Fiscal Fitness

By almost every economic and financial measure, the U.S. economy has been steadily declining for many years. But most Americans are so tied into "the matrix" that they can only understand the cheerful propaganda that is endlessly being spoon-fed to them by the mainstream media. The economic collapse is not a single event. The economic collapse has been happening, it is is happening right now, and it will continue to happen.

We are living in the greatest debt bubble in the history of the world, and once it completely bursts there will be no going back to how things were before. Right now, we are living in a "credit card economy." As long as we can keep borrowing more money, most people think that things are just fine. But eventually there comes a point when the game is over, and we are rapidly approaching that point as a nation.

At first, living on credit can be a lot of fun. You can live a much higher standard of living than you otherwise would be able to. But inevitably a day of reckoning comes. If the federal government and the American people were forced at this moment to live within their means, the U.S. economy would immediately plunge into a depression. But our politicians and the mainstream media continue to perpetuate the fiction that we can live in this credit card economic fantasy land indefinitely. And most Americans could not care less about the future. As long as "things are good" today, they don't really think much about what the future will hold. As a result of our very foolish short-term thinking, we have now run up a national debt of 16.4 trillion dollars. It is the largest debt in the history of the world, and it has gotten more than 23 times larger since Jimmy Carter first entered the White House.

Since Barack Obama entered the White House, the U.S. government has run a budget deficit of well over a trillion dollars every single year, and we have stolen more than 100 million dollars from our children and our grandchildren every single hour of every single day. It is the biggest theft of all time. What we are doing to our children and our grandchildren is beyond criminal.

Our politicians are stealing from the future in order to make the present look better. During Obama's first term, the federal government accumulated more debt than it did under the first 42 U.S presidents combined. If you started paying off just the new debt that the U.S. has accumulated during the Obama administration at the rate of one dollar per second, it would take more than 184,000 years to pay it off.

The Rothschild family is slowly but surely placing their Central banks established in every country of this world, giving them incredible amount of wealth and power. In the year of 2000 there were seven countries without a Rothschild owned Central Bank:

Afghanistan
Iraq
Sudan
Libya
Cuba
North Korea
Iran

It is not a coincidence that these countries, which are listed above were and are still being under attack by the western media, since one of the main reasons these countries have been under attack in the first place is because they do not have a Rothschild owned Central Bank yet. The first step in having a Central Bank establish in a country is to get them to accept an outrageous loans, which puts the country in debt of the Central Bank and under the control of the Rothschilds. If the country does not accept the loan, the leader of this particular country will be assassinated and a Rothschild aligned leader will be put into the position, and if the assassination does not work, the country will be invaded and have a Central Bank established with force all under the name of terrorism.

Rothschild owned Central Bank:

Central banks are illegally-created private banks that are owned by the Rothschild banking family. The family has been around for more than 230 years and has slithered its way into each country on this planet, threatened every world leader and their governments and cabinets with physical and economic death and destruction, and then placed their own people in these central banks to control and manage each country’s pocketbook. Worse, the Rothschilds also control the machinations of each government at the macro level, not concerning themselves with the daily vicissitudes of our individual personal lives. Except when we get too far out of line.

The only countries left in 2003 without a Central Bank owned by the Rothschild Family were:

Sudan
Libya
Cuba
North Korea
Iran

The Attacks of September 11th were an inside job to invade Afghanistan and Iraq to then establish a Central Bank in those countries. After the instigated protests and riots in the Arab countries the Rothschild finally paved their way into establishing Central Banks, and getting rid of many leaders, which put them into more power.

The only countries left in 2011 without a Central Bank owned by the Rothschild Family are:

Cuba
North Korea
Iran

Our financial system is actually designed to create government debt. The banksters that helped create the Federal Reserve intended to permanently enslave the U.S. government to a perpetually expanding spiral of debt, and their plans worked. At this point, the U.S. national debt is more than 5000 times larger than it was when the privateFederal Reserve was first created. If nothing is done about our exploding debt, it is only a matter of time before we reach financial oblivion.

It is not just the U.S. government that is drowning in debt. All over the United States state and local governments are on the verge of bankruptcy. The only way that most of our state and local governments can keep going at this point is to also "kick the can" down the road some more. And of course most of the rest of us are drowning in debt as well.

40 years ago, the total amount of debt in the U.S. economic system (government + business + consumer) was less than 2 trillion dollars. Today, the total amount of debt in the U.S. economic system has grown to more than 55 trillion dollars. The good news is that U.S. GDP is now more than 12 times larger than it was 40 years ago. The bad news is that the total amount of debt in our financial system is now more than 30 times larger than it was 40 years ago...

At the same time that we are going into so much debt, our ability to produce wealth continues to decline. Overall, the value of the U.S. dollar has declined by more than 96 percent since the Federal Reserve was first created. As the cost of living continues to go up and wages continue to go down, millions of American families have fallen out of the middle class and into poverty. The number of Americans on food stamps has grown from about 17 million in the year 2000 to more than 47 million today. More than a million public school students in the United States are homeless. This is the first time that has ever happened in our history.

The most honest three and a half minutes of television, EVER...

Money

Most people think of money as simply a medium of exchange that makes economic transactions more convenient, but money is also a form of social control. If you are like most Americans, you either got up this morning and went to work (to make money) or to school (to learn the skills that you will need to make money). We spend a great deal of our lives pursuing the almighty dollar, and there are literally millions of laws, rules and regulations about how we earn our money, about how we spend our money and about how much of our money the government gets to take from us.

Not that money is a bad thing in itself. Without money, it would be really hard to have a modern society. Unfortunately, our money is based on debt, and debt levels in the United States have exploded to absolutely unprecedented levels in recent years. The borrower is the servant of the lender, and if you are like most Americans, nearly every major purchase that you make in your life is going to involve debt. Do you want to get a college education so that you can get a "good job"? You are told to get a student loan. Do you want a car? You are encouraged to get an auto loan and to stretch out the payments for as long as possible. Do you want a home? You are probably going to end up with a big fat mortgage, and on and on and on. The cold, hard truth of the matter is that most Americans are debt slaves. Most of us spend our entire lives trapped in an endless cycle of debt that we never escape until we die, and meanwhile our years of hard labor are greatly enriching those that own our debts.

Have you ever found yourself wondering why you can never seem to get ahead financially no matter how hard you work? Well, it is probably because you have gotten yourself enslaved to debt. On the debt side of things, how much does your credit card company earn if you carry just an average of a $5,000 credit card balance, paying, say, 22% annual interest rate (compounding monthly) for the next 10 years? The answer, including the cost of monthly compounding, is $44,235, or about 9 times what it appears to cost you at face value. But a large percentage of Americans never pay off their credit cards at all. They make small payments each month, but then they just keep on adding to their balances. In the end, that is financial suicide. If you carry an "average balance" on your credit cards each month, and those credit cards have an "average" interest rate, you could end up paying millions of dollars to the credit card companies by the end of your life.

Let’s say you are an average American household, and you carry an average balance of $15,956 in credit card debt. Also, as an average American household, let’s assume you pay an average current rate of 12.83%. Finally, let’s assume you carry this average balance for 40 years, between ages 25 and 65. How much did your credit card company make off of you and your extreme averageness? Answer: $2,629,618.64

Approximately 46% of all Americans carry a credit card balance from month to month. How stupid can we be as a nation? When you become enslaved to the credit card companies, your toil and sweat makes them much wealthier. It is a form of slavery that does not require anyone pointing a gun at you. But we never seem to learn. Incredibly, 43 percent of all American families spend more than they earn each year.

Government debt is a collective form of debt. You may not have voted for any of the politicians that have been racking up debt in your name, but part of it still belongs to you. Since the year 2000, state and local government debt has more than doubled. These are collective debts for which we are all responsible. And of course the biggest collective debt of all is the U.S. national debt. The U.S. debt to GDP ratio has increased from 66.6 percent to 103 percent since 2007, and the U.S. government accumulated more new debt during Barack Obama's first term than it did under the first 42 U.S. presidents combined. The amount of new debt accumulated by the federal government breaks down to approximately $50,521 for every single household in the United States. If you started paying off just the new debt that the federal government has accumulated during the Obama administration at the rate of one dollar per second, it would take more than 184,000 years to pay it off.

The ultra-wealthy and the international bankers make enormous profits by lending money to all the rest of us. The global elite have up to 32 trillion dollars stashed away in offshore tax havens around the globe...

The borrower is the servant of the lender. They have gotten rich at our expense. But most people live their entire lives without ever understanding how the game is being played. Today, most Americans see that the Dow is back above 14,000 and they hear the mainstream media telling them that happy days are here again and so they just believe that things are going to turn out okay somehow. And it certainly does not help that most people seem to let others do their thinking for them. In fact, about 23% of all Americans can't even read at this point.

The Global Elite

Most of us tend to think of money as a convenient way to conduct transactions, but the truth is that it also represents power and control. And today we live in a neo-fuedalist system in which the super rich pull all the strings. A very small core group of huge banks and giant predator corporations dominate the entire global economic system. The ultra-wealthy have enough money sitting in offshore banks to buy all of the goods and services produced in the United States during the course of an entire year and still be able to pay off the entire U.S. national debt. That is an amount of money so large that it is almost incomprehensible. Under this neo-feudalist system, all the rest of us are debt slaves, including our own governments.

Everyone is drowning in debt, and all of that debt is making the ultra-wealthy even wealthier. But the ultra-wealthy don't just sit on all of that wealth. They use some of it to dominate the affairs of the nations. The ultra-wealthy own virtually every major bank and every major corporation on the planet. They use a vast network of secret societies, think tanks and charitable organizations to advance their agendas and to keep their members in line. They control how we view the world through their ownership of the media and their dominance over our education system. They fund the campaigns of most of our politicians and they exert a tremendous amount of influence over international organizations such as the United Nations, the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO.

There is little doubt about who runs the world. It is just that most people don't want to admit the truth. The ultra-wealthy don't run down and put their money in the local bank like you and I do. Instead, they tend to stash their assets in places where they won't be taxed such as the Cayman Islands. According to a report that was released last summer, the global elite have up to 32 TRILLION dollars stashed in offshore banks around the globe, representing up to $280 billion in lost income tax revenues. U.S. GDP for 2011 was about 15 trillion dollars, and the U.S. national debt is sitting at about 16 trillion dollars, so you could add them both together and you still wouldn't hit 32 trillion dollars.

That does not even count the money that is stashed in other locations that the study did not account for, and it does not count all of the wealth that the global elite have in hard assets such as real estate, precious metals, art, yachts, etc. The global elite have really hoarded an incredible amount of wealth in these troubled times. The global elite just don't have a lot of money. They also basically own just about every major bank and every major corporation on the entire planet.

The Bank for International Settlements

An immensely powerful international organization that most people have never even heard of secretly controls the money supply of the entire globe. It is called the Bank for International Settlements, and it is the central bank of central banks. It is located in Basel, Switzerland, but it also has branches in Hong Kong and Mexico City. It is essentially an unelected, unaccountable central bank of the world that has complete immunity from taxation and from national laws. Even Wikipedia admits that "it is not accountable to any single national government." The Bank for International Settlements was used to launder money for the Nazis during World War II, but these days the main purpose of the BIS is to guide and direct the centrally-planned global financial system. Today, 58 global central banks belong to the BIS, and it has far more power over how the U.S. economy (or any other economy for that matter) will perform over the course of the next year than any politician does. Every two months, the central bankers of the world gather in Basel for another "Global Economy Meeting." During those meetings, decisions are made which affect every man, woman and child on the planet, and yet none of us have any say in what goes on. The Bank for International Settlements is an organization that was founded by the global elite and it operates for the benefit of the global elite, and it is intended to be one of the key cornerstones of the emerging one world economic system. It is imperative that we get people educated about what this organization is and where it plans to take the global economy.

If you go to the official BIS website, the purposes of the organization sound fairly innocent and quite boring. But when you start looking into the details, things get much more interesting. In recent years, it has become increasingly obvious who really has power over our economy. When Barack Obama speaks, the markets usually move very little. When Ben Bernanke speaks, the markets often respond with wild gyrations.

It accomplishes monetary and financial stability through control of currencies. It currently holds 7% of the world's available foreign exchange funds, whose unit of account was switched in March of 2003 from the Swiss gold franc to Special Drawing Rights (SDR), an artificial fiat "money" with a value based on a basket of currencies (44% U.S. dollar, 34% euro, 11% Japanese yen, 11% pound sterling). The bank also controls a huge amount of gold, which it both stores and lends out, giving it great leverage over the metal's price and the marketplace power that brings, since gold is still the only universal currency. BIS gold reserves were listed on its 2005 annual report (the most recent) as 712 tons. How that breaks down into member banks' deposits and the BIS personal stash is unknown. By controlling foreign exchange currency, plus gold, the BIS can go a long way toward determining the economic conditions in any given country. Remember that the next time Ben Bernanke or European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet announces an interest rate hike. You can bet it didn't happen without the concurrence of the BIS Board.

The central banks had enormous impact on the global financial system during 2012. In all, 13 other central banks in the world have followed the Fed's lead and set interest rates at or near zero in an effort to keep the liquidity spigots open and prop up their ailing economies. Those 14 economies represent a staggering $65 trillion in combined equity and bond market capitalizations, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch. When you add up all the central banks in the world, the amount of money they created out of thin air is over $9 trillion. That's like creating the second-largest economy in the world out of thin air.

So who controls the money? The central banks of the world do. And who controls those central banks? The Bank for International Settlements does. Most everything about it, including its bi-monthly member and board meetings, is shrouded in secrecy. And perhaps more worrisome is that the BIS is free from oversight. By rights granted under its agreement with the Swiss Federal Council, all of the bank's archives, documents and "any data media" are "inviolable at all times and in all places." Furthermore, officers and employees of BIS "enjoy immunity from criminal and administrative jurisdiction, save to the extent that such immunity is formally waived . . . even after such persons have ceased to be Officials of the Bank. Finally, no claims against BIS or its deposits may be enforced "without the prior agreement of the Bank." In other words they can do whatever they want, without consequences. How's that for a leak-proof legal umbrella?

If the BIS wants to "intervene" in the financial markets, they simply just do it. If the BIS wants to bail out big banks or even entire nations, they simply just do it. Many have speculated that eventually the goal is to have just a single global currency which will be administered by a single global central bank. The BIS is already using Special Drawing Rights (SDRs), which are considered to be a precursor to the coming global currency. The BIS played a big role in the adoption of the euro, and more currency integration is almost certainly on the way in future years...

In the end, how you feel about the BIS may come down to how you feel about a one-world currency. The bank was a major player promoting the adoption of the euro as Europe's common currency. There are rumors that its next project is persuading the U.S., Canada and Mexico to switch to a similar regional money, perhaps to be called the amero, and it's logical to assume the bank's ultimate goal is a single world currency. That would simplify transactions and really solidify the bank's control of the planetary economy.

If the United States ever did give up the U.S. dollar, it would be a massive blow to our national sovereignty. When someone else controls your money, it doesn't really matter that much who makes the laws. Unfortunately, the global elite seem absolutely obsessed with the idea of a global currency, a one world economic system and a global government.

The following are the top 25 banks and corporations at the heart of this "super-entity."

1. Barclays plc
2. Capital Group Companies Inc
3. FMR Corporation
4. AXA
5. State Street Corporation
6. JP Morgan Chase & Co
7. Legal & General Group plc
8. Vanguard Group Inc
9. UBS AG
10. Merrill Lynch & Co Inc
11. Wellington Management Co LLP
12. Deutsche Bank AG
13. Franklin Resources Inc
14. Credit Suisse Group
15. Walton Enterprises LLC
16. Bank of New York Mellon Corp
17. Natixis
18. Goldman Sachs Group Inc
19. T Rowe Price Group Inc
20. Legg Mason Inc
21. Morgan Stanley
22. Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc
23. Northern Trust Corporation
24. Société Générale
25. Bank of America Corporation

The ultra-wealthy elite often hide behind layers and layers of ownership, but the truth is that thanks to interlocking corporate relationships, the elite basically control almost every Fortune 500 corporation. The amount of power and control that this gives them is hard to describe. This same group of people have been running things for a very long time...

Our entire economy is a giant illusion. The extreme prosperity that we have been enjoying has been fueled by debt, and any future prosperity that we will experience is completely dependent on our ability to go into even more debt. Our entire economy has become a giant pyramid of debt, risk and leverage. At some point there is going to be a giant crash. When that happens, people are going to become very desperate. We need to learn some lessons from history. This is exactly the kind of thing that happened back in the 1930s. The total amount of debt in our economy is almost 10 times larger than it was just 30 years ago, but we don't like to think about that too much. Most Americans are way too busy living the good life to be bothered with "doom and gloom."

From the time that George Washington was inaugurated (1789) to the time that George W. Bush was inaugurated (2001), the U.S. government accumulated about 5.7 trillion dollars of debt. During the first four years of the Obama administration, the U.S. government accumulated about 5.7 trillion dollars of debt. How can anyone support this kind of insanity? In the end, all of this debt will absolutely destroy the U.S. dollar, our economic system and the bright futures that our children and our grandchildren were supposed to have. As if all of that was not enough to be concerned about, there is also the threat that Wall Street could implode at any time. Most Americans have no idea that Wall Street has been transformed into the largest casino in the history of the world. The "too big to fail" banks are the ringleaders, and the derivatives bubble hangs over our financial system like a "sword of Damocles" that could fall at virtually any moment. Everything will remain fine as long as the spiral of derivatives that our bankers have constructed remains perfectly balanced. But if something happens and it becomes unbalanced and starts to collapse, the consequences could be unlike anything we have ever seen before.

Our financial system is even more vulnerable than it was back in 2008, and financial experts such as Doug Short, Peter Schiff, Robert Wiedemer and Harry Dent are all warning that the next crash is rapidly approaching. We are living in the greatest debt bubble in the history of the world and Wall Street has been transformed into a giant casino that is based on a massive web of debt, risk and leverage. Peter Schiff, the CEO of Euro Pacific Capital, has been one of the leading voices in the financial community warning people about the crisis that is coming. During a recent interview with Fox Business, Schiff stated that the massive financial collapse that we witnessed back in 2008 “wasn’t the real crash” and he boldly declared that the “real crash is coming.” Economist Robert Wiedemer warned people what was coming before the crash of 2008, and now he is warning that what is coming next is going to be even worse. Financial author Harry Dent believes that the stock market could fall by as much as 60 percent in the coming months. He is convinced that stocks are hugely overvalued right now…

When that web breaks we are going to see a stock market crash that is going to make 2008 look like a Sunday picnic. Yes, the Federal Reserve has tried to prevent any problems from erupting in the financial markets by initiating another round of quantitative easing, but 40 billion dollars a month will not be nearly enough to stop the massive collapse that is coming.

Despite four years of outrageous "stimulus" spending by the federal government, despite four years of record low interest rates, and despite four years of unprecedented money printing by the Federal Reserve, the U.S. economy continues to perform miserably. Hopefully this little stretch of false economic hope that we have been living in will last for a little while longer. We never fully recovered from that last downturn and now the incredibly foolish decisions that our "leaders" continue to make have made another major economic downturn inevitable. The truth is that the official numbers always make things appear better than they really are.

