s regulatory role reached the point of malfeasance long ago. History is unlikely to be kind to the Maestro.
There is a choice to be made: Either we regulate the Banks, or leave it to the vagaries of the free markets to punish those who trade with, or place their assets in the wrong institutions. But for God’s sake, do not give us the worst of both worlds — do not allow banks the freedom to make horrific but preventable mistakes (i.e., only lending money to those who can pay it back), but then expect the taxpayers to foot the trillion dollar bill.
That’s not capitalism, its not socialism, its not regulation, and its sure as hell isn’t what free markets are. Our language is insufficient to describe this hodge-podge system, other than to call it a random patchwork of quasi-capitalism, quadrennial-socialism, and politics as usual. IDEOLOGICAL IDIOCY is the only phrase I can muster that has any resonance with the daily insanity.
We have entered into a fit of Orwellian madness: The American Capitalists, long the globe’s leading advocates for free markets, have become near Socialists. Halfway around the world, the Chinese Communists have picked up the baton, and are moving rapidly towards a form of Capitalism. Ironically, it is the once largest communist nations — the Chinese and the Russians — who hold much of Fannie and Freddie’s paper.
Hey comrades, who’s selling the rope to whom?
Perhaps the rescue of “Phony and Fraudy” are not so much a bail out of American homeowners as it is a desperate attempt to stay in the good graces of our friendly global bankers. We are the world’s largest debtor nation, and as such, we depend upon the kindness of strangers — be they Japanese or Europeans or Abu Dhabians — or even former communists.
Back in the States, something beyond cognitive dissonance is occurring — this is full blown case of dementia unfolding in the public sphere. When this era of excess and absurdity is treated by historians in the future, the question I expect to be asked most is not why many of these people weren’t jailed for their financial felonies. Rather, I expect them to wonder why so many of these folk weren’t placed in protective custody, and heavily medicated, for the only rational explanation for their statements and behaviours is that they have gone so far beyond the bend as to be completely and totally insane.
Massively over-leveraged companies? Blame short sellers.
Wildly under-capitalised financial firms? Blame rumours.
Heinously poor corporate management? Blame a Senator.
It is as if someone is running around Washington D.C. with a ball-peen hammer, smacking senior government officials on their skulls. If you find the standard finger pointing hard to fathom, perhaps blunt head trauma is a better explanations for the absurdities proffered.
Books will be written about this period of time, and our descendants will wonder in awe as to how this was allowed to happen.
Tulips got nothing on us!
Its not just the total dollar value of the losses that have exceeded all other global fits of financial madness combined, but rather, how so many warning signs were so blithely ignored by so many and for so long. What was wrong with these people, the authors and historians will wonder. Did the antibiotics in the food supply drive them mad? Did the High Fructose Corn Syrup compromise their ability to think? Some form of viral plague? Roid rage? What else could have created such a mass delusion amongst not just the populace, but their leadership and institutions?
Indy Mac goes belly up, having lost $900 million this year alone. Its shares fell 87% in 2007 and then its value dropped (on top of last year’s collapse) another 95% this year-to-date. The stock fell to 28 cents yesterday. Some estimates of the total bad loans made by this somewhere in the neighborhood of $30 billion dollars — and the Office of Thrift Supervision blames a senator who is investigating how much of the FDIC’s $53 Billion this is going to eat up, with Wall Street estimates ranging from 15% to 30%. The towering incompetence of OTS is incomprehensible, but it is their colossal gall that is truly stupefying.
From beyond the grave, Adam Smith does not know whether to weep or retch.
Let me put it simply
“Systemic Hazard”
The problem is that most, if not all, of these financial institutions are insolvent, unable to trade, bankrupt, if all the off-balance sheet items were returned to the balance sheet, and toxic paper not yet traded to the Fed, is marked to market. They are valueless.
In order to keep the wheels rolling, regulators must look the other way, and the Fed must aid in the process, in order to give the Banks time to trade profitably in order to slowly, over a number of years, repair the balance sheet. This round of fund raising is probably the last chance at selling shares in order to shore up the balance sheets. Should investors get burned from this round, as they did from earlier rounds, and they will, I don’t see any being eager to invest in further dilutions of their already deep underwater capital.
There are trillions of $ of toxic paper circulating, in grave danger of counter-party default, that could trip the entire global system into crash, from one wrong move. Until it is all unwound (years) the world walks a tight-rope, largely blindfolded.
Politicians, Gov’t Agencies, SEC, all have been corrupted. The laws are merely an inconvenience, to be shrugged off, or laughed at, or bought off. Senate committees, regulators, Over-sight entities, to a man have been asleep/blind/corrupted at the wheel.
U.S. foreclosure filings increased 53 percent in June from a year earlier and bank seizures rose the most on record as deteriorating property values and higher rates on adjustable mortgages forced more people to give up their homes…
Bank seizures rose 171 percent, the most since the Irvine, California-based company began tracking statistics on default notices, warnings of a scheduled auction and repossessions in January 2005.
“The foreclosure problem is getting worse and will stay with us well into the next decade,” Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Economy.com in West Chester, Pennsylvania, said in an interview…
Foreclosure activity is the highest since the Great Depression of the 1930s, said Rick Sharga, RealtyTrac’s vice president of marketing…
“We’ll have 1 million bank-owned properties by the end of the year,” Sharga said in an interview. “That will represent between one-fourth and one-third