For the entire year of 2012, official U.S. GDP growth was only about 1.5%. Every time economic growth has fallen that low (below 2 percent annually) the U.S. economy has always ended up going into a recession. Even the government's own numbers tell us that the percentage of the U.S. labor force that is employed continues to fall and that the U.S. economy is heading into a recession. For the week ending January 26th, initial claims for unemployment rose to 368,000. The percentage of the U.S. labor force that is employed has continually been falling since 2006 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It is amazing the things that you can find out when you actually take the time to look at the hard numbers instead of just listening to the media spin.

The mainstream media would have us believe that 157,000 jobs were added to the U.S. economy in January. But if you actually look at the "non-seasonally adjusted" numbers, the number of Americans with a job actually decreased by 1,446,000 between December and January. But nowhere in the mainstream media did you hear that the U.S. economy lost more than 1.4 million jobs between December and January. During the first full week of January, an astounding $114 billion was pulled out of U.S. banks. The payroll tax hike that went into effect in January has reduced the paychecks of average American workers by about $100 a month. An astounding 33 percent of all "subprime student loans" are at least 90 days past due. One out of every seven adults in the United States is financially supporting their kids and their parents at the same time. Americans are now more pessimistic about where the U.S. economy will be five years from now than Gallup has ever recorded before.

The truth is that both parties have been leading us down a road toward economic oblivion. Neither political party is willing to tell the American people the truth. 40 years ago, the total amount of debt in the U.S. economic system was less than 2 trillion dollars. Today, the total amount of debt in the U.S. economic system has grown to more than 55 trillion dollars. It hasn't mattered which party has occupied the White House or which party has been in control of Congress. The debt bubble that we have been living in has just continued to grow. And all bubbles eventually pop.

The prosperity that we are enjoying today is the result of the biggest debt binge in the history of the world. We have stolen a giant mountain of money from our children and our grandchildren and we have destroyed their futures. People can debate about whether the next "recession" has already started or not, but the truth is that what we are experiencing now is nothing compared to what is coming. In the end, we will pay a great price for our decades of foolishness. The U.S. economy is going to completely collapse, and the last few years have only been the very beginning of that process. The U.S. economy is going to completely collapse, and the last few years have only been the very beginning of that process.

There are thousands upon thousands of moving parts in the global financial system. So that makes it nearly impossible to predict the timing of events with perfect precision. Financial conditions are constantly shifting and changing. But without a doubt another major financial collapse similar to what happened back in 2008 (or even worse) is on the way. Right now, things are still relatively good in America. Yes, there are a whole host of economic numbers that look really bad, but what we are experiencing right now is nothing compared to the horrific economic pain that is coming. When our economy finally crashes, nobody is going to be able to press a button and restore things to how they were previously.

Many Americans like to think that the United States is greater today than it has ever been before, but the truth is that America is like a patient that has stage-4 cancer that has spread to almost every area of the body. Our nation is being destroyed in thousands of different ways, and more distressing news emerges with each passing day. We are living in a bubble of debt-fueled false prosperity that allows us to continue to consume far more wealth than we produce, but when that bubble bursts we are going to experience the most painful economic "adjustment" that America has ever gone through.

All over America there are millions of people that will be missing meals and going hungry this holiday season. Even as much of the country indulges in the yearly ritual of unbridled consumerism that we refer to as "the holiday season," more families in the United States than ever before will be dealing with not having enough food to eat. They keep telling us that we are in an "economic recovery" and yet the middle class continues to shrink and the number of Americans living in poverty just continues to grow. We are witnessing unprecedented hunger in America, and this especially seems tragic during the holidays. Much of the country is partying as if the good times will never stop, but families that are living from one meal to the next are facing a completely different reality. More than 20 million U.S. children rely on school meal programs to keep from going hungry.

Today, about one out of every four workers in the United States brings home wages that are at or below the federal poverty level. How do you tell your children that there isn't going to be any food to eat for dinner? How do you explain to them that other families have plenty to eat but you don't? Sadly, many food banks are overstretched at this point. But it isn't just during the holidays that food banks are having problems keeping up with demand. Many food banks find themselves out of food and having to turn away hungry families all throughout the year. All over the nation, food pantries have actually had to turn people away because of the overwhelming demand. And more Americans used food stamps to buy their Thanksgiving dinners this year than ever before. This is a problem that is not going away any time soon, and if you think that things are bad now, you should brace yourself, because things are going to get even worse.

The number of Americans on food stamps now exceeds the combined populations of "Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming." By August 2012 the number of Americans on food stamps had risen to 47.1 million Americans. Right now, one out of every seven Americans is on food stamps and one out of every four American children is on food stamps.

The world is currently undergoing an economic shock every bit as big as the Great Depression shock of 1929-30 yet the threats are greater, the world situation critical and threatening. This is neither an ordinary recession nor a generational depression. It’s a straight trip into financial hell right in the face of ecological and climate disasters of the first order. It is a unique situation we are facing early in this century that will challenge us in ways we have never been challenged before.

We are looking at nothing less than a historic tragedy yet the government, and in its wake the media, continues to downplay, embellish and downright lie about the gravity of the situation. People are, in general, not considering their actual positions, where they are headed, or what vessel they are sailing on.

We are simply not the same country that we used to be. Americans are proud, selfish, greedy, arrogant, ungrateful, treacherous and completely addicted to entertainment and pleasure. Our country is literally falling apart all around us, but most Americans are so plugged into entertainment that they can’t even be bothered to notice what is happening. Most Americans seem to assume that we will always have endless prosperity just because of who we are, but unfortunately that simply is not true. We inherited the greatest economic machine the world has ever seen and we have wrecked it, and now a very painful day of reckoning is approaching. But most people will not understand until it is too late.

In 11 different U.S. states, the number of government dependents exceeds the number of private sector workers. This list of states includes some of the biggest states in the country: California, New York, Illinois, Ohio, Maine, Kentucky, South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, New Mexico and Hawaii. In California, there are 139 "takers" for every 100 private sector workers. The American people have become absolutely addicted to government money, and it gets worse with each passing year. Entitlements accounted for 62 percent of all federal spending in fiscal year 2012. It would be one thing if we could afford all of this spending, but unfortunately we simply cannot. The number of Americans on food stamps grew from about 17 million in 2000 to more than 47 million today. It nearly tripled in just 12 years. What will happen if it nearly triples again over the next 12 years?

Overall, the federal government runs nearly 80 different "means-tested welfare programs" and more than 100 million Americans are already enrolled in at least one of those programs. The figure of 100 million Americans does not even include those who only receive Social Security or Medicare. Today, there are 56.76 million Americans on Social Security. To support all of those Americans on Social Security, there are only about 94.75 million full-time private sector workers. So there are just 1.67 full-time private sector workers to support each American that is on Social Security.

Medicare is also growing like crazy. The number of Americans on Medicare is expected to grow from 50.7 million in 2012 to 73.2 million in 2025. How much farther can we push things before the entire system collapses? In order to support this exploding entitlement system, we need a lot more Americans to be working good paying jobs. There is no way in the world that we could raise taxes high enough to pay for all of the obligations that we are currently taking on. Even if we taxed all corporations and all individuals at a 100% tax rate on all income over $66,193, it wouldn't be nearly enough to fund the over $8 trillion per year in the growth of U.S. liabilities. We are drowning in debt, and we are stealing more than a hundred million more dollars from future generations with each passing hour. No bank robber in history can match that kind of theft.

In 2013, taxes are going to go up, good paying jobs will continue to leave the country, small businesses will continue to be destroyed, the number of Americans living in poverty will continue to soar, our infrastructure will continue to decay, global food supplies will likely continue to dwindle and the U.S. national debt will continue to explode. Our politicians continue to pursue the same policies that got us into this mess, and yet they continue to expect things to magically turn around. Instead of realizing that what we are doing is not working, our "leaders" continue to give us more of the same.

Obamacare contains twenty new or higher taxes. Five of the taxes hit for the first time on January 1, 2013. In total, Americans face a net $1 trillion tax hike for the years 2013-2022, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

More than 3 billion people, close to half the world's population, live on less than 2 dollar a day.

According to the U.S. Department of Education, for the first time ever more than a million U.S. public school students are homeless. More than a million children can't count on a warm bed to sleep in at night. Sadly, a huge number of American children can't count on a warm dinner either. About a fourth of them are enrolled in the food stamp program. The federal government hands out money to 41.3 percent of the entire population of the United States each month. Overall, more than 70 percent of all federal spending goes to what they call "dependence-creating programs." It is the most massive wealth redistribution scheme in the history of the world, and it continues to grow at a very rapid pace with each passing month.

We are all liars. We lie to friends, family and co-workers. We convince ourselves they are only small lies and just protect others from being hurt. We would rather be lied to than face the blunt truth about our deficiencies, shortcomings and failures. Willfully believing mistruths allows a person to become dependent upon those promulgating the mistruths. It relieves them of their responsibility to act upon the knowledge that something is wrong and must be fixed. It is a cowardly path to ultimate servitude and destruction. The German people chose this path in the 1930s and the American people have chosen a similar and ultimately destructive path today.

America’s corruptible politicians, greedy corporate chieftains, criminal banking overlords, and despicable media manipulators all learned the sordid lessons of mass propaganda from the masters. Our willingness to lie and be lied to set us up to be manipulated by those who understood the mass psychology of a nation. Goebbels and Hitler were heavily influenced by the father of propaganda – Edward Bernays. He and his disciples are professional poisoners of the public mind, exploiters of public foolishness and ignorance, and never allow truth to interfere with a good story. What master manipulators realized is that it is easier to change the attitude of millions than the attitude of one man. By analyzing and understanding the process and motives of how the group mind works, the invisible government has been able to manipulate and regulate the masses according to their will without the masses knowing they are being managed.

The super-rich elite believe they are more intelligent, more capable of managing the affairs of state, masters of the financial world, and chosen to decide what is best for the masses. In reality, they are egocentric, psychotic, power hungry, myopic, self-serving ravenous vultures, feasting upon the carcass of a once great nation. Truth is inconsequential and irritating to their plans for world domination and control. Therefore, no truth will be forthcoming from any organization or person that is associated with the existing political, economic, financial or social order. Every bit of information that is permitted into the public realm has been vetted, manipulated and spun for public consumption. The public does not like bad news. They do not like hard facts. They do not like to think or do math. They want to be spoon fed mindless sound bites and happy talk. The oligarchs need to keep the masses sedated and subservient while they continue to plunder and pillage, so all data is massaged to provide a happy ending.

The masses are relatively poor, easily influenced, willfully ignorant, and many. The ruling oligarchs are most certainly evil, but the masses are not the hard working, stoic, downtrodden portrayed by liberal ideologues. One just needs to walk down the street in one of our urban enclaves, saunter through a suburban mall, or click on "People of Wal-Mart" to witness the tattooed, pierced, butt crack showing, slovenly, obese, and ignorant, attached to their electronic iGadgets, to understand how far our society has deteriorated. Every individual born into this world has the capability to become educated, think critically, not follow the herd, live beneath their means, and not be influenced by propaganda. Aldous Huxley understood in 1931 that those in power could use material goods to invoke passivity and egotism among the populace. He feared that truth would be obscured by an avalanche of irrelevance (500 Reality TV shows), cultural trivialities (Lady Gaga, Lindsey Lohan), distractions (Professional sports), and pharmaceutical enhanced escape (Prozac). He saw the possibility that we would grow to love our servitude as the pleasures of life provided by our controllers overwhelmed any desire to think or question authority.

The pillars are crumbling. The $1.4 trillion wasted on two worthless wars of choice in the Middle East, the trillions wasted and liberties sacrificed for the never ending unwinnable War on Terror, the Keynesian spending frenzy that has driven the National Debt from $9 trillion to $16.3 trillion in the last five years, the looting of the American taxpayer by Wall Street and their co-conspirators at the Federal Reserve and in Congress, and the belief that ramping up the debt driven consumption that drives 71% of our GDP is our path to prosperity is absolutely freaking nuts.

The pillars will not be abolished willingly. The ruling class depends upon their continued existence and expansion. There is the rub. The math doesn’t work. We’ve reached the point where continued expansion of debt and money printing no longer works. With a national debt to GDP ratio of 102% and a total credit market debt to GDP ratio of 350%, we have passed the point of no return. This time is not different. A country cannot run trillion dollar deficits indefinitely and expect to not suffer the consequences. This is why those in power are increasingly resorting to propaganda, data manipulation, and outright lies to convince the masses of their omnipotence and brilliance in managing the fiscal affairs of the state.

To our invisible government rulers we are nothing but rats to be manipulated through food pellets and shock therapy. Pleasure and fear of pain are the drivers of our warped society. The ruling oligarchs truly think they know what is best for the masses and believe any means is worthwhile as long as the ends support their agenda. This is blatantly obvious to anyone with their eyes open and their brain functioning. Sadly, the government run educational system produces mostly drones that are barely able to tie their own shoes, spell Cat, or make change from a one dollar bill. Only 20% of all high school seniors score high enough on the SAT test to get a B minus in college and most of these kids come from private and parochial schools. This is exactly what those in power prefer. They want non-critical thinking, mindless consumers, who don’t understand the criminal nature of Federal Reserve created inflation or their enslavement in the chains of debt at the hands of their Wall Street slave owners. They certainly don’t want the masses to understand that real median household net worth is lower today than it was in 1969. Luckily for the oligarchs, 95% of the public couldn’t define the terms: real, median or net worth. Math is hard.

The average person is inundated on a 24/7 basis with pabulum from liberal network media talking heads, CNBC Wall Street shills regurgitating whatever their sponsors desire, Fox News blonde bimbos and neo-con war mongers programmed to spew Rupert Murdoch talking points, MSNBC tingling leg faux journalists, NYT intellectually corrupt Nobel prize winners, NAR nitwits repeating “best time to buy” on a daily basis for the last 12 years, and government agencies whose sole purpose is to manipulate data in a way that supports the agenda of those in power.

The intellectually lazy and willfully ignorant masses are no match for those who control the message and the media. How else can you explain their ability to convince millions of drones to line up for hours in front of a store and stampede like crazed hyenas to grab a $5 crockpot, the Chinese-produced gadget of the moment or a designer top made by slave labor in safety conscious Bangladesh factories? How else can you explain a population willing to be molested by government TSA dregs in the name of security from phantom terrorists, the passive acceptance of military exercises in US cities, unquestioning submissiveness as Presidential Executive Orders allow the government dictatorial powers based on their judgment, the monitoring of internet and voice correspondence of all citizens, and believing that FBI agents luring clueless teenage Muslim dupes into fake terrorist plots, providing the fake explosives, and then announcing with great fanfare how they saved us from another 9/11? But, the prize for boldest, most outrageous, blatant use of propaganda and misinformation to cover-up their criminal looting of America goes to Ben Bernanke, his cronies at the Federal Reserve, and the Wall Street banks that own and control our Central Bank.

Having the gall to portray themselves as the stabilizer of our economic system over the last 100 years is a putrid joke on the dying and broke middle class. Their mandate has been stable prices, full employment, and avoiding financial crisis. It is a tribute to Bernays and the rest of the public relations swine that the average American actually believes inflation is a good thing and it is under control despite the FACT that 96.2% of their purchasing power has disappeared since 1900, with the most rapid decline occurring since Nixon closed the gold window in 1971.

The average American actually believes Ben Bernanke saved us from a Great Depression when in actuality he saved the owners of the Federal Reserve from accepting the losses they generated through the greatest financial fraud in history. His “solutions” have zombified our economic system, just as the Japanese Central Bank did 20 years ago. He has destroyed the concept of saving, while rewarding the indebted and profligate with his QE to Infinity money printing policies. And the ignorant masses have been convinced by the corporate media and their corrupt government lackeys that Ben did this for them. Kyle Bass knows otherwise. He knows how the Fed and their backers have preyed upon the masses through their understanding of human psychology.

The middle class has quite a gift welcoming them as the calendar flips over to 2013. Their payroll taxes are going to go up, their income taxes are going to go up, and approximately 28 million households are going to be hit with a huge, unexpected AMT tax bill on their 2012 earnings. So happy New Year middle class! You are about to be ripped to shreds. In addition to the tax increases, approximately two million unemployed Americans will instantly lose their extended unemployment benefits when 2013 begins, and new Obamacare tax hikes which will cost American taxpayers about a trillion dollars over the next decade will start to go into effect. All middle class families in America will be sending thousands more dollars to Uncle Sam next year than they were previously. And considering the fact that the middle class is already steadily shrinking and that the U.S. economy is already in an advanced state of decline, that is not good news.

The Obama administration and the media have been lying to you about unemployment and about the true condition of our economy. Let's take a look at the percentage of the civilian labor force that has been employed over the past several years. These numbers come directly from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This is a number that has been steadily falling since 2006...

In January, 2012, only 57.9 percent of the civilian labor force was employed. Do the numbers above represent a positive trend or a negative trend? Even a 2nd grader could answer that question. So how in the world can the Obama administration and the mainstream media claim that the employment picture is getting better and that we are in a "recovery?" But most Americans believe what they are told. It is almost as if we are in some kind of a "matrix" where reality is defined by the corporate-controlled propaganda that is relentlessly pumped into our brains.

The only way that the government has been able to show a declining unemployment rate is by dumping massive numbers of Americans into the "not in the labor force" category. Just check out how the number of Americans "not in the labor force" has absolutely skyrocketed in recent years...

In January, there were supposedly 89,868,000 Americans that were at least 16 years of age that were not in the labor force. That number has risen by more than 8 million since Barack Obama first entered the White House, and that is highly unusual, because the number of Americans "not in the labor force" only increased by 2,518,000 during the entire decade of the 1980s.

In America today 41 percent of all workers make $20,000 a year or less. It is incredibly challenging for anyone to live on $20,000 a year, much less try to support a family. There are tens of millions of American families that are really hurting out there. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 146 million Americans are either "poor" or "low income" at this point, and most of those people actually do have jobs. If something is not done, the middle class will continue to disappear and poverty in America will continue to explode.

Millions of small businesses are on the verge of extinction, and yet our politicians just continue to pile on more taxes, more rules and more regulations. Small businesses are dying all around us, and the number of new small businesses continues to decline. Sadly, most Americans still have faith in the system. Most Americans are still convinced that our politicians will somehow find a way to turn things around. All of this is so simple that even the family pet should be able to figure it out, and yet most Americans seem oblivious to all of this. They just keep gobbling up the mainstream media propaganda and they just continue to go out and wildly spend money.

Barack Obama has just issued a new executive order that ends the pay freeze for federal workers that had been in place. So now all federal employees will be getting a nice hefty pay raise. For example, Vice President Joe Biden brought in $225,521 in 2012. in 2013, he will make $231,900. Not that our politicians really need the money. Most members of Congress are millionaires anyway.

There are now close to half a million federal employees that bring home at least $100,000 a year. Plus, it is important to keep in mind that the benefits that federal employees get are absolutely outstanding, and it is close to impossible to actually fire a federal worker. Life is good if you are working for Uncle Sam. Meanwhile, our politicians seem determined to keep draining more blood out of the middle class. Now that a "deal" is reached, we will be hit by some categories of tax increases. Let's just hope and pray that we don't get hit by all of the tax increases that are scheduled to go into effect. That would be a financial disaster for millions of families. So happy New Year middle class. Your taxes are about to go through the roof and our politicians are too busy fighting with each other to do anything about it.

They pretend they are fighting up there, but they really aren't. They are arguing over power, spin, who looks good, who looks bad; all trying to preserve the system where they can spend what they want, take care of their friends and print money when they need it. Most in the mainstream media are making it sound like some kind of a "battle royal" is going on in Washington, but the U.S. national debt is going to end up in just about the same place no matter what happens. If we "did nothing" the U.S. national debt will be approximately 25.8 trillion dollars in 2022. If "Obama wins," the U.S. national debt will be approximately 25.4 trillion dollars in 2022. If "Boehner wins," the U.S. national debt will be approximately 25.2 trillion dollars in 2022.

Overall, the global elite have approximately 18 trillion dollars parked in offshore tax havens such as the Cayman Islands. Keep in mind that U.S. GDP for 2011 was only slightly above 15 trillion dollars. So the global elite have an amount of money parked in offshore banks that is substantially larger than the total value of all goods and services produced in the United States each year. According to one estimate, a third of all the wealth in the entire world is stationed in offshore banks. Our politicians are playing checkers and the global elite are playing chess when it comes to taxes. Our current system of taxation is irreversibly broken and should be entirely thrown out and replaced with something else.

When financial markets in the United States crash, so does the U.S. economy. Just remember what happened back in 2008. The financial markets crashed, the credit markets froze up, and suddenly the economy went into cardiac arrest. There are very few things that could cause the financial markets to crash harder or farther than a derivatives panic. Sadly, most Americans don't even understand what derivatives are. Unlike stocks and bonds, a derivative is not an investment in anything real. Rather, a derivative is a legal bet on the future value or performance of something else. Just like you can go to Las Vegas and bet on who will win the football games this weekend, bankers on Wall Street make trillions of dollars of bets about how interest rates will perform in the future and about what credit instruments are likely to default. Wall Street has been transformed into a gigantic casino where people are betting on just about anything that you can imagine.

The largest insurance company in the world, AIG, crashed back in 2008 and required a government bailout because of derivatives. Bad derivatives trades also caused the failure of MF Global, and the 6 billion dollar loss that JPMorgan Chase recently suffered because of derivatives made headlines all over the globe. But all of those incidents were just warm up acts for the coming derivatives panic that will destroy global financial markets. The largest casino in the history of the world is going to go "bust" and the economic fallout from the financial crash that will happen as a result will be absolutely horrific.

There is a reason why Warren Buffett once referred to derivatives as "financial weapons of mass destruction." Nobody really knows the total value of all the derivatives that are floating around out there, but estimates place the notional value of the global derivatives market anywhere from 600 trillion dollars all the way up to 1.5 quadrillion dollars.

We are just finding out that debt is not money, not real money at least, and now we find that debt has become one of the main sources of income of the United States federal government like it did for consumers before them. Unfortunately one can’t borrow ones way out of debt though it is exhilarating trying to do so. Borrowing money to pay off ones debts just delays the day of reckoning but the day comes (even though we have had fun partying it up as we were waiting) and it comes hard. In a nutshell it is the official policy of most of the G20 to borrow their way out of debt. Officials think that they can overcome that problem by borrowing trillions more. Who are they really kidding, no one is that stupid but to our surprise we find out that we are that dumb.

Human cooperation will be needed for survival but we have been raised and bred into competition and separation. Hard times are ahead and human survival will depend on us finding courage and great heart to weather all the storms. If you are going to depend or surrender to the will of the pharmaceutical industry, which thrives on using poisons that create all kinds of side effects and premature deaths, you certainly will reduce your survival chances for yourself and your loved ones.

We have been living in the biggest debt bubble in the history of the world, and it is only a matter of time until it bursts. 2008 was just a "hiccup" compared to what is coming. Our politicians and the Federal Reserve were able to keep the house of cards from completely crashing down back then, but they are not going to be able to avert the economic horror show that is rapidly approaching. Anything that you can do to become more self-sufficient and more independent of the system is a good thing, because the system is failing. The years ahead are going to be much more chaotic than what we are experiencing right now, and when the next crisis strikes you will be very thankful for the time and the energy that you put into preparing.

According to the federal government, four very large U.S. banks "represent 93% of the total banking industry notional amounts and 81% of industry net current credit exposure." These four banks have an overwhelming share of the derivatives market in the United States. If a derivatives crisis were to cause the "too-big-to-fail" banks to crash and burn, it would almost certainly cause the entire U.S. economy to crash and burn. Just remember what we saw back in 2008. What is coming is going to be even worse.

It would have been really nice if we had not allowed these banks to get so large and if we had not allowed them to make trillions of dollars of reckless bets. But we stood aside and let it happen. Now these banks are so important to our economic system that their destruction would also destroy the U.S. economy. It is kind of like when cancer becomes so advanced that killing the cancer would also kill the patient. That is essentially the situation that we are facing with these banks.

It would be hard to overstate the recklessness of these banks. The numbers that you are about to see are absolutely jaw-dropping. According to the Comptroller of the Currency, four of the largest U.S. banks are walking a tightrope of risk, leverage and debt when it comes to derivatives. Check out how exposed they are:

Total Exposure To Derivatives: $69,238,349,000,000 (more than 69 trillion dollars)

Total Exposure To Derivatives: $52,150,970,000,000 (more than 52 trillion dollars)

Total Exposure To Derivatives: $44,405,372,000,000 (more than 44 trillion dollars)

Total Exposure To Derivatives: $41,580,395,000,000 (more than 41 trillion dollars)

That means that the total exposure that Goldman Sachs has to derivatives contracts is more than 362 times greater than their total assets.

How in the world could we let this happen? What is our financial system going to look like when this pyramid of risk comes falling down?

When the casino finally goes "bust," we will know who to blame. Without a doubt, a derivatives panic is coming. It will cause the financial markets to crash. Several of the "too big to fail" banks will likely crash and burn and require bailouts. As a result of all this, credit markets will become paralyzed by fear and freeze up. Once again, we will see the U.S. economy go into cardiac arrest, only this time it will not be so easy to fix.

The United States in late 2012 is not dying, it is dead. It is not going bankrupt, it is insolvent.

The government is actually a parasitic institution living off the labor of its subjects as it engages in activities that are morally corrupt.

According to The Economist, the United States was the best place in the world to be born into back in 1988. Today, the United States is only tied for 16th place. The United States has fallen in the global economic competitiveness rankings compiled by the World Economic Forum for four years in a row.

If you are under the age of 30, it is really, really difficult to get a job in America today. The competition for the few decent jobs that seem to be available is absolutely crazy. Unemployment among young people is at a level that we have not seen since World War II, and this is causing major problems. Even if you do have a college degree, there is no guarantee that you will be able to get any type of a job. In fact, more than half of all college graduates under the age of 25 were either unemployed or underemployed last year. There are millions of very talented college graduates that are waiting tables, making sandwiches or stocking shelves down at the local branch of a global retail conglomerate. Meanwhile, they are saddled with record breaking amounts of student loan debt.

This is easily the worst economic environment that we have seen for young people since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The number of good jobs continues to decline. Many young people are faced with the choice of taking a bad job or having no job at all.

CAN YOU ANSWER THESE QUESTIONS?

Sometimes asking good questions is the best way to get someone that you care about to understand something. Many times those of us that can see what is happening to this country get frustrated when we try to get others to see what is so apparent to us. But instead of preaching to them, perhaps asking questions would be more helpful. When you ask someone a question, they are almost forced to think about what you just said and come up with a response. And without a doubt, the fact that America is in decline is undeniable. Those that would choose to blindly have faith in the system are foolish, because it is glaringly obvious that the system is failing. Our economy is heading for collapse and the world around us is becoming more unstable with each passing day.

#1 Why are sales of physical silver coins breaking all sorts of all-time records? The U.S. Mint is on pace to sell more silver eagles during the first month of 2013 than it did during the entire year of 2007.

#2 Why has Germany announced that it will be moving gold from New York and Paris to its own vaults back home? Is this a sign of a breakdown in trust among global central banks?

#4 Why have billionaires such as George Soros and John Paulson been hoarding massive amounts of gold?

#6 Why is Russia warning that we are rapidly approaching a global "currency war"?

#7 Why has Barack Obama chosen this moment to launch an all-out attack on the Second Amendment?

#11 Why are gun control advocates such as Piers Morgan pushing for us to become more like the UK when the UK actually has a much higher violent crime rate than we do?

#13 Why does the federal government want to start putting "black boxes" in all new motor vehicles?

#14 Why are some U.S. states now using computers to predict "future crimes"?

#18 Why have police departments all over America begun to deploy unmanned surveillance drones in the skies over our cities?

#19 Why are schools all over America beginning to require students to carry IDs with RFID microchips in them wherever they go?

#20 Why are more Americans not outraged that nearly 400 TSA employees have been fired for stealing from travelers since 2003?

#21 Why are Americans not more outraged that TSA goons are manhandling the private areas of our women and our children in the name of "national security"?

#22 Why is an elderly survivor of the Nazi occupation of Austria, Kitty Werthmann, warning that America is heading down the exact same path that she experienced?

#24 Why does the Federal Reserve continue to insist that the economy is "improving" when it obviously is not?

#25 Why can so few Americans explain how money is created in the United States?

#26 Why has the U.S. dollar declined in value by well over 95 percent since the Federal Reserve was created?

#27 Why is the U.S. national debt more than 5000 times larger than it was when the Federal Reserve was created?

#28 Why isn't the mainstream media in the U.S. discussing the fact that the U.S. dollar is in danger of losing its status as the primary reserve currency of the world?

#30 Why did the U.S. national debt grow during the first four years of the Obama administration by about as much as it did from the time that George Washington took office to the time that George W. Bush took office?

#31 Why is the middle class in America bringing home a smaller share of the overall income pie than has ever been recorded before?

#32 If the U.S. economy is producing a healthy number of good jobs, then why are we spending nearly a trillion dollars a year on welfare?

#33 If the U.S. economy is not collapsing, then why has the number of Americans on food stamps grown from 17 million in the year 2000 to more than 47 million today?

#34 If America is still an economic powerhouse, then why have we lost more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities since 2001?

#36 Why were one out of every ten homes sold in the state of California last year purchased by Chinese citizens?

#37 Why has the percentage of men with jobs in the United States fallen so dramatically? Back in 1950, more than 80 percent of all men in the United States had jobs. Today, less than 65 percent of all men in the United States have jobs.

#38 Why are so many Americans poor today? According to the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 146 million Americans are either "poor" or "low income". Why is this happening?

#39 Why does the U.S. government have a website that teaches immigrants how to sign up for welfare programs once they arrive in the United States?

#40 Why has the number of gang members living in the United States risen by an astounding 40 percent just since 2009?

#41 Why does approximately one out of every three children in the United States live in a home without a father? Can such a society prosper in the long run?

#42 Why are our supermarkets being flooded with genetically-modified foods when a whole host of studies have shown that they are potentially dangerous to human health?

#43 If the economy has "improved" during the Obama years, then why are hunger and poverty still absolutely skyrocketing in the United States?

#44 Why are more than a million public school students in the United States homeless?

#45 Why are more than 50 percent of all children in Detroit living in poverty? Detroit used to be one of the greatest cities in the entire world. How did such prosperity turn into such desolation?

#46 Why did a violent riot break out at an event where government-subsidized section 8 housing vouchers were being handed out in a suburb of Detroit earlier this month? Is this the kind of unrest that we can expect to see all over the country when things get really bad?

#49 Why have global food supplies sunk to their lowest level in nearly 40 years?

#50 Why is global power concentrated in so few hands? According to the Swiss Federal Institute, a network of 147 mega-corporations control 40 percent of all the wealth in the world, and in a previous article I described how just six obscenely powerful corporations completely dominate the media industry in the United States. Is it good for such incredible power to be concentrated in the hands of so few people?

The Employment Rate Has Been Under 59 Percent For 39 Months In A Row

During the last recession, the percentage of working age Americans with a job fell from about 63 percent to under 59 percent and it has stayed there for 39 months in a row. In September 2009, during the depths of the last economic crisis, 58.7 percent of all working age Americans were employed. In November 2012, 58.7 percent of all working age Americans were employed. It is more then 3 years later, and we are in the exact same place! So how in the world are they able to pretend that the "unemployment rate" is going down steadily? But if unemployment was actually going down, we should be seeing the percentage of Americans with a job go up. Unfortunately, that is NOT happening. At this point the official unemployment rate is so manipulated that it is of very little value at all.

The percentage of Americans with a job has stayed very, very steady since the end of 2009. It is almost as if someone has hit a "pause button" and won't let unemployment get better or get worse. This is the first time since the end of World War II that we have not seen the employment-population ratio bounce back in a significant way after a recession has ended. It takes somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000 new jobs a month just to keep up with the growth of the population. So at best we are treading water. We continue to see an increase in the number of Americans living in poverty. If things are getting better, then why are organizations like the Salvation Army seeing record numbers of families coming to them for help this holiday season?

There was a time in America when virtually anyone that wanted a job could go out and get one and the United States boasted the largest and most prosperous middle class in the history of the world. Sadly, those days are long gone. Back in 1969, 95 percent of all men between the ages of 25 and 54 had a job. But now there are millions of Americans in their prime working years that cannot find a job. Millions of others are working low wage jobs or part-time jobs because that is all they can get.

Good paying manufacturing and professional jobs are being replaced by low paying service jobs. We are transitioning from an economy with plenty of good jobs to an economy with plenty of bad jobs. The next stage in our transition will be to an economy where it seems like there are no jobs for anyone. We are witnessing the tragic downfall of the American worker, and it is heartbreaking. Many of our politicians insist that things are getting better for American workers, but that is simply not true. Since the start of 2008, the percentage of working age Americans with a job has fallen below 59 percent and it has stayed there for over 4 years. After every other recession in the post-World War II era the employment-population ratio has always bounced back. That has not happened this time...

More than 75 percent of all jobs in the U.S. today are not "good jobs," and things are not looking promising for the future. No wonder so many families are barely surviving these days. Right now, approximately 77 percent of all Americans are living paycheck to paycheck at least some of the time. That is a dreadful number. But if you still do have a job, you should consider yourself to be fortunate. There are millions upon millions of Americans out there without any job at all. 53 percent of all Americans with a bachelor's degree under the age of 25 were either unemployed or underemployed during 2011. Hordes of fresh college graduates are entering the marketplace each year only to find that the good jobs that they were promised simply are not there. And now it looks like things are getting even worse. The cold, hard reality of the matter is that the U.S. economy no longer produces enough jobs for everybody and it never will again. Both of our major political parties have fully embraced the emerging one world economic system which puts average American workers into direct competition for jobs with workers in third world countries where it is legal to pay slave labor wages. Millions of good paying American jobs have been shipped to countries where workers work very long hours in absolutely horrific conditions for as little as 45 dollars a month.

Many Americans that actually do have jobs right now find that they simply don't make enough to take care of themselves and their families. They are called "the working poor," and their ranks are growing steadily. Today, about one out of every four workers in the United States brings home wages that are at or below the federal poverty level. American households are getting poorer at a time when prices continue to rise. Median household income in America has declined for four years in a row. Overall, it has fallen by over $4000 during that time span. Meanwhile, Americans that still do have jobs are piling up more debt than ever before. It appears that most people have not learned any lessons from the last major economic crisis. It has just been reported that consumer borrowing in the United States has hit a new record high. The biggest offender of all is our federal government. They just keep borrowing money as if there was no tomorrow. 30 years ago, the U.S. national debt was about 1.1 trillion dollars. Now it is more than 16.3 trillion dollars.

To get an idea how much money 16 trillion dollars is, just watch this 2 minute video.

Bernanke and the Fed cited cooked numbers that claim unemployment in the United States fell to 7.7 percent in November. In fact, as John Williams’ Shadow Government Statistics website demonstrates, the real unemployment rate is 22.9 percent. In order to trick the public into believing things are better than they actually are, the Fed and the government do not include unemployed members of the workforce who are not actively looking for work or workers with part-time jobs who are seeking full-time employment. Despite the government claim that unemployment fell in November, a recent Gallup poll shows that it increased significantly from October to November 2012.

Obama Care Causing Loss of Jobs

Huge numbers of American workers who voted for Obama are now seeing their own jobs slashed below 30 hours a week as employers desperately try to avoid "Obamacare bankruptcy." Obamacare mandates for businesses only apply to those working 30 hours a week or more, and while many businesses do not want to cut workers' hours, they are being forced to in order to stay afloat. This necessary action is causing businesses to lose money and become less competitive while at the same time destroying American jobs.

Some businesses are also slashing job positions in an effort to get below the 50-employee threshold above which Obamacare mandates kick in. So across the country, we're not only seeing workers lose hours thanks to Obamacare; we're also seeing workers losing their jobs. But the Obama administration will announce these results to be a huge "job creation success!" because workers must now find two part-time jobs that usually pay less than the one full-time job they used to have. The raw job numbers, however, will be spun by the White House into a victory pronouncement of "twice as many jobs exist now!"

Among the regulations being rushed out the door by the Department of Health and Human Services 32 months after Obamacare passed is a requirement that every plan in America be subject to a $63 fee. That $63 is part of a fund to subsidize people with pre-existing conditions, who are more expensive to cover but whose costs must be transferred to healthier individuals in the new system. Reporting suggests the costs could hit 190 million health care plans held by individuals or provided by employers. The $25 billion fee is part of a bigger package of taxes and fees to finance Mr. Obama’s expansion of coverage to the uninsured.

Much of America is still experiencing "prosperity" right now. But it is a prosperity that has been fueled by the greatest debt bubble that the world has ever seen. When that debt bubble bursts the pain is going to be unbelievable. There will be those that will have prepared and that will have gotten themselves into position to take advantage of what is coming. During the coming crisis a massive amount of money and wealth will change hands. Instead of living in fear and cowering under a blanket, now is the time to figure out how you and your family can thrive during the hard times that are on the horizon. But if you just stick your head in the sand and have blind faith in the system and pretend that everything is going to be okay somehow, then you will be blindsided by the coming crisis and you will only have yourself to blame.

As you’ll remember, the president promised throughout his first campaign for president and the contentious health care debate that his plan would lower premiums for Americans by as much as $2,500 annually.

The Fiscal Cliff

Every American worker is going to pay higher taxes next year as a result of this deal. The fiscal cliff deal represents the biggest tax increase in 20 years, and it is also projected to increase the U.S. national debt by an additional 4 trillion dollars over the next decade. In the final analysis, U.S. government finances are still wildly out of control and we are all going to be paying higher taxes. Not a whole lot to be excited about, and nothing has really been fixed for the long-term. Our politicians have kicked the can down the road once again, but someday they will run out of road and all of this debt will absolutely crush us. And of course a lot of our politicians didn't even really know what they were voting for. The fiscal cliff bill was more than 150 pages long, and our Senators got the bill into their hands just 3 minutes before they voted on it. So none of them actually read the bill. But that is the way things work in America today. The blind are leading the blind and everyone is mindlessly hoping that everything will turn out okay somehow.

The fiscal cliff is the result of the inability to close the federal budget deficit. The budget deficit cannot be closed because large numbers of US middle class jobs and the GDP and tax base associated with them have been moved offshore, thus reducing federal revenues. The fiscal cliff cannot be closed because of the unfunded liabilities of eleven years of US-initiated wars against a half dozen Muslim countries–wars that have benefitted only the profits of the military/security complex and the territorial ambitions of Israel. The budget deficit cannot be closed, because economic policy is focused only on saving banks that wrongful financial deregulation allowed to speculate, to merge, and to become too big to fail, thus requiring public subsidies that vastly dwarf the totality of US welfare spending.

Washington’s response to the fiscal cliff is austerity: spending cuts and tax increases.

In Europe, they call a combination of government spending cuts and tax increases "austerity." Nations like Greece and Spain have tried this. They cut spending and raised taxes in an attempt to reduce government budget deficits. What happens is that the spending cuts and the tax increases cause a significant economic slowdown and this causes tax revenues to come in much lower than projected. So then more spending cuts and tax hikes are necessary in order to try to get closer to balancing the budget. But then tax revenues fall even more. That is why everybody is freaking out about the fiscal cliff. They don't want to go down the same road of austerity. They want to keep living in an economic fantasy land where we can borrow our way to "prosperity."

Tax increases and spending cuts suppress, not stimulate, economic activity. This is especially the case in an economy such as the American one, which is driven by consumer spending. When spending declines, so does the economy. When the economy declines, the budget deficit rises. This is especially the case when an economy is weak and already in decline. A declining economy means less sales, less employment, less tax revenues. This works against the effort to close the federal budget deficit with austerity measures. Instead of strengthening the economy, the austerity measures weaken it further. To cut unemployment benefits and food stamps when unemployment is high or rising will provoke social and political instability.

The big corporations and the ultra-wealthy have become masters at avoiding taxation no matter what the rates are.

When you raise taxes too high you eliminate the incentive to work hard. Why should someone bust his or her rear end to run a business and make a lot of money if the government is just going to come along and take over half of all the money that is made? If that starts happening on a large scale, then you have a significant loss of economic activity which hurts the economy overall. When the government "steals from the rich" and "gives to the poor," that also tends to create a large group of people that decides that it is easier to take from the government than it is to work for a living. When you make it too easy to depend on government handouts you create an underclass of economic parasites. At this point, U.S. households are now receiving more income from the U.S. government than they are paying to the government in taxes. That is not even close to sustainable, but nobody wants to give up their "government benefits." Today, 59 percent of all Americans receive money from the federal government in one form or another.

Right now, an all-time record 44 million Americans are on food stamps. Back in 1965, only one out of every 50 Americans was on Medicaid. Today, one out of every 6 Americans is on Medicaid. The U.S. government is even handing out billions of dollars to homeowners that are delinquent on their mortgages. This is not a formula for long-term economic success. When people get addicted to government checks they never want to stop. What the poor need are good jobs that pay good wages. Unfortunately, we keep shipping millions of those jobs overseas. So now the Chinese economy is thriving and our formerly great manufacturing cities are turning into hellholes. Handouts do not give people hope, dignity and a future, but jobs can.

New legislation that jumps the death tax to 55 percent of estates and drop the tax's exemption from $5.1 million to $1 million, threatens 526,421 family farms, or about 25 percent of all farms in America, according to a Senate analysis. The federal government will begin taking more than half the value of family farm estates exceeding $1 million beginning next year. The lower exemption -- combined with soaring farm real estate values -- could put more than 420,000 additional farm estates at risk from the death tax.

Farm values are largely tied up in non-liquid assets like land, buildings, and livestock. Many farm and ranch families would be forced to sell their assets to satisfy Washington's insatiable appetite for tax money. Up to 24 percent of America's farm and ranch families could be forced to hand over a large chunk of their heritage to the Internal Revenue Service when a family member dies. This would economically devastate rural communities.

Intaxication

The US federal income tax system rewards those that know how to exploit loopholes and those that know how to cheat the system. Those that "play by the rules" always get the short end of the stick. Our government could easily be funded by tariffs and other forms of taxation that are more equitable. For most of U.S. history there was not a federal income tax at all and the federal government did just fine. According to The Tax Foundation, the average American has to work until April 17th just to pay federal, state, and local taxes. Back in 1900, "Tax Freedom Day" came on January 22nd. When the U.S. government first implemented a personal income tax back in 1913, the vast majority of the population paid a rate of just 1 percent, and the highest marginal tax rate was just 7 percent. Every year average Americans pay dozens of different types of taxes, and yet many of our politicians are very open about the fact that they want to raise rates even higher and invent even more ways to bleed us all dry. Someday historians will look back and be absolutely amazed at how stupid we were.

We have the most complicated tax code in all of human history and If you took all of William Shakespeare's works and collected them together, the entire collection would only be about 900,000 words long. The U.S. tax code is now 3.8 million words long. In many places it is so incomprehensible that nobody actually understands what it means and the entire thing is absolutely riddled with loopholes from the beginning to the end. Nobody could ever read the entire thing--it is close to four million words long. But that is just for federal income taxes.

According to the National Taxpayers Union, U.S. taxpayers spend more than 7.6 billion hours complying with federal tax requirements each year. Imagine what our society would look like if all of that time was spent on more economically profitable activities. 75 years ago, the instructions for Form 1040 were two pages long. Today, they are 189 pages long. There have been 4,428 changes to the tax code over the last decade. It is incredibly costly to change tax software, tax manuals and tax instruction booklets for all of those changes. According to the National Taxpayers Union, the IRS currently has 1,999 different publications, forms, and instruction sheets that you can download from the IRS website.

We have a number of other taxes taken out of our paychecks such as state income taxes, Social Security taxes and Medicare taxes. Sadly, the taxes taken out of your paycheck are only just the beginning. There are more than 40 other taxes that average Americans pay each year in addition to the taxes that are taken out of their paychecks. Politicians love to find ways that they can "raise revenue" without us feeling it. Most people just focus on income tax rates and they forget about the dozens of other ways that they are bleeding us dry. It is kind of like "death by a thousand cuts," and the middle class gets hit the hardest. The poor are exempt from many taxes, the ultra-wealthy are masters at cheating the system and avoiding taxes, and so the most pain is always felt by those in the middle. Hard working middle-class families and small businesses all over America are being financially raped by this insidious system.

The following are 44 more taxes that at least some average Americans are paying now or will be paying soon other than federal, state and local income taxes...

#22 Obamacare Individual Mandate Excise Tax (if you don't buy "qualifying" health insurance under Obamacare you will have to pay an additional tax)

#23 Obamacare Surtax On Investment Income (a new 3.8% surtax on investment income that goes into effect next year)

Sadly, this list is far from complete. There are many more forms of taxation that could be included. When you account for all forms of taxation, there are some Americans that are sending more than half of their incomes to the government. The United States is the only nation on the planet that tries to tax citizens on what they earn in foreign countries. This is why "tax avoidance" has become a multi-billion dollar industry in the United States. People are sick and tired of being drained dry. "Capitalism" is supposed to be about the empowerment of individuals and families and small businesses. Instead, today "capitalism" has come to mean something completely different. Today, the biggest, meanest concentrations of wealth devour everyone else with a big assist from the government. At this point, average Americans mean next to nothing in the political process.

Our society has veered very far from the egalitarian ideal that our founding fathers once hoped for. The corporate giants are so powerful that it is next to impossible for small businesses to directly compete with them. Our founding fathers tried to warn us about large concentrations of power. They attempted to establish a very limited central government, they wanted to keep us free from the tyranny of the big banks and they were very suspicious of large corporations. Today, the big banks, the big corporations and the federal government are all in bed with one another and it is average Americans that always lose out. Over the past several decades, those with huge amounts of money and power have been busy rigging the game so that the rest of the money and power slowly but surely funnels into their hands. If current trends continue, the banksters and the corpocracy will eventually own it all.

According to Forbes, the 400 highest-earning Americans pay an average federal income tax rate of just 18 percent. Warren Buffett had an effective federal income tax rate of just 17.4 percent for 2010. The United States has the highest corporate tax rate in the world (35 percent). In Ireland, the corporate tax rate is only 12.5 percent. This is causing thousands of corporations to move operations (jobs) out of the United States and into other countries. The elite are not stupid. They are not just going to sit there and let our politicians tax them into oblivion. In fact, many of them will openly cheat if that is what it takes to avoid taxes. Most of them have become masters at avoiding taxes or they have hired people that do that kind of work for them. In 1950, corporate taxes accounted for about 30 percent of all federal revenue. In 2012, corporate taxes will account for less than 7 percent of all federal revenue. There is a reason why approximately a third of all the wealth in the world is held in "offshore" tax havens. According to the IMF, the global elite are holding a total of 18 trillion dollars in offshore banking havens such as the Cayman Islands. It has been reported that 80 percent of all international banking transactions involve offshore banks. A whopping 1.4 trillion dollars is being held in offshore banks in the Cayman Islands alone. An estimated one-third of all the wealth on the entire planet is being kept in offshore banks. One of the primary reasons for this is tax avoidance.

Enough Already!

Today, average Americans have less power, relative to the monolithic corporate and governmental institutions that dominate our society, than at any other point in U.S. history. Income inequality is not a "Democrat" or a "Republican" issue. In the United States today, the richest one percent of all Americans have a greater net worth than the bottom 90 percent combined. The wealthiest 1% of all Americans now own more than a third of all the wealth in the United States. The wealthiest 1% of all Americans own over 50% of all the stocks and bonds. The poorest 50% of all Americans collectively own just 2.5% of all the wealth in the United States. The average CEO made 343 times more money than the average American did last year. Half of all American workers now earn $505 or less per week. 58 percent of the members of Congress are millionaires while only about 1 percent of the general population is made up of millionaires. The number of "low income jobs" in the U.S. has risen steadily over the past 30 years and they now account for 41 percent of all jobs in the United States.

Many banks and corporations have become so big that the world literally cannot afford for them to fail. When wealth and power are so highly concentrated, economic rewards flow only to a few. Corporatism (as opposed to true capitalism) produces a handful of winners and a whole lot of losers. Three U.S. corporations control approximately 90% of the world’s grain trade. So what happens if those three corporations collapse? But average Americans are never "too big to fail." The big banks begged and begged for bailouts, but if you are late on your debt payments they will throw you into prison.

If a deal is not reached and the "fiscal cliff" is not avoided, the average American taxpayer can expect to pay about $3,500 more in taxes next year. Clearly, the tax system that we are using right now is not working. The big corporations and the ultra-wealthy have mastered the art of moving money offshore and using loopholes to make their tax burdens as low as possible. So our politicians just keep finding more ways to squeeze more money out of the middle class and small businesses in order to make up the difference.

For the majority of people, incomes are stretched to the limit and beyond. Many cannot pay their bills, their mortgages, their car payments, their student loans. They are drowning in debt, and there is nothing that they can cut back in order to save money with which to pay higher taxes. Congress will refuse to face the difficult issues and kick the can down the road, leaving the fiscal cliff looming. This would probably be the best outcome. As the fiscal cliff is a result, not a cause, to focus on the fiscal cliff is to focus on the symptoms rather than the disease.

The US economy has two serious diseases, and neither one is too much welfare spending. One disease is the off-shoring of US middle class jobs, both manufacturing jobs and professional service jobs such as engineering, research, design, and information technology, jobs that formerly were filled by US university graduates, but which today are sent abroad or are filled by foreigners brought in on H-1B work visas at two-thirds of the salary. The other disease is the financial deregulation, that caused the ongoing financial crisis and created banks too big to fail, which has prevented capitalism from working and closing down insolvent corporations.

The Federal Reserve’s policy is focused on saving the banks, not on saving the economy. The Federal Reserve is purchasing not only new Treasury bonds issued to finance the more than one trillion dollar annual federal deficit but also the banks’ underwater financial instruments, taking them off the banks’ books and putting them on the Federal Reserve’s books. Normally, debt monetization of this amount results in rising inflation, but the money that the Federal Reserve is creating in its attempt to manage the public debt and the banks’ private debt is hung up in the banking system as excess reserves and is not finding its way into the economy. The banks are too busted to lend, and consumers are too indebted to borrow.

Already there is evidence of central banks and individuals moving out of dollars into gold and silver bullion and into other currencies of countries that are not hemorrrhaging debt and money. Russia, China, Brazil, India, and South Africa intend to conduct trade among themselves in their own currencies without use of the dollar as reserve currency. The EU countries conduct their trade with one another in euros, and although not reported in the US media, Asian countries are discussing a new common currency for trade among themselves. The world is abandoning the use of the dollar to settle international accounts, and the demand for dollars is falling as the Federal Reserve increases the supply of dollars.

The Federal Reserve can create new money with which to purchase the dumped financial instruments, thus maintaining their prices. But the Federal Reserve cannot print gold or foreign currencies with which to buy up the dollars that foreigners are paid for their US stocks and bonds. When the dollars in turn are dumped, the exchange value of the dollar will collapse, and US inflation will explode. The onset of hyperinflation can be as sudden as the collapse of a currency’s exchange value.

The real crisis facing the US is the impending collapse of the US dollar’s foreign exchange value. The US dollar’s value in relation to silver and gold has already collapsed. In the past ten years, gold’s price in US dollars has increased from $250 per ounce to $1,750 per ounce, an increase of $1,500. Silver’s price has risen from $4 per ounce to $34 per ounce. These price rises are not due to a sudden scarcity of gold and silver, but to a flight from the dollar into the two forms of historical money that cannot be created with the printing press.

The problem is the loss of US employment, consumer income, GDP, and tax base to offshoring. The solution is to reverse the outward flow of jobs and to bring them back to the US. This can be done by taxing corporations according to where they add value to their product. If the value is added abroad, corporations would have a high tax rate. If they add value domestically with US labor, they would face a low tax rate. The difference in tax rates can be calculated to offset the benefit of the lower cost of foreign labor. As all offshored production that is brought to the US to be marketed to Americans counts as imports, relocating the production in the US would decrease the trade deficit, thus strengthening belief in the dollar. The increase in US consumer incomes would raise tax revenues, thus lowering the budget deficit. It is a win-win solution.

The second part to the solution is to end the expensive unfunded wars that have ruined the federal budget for the past 11 years as well as future budgets due to the cost of veterans’ hospital care and benefits.

No one in the White House and no more than one dozen members of the 535 member US Congress represents the American people. This is the reason that, despite obvious remedies, nothing can be done. America is going to crash big time. And the rest of the world will be thankful. America, along with Israel, is the world’s most hated country.

The overwhelming consensus in the United States seems to be that we should put off any economic pain for as long as possible. The American people don't want significant cuts to government spending and they don't want taxes to be raised to pay for the spending that we are already doing.

The American people want the government to give everything to everybody, but they definitely do not want to pay for it. They want a big government that showers them with government checks and government benefits, but they don't want to cough up the ridiculous amount of money that it would take to fund such a government. So we just keep ripping off our kids and our grandkids. What we are doing to future generations is not just immoral, it is criminal. We are greedy and selfish and we are absolutely desperate to maintain the massively overinflated standard of living that we have been enjoying. We have lived way above our means for so long that we don't even know what "normal" is supposed to be anymore.

It is time to wake up and admit that our economy is in an advanced state of decline, that we need to quit shipping our jobs out of the country, and that what we are doing now is clearly not working. If we are "the greatest economy on earth," why are approximately 48 percent of all Americans either considered to be "low income" or are living in poverty? We need to return to the principles that our Founding Fathers founded this country on or else things are going to get a lot worse and people are going to get very, very angry. Our politicians have been pitting different groups of people against one another and many of them have been blaming the wealthy for all of our problems. There is so much anger directed toward those that have money. This anger is even being expressed in ways that you would not normally expect.

Eventually, all of this anger is going to lead to violence if we are not careful. When the next major wave of the economic crisis strikes and unemployment gets significantly worse, it is very possible that we may see mobs of struggling people storm into wealthy neighborhoods and play "Robin Hood" with their possessions. Instead of hating one another, we need to return to the principles that once made our economy so great. Those principles would enable everyone to prosper. Unfortunately, this country continues to turn away from those principles and hate and anger continue to grow. If we continue down this path, the end result is going to be a complete and total nightmare. It is possible to turn this economy around. But we can't do the same things that we have been doing.

"You can ignore reality, but you can't ignore the consequences of ignoring reality." --Ayn Rand

"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered." --Thomas Jefferson

"Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance and the gospel of envy; its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery." -- Winston Churchill

You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity, by legislating the wealth out of prosperity.

What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving.

The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.

When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them; and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work, because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that is the beginning of the end of any nation.

The bold print of the Constitution should trump the small print of the so-called sacroscant contracts of collateralized debt obligations and other bogus derivatives.

Corporate insiders dumping huge numbers of shares in their own companies right now. Some very large investors are suddenly making gigantic bets that the stock market will crash at some point in the next 60 days. Do Wall Street insiders expect something really BIG to happen very soon? Do they know something that we do not know? Corporate insiders are selling nine times as many shares as they are buying right now. In addition, some extraordinarily large bets have just been made that will only pay off if the financial markets in the U.S. crash by the end of April, 2013. It could mean that there are people out there that actually have insider knowledge that a market crash is coming.

For some reason, corporate insiders have chosen this moment to unload huge amounts of stock. What makes this so alarming is that corporate insiders have been exceedingly good at "timing the market" in recent years. Insiders know more than the vast majority of market participants and they're usually right over a long period of time. There are other indications that the stock market may be headed for a significant tumble in the months ahead. The recent purchase of 100,000 put options by a mystery investor has a lot of people on Wall Street talking.

Someone made a big bet against the financials ETF Feb. 5, 2013, (ticker symbol XLF), and it has everybody buzzing. The trader bought 100,000 put options on the ETF (a put option increases in value when the price of the underlying asset, in this case, the ETF, goes down). To put that number in perspective, few investors ever trade more than 500 contracts, so a 100,000 order tends to stop traffic and prompt all sorts of speculation about what's motivating the trade. The trade has sparked conversations across the market.

There was also another extremely large bet that was placed recently that is banking on a financial crash within the next two months... That suggests there will be a market event in the near future. Last week somebody put on a call spread on the VIX using the April 20 and 25 puts. They bought 150,000 contracts for a net of $75 per contract. That is an $11,250,000 bet that the VIX will move over 20 over the next 60 days. You would have to be VERY confident in your outlook to risk $11 million on a directional position with the VIX at five year lows and the markets trying to break out to new highs.

When you step back and look at the bigger picture, it does appear that Wall Street insiders are preparing for something. Meanwhile, the government continues to assure us that happy days are here again for the U.S. economy and that we don't have anything to worry about.

More Lies

President Barack Obama campaigned on promises to end secret prisons, decriminalize marijuana, balance the budget, honor the Second Amendment and make health care affordable. But what really unfolded was an explosion in the national debt (now $16 trillion and climbing), the signing of the NDAA, a claimed new power to kill any American at any time, even on U.S. soil, the use of military drones to murder American children overseas, a full-on assault against the Bill of Rights, a doubling of health insurance rates and the destruction of the U.S. economy.

Now Obama has signed the "Monsanto Protection Act" into law, stabbing America in the heart yet again and proving that no matter how convincing politicians appear on the campaign trail, they are still sociopathic liars in the end.

The Monsanto Protection Act, part of the HR 933 continuing resolution, allows Monsanto to override U.S. federal courts on the issue of planting experimental genetically engineered crops all across the country. Even if those experimental crops are found to be extremely dangerous or to cause a runaway crop plague, the U.S. government now has no judicial power to stop them from being planted and harvested.

The bill effectively bars federal courts from being able to halt the sale or planting of GMO or GE crops and seeds, no matter what health consequences from the consumption of these products may come to light in the future.

Enough!

By recklessly printing, borrowing and spending money, our authorities are absolutely shredding confidence in the U.S. dollar. The rest of the world is watching this nonsense, and at some point they are going to give up on the U.S. dollar and throw their hands up in the air. When that happens, it is going to be absolutely catastrophic for the U.S. economy.

Right now, we export a lot of our inflation. Each year, we buy far more from the rest of the world than they buy from us, and so the rest of the world ends up with giant piles of U.S. dollars. This works out pretty well for them, because the U.S. dollar is the primary reserve currency of the world and is used in international trade far more than any other currency is. We can print, borrow and spend like crazy because the rest of the world is there to soak up our excess dollars because they need them to trade with one another. But what will happen someday if the rest of the world decides to reject the U.S. dollar? At that point we would see a tsunami of U.S. dollars come flooding back to this country.

Most Americans don’t realize that there are far more dollars in use in the rest of the world than in the United States itself. More than 70% of hundred-dollar notes and nearly 60% of twenty- and fifty-dollar notes are held abroad, while two-thirds of all US banknotes have been in circulation outside the country since 1990. For decades we have been exporting gigantic quantities of our currency. So what would happen if that process suddenly reversed and massive piles of dollars started coming back into the country? It is frightening to think about. There are lots of signs that the rest of the world is accelerating their move away from the U.S. dollar. There have been a whole host of new international currency agreements that encourage the use of national currencies over the U.S. dollar. But you don’t hear anything about this in the U.S. media and our politicians are not talking about this at all.

The Federal Reserve is printing money like there is no tomorrow, and the federal government continues to run up trillion dollar deficits year after year. They do not seem to understand that they are systematically destroying the U.S. financial system. What the federal government continues to do is absolutely insane. The national debt increased by more than 24 billion dollars on the day after Thanksgiving 2012. But utter disaster has not struck yet, and most Americans are not really that concerned about the debt. So things just keep rolling along. Our national debt of $16,309,738,056,362.44 is nothing when compared to the future liabilities that our federal government is facing.

The actual liabilities of the federal government—including Social Security, Medicare, and federal employees’ future retirement benefits—already exceed $86.8 trillion, or 550% of GDP. For the year ending Dec. 31, 2011, the annual accrued expense of Medicare and Social Security was $7 trillion. Nothing like that figure is used in calculating the deficit. In reality, the reported budget deficit is less than one-fifth of the more accurate figure. Other economists paint an even gloomier picture. According to one economist, the U.S. government is facing future unfunded liabilities of 238 trillion dollars. So where are we going to get all that money?

At some point this con game is going to collapse and the rest of the world is going to say a big, fat, resounding “NO” to the U.S. dollar. And when the rest of the world rejects the U.S. dollar, the value of the dollar will drop like a rock because there will be far less global demand for it. If the rest of the world is not using the U.S. dollar for trade any longer, other nations will cease to soak up our excess currency and huge mountains of our currency that are floating around out there will start flooding back to our shores.

At that point we will be looking at inflation unlike anything we have ever seen before. The era of cheap imports will be over and we will pay far more for everything from oil to the foreign-made plastic trinkets that we buy at China-Mart. Most Americans don’t even know what a “reserve currency” is, but when the U.S. dollar loses reserve currency status it is going to unleash a nightmare that most economists cannot even imagine.

There is a fast approaching agricultural apocalypse that is going to affect every man, woman and child on our planet as present food stocks crash to levels that will not sustain our population of almost seven billion souls. The United Nations has reported that approximately one in six humans on the planet is starving so that’s over a billion people not having basic nutritional needs met.

Half of U.S. families are on food stamps. Half of U.S. families live below the poverty line. Half of American households are receiving government funds to support themselves. Officially, half of the country is directly supporting the other half through taxpayer funded federal subsidies.

The United States government has been seized by domestic and foreign banking cartels. While Americans are being told to brace for tax hikes, spending cuts and a myriad of other austerity measures, the Federal Reserve has been sending trillions of dollars to foreign banks. The federal government is supposed to represent the states, but it doesn’t, it represents the interests of the political and banking elite who themselves have no allegiance whatsoever to America.

There is a widespread discontent that has been ongoing for long before Obama even took office, and a new commitment calling on states to nullify unconstitutional laws and regulations and secede from the increasingly tyrannical federal government. They are merely expressing the opinion that the federal government has become unwaveringly corrupt and gone rogue.

The US continues to suffer economic difficulties stemming from the federal government’s neglect to reform domestic and foreign spending. The inability of our government to do much of anything without further borrowing is now well documented. Uncle Sam borrows nearly 50 cents of every dollar spent, and despite massive stimulus via heavy deficit spending, the U.S. economy is dead in the water. Hurricane Sandy has already created more jobs than Obama has!

Economics

Economics is a social science dealing with acting and reacting individuals who are constantly shifting their behavior in order to protect and improve themselves. The broad perspective of economics recognizes economics as a science of human behavior. As thinking beings, men act purposefully in order to achieve ends. As such it cannot be modeled like physics which depends on past actions repeating. The difficult problem is discerning ends or the intentions of the human being. That piece of knowledge is subjective and problematic, limiting the value of economics as a predictive science…

While it is nearly impossible to predict the actions of millions and millions of individuals because of their differing goals, it is possible to reasonably predict the actions of the federal government, at least in the near term. To understand why, one needs to understand the behavior and motivation of politicians.

Politicians have tools to defer some crises, but only by making future crises bigger. Future crises are of no concern to politicians who live in the moment, dominated by the Keynesian creed that “in the long run we are all dead.” All political decisions:

Politicians must not allow a deflation, which equates to a Depression under current circumstances, because of the potential for two crises foremost in their minds.

Because politicians will not allow deflation, and as long as they control the printing presses, they will flood the system with liquidity in hopes that one final bounce can be elicited from the economy. As such, we are headed for high inflation which the Fed will undoubtedly rationalize as necessary in order to save the economy. There are two reasons for that:

Unfortunately there is no way the Fed can calibrate the level of inflation. It is impossible, for example, to say that we will have an 8% level of inflation with any reasonable hope of achieving it. Neither politicians nor the Federal Reserve are capable of “managing” inflation in the sense that they can dial in some acceptable level and maintain it. Furthermore, inflation will not help the economy but can kill it.

Once money reaches the “crack up boom” phase, it ceases being acceptable as currency. People resort to barter which is necessarily inefficient and costly. The economy shrinks and the economy plunges into a Depression. This result can occur in a highly inflationary environment (a hyperinflationary Depression) or it could devolve into a deflationary Depression. The decision as to which occurs is in the hands of the government and the Federal Reserve. If they continue printing, there will be a hyperinflationary Depression. Whether the government chooses to pursue inflation or allow deflation to play out, economically the end is the same — a Depression. From a political standpoint, it is beneficial to continue to kick the can down the road. The bottom line is that a Depression is unavoidable.

People appear to be under the false notion that the government is going to take care of them and that their Social Security (which is anything but) will carry them through. Many are now finding out the hard way that this simply isn’t the case. The persistently poor economy, which has now been in recession for nearly 6 years, has created an entire class of people who are dependent on the government for either all, or nearly all, of their sustenance. Social Security Disability claims are at an all-time high. Food stamp subscriptions are at an all-time high, as are energy assistance, and Medicaid use. We are Europe, plain and simple.

While our politicians and Mr. Geithner sit here and lecture the Europeans on fiscal responsibility, we’ve got our very own Titanic that is listing from a huge gash in its side caused by the overriding welfare mentality and a complete lack of leadership over the past half century. We have lost our own sense of personal responsibility. Somebody else will take care of it. Someone else will pay for it. Someone else will clean up our mess. The bailout mentality is too prevalent. There is a complete lack of moral hazard.

The bubble blowing up in U.S. Treasuries is the mother of all bubbles to date, eclipsed only by the even larger bubble being blown up in OTC derivatives. Who is going to do the bailing out when these bubbles burst? There isn’t enough capital in America to cover the Treasury mess and there isn’t enough capital in the universe to cover the OTC casino gambling of financial agents around the globe.

We have created a civilization based on profiting from human suffering and the consequence is a forced end to this. What can we expect from a culture that has been busy enslaving and domesticating humans for thousands of years? We humans have not found any way to successfully rebel against the powers that be, the owners of the human herd. Instead of rebellion and revolution against the system en mass we have all joined the system so perhaps we are fortunate that natural consequences are at hand that will finally bring down the rein of the ruling elite that have sat on top of us since ancient times.

Human cooperation will be needed for survival but we have been raised and bred into competition and separation. Hard times are ahead and human survival will depend on us finding courage and great heart to weather all the storms.

The official government figure for the national debt is around $16 trillion, a figure that is wildly off the mark. “The true present value of future obligations is $222 trillion,” writes Laurence Kotlikoff, professor of economics at Boston University. “This is $700,000 per person. This is $1.9 million per household. This is what you currently owe. Do you feel better?”

Prior to FDR in the 1930s, the federal government response to natural disasters was minimal. FDR’s socialist and interventionist government polices established the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to issue loans for disaster relief and the Bureau of Public Roads was given authority to provide funding for highways and bridges damaged by natural disasters. In 1974, the Disaster Relief Act established the process of presidential disaster declarations and federal intervention. The federal effort was further enlarged and centralized under president Jimmy Carter after he issued an executive order in 1979 creating the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA. During the Reagan administration FEMA acquired a new mandate under the auspices of Continuity of Government.

The corporate-owned mainstream media repeats the falsehood that FEMA is all about natural disasters when a closer examination of the ‘agency’ reveals what its true purpose is – not hurricane relief (which has consumed only a fraction of its budget) but the continuity of a secret government most Americans know little or nothing about. FEMA has served as a cover for black op funding. A 1992 study by the Cox Newspapers Group found that during 1982-1992 FEMA’s budgets included only $243 million for disaster relief but $2.9 billion for black ops.

The financial system is rigged to quietly steal the value of your money through endless monetary creation also known as “quantitative easing.” The more money the Fed prints, the less valuable the money you worked so hard to earn is left remaining. The political system is utterly rigged to give you the illusion of choice while parading in front of you two puppets of different skin colors who both serve the same masters (the banksters).

The Treasury Department officially confirmed a fiscal 2012 deficit of $1.089 trillion. That figure is $207 billion less than in 2011, and $238 billion less than forecast in February. The deficit remains above $1 trillion for the fourth year in a row, despite President Obama's pledge to cut it in half by now. Americans have been looking for leadership from the White House, and while the president claims to have offered a ‘balanced and comprehensive deficit reduction’ approach, his plan was so unserious that it was rejected by every single member of Congress.

I can hear the question already... "What did you do during the Great Economic Shakeout Grandpa?"

"Oh gosh, grandchild, I helped major corporations shove senseless debt loads onto people and outsourced everything I could to India and the Philippines to increase corporate profits so boards of directors could get paid huge blocks of options offshore to avoid their honest share of taxes... and in return, I got dog biscuits and screwed like every other minion... which is why we're having dumpster for dinner again tonight..."

"I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution ... taking from the federal government their power of borrowing." --Thomas Jefferson 11-26-1798

"It is well enough that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning." --Henry Ford

The U.S. Postal Service was established in 1775. They've had 234 years to get it right and it is broke.

Social Security was established in 1935. They've had 74 years to get it right and it is broke.

Fannie Mae was established in 1938. They've had 71 years to get it right and it is broke.

War on Poverty started in 1964. They've had 45 years to get it right; $1 trillion of our money is confiscated each year and transferred to "the poor" and they only want more.

Medicare and Medicaid were established in 1965. They've had 44 years to get it right and they are broke.

Freddie Mac was established in 1970. They've had 39 years to get it right and it is broke.

The Department of Energy was created in 1977 to lessen our dependence on foreign oil. It has ballooned to 16,000 employees with a budget of $24 billion a year and we import more oil than ever before. They've had 32 years to get it right and it is an abysmal failure.

The government has FAILED in every "government service" they have shoved down our throats, while overspending our tax dollars.

We're "broke" & can't help our own Seniors, Veterans, Orphans, Homeless etc.,?

In recent months, we have provided aid to Haiti, Chile, and Turkey.. and now Pakistan -- previous home of bin Laden. Literally, BILLIONS of DOLLARS!!!

Our retired seniors living on a 'fixed income,' receive no aid, nor do they get any breaks.

AMERICA is a country where we have homeless without shelter, children going to bed hungry, elderly going without 'needed' meds, and mentally ill without treatment.

Imagine if the *GOVERNMENT* gave 'US' the same support they give to other countries!

Today the Western peoples are experiencing the destruction of their well being that is comparable to what the one percent in Rome imposed on Roman citizens and conquered peoples. Consumers simply cannot make ends meet. Inflation-adjusted, or real, median household income declined for the fourth-straight year, plunging to its lowest level since 1995. Deflated by the CPI-U, the 2011 reading actually stood below levels seen in the late-1960s and early-1970s. At the same time, despite the ongoing nature of the economic and systemic-solvency crises, and the effects of the 2008 financial panic, income dispersion—the movement of income away from the middle towards both high- and low-level extremes—has hit a record high, instead of moderating, as might be expected during periods of financial distress. Extremes in income dispersion usually foreshadow financial-market and economic calamities. With the current circumstance at a record extreme, and well above levels estimated to have prevailed before the 1929 stock-market crash and the Great Depression, increasingly difficult times are likely for the next several years.

The main points of Bernanke’s policy are as follows:

1. Lower interest rates to zero.
First, the Fed should try to preserve a buffer zone for the inflation rate, that is, during normal times it should not try to push inflation down all the way to zero. Most central banks seem to understand the need for a buffer zone. For example, central banks with explicit inflation targets almost invariably set their target for inflation above zero, generally between 1 and 3 percent per year. Maintaining an inflation buffer zone reduces the risk that a large, unanticipated drop in aggregate demand will drive the economy far enough into deflationary territory to lower the nominal interest rate to zero.

2. Buy securities from the banks to expand the Feds balance sheets
Second, the Fed should take most seriously–as of course it does–its responsibility to ensure financial stability in the economy. Irving Fisher (1933) was perhaps the first economist to emphasize the potential connections between violent financial crises, which lead to “fire sales” of assets and falling asset prices, with general declines in aggregate demand and the price level. A healthy, well capitalized banking system and smoothly functioning capital markets are an important line of defense against deflationary shocks. The Fed should and does use its regulatory and supervisory powers to ensure that the financial system will remain resilient if financial conditions change rapidly. And at times of extreme threat to financial stability, the Federal Reserve stands ready to use the discount window and other tools to protect the financial system, as it did during the 1987 stock market crash and the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

3. Increase the money supply.
If we do fall into deflation, however, we can take comfort that the logic of the printing press example must assert itself, and sufficient injections of money will ultimately always reverse a deflation.

4. Buy our countries debt.
The Fed was able to achieve these low interest rates despite a level of outstanding government debt (relative to GDP) significantly greater than we have today, as well as inflation rates substantially more variable. At times, in order to enforce these low rates, the Fed had actually to purchase the bulk of outstanding 90-day bills.

…… Unlike some central banks, and barring changes to current law, the Fed is relatively restricted in its ability to buy private securities directly. However, the Fed does have broad powers to lend to the private sector indirectly via banks, through the discount window. Therefore a second policy option, complementary to operating in the markets for Treasury and agency debt, would be for the Fed to offer fixed-term loans to banks at low or zero interest, with a wide range of private assets (including, among others, corporate bonds, commercial paper, bank loans, and mortgages) deemed eligible as collateral. For example, the Fed might make 90-day or 180-day zero-interest loans to banks, taking corporate commercial paper of the same maturity as collateral.

……The Fed can inject money into the economy in still other ways. For example, the Fed has the authority to buy foreign government debt, as well as domestic government debt. Potentially, this class of assets offers huge scope for Fed operations, as the quantity of foreign assets eligible for purchase by the Fed is several times the stock of U.S. government debt.

5. Devalue the dollar.
Although a policy of intervening to affect the exchange value of the dollar is nowhere on the horizon today, it’s worth noting that there have been times when exchange rate policy has been an effective weapon against deflation. A striking example from U.S. history is Franklin Roosevelt’s 40 percent devaluation of the dollar against gold in 1933-34, enforced by a program of gold purchases and domestic money creation. The devaluation and the rapid increase in money supply it permitted ended the U.S. deflation remarkably quickly. Indeed, consumer price inflation in the United States, year on year, went from -10.3 percent in 1932 to -5.1 percent in 1933 to 3.4 percent in 1934.17 The economy grew strongly, and by the way, 1934 was one of the best years of the century for the stock market. If nothing else, the episode illustrates that monetary actions can have powerful effects on the economy, even when the nominal interest rate is at or near zero, as was the case at the time of Roosevelt’s devaluation.

History has shown us that this has happened already in the past and is a weapon than can be used when all else fails. We are coming to that point now as all else has failed. Previously the dollar was devalued by 40% and I’m sure we can expect something similar this time around.

You Can't Make This Stuff Up

Every single day more Americans fall into poverty. This should deeply alarm you no matter what political party you belong to and no matter what your personal economic philosophy is. Right now, approximately 100 million Americans are either “poor” or “near poor.” Millions upon millions of families are experiencing a tremendous amount of pain in this economy, and no matter what “solutions” we think are correct, the reality is that we all should have compassion on them. Sadly, things are about to get even worse. The next major economic downturn is rapidly approaching, and when it hits are going to be even more horrendous. After accounting for inflation, our economic growth has actually been negative all the way back into the middle of the last decade. Our “real GDP” has continually been negative since 2005. So that means we are getting poorer as a nation. Meanwhile, we have been piling up astounding amounts of debt.

We do not have a market economy. We have a rigged economy through central economic planning by central banking. The system is failing, it was doomed to fail and we have to wake up to that fact. It is only a matter of time before America undergoes a catastrophic economic Great Depression. The recent economic history of the U.S. has been one of the government creating bubbles which subsequently crash and burn. We are on the last bubble--the debt bubble. The government currency bubble. This is truly the final stage for any nation, when it is so badly in debt that it’s terrified of balancing its budget and resorts to either destroying its currency or being forced into bankruptcy by its creditors.

The economic forces combining to create a perfect storm of destruction have been slowly building in scope for over 30 years. Once the average American understands just how long these destructive forces have been building, they get that much closer to understanding the terrible judgment hovering over the United States. We have been the children of good fortune. We were pampered, coddled, and spoiled for decades upon decades. And now it is time to pay the piper. And behind it all lurks the depravity and evil of the communists, corroding the foundations of human civilization, reveling in the creation of new underclasses steeped in suffocating poverty, eradicating morality and virtue in their maniacal dash towards the New Global Hell.

The middle class in America is being systematically destroyed. Once upon a time the United States had the largest and most vibrant middle class in the history of the world. The rest of the globe looked at us in envy and wondered what we were doing right. But now everything seems to be going wrong for the middle class. Millions of our jobs have been shipped out of the country and competition for the remaining jobs is keeping wages at depressed levels. Meanwhile, the cost of living just keeps going up and up and middle class budgets are being stretched and strained like never before. Millions more Americans fall out of the middle class and into poverty every single year, and government dependence is at an all-time high. Finding a solution to the decline of the middle class is absolutely central to fixing the economic problems in this country. Without a large, thriving middle class this would not be America. The truth is that people from all over the world want to come here because they want to work hard, buy a house, raise a family and provide a better future for their children. This has traditionally been “the land of opportunity,” but now the middle class is rapidly declining and none of our politicians seem to have any solutions. With each passing day, the American Dream is slipping through the fingers of millions of hard working American families. We owe it to them to get this thing fixed.

61 percent of all Americans were “middle income” back in 1971. Today, only 51 percent of all Americans are. 85 percent of middle class Americans say that it is harder to maintain a middle class standard of living today compared with 10 years ago. 62 percent of middle class Americans say that they have had to reduce household spending over the past year. The average net worth of a middle class family in America was $129,582 in 2001. By 2010 that figure had dropped to $93,150. According to the Federal Reserve, the median net worth of all families in the United States declined “from $126,400 in 2007 to $77,300 in 2010.“

Back in 1970, middle income Americans brought home 62 percent of all income in the United States. In 2010, middle income Americans only brought home 45 percent of all income. After you adjust for inflation, median family income in the United States has fallen by about 6 percent since the year 2000. Real median household income has decreased by more than 4000 dollars since Barack Obama entered the White House. Amazingly, more than half of all Americans are now at least partially financially dependent on the government. In 1970, 65 percent of all Americans lived in “middle class neighborhoods.” By 2007, only 44 percent of all Americans lived in “middle class neighborhoods.” One recent survey found that 28 percent of all Americans do not have a single penny saved for emergencies.

The United States was once ranked #1 in the world in GDP per capita. Today we have slipped to #12. The total value of household real estate in the U.S. has declined from $22.7 trillion in 2006 to $16.2 trillion today. Most of that wealth has been lost by the middle class. Back in 2007, 19.2 percent of all American families had a net worth of zero or less. By 2010, that figure had risen to 32.5 percent. Since the year 2000, incomes for U.S. households led by someone between the ages of 25 and 34 have fallen by about 12 percent after you adjust for inflation. In 1984, the median net worth of households led by someone 65 or older was 10 times larger than the median net worth of households led by someone 35 or younger. Today, the median net worth of households led by someone 65 or older is 47 times larger than the median net worth of households led by someone 35 or younger.

Corporate profits as a percentage of GDP are at an all-time high. Meanwhile, wages as a percentage of GDP are near an all-time low. There are now 20.2 million Americans that spend more than half of their incomes on housing. That represents a 46 percent increase from 2001. The average American household spent approximately $4,155 on gasoline during 2011, and electricity bills in the U.S. have risen faster than the overall rate of inflation for five years in a row. Over the past decade, health insurance premiums have risen three times faster than wages have in the United States. Health insurance costs have risen by 23 percent since Barack Obama became president. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, health care costs accounted for just 9.5% of all personal consumption back in 1980. Today they account for approximately 16.3%. Back in 1983, the bottom 95 percent of all income earners had 62 cents of debt for every dollar that they earned. By 2007, that figure had soared to $1.48.

Just under 2.3 million U.S. homes make up a “shadow inventory” of distressed properties that are likely to hit the housing market in the future. Shadow inventory are homes where owners are 90 days or more behind on mortgage payments, homes in some stage of the foreclosure process or bank-owned foreclosures that have yet to be listed for sale.

Total home mortgage debt in the United States is now about 5 times larger than it was just 20 years ago. Total consumer debt in the United States has risen by 1700 percent since 1971. Recently it was announced that total student loan debt in the United States has passed the one trillion dollar mark. One study found that approximately 41 percent of all working age Americans either have medical bill problems or are currently paying off medical debt. According to a report published in The American Journal of Medicine, medical bills are a major factor in more than 60 percent of the personal bankruptcies in the United States. Of those bankruptcies that were caused by medical bills, approximately 75 percent of them involved individuals that actually did have health insurance. According to a report released in 2010, Americans spend approximately twice as much as residents of other developed countries do on health care. According to one recent survey, approximately 10 percent of all employers in the United States plan to drop health coverage when key provisions of the new health care law kick in less than two years from now.

According to one recent survey, approximately one-third of all Americans are not paying their bills on time at this point. The wealthiest 20 percent of all Americans now control 84 percent of all the wealth in America. Right now, over 50 percent of all stocks and bonds are owned by just 1 percent of the U.S. population. Back in the 1970s, the top 1 percent of all income earners brought in about 8 percent of all income. Today, they bring in about 21 percent of all income. 40 years ago, the top 1/10,000th of all U.S. households brought in about 1 percent of all income. Today, they bring in about 5 percent of all income.

Today, the wealthiest 1 percent of all Americans own more wealth than the bottom 95 percent combined. The wealthiest 400 families in the United States have about as much wealth as the bottom 50 percent of all Americans do combined. The six heirs of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton have a net worth that is roughly equal to the bottom 30 percent of all Americans combined. At this point, the poorest 50 percent of all Americans collectively own just 2.5% of all the wealth in the United States.

The following is how income gains in the United States were distributed during 2010….

-37 percent of all income gains went to the top 0.01 percent of all income earners

The U.S. economy lost more than 220,000 small businesses during the recent recession. The percentage of Americans that are self-employed fell by more than 20 percent between 1991 and 2010. Overall, the number of “new entrepreneurs and business owners” dropped by a staggering 53 percent between 1977 and 2010. In 2010, the number of jobs created at new businesses in the United States was less than half of what it was back in the year 2000. The average pay for self-employed Americans fell by $3,721 between 2006 and 2010.

In the United States today, there are 240 million working age people. Only about 140 million of them are working. Since the year 2000, the United States has lost 10% of its middle class jobs. In the year 2000 there were about 72 million middle class jobs in the United States but today there are only about 65 million middle class jobs. Back in 1950, more than 80 percent of all men in the United States had jobs. Today, less than 65 percent of all men in the United States have jobs.

Right now, approximately 25 million American adults are living with their parents. According to one study, between 1969 and 2009 the median wages earned by American men between the ages of 30 and 50 dropped by 27 percent after you account for inflation. According to U.S. Representative Betty Sutton, America has lost an average of 15 manufacturing facilities a day over the last 10 years. During 2010 it got even worse. That year, an average of 23 manufacturing facilities a day shut down in the United States.

At this point, one out of every four American workers has a job that pays $10 an hour or less. Today, about one out of every four workers in the United States brings home wages that are at or below the poverty level. If you can believe it, the United States actually has a higher percentage of workers doing low wage work than any other major industrialized nation does. Back in 1980, less than 30% of all jobs in the United States were low income jobs. Today, more than 40% of all jobs in the United States are low income jobs. At this point, only 24.6 percent of all jobs in the United States are considered to be good jobs.

Right now, approximately 48 percent of all Americans are either considered to be “low income” or are living in poverty. Approximately 57 percent of all children in the United States are living in homes that are either considered to be either “low income” or impoverished. In the United States today, somewhere around 100 million Americans are considered to be either “poor” or “near poor.” In 2010, 2.6 million more Americans descended into poverty. That was the largest increase that we have seen since the U.S. government began keeping statistics on this back in 1959. It is being projected that when the final numbers come out, the U.S. poverty rate will be the highest that it has been in almost 50 years.

It is also being projected that about half of all American adults will spend at least some time living below the poverty line before they turn 65. Today, one out of every six elderly Americans lives below the federal poverty line. It was recently reported that 1.5 million American families live on less than two dollars a day (before counting government benefits). According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the percentage of “very poor” rose in 300 out of the 360 largest metropolitan areas during 2010.

According to one recent poll, 18.2 percent of all Americans have not been able to buy enough food to eat at some point during this past year. Households that are led by a single mother have a 31.6% poverty rate. In 2010, 42 percent of all single mothers in the United States were on food stamps. At this point, approximately 22 percent of all American children are living in poverty. According to the National Center for Children in Poverty, 36.4 percent of all children that live in Philadelphia are living in poverty, 40.1 percent of all children that live in Atlanta are living in poverty, 52.6 percent of all children that live in Cleveland are living in poverty and 53.6 percent of all children that live in Detroit are living in poverty. Since 2007, the number of children living in poverty in the state of California has increased by 30 percent. Child homelessness in the United States has risen by 33 percent since 2007. There are 314 counties in the United States where at least 30% of the children are facing food insecurity. Approximately one-fourth of all American children are enrolled in the food stamp program. It is projected that half of all American children will be on food stamps at least once before they turn 18 years of age.

Since Barack Obama became president, the number of Americans living in poverty has risen by 6 million and the number of Americans on food stamps has risen by 14 million. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 49 percent of all Americans live in a home where at least one person receives benefits from the federal government. Back in 1983, that number was below 30 percent. Federal housing assistance outlays increased by a whopping 42 percent between 2006 and 2010.

Approximately 50 million Americans do not have any health insurance at all right now. Back in 1965, only one out of every 50 Americans was on Medicaid. Today, approximately one out of every 6 Americans is on Medicaid. It is being projected that Obamacare will add 16 million more Americans to the Medicaid rolls.

Overall, the amount of money that the federal government gives directly to the American people has risen by 32 percent since Barack Obama entered the White House. According to a recent report produced by Pew Charitable Trusts, approximately one out of every three Americans that grew up in a middle class household has slipped down the income ladder. If you can believe it, more than 100 million Americans are enrolled in at least one welfare program run by the federal government at this point. In the United States today, 77 percent of all Americans are living to paycheck to paycheck at least some of the time.

Warmaking priorities matter most. So do policies favoring bankers, other corporate favorites, and super-rich elites. Today's upside down reality endangers everyone. Protracted global Depression deepens. The policies adopted make things worse, not better. Criminality is rewarded, not punished. Warmakers won their Peace Prize. They'll be encouraged to keep ravaging countries globally. War is considered peace. Leaders who wage them reap huge rewards. Peacemakers are vilified. Body counts don't matter and never did. Only wealth, power, and privilege count.

It's time "We the People" used our brains, energies, and values responsibly. Independent activism is key. America's two-party duopoly is too corrupt and dysfunctional to fix. Another way is essential. What passes for normal in America includes wars without end, eroding social services enroute to eliminating them, and police state harshness for non-believers. Wars threaten to go global. Today's weaponry is insanely more destructive both quantitatively and qualitatively than decades earlier. Future wars are almost certain to bring life on the earth to an end. At the same time, it's unlikely that anyone will do what is necessary to bring government to sanity and decency regarding war. What kind of leaders think blowing up countries makes sense? What kind of people support them? Real change is urgent, and not just on foreign policy. It is no secret that today we are facing a planetary environmental emergency, endangering most species of the planet including our own, and that this impending catastrophe has its roots in the capitalist economic system.

Growing inequality is institutionalized. America's heading for oblivion. People needs are ignored. Depression conditions threaten to become catastrophic. Policymakers able to act don't notice or care. Self-interest defines them. They infest Washington like a metastasizing cancer. The longer injustices persist, the worse they get. A race to the bottom assures disaster. It's happening in America, across Europe, and in Israel. Who wants to live this way?

Modern ways of what, how, and the ways in which we produce and consume have increasingly poisoned what we depend upon for life. The products we consumers depend upon for life, industry and agriculture depend upon for their profits. Pushed by their needs and desires, all too many producers--most, immorally, and successfully the giants among them--have, through endless product changes and advertising, brought out the foolish in consumers, and dangerous levels of waste of our natural resources. Most people have no idea what's going on or how it harms them.

Clearly something is occurring in America. Millions are unemployed. Poverty's expanding exponentially. So are homelessness, hunger, and overall depravation. Environment dangers are ignored. Even the formerly “moderate” are realizing that something has gone horribly wrong in their country. But the vast majority of Americans are still fast asleep. They are brainwashed, neurotic, and addicted. There is swiftly approaching a moment where the brainwashed Americans will have outlived their usefulness, when all their money has been stolen by the communists, their guns have been confiscated, their liberties destroyed. It is clear that unless we make substantial changes in how and what we produce and consume the world will sink into irreversible and increasing dangers to air and water and much else upon which our very existence relies. There is a Damocles sword of economic death and destruction hovering over the sleeping citizenry. Politicians are in bed with corporate crooks. They don't give a damn about life, liberty, equity, justice, and human need. Policies they support show it. Ordinary people must act on their own behalf. No other way works.

When the economic crash occurs, the cities will burn with a fervent intensity. Woe to those who have not prepared oil for their lamps, to those who did not foresee the evil approaching. When the food runs out, when the electricity stops, when civil society breaks down, understand that this moment has been in the making for a lifetime. When gangs rule the streets, when the tanks roll in, when the communists begin their ascent to power, you must be prepared and knowledgeable of the facts.

When the lights go out, when the party stops, everything changes. When the violence begins, when the cities riot, the mass population becomes more pliant, more fearful. The entire paradigms of hundreds of millions of people will change overnight to one of simple survival. When the chaos escalates and evil ascends, there will be a great spiritual awakening. But it is in the midst of chaos, fear, and bloodshed that communists have historically made their greatest gains, and every action of theirs will be calculated to play the Economic Crash card to its greatest power efficiency. Their advantage will be that they have known for years what is coming, and have laid their plans accordingly.

Americans are the first people in history who are so idealistic, or so thoroughly brainwashed, that they prefer to pay for wars and bail out banks than to make their mortgage payments and help their children with student loan debt. The federal court in Germany has ruled that Germans are to be just as idealistic as Americans. The federal court has produced a ruling that it is OK for the EU to require German citizens to provide $190 billion to pay off the private banks who lent too much money to Greece. In exchange for paying off the banks for Greece, the Greek people are to be driven into poverty and hopelessness. Pensions are cut, taxes are raised, employment is cut, social services are curtailed, prices of utilities are raised. The Greek people are to be destroyed in order that the private European banks do not lose money on their bad loans. In the West the Revolution From Above has succeeded. The peoples are re-enserfed. The promised land is a promised land for the one percent.

The highlight for the moment is on Greece, but let’s remember that Greece only counts for 2% of the eurozone GDP. It’s more about publicity. Also, everybody knew that the $125 billion (for Spain) was a drop in the bucket compared to the trillions of dollars of debt. What’s going to happen with the Italians with their bond yields skyrocketing? So with each day it’s a new catastrophe. With each new catastrophe you hear the same lines from the central bankers and the politicians, ‘We have to fix this one. If we don’t fix this one, the whole world will go up in smoke.’ So this is really serious. It works the same way every time. Bad policies assure bad results. Prioritizing short-term profits jeopardizes long-term gains.

The global communist forces and their agent Obama are all aware of the approaching crisis. The Department of Homeland Security sounds as if it is becoming Obama’s personal security service with each passing day. They have certainly not been idle. They are clearly preparing for something, as evidenced by their recent purchases of hundreds of millions of rounds of hollow point ammunition.

The Fed is the heart of the problem. We have destroyed the capital markets, the money markets. Interest rates mean nothing. Everything is trading off the Fed. Wall Street isn’t even home. It’s a bunch of computers trading word clouds emitted by this central bank or that. With the insane interest rate policies of the Fed, the crushing debt of entitlements and the neocon-driven war machine with a parasitic military-industrial complex in tow will continue to roll on unless something gives.

Facing the music will never happen if you can keep borrowing free money forever because the Fed and these lunatics who are running it are basically telling the whole world untruths about the cost of money, about the cost of risk, about how you allocate capital. The Federal Reserve, is not merely a gaggle of lunatics, it is a façade for a cartel of international banksters who know exactly what they are doing – destroying the greatest engine of wealth and prosperity the world has ever known. The “moneyed vultures who control” the Federal Reserve are determined to bankrupt the government and impoverish the American people.

It seems that whenever the U.S. economy gets into trouble, Bernanke and his friends at the Fed only have one prescription and it goes something like this: “Print more money and promise to keep interest rates near zero even longer.” On September 14, 2012, the Fed announced that it will buy $40 billion dollars of mortgage-backed securities per month …indefinitely. This is just another bailout for the big banks. (If the government had instead given money directly to the consumer, we would be out of this economic slump by now). Bernanke claims that the main justification for QE3 is to boost employment. This is slightly ironic, since Bernanke’s policies are largely responsible for creating high unemployment in the first place. The real justification is to try to artificially prop up asset prices. But that approach has been proven to be an absolute failure.

In addition, the Fed said it will continue its program of selling shorter-dated government debt and buying longer-term securities, a mechanism known as Operation Twist. It also will continue its policy of reinvesting principal payments from agency debt and mortgage-backed securities back into mortgages. These actions, which together will increase the Committee’s holdings of longer-term securities by about $85 billion each month through the end of the year, should put downward pressure on longer-term interest rates, support mortgage markets, and help to make broader financial conditions more accommodative. And the Fed isn’t stopping there. There’s strong hints that they’ll do Treasurys next. They’re pulling out all the stops to try to get this economy to gain some traction and, most important, to get unemployment down. This sounds nice, except that quantitative easing destroys the economy and hurts the little guy.

QE3

The United States is an addict “who frequently pleasures itself with budgetary crystal meth. On September 14, 2012, the Federal Reserve announced that QE3 will begin, but it is going to be much different from QE1 and QE2. Both of those rounds of quantitative easing were of limited duration. This time, the quantitative easing is going to be open-ended. The Fed is going to buy 40 billion dollars worth of mortgage-backed securities per month until they have decided that the economy is in good enough shape to stop. For those that get confused by terms like “quantitative easing” and “mortgage-backed securities,” what the Federal Reserve is essentially saying is this: “We’re going to print a bunch of money and buy stuff for as long as we feel it is necessary.” In addition, the Federal Reserve has promised to keep interest rates at ultra-low levels all the way through mid-2015. The course that the Federal Reserve has set us on is utter insanity. Ben Bernanke can rain money down on us all he wants, but it is not going to do much at all to help the real economy. However, it will definitely hasten the destruction of the U.S. dollar. And the Federal Reserve is apparently very eager to get QE3 going. Purchases of mortgage-backed securities are going to start on Friday, September 14.

We are told that one of the primary reasons for QE3 is jobs. But did QE1 and QE2 create jobs? The answer is clearly no. The percentage of working age Americans with a job fell dramatically during the last recession and has not bounced back since that time despite all of the quantitative easing that has been done already. So why try the same thing again when it did not work the first two times? But what more quantitative easing is likely to do is to pump up stock market values because a lot of the money from QE3 is going to end up being put into stocks and other investments. This is going to help the wealthy get even wealthier, and it is going to make the “wealth gap” between the rich and the poor even larger in America.

In the coming months, hundreds of billions of dollars that the Federal Reserve has zapped into existence out of nothing will be injected into our financial system. So what will happen to all of this new money? If banks and financial institutions use that money to make loans then it could have somewhat of a positive impact on the economy in the short-term. However, the truth is that it isn’t as if banks are hurting for cash to loan out. In fact, right now banks are already sitting on $1.6 trillion in excess reserves. Just like with the first two rounds of quantitative easing, a lot of the money from QE3 will likely end up being put on the shelf. But the stock market loved the news because they know that the previous two rounds of quantitative easing have been great for the financial markets. On September 13, 2012, the stock market soared to levels not seen since December 2007.

There is much rejoicing on Wall Street right now. And this stock market bounce is great for Bernanke’s good buddy Barack Obama. Obama nominated Bernanke to a second term as Fed Chairman, and this might be Bernanke’s way of paying him back. No longer will quantitative easing be considered an “emergency measure.” It will now be considered just another “tool” that the Fed uses in the normal course of business. Considering how vulnerable the U.S. dollar already is, announcing an “open-ended” round of quantitative easing is utter foolishness. According to the Fed, when you add the 40 billion dollars of new mortgage-backed security purchases per month to all of the other “easing” measures the Fed is continuing to do, the grand total is going to come to about 85 billion dollars a month. And without a doubt the mainstream media will be proclaiming this to be “good news” for the economy in the short-term.

QE3 is also probably going to cause commodity prices to rise just like QE1 and QE2 did. That means that you will be paying more for gasoline, food and other basic necessities. So there may not be more jobs, but at least you will get the privilege of paying more for things. The inflation that QE3 will cause will be particularly cruel for those on fixed incomes such as retirees. None of the extra money from QE3 is going to go into their pockets, but they will have to pay more to heat their homes and fill up their shopping carts. And the “exceptionally low interest rate” policy of the Federal Reserve is absolutely devastating for those that have saved for retirement and that are relying on interest income for their living expenses. In short, quantitative easing is very good for the wealthy and it is very bad for the average man and woman on the street. But what else would you expect from the Federal Reserve? It is imperative that we educate the American people about the Federal Reserve and about how they are destroying our economy.

Perhaps the biggest danger from QE3 is that it could greatly hasten the day when the U.S. dollar ceases to be the reserve currency of the world. The rest of the world is not stupid. They see that the Federal Reserve is now firing up the printing presses whenever they feel like it. They can see the games that we are playing with our currency. Why should the rest of the world continue to use the U.S. dollar to trade with one another when the United States is constantly debasing it and playing games with its value? China and Russia have been calling for a new reserve currency for the world for several years. They have been leading the charge to conduct international trade in currencies other than the U.S. dollar.

Not only is the Fed making a commitment to purchase $40 Billion per month of MBS (mortgage backed securities) from large banks with “newly printed money,” it is also making an open ended commitment – there is no end date. Ultimately this is highly inflationary for the American public and very beneficial for the banks holding what is often referred to as “toxic waste” (MBS) that can be dumped onto the Fed at full face value. Hopefully the bailouts to the banks will allow them to loan that newly created money into the economy so it benefits real people and “Main Street.” Regardless, we have been warned about the consequences of printing money and the resulting consumer price inflation.

QE3 looks like a desperate act to feed money to large banks, offload MBS toxic waste from their balance sheets, and devalue the dollar against houses, commodities, and other currencies. There will be significant collateral damage but apparently funneling money to the banks is more important. The Fed will try to conjure a recovery on the backs of currency debasement. It will not stop or alter from this course. If the economy fails to respond to the drugs, Bernanke, in an effort to devalue the dollar, will simply up the dosage. In other words, the dollar is screwed. Bernanke is effectively calling in a B-52 strike on the US dollar, monetizing for the world to see, and pledging to monetize for as long as it takes – until the US dollar is driven down to a level where American workers can once again be globally competitive. He explained how the new stimulus will be focused directly at the housing market through purchases of mortgage backed securities.

When this latest program doesn’t achieve the intended results, it won’t be perceived by the Fed as a failure of ‘monetary accommodation’. It will, instead, be perceived as a failure due to insufficient monetary accommodation and therefore as a reason for an even higher dose of the same bogus remedy. This process is likely to continue until price inflation is widely perceived as a major problem.

Why should a nation’s Central Bank buy mortgages from private financial institutions? The Central Bank prints money and buys the mortgages as a way of socializing private losses and passing through billions of dollars in “free money” to private hands… Since the Fed can create unlimited money, why not pay off every mortgage in the land? That’s only $9.7 trillion, and if the Fed wanted to unleash an orgy of spending, that would certainly do it. Trillions in losses would be filled with “free money,” since the Fed would pay the full value of all mortgages. It’s not about aiding the nation or borrowers, it’s all about funneling “free money” to the banks to restore their balance sheets and profits.

The status of the U.S. dollar in the world has already been steadily slipping, and now Ben Bernanke pulls this kind of nonsense. We are handing the rest of the world an excuse to abandon the U.S. dollar on a silver platter. And when the rest of the globe rejects the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency, the dollar will crash, the cost of living will increase dramatically, our standard of living will go way down and we will never fully recover from it. So if you think that things are “bad” now, just wait until that happens. The U.S. dollar is one of the best things that the U.S. economy still has going for it, and Ben Bernanke is doing his best to absolutely destroy that.

The American Dream is being systematically destroyed right in front of our eyes and most Americans don't even realize what is happening. Many Americans seem to be far more interested in American Idol and Dancing With The Stars than they are in dealing with the very serious economic, political and moral problems facing this nation. Most Americans know much more about Kim Kardashian than they do about the Federal Reserve. Sadly, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has a track record of failure that is absolutely legendary. Barack Obama has fully supported Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and actually nominated him for a second term. The truth is that the United States is absolutely drowning in debt, and when that debt bubble finally bursts the Federal Reserve is simply not going to be able to save us from the Great Depression that will happen as a result. More Americans than ever are coming to realize that the Federal Reserve is at the very heart of our economic problems.

In a rare moment of bipartisanship, the House overwhelmingly passed a bill by Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) to audit the Federal Reserve. The first ever GAO (Government Accountability Office) audit of the Federal Reserve was carried out in the past few months due to the Ron Paul, Alan Grayson Amendment to the Dodd-Frank bill, which passed last year. Jim DeMint, a Republican Senator, and Bernie Sanders, an independent Senator, led the charge for a Federal Reserve audit in the Senate, but watered down the original language of the house bill(HR1207), so that a complete audit would not be carried out.

Ben Bernanke, Alan Greenspan, and various other bankers vehemently opposed the audit and lied to Congress about the effects an audit would have on markets. Nevertheless, the results of the first audit in the Federal Reserve’s nearly 100 year history were posted on Senator Sander’s webpage earlier this morning.

$16,000,000,000,000.00 (16 trillion) had been secretly given out to US banks and corporations and foreign banks everywhere from France to Scotland. From the period between December 2007 and June 2010, the Federal Reserve had secretly bailed out many of the world’s banks, corporations, and governments. 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. Why the Federal Reserve had never been public about this or even informed the United States Congress about the $16 trillion dollar bailout is obvious – the American public would have been outraged to find out that the Federal Reserve bailed out foreign banks while Americans were struggling to find jobs.

The entire national debt of the United States government spanning its 200+ year history is “only” $14.5 trillion. The budget that is being debated so heavily in Congress and the Senate is “only” $3.5 trillion. Take all of the outrage and debate over the $1.5 trillion deficit into consideration, and swallow this Red pill: There was no debate about whether $16,000,000,000,000 would be given to failing banks and failing corporations around the world.

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.

The U.S. economy is nothing but a credit card which is past the point of being “maxed-out.” As our economies collapse it is inevitable that both our banking system and markets will be forced to shut down – likely for extended periods. What looms ahead of us is an economic cataclysm more severe than anything we have even read about in our history books, let alone experienced in our own lives.

Ryan, Romney, Obama and the hapless Biden – these are merely bit part actors in a larger drama that will eventually end in disaster. Ron Paul’s diligent effort to audit the Fed was a good starting point and has produced tangible results, namely the revelation that the bankster cartel had secretly doled out $16 trillion to foreign banks and corporations, a factoid almost completely ignored, of course, by the establishment media.

Much more must be done soon. The Federal Reserve must be dismantled immediately and the banksters prosecuted for their criminal conspiracy to destroy America. Short of that, we can only expect to be made homeless on the continent our fathers conquered.

“America was born of protest, revolution, and mistrust of government,” writes Ron Paul. “Subservient societies neither maintain nor deserve freedom for long.”

The single most important factor responsible for fueling the last several decades of economic growth has been credit expansion. Whether it’s central banks lending money to large financial institutions, or private banks dispersing funds to businesses and individuals, our lifestyles simply would not have been made possible without it – builders couldn’t build homes, manufacturers couldn’t acquire raw materials, and consumers wouldn’t be able to consume. In the process we’ve expanded our national debt to unprecedented levels, with some estimates suggesting that our total liabilities and commitments are approaching nearly $200 trillion in the next twenty five years. By all accounts, we live in a system built on nothing more than a promise to repay what we’ve borrowed. This reverse trickle-down economics has left everyone bloated with debt, including the government as a whole, as well as the individual American who has bought his house, car, furnishings and overall lifestyle by taking on insurmountable levels of debt.

There is no recovery. The credit crisis has not been averted. Things are going to get far worse before they get better. While most refuse to admit it, the evidence is clear. Our system of creditism is dependent on monetary intervention and expansion by our central bank. Unless the Federal Reserve continues to artificially expand credit and print more money, the system will collapse in on itself – just as it almost did in 2008.

Consider what happens when someone loses their income stream. As a result, they are unable to pay their mortgage, put food on the table or live any semblance of the life they came to know while they were gainfully employed. Our government, like any individual American, also has an income stream. That income is based on taxes, and in recent years, overwhelming borrowing. In the near future we will reach a point where we’ve taken on so much debt that our creditors will no longer lend us money. Because tax revenues are already dropping due to negative economic growth, the government will essentially be left with no income. Like someone who loses their job, they will have no way of meeting their monthly obligations. They won’t be able to provide nutritional assistance, there will be no health care, and social security benefits will stop being distributed. Our civilization would not be able to handle such a transition from an expansionary credit based economy where goods and services were readily available into a paradigm of credit contraction, supply shortages and destitution. This is what is coming. There is no way to prevent – only to defer it until a later date. That day will soon be upon us, and one way or the other life in America as we have come to know it will take a drastic turn for the worse. When civilizations transform in this way it often results in violence, starvation and bloodshed. Prepare for it, because it will be on our doorsteps soon enough.

America is losing half a million jobs to China every single year. Once upon a time, the United States had the largest and most prosperous middle class in the history of the world, but now that is changing at a breathtaking pace. Our economy is not producing nearly enough jobs for all of us anymore, and an increasing percentage of the jobs that are being produced pay 10 dollars an hour or less. Apparently Barack Obama believes that the more punishment that he inflicts on the U.S. economy the more we will like him. The truth is that Barack Obama is killing jobs in America. His regulations are absolutely crippling our businesses, he has been heavily promoting new job killing "free trade" agreements, Obamacare has the potential to be the most job-killing law of all time, and he is running up debt that will crush job creation in this country for ages to come. Obama will likely go down as the most anti-business president in U.S. history. He has presided over the worst "recovery" from a recession in post-World War II history, and under his leadership a whole host of economic statistics have steadily gotten worse. The percentage of working age Americans that have jobs has not bounced back since the end of the last recession, and now the next major economic crisis is rapidly approaching.

Following a brief period in which it seemed that US foodstamp recipients may have peaked, with those living in poverty maxing out at 46.514 million in December 2011, and then declining modestly for the next few months, June saw a new surge in those Americans living in poverty and thus eligible for foodstamps, with 173,600 new entrants into the system, bringing the total to a new all time high of 46.670 million and once again rising fast. Furthermore, with subsequent emergency events affecting the heartland due to the drought, the administration has made sure even more Americans will be eligible going forward. As a result expect the July and August numbers to promptly surpass 47 million on their way to the psychological resistance level of 50 million. Indicatively, the 173,600 increase in Foodstamps recipients in June was three times greater than Americans finding jobs (64,000, most of which part-time) according to the BLS. Finally, a new record was also breached for American households on foodstamps, which now hit 22.4 million, an increase of 106,298 households. The average benefit per household decline once more, this time to $276.5. Not an all time low, but just above it.

Obamacare is going to kill countless numbers of jobs. Obamacare is going to require all businesses that have at least 50 full-time workers to either provide very expensive health insurance for their employees or pay a $2,000 penalty for each worker after the first 30 employees. It is going to encourage small businesses to stay under the 50 full-time employee cap. It is going to encourage some businesses to fire workers because they are now too expensive to be profitable. It is going to make businesses operating in the United States even less competitive with foreign businesses than they were before. So even more jobs and even more businesses will leave the United States. There are more than 20 new taxes in the Obamacare law alone. Obama does not seem to care about the impact that heavy tax burdens are having on businesses all over America. But even though Obama knows all of this, he is completely and totally unrepentant about this law.

At the same time that Barack Obama is absolutely crippling small businesses, he is also encouraging more Americans to kick back and become financially dependent on the federal government. But it is not good to have tens of millions of Americans sitting around and doing nothing productive for the economy. Since Barack Obama entered the White House, the number of Americans on food stamps has increased from 32 million to 46 million. Amazingly, the Obama administration has been spending millions of dollars on ads that encourage even more people to go on food stamps.... Overall, the amount of money that the federal government gives directly to the American people has increased by 32 percent since Barack Obama entered the White House.

The cost of living continues to rise steadily every single year while wages do not. Close to half of all American workers are living month to month, and many American families have gone deeper into debt as they struggle to pay the bills. Millions more Americans are falling into poverty each year and dependence on the government is at an all-time high. Something is fundamentally wrong with our economy. It is not working the way that it used to, and the middle class is being absolutely shredded. Most American families are finding it harder and harder to make it through each passing year, and unless a miracle happens things are going to continue to get even harder.

The real unemployment numbers are much worse than we are being told. For example, if the labor force participation rate was the same today as it was back when Barack Obama first took office, the unemployment rate in the United States would be a whopping 11.2 percent. But every month the Obama administration has been able to show “progress” because of the fiction that hundreds of thousands of Americans are “disappearing” from the labor force each month. Frankly, the way that they come up with these numbers is an insult to our intelligence. The employment-population ratio is a measure of the percentage of working age Americans that actually have jobs. It should be called “the employment rate.” In August, 2012, it fell slightly to 58.3 percent. It is lower than it was when the last recession supposedly ended, and it is almost as low as it has been at any point since the very beginning of this crisis. A few times during this economic downturn it has actually hit 58.2 percent. Needless to say, things are not getting any better. Why aren’t the American people being told the truth? After every other recession in the post-World War II era, the employment rate has always rebounded. But not this time.

How can Barack Obama claim that we are better off now? In August 2010, 58.5 percent of working age Americans had jobs. In August 2012, 58.3 percent of working age Americans had jobs. So where is the recovery? It is two years later and a smaller percentage of Americans are employed. We are not being told the truth about the unemployment numbers. The following are some more indications that the real unemployment numbers are much worse than we are being told.

-In July, 142,220,000 Americans were working. In August, only 142,101,000 Americans were working. So the number of Americans working fell by 119,000 and yet the government would have us believe that the unemployment rate actually declined from 8.3 percent to 8.1 percent.

-According to the federal government, 96,000 jobs were added to the economy in August and the U.S. labor force shrank by 368,000 even though our population is continually growing. If the size of the U.S. labor force had stayed the same, the official unemployment rate would have actually gone up to 8.4 percent.

-Almost all of the new jobs added in August were the result of the “birth-death” model used by the Labor Department to estimate jobs added by new businesses. That model has been heavily criticized for being inaccurate. If you take the 87,000 jobs added by that model out of the equation, then the U.S. economy only added 9,000 jobs in August. But it takes somewhere around 125,000 new jobs each month just to keep up with the growth of the population.

-If the labor participation rate was sitting where it was when Barack Obama first took office, the unemployment rate in the United States would actually be 11.2 percent.

-If the labor participation rate was sitting at the 30 year average of 65.8 percent, the unemployment rate in the United States would actually be 11.7 percent.

-John Williams of Shadow Government Statistics would put the “real” rate of unemployment up around 23 percent, after adding in all workers that have given up looking for work and all underemployed workers.

-The labor participation rate for men has fallen to 69.9 percent. This is the lowest level that it has been since the U.S. government began tracking this statistic back in 1948.

-There was more bad news for manufacturing in this latest report. During the month of August the U.S. manufacturing sector lost approximately 15,000 jobs.

-The percentage of working age Americans with a job has been below 59 percent for 36 months in a row.

-The employment numbers for both June and July were revised downward significantly. For June, it turns out that only 45,000 jobs were added to the economy as opposed to the 64,000 that were originally reported. For July, it turns out that only 141,000 jobs were added to the economy as opposed to the 163,000 that were originally reported.

-Incredibly, 58 percent of the jobs created since the end of the last recession have been low income jobs.

-The U.S. economy currently has 4.7 million less jobs than it did when the last recession started.

So what is the solution to these problems? The media is breathlessly proclaiming that more quantitative easing is on the way and that the Federal Reserve will save the economy and send the stock market soaring to new heights. In recent years Federal Reserve Chairmen have printed money like there is no tomorrow. The previous rounds of quantitative easing haven't solved our problems.

The employment rate is even lower today than it was two years ago. But all of that money printing has sent the stock market soaring and it has enabled the big Wall Street banks to make an obscene amount of money. The truth is that the Federal Reserve, the Obama administration and the big Wall Street banks don’t really care about you. They don’t really care that the middle class is rapidly shrinking and that the number of Americans on food stamps has risen by more than 14 million since Barack Obama became president. What they care about is what is good for them.

If we continue on the same path that we have been on for the past several decades, there will never be enough jobs in America ever again. On our current trajectory, we will end up just like Greece where the unemployment rate is now up to 24.4 percent. Once upon a time the economy of Greece was thriving. But today, many formerly middle class Greek citizens are leaving Greece and are picking up whatever work they can find. Would you be willing to do that?

When the unemployment rate in the United States gets that high we will see large numbers of desperate Americans leaving this country in search of work somewhere else. Already, an increasing number of Americans are buying expired food at auctions. Times are hard and people are trying to get by any way that they can.

More than 100 million Americans are already on welfare and things have not even gotten that bad yet. This is nothing compared to what is coming. The last economic downturn appears to have permanently weakened the U.S. economy. Now the next wave of the economic collapse is rapidly approaching. How much worse will things get when it finally hits us?

Over the last thirty years, the United States has been taken over by an unethical financial oligarchy, and the American dream of opportunity, education, and upward mobility is now largely confined to the top few percent of the population. Federal policy is increasingly dictated by the wealthy, by the financial sector, and by powerful (though sometimes badly mismanaged) industries such as telecommunications, health care, automobiles, and energy. These policies are implemented and praised by these groups’ willing servants, namely the increasingly bought-and-paid-for leadership of America’s political parties, academia, and lobbying industry. The global economic devastation is going to have a very real and significant death toll. The price in human suffering these fools in government have set us up for is monstrous.

So many people left their wealth in the system, only to watch it get eroded and utterly destroyed over time. Most people had a blind belief in the money system. They lost their wealth because they were unable or unwilling to allow reality to challenge their beliefs. It’s not that there weren’t numerous warning signs to heed—they could be seen everywhere—but most willfully ignored them.

USA alone spent the record sum of $741,2 billion in 2011 for waging wars and producing new weapons, while in 2010, the US military expenditures reached $683.7 billion. The US defense budget for 2012 will exceed $1 trillion and is expected to reach as high as $1,415 trillion!!! In January 2012, Obama promised that USA's defense budget will grow slowly but steadily in the following 10 years.

The debt that Barack Obama is piling up right now will haunt the U.S. economy for ages to come. When Barack Obama first entered the White House, the U.S. national debt was sitting at 10.6 trillion dollars. Now it is right on the verge of crossing the 16 trillion dollar mark. Amazingly, Obama has added more to the national debt than the first 41 presidents combined. At this point, the United States has more government debt per capita than Greece, Portugal, Italy, Ireland or Spain does. But Barack Obama shows no sign of slowing down. In fact, the federal government continues to steal approximately 150 million dollars from our children and our grandchildren every single hour. In the end, this is going to absolutely destroy our financial system and our economy will collapse.

Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal and so many other countries are experiencing depression-like conditions right now because they have too much debt. They have too much debt because they allowed themselves to become enslaved to the bankers. Borrowing money from the bankers can allow a nation to have a higher standard of living in the short-term, but it always results in a lower standard of living in the long-term, because you always have to pay back more money than you borrowed. And when you get to the point of having a debt-to-GDP ratio in excess of 100%, you are basically drowning in debt. Huge amounts of money that could be going to providing essential services and stimulating your economy are now going to service your horrific debt. Today, citizens in Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy are experiencing a standard of living far below what they should be because the bankers have trapped them in endless debt spirals. Sadly, the vast majority of the people living in those countries have absolutely no idea what is at the root cause of their problems.

The truth is that no sovereign nation on earth ever has to borrow a single penny from anyone. In theory, there is nothing stopping a government from printing up debt-free money and spending it into circulation. But that is not the way our world works. Instead, our national governments borrow money that has been zapped into existence out of thin air by central banks.

Greece is an accident that keeps on crashing. Spain’s government is propping up its banks with European Union help, so that these banks can keep propping up the government by buying the government’s bonds—the equivalent of two drunks holding each other up. And the sad fact is: Italy, Portugal and possibly France are not far behind. The entire financial system is under collapse. It’s not about the Greeks; it’s not about the Spanish; it’s not about the Italians; it’s not about the English; it’s not about the Americans; it’s not about the Chinese; it’s about everybody. Darker days are ahead. The world and everyone in it has much to fear as we cascade down into a black hole of deflation, even as prices continue to inflate.

Global leaders have tried just about everything that they can think of, but the coming global financial catastrophe continues to march steadily toward us. We have seen ‘stimulus packages,’ quantitative easing, bond buying, interest rate cuts, emergency economic summits, bailout packages for banks, bailout packages for entire nations, ‘Operation Twist,’ unprecedented government intervention in business and massive amounts of new government debt and yet nothing seems to revive the global economy. It looks like we are rapidly heading into the second dip of a ‘double dip recession.’ Unfortunately, many believe that this next dip will be more like a full-blown depression. All over the world, top economic experts are warning that we are facing an unprecedented crisis of debt and insolvency that will result in a global financial catastrophe.

The majority of people are completely oblivious to what’s happening. Governments are, in fact, going bankrupt and they’re turning the heat up against their own citizens in a desperate attempt to maintain the status quo. The global financial crisis has barely started and is likely to last for at least another 15-20 years as major economies cut debt levels. It will take an extremely long time to reach its peak velocity. The economic impact of this crisis will be devastating.

The Eurozone is drowning in debt, the U.S. government is drowning in debt and major banks all over the globe are drowning in debt. Global authorities have been trying to patch the system together and keep it going, but the incredible damage that all of this debt has done is now becoming apparent to everyone. The global debt bubble that has fueled prosperity in the western world for the last several decades is getting ready to burst, and when that happens the chaos that will result will be absolutely horrifying.

The banks can’t trick you to take out a loan on a farm you can’t pay because what they really want is that land. The banks can’t trick you to sign away your birthright and your children’s future. But they can go buy off your government, militarize your police and military, generationally, while they get the wealth off the control they have in the earlier sets of the Ponzi scheme, and then come in and bring in total tyranny. And this is what they have done. This is not a bail-out you are seeing; this is mass raping of the economy. This is done by design, and they are moving in army brigades so that when you really find out what’s happening, when you riot because they’ve taken your pension fund and destroyed your future, they can use microwave guns and machine guns down the street.

It really is the beginning of the end of the world as we know. Unfortunately, we have become a nation that is completely and totally addicted to debt. We have no idea how to live within our means. Our modern civilization is vulnerable from a number of different angles and the insanity of the elite and centuries of financial manipulation and control are smashing against the wealth of the masses and the very structure of society. Homeland Security is preparing for civil war, preparing to fight the heavily armed American people and government security agencies have bought enough ammunition to kill everyone. Never has a public been so heavily armed so obviously the military and the police know it will take a lot to suppress Americans.

Though the world’s 190-trillion-dollar indebtedness and the quadrillion in derivatives seem like weapons of mass destruction pointing down all our throats, these are trivial to the permanent destruction that our nuclear industry has provided for us. Only those with no children and no plans to have any can shrug their shoulders and yawn, that’s how compromised biological life will be on this planet. This is a tough situation and in an absolute sense there is little we can do about it. As the sovereign debt crisis in Europe dominates media coverage of both financial and main street news, Washington’s deliberate cover-up of a far more serious threat to the global economy stemming from the continuing crisis at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant is now seeping out more rapidly from sources outside the captured and complicit mainstream news outlets. Due to increasing reports of nuclear contamination found in pollen across the U.S. West Coast, babies with elevated becquerel levels of nearly 10 times normal (presumably from mother’s milk), and a statistically unusual number of children with flu-like symptoms who won’t respond to conventional medical protocol, the truth about Fukushima could easily break out into a national panic significant enough to trigger an economic collapse of the U.S. economy and dollar.

And the threat to U.S. national security as well as the implications to the global economy a nuclear contamination multiple-times more devastating than Chernobyl poses to America may have been the impetus for President Obama’s rapid-fire signing of the Executive Orders of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) in January and the National Defense Resources Preparedness Act (NDRPA) in March 2012. There was an actual letter that came from the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) telling physicians in California not to put people on potassium iodide (KI). And the only thing that you can draw from that is they didn’t want to panic people; they didn’t want them to know how bad the situation is. But the problem is that the situation is ongoing.

There have been strong recommendations for enacting the evacuation of Tokyo and other major cities of Japan. With a total population of approximately 35 million people affected by an evacuation within the world’s third-largest economy, the already-highly-fragile global economy would immediately drop to free fall as currency and bond traders would predictably sell their holdings at any price to get out of the way of a total collapse of the financial system.

Americans suffered a record decline in wealth between 2007 and 2010 as home values tumbled, according to a Federal Reserve (June 11, 2012) that underscored the severity of the recent recession. The median family's net worth dropped 38.8 percent during the three-year period, the Fed said in its latest report on changes in U.S. Family Finances, derived from a survey of consumer finances. Fed economists told reporters that this was the biggest drop in net worth since the survey started in 1989. The median net worth, which is the value of assets minus debt, plunged to $77.3 trillion in 2010 from $126.4 trillion in 2007. Net worth in 2010 was at levels last seen in 1992.

As CNS News (6-1-12) recently pointed out, the U.S. national debt has increased by approximately 1.6 trillion dollars in 15 months. This Congress has added more to the national debt than the first 97 Congresses combined.... It is the greatest debt in the history of the world and it threatens to destroy the future for all Americans. Right now, the United States already has more government debt per capita than Greece, Portugal, Italy, Ireland or Spain does. How much worse does it have to get before we all start screaming at the top of our lungs? When Ronald Reagan was elected, the U.S. national debt was less than a trillion dollars. Now it is almost 16 trillion dollars.

Under those accounting practices, the government ran red ink in 2011 equal to $42,054 per household — nearly four times the official number reported under unique rules set by Congress. A U.S. household's median income is $49,445, the Census reports. Right now, the federal government is stealing approximately 150 million dollars an hour from our children and our grandchildren. Our politicians don't ever want to cut the budget significantly because it will hurt the economy and make them look bad. If they look bad then there is a good chance that they will not be elected again. So we continue to steamroll down the same path that Greece has gone. The greatest debt bubble in the history of the world is going to burst and America is going to be completely devastated. In the end, our financial system will be absolutely destroyed.

Every single year, hundreds of billions of dollars leaves the United States and goes to China. If you go into any major retail store today and start turning over products, you will find that hundreds of them have been made in China and that very few of them have been made in America. As a nation, we buy far, far more from China than they buy from us. As a result, China is absolutely swimming in cash and they have been looking for things to do with all that money. One thing that China has done is loan the U.S. government over a trillion dollars and this has given the Chinese a tremendous amount of leverage over us. Major road and bridge projects all over the United States are being built by Chinese companies. Meanwhile, there are millions upon millions of blue collar American workers that cannot find jobs. China has started to buy up businesses, real estate and natural resources all over America. This kind of "economic colonization" is similar to what China has already been doing in Africa, South America and Australia. The formula is actually very simple. We send them our money and then they use it to buy us. The Federal Reserve has given approval for banks owned by the Chinese government to buy stakes in U.S.-owned banks. China is now able to completely bypass Wall Street and purchase U.S. debt directly from the U.S. Treasury Department. With each passing day China's ownership over America grows, and it is frightening to think about where all of this could end.

China now holds approximately 1.17 trillion dollars of U.S. government debt. Our trade deficit with China in 2011 was $295.5 billion. That was the largest trade deficit that one country has had with another country in the history of the planet. In 2011, our trade deficit with China was 28 times larger than it was back in 1990 and more than 49,000 times larger than it was back in 1985. Back in 1998, the United States had 25 percent of the world’s high-tech export market and China had just 10 percent. Today, China's high-tech exports are more than twice the size of U.S. high-tech exports. America has lost more than a quarter of all of its high-tech manufacturing jobs over the past ten years. America is losing half a million jobs to China every single year. The U.S. spends about 4 dollars on goods and services from China for every one dollar that China spends on goods and services from the United States. Does that sound like "fair trade" to you?

An average of 23 manufacturing facilities a day closed down in the United States during 2010. The United States has lost an average of approximately 50,000 manufacturing jobs a month and more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities in the United States have been shut down since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.

Financial Armageddon is inching closer and closer. The future for the first world is already being written in Spain and Greece and even California, places where the money is running out big time. The illusion of growth is fast fading and what will take its place is an ugly depression with a threatened currency collapse as trillions are printed to save the world from its own stupidity. The United States is facing an unmitigated economic implosion. Not just a mere market crash, or a stint of high unemployment, but a full spectrum collapse driven by unsustainable debt spending and hyperinflationary printing. The "official" Obama budget deficit for 2011 was 1.3 trillion dollars, but according to USA Today when you add in the rise in liabilities for Social Security, Medicare and other retirement programs that adds another 3.7 trillion dollars to the total. The American people are witnessing multiple credit downgrades of U.S. Treasury mechanisms, the dollar losing its reserve status, devaluation of the currency is running rampant, and the prices of commodities and imported goods are skyrocketing.

In the background of this disaster, a group of financial elite with dreams of a new centralized economic and political system use the chaos to encourage a removal of long held civil liberties; displacing Constitutional protections they deem “outdated” and no longer “practical” in the midst of our modern day troubles. This group is instituting draconian policies through the executive orders of a puppet president, including indefinite detention, assassination, and even martial law against citizens. Assuming that life will go on as it has these past decades is perhaps one of the greatest and most dangerous assumptions most people are making today. The mainstream news media feeds this almost universally-shared assumption, so when this greatest-of-all bubbles bursts, there will be hell to pay—that is for sure.

We don't have real economic growth in America today. What we have is debt-fueled prosperity. Without unprecedented borrowing by the federal government we would be in a full-blown economic depression right now. So where in the world is the U.S. government getting all of this money? Well, the truth is that most of it appears to be coming from the Federal Reserve. During 2011, the Federal Reserve bought up approximately 61 percent of all government debt issued by the U.S. Treasury Department. The Fed is doing all of this buying in a desperate attempt to keep interest rates low. It is a Ponzi scheme that cannot last too much longer. But most Americans have no idea how close to the edge we really are. Most Americans just assume that we will have prosperity forever because that is what always happens in America. They don't bother to look at the man behind the curtain. They don't bother to notice that Barack Obama is stealing 150 million dollars an hour from our children and our grandchildren so that we can continue to enjoy our inflated standard of living.

What Would Jesus Do?

The only time the Prince of Peace became violent is when he cleansed the temple of the money changers.

Today, the money changers have conquered the world through numerous frauds including debt-based currencies issued by their privately owned central banks, fractional reserve lending, fiat currencies and political think-tanks such as the Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission and Bilderberg Group, which control all major political parties.

To free the world of debt slavery and a totalitarian world government run by banksters, it is necessary to understand these frauds. Let us start with the private banking cartel known as the Federal Reserve, which issues and controls the value of the world’s first reserve paper currency, the U.S. dollar. The Federal Reserve is no more federal than is Federal Express. The world financial system seems complex but it is actually very simple: a cabal of banksters has conquered the world by lending people and governments money that does not exist and charging interest on it.

Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act into law on December 23, 1913. On that day, the U.S. government officially transferred its power to create money and regulate the value thereof to the world’s wealthiest private banksters. Furthermore, the U.S. government would now borrow money from private banks, enslaving its citizens with the national debt, rather than creating its own money interest free.

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan publicly brags that the private banking cartel is above the law and creates unlimited money out of nothing to loan its insolvent borrower, the U.S. government. David Lang, a Federal Reserve employee, admits that the Federal Reserve is a private corporation that pays dividends to its undisclosed shareholders. The head of security at the San Antonio Federal Reserve also admits the institution is private.

The private Federal Reserve’s website says that the Fed:
… is considered an independent central bank because its monetary policy decisions do not have to be approved by the President or anyone else in the executive or legislative branches of government, it does not receive funding appropriated by the Congress, and the terms of the members of the Board of Governors span multiple presidential and congressional terms.

So who receives dividends from owning shares of the private Federal Reserve? Charts created by the House Banking Committee Staff Report of August, 1976 reveal the following people and companies own shares in the Federal Reserve: Rothschilds, JP Morgan, the Warburgs banks, Lehman Brothers, Kuhn, Loeb & Company, Jacob Schiff, William Rockefeller, David Rockefeller/Chase Bank, and many others. A more recent study found that Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo and HSBC now have the power of the Federal Reserve at their fingertips.

JP Morgan Chase, the predatory institution, along with the other ‘Too Big to Fail’ banks that received bailouts, have used corporate welfare to sellout the nation, ship jobs overseas, reaped profits on money lent from the Federal Reserve at zero interest, while saddling huge debts upon the people through the larger derivatives scheme. The failure of the banks to lend to small businesses and ordinary Americans has been blamed for further stalling the economic crisis created by over-leveraging and derivatives on the global market.

JP Morgan Chase is at the heart of Rothschild and Rockefeller monetary interests; no wonder that its CEO Jamie Dimon sits on the New York Federal Reserve board of directors, while wealthy elites like Warren Buffett have called for him to replace Tim Geithner (another Fed insider) at the Treasury Department.

After years of making bad loans with artificially low interest rates and foreclosing on millions of American homes, the largest banks, many of which appear to own shares in the private Federal Reserve, bailed themselves out to what economists estimate the bankster theft and financial raping of dollar holders since 2008 is $29 trillion. Even the fictional national debt of $15.7 trillion dollars could have been paid-off for less than what the banksters stole.

The collapse of the dollar, a fiat currency, is guaranteed as there is always more debt and interest owed on the debt than there is money in circulation. It is important to understand that the real national debt, which increases every year, is not just a measly $15.7 trillion. When you factor in unfounded liabilities like Social Security and Medicare, the actual debt is $127 trillion - $211 trillion. There is no question that the dollar’s doomsday will arrive, the question is when.

Medical Expenses

Our health care system is dominated by government bureaucrats, pharmaceutical corporations and the big health insurance companies. It is a giant money making scam that seeks to drain as much money from the rest of us as possible. The fastest way to go broke in America is to go to the hospital. It has been estimated that hospitals in the United States overcharge their patients by about 10 billion dollars every single year. These days it seems like almost everyone has an outrageous hospital bill story to share. Medical bills are the number one reason why Americans file for bankruptcy. It is getting to the point where most people are deathly afraid to go to the hospital.

All the financial progress that you have made in recent years can literally be wiped out in just a matter of hours. An Arizona woman that was recently charged $83,046 for a 3 hour hospital visit. How in the world is anyone supposed to pay a bill like that? Why can a visit to the doctor ever be more than a couple hundred bucks or why can a hospital stay ever be more than a couple thousand dollars. What makes all of this even more infuriating is that Medicare, Medicaid and the big insurance companies are often charged less than 10 percent of what the rest of us are billed for the same procedures. 41 percent of all working age Americans are struggling with medical debt right now because our health care system has become a giant money making scam. Millions of desperate Americans go into hospitals each year assuming that they will be treated fairly, but in the end they get stuck with incredibly outrageous bills and in many cases cruel debt collection techniques are employed against them if they don’t pay.

So why do we have to pay so much for medical care? Back in 1980, less than 10 percent of U.S. GDP went to health care. Today, about 18 percent of U.S. GDP goes toward health care. And considering the fact that over the next 20 years, the number of Americans 65 years of age or older is projected to double, that number is going to go even higher. On a per-capita basis, we spend about twice as much on health care as anyone else in the world. In fact, if the U.S. health care system was a nation it would be the 6th largest economy on the entire planet.

America spent 2.47 trillion dollars on health care in 2009, and it is now being projected that we will spend 4.5 trillion dollars on health care in 2019. Our system is completely and totally broken, and Obamacare is going to make things far worse. We need to throw the entire system out and start over.

Considering the fact that 77 percent of American families are living paycheck to paycheck at least part of the time, a single hospital bill like this can be a financial death blow. One man was charged $11,000 and all he had was a case of bad indigestion. Nothing was even wrong with him and now his family is going to have to declare bankruptcy. Often medical bills are so complex and so confusing that nobody can really understand them. A lot of the times this is probably done on purpose to keep people from understanding how badly they are being overcharged.

And health insurance is not as much protection as you might think. According to a report published in the American Journal of Medicine, of all bankruptcies caused by medical debt, approximately 75 percent of the time the people actually do have health insurance. And if you can’t pay your bills, many hospitals will come after you ruthlessly. In fact, collection agencies sought to collect unpaid medical bills from approximately 30 million Americans during 2010 alone. If you don’t cough up the cash they are demanding you can even end up in prison.

There are two main reasons that US medicine is so expensive. One is that profits are piled upon profits. In addition to wages and salaries for doctors, nurses, and medical personnel, the American health care system has to provide profits for private hospitals, diagnostic centers, insurance companies, and for the accountants, attorneys and management consultants made necessary by the enormous litigation and regulatory compliance cost. American medicine is the most regulated in the world and the most criminalized. And another big factor is that the rest of us have to make up the difference for the patients that are not profitable. It has gotten to the point where some doctors in certain kinds of practices barely make any profit on Medicare and Medicaid patients. In fact, in many cases doctors actually lose money treating them.

Not only do we pay very high taxes to support Medicaid and Medicare, we also have to pay higher medical bills in order to make up the difference for the money that doctors and hospitals are not seeing from those patients. Unfortunately, Medicaid and Medicare are expected to grow dramatically in the years ahead. It is now being projected that Obamacare will add 16 million more Americans to Medicaid. And enrollment in Medicare is projected to grow from 50.7 million today to 73.2 million in 2025.

Obamacare is going to take everything that is wrong with our health care system and make it even worse. In the years ahead it is going to get even harder for those that are not dependent on the government for health care. Approximately 10 percent of all employers plan to drop health insurance coverage entirely because of Obamacare. According to one recent poll, 83 percent of all doctors in the United States have considered quitting the profession because of Obamacare, and we were already projected to have a severe doctor shortage in the years ahead even before Obamacare came along. We are heading into the greatest health care crisis the United States has ever seen, and none of our leaders seem to have any answers.

Down the Slippery Slope

When evaluating the health of the American economy, the key is not to focus on the short-term economic numbers. Sometimes they go up and sometimes they do down. Instead, the key is to look at the long-term balance sheet numbers. When you do that, it quickly becomes apparent how appalling our economic decline has been. The size of federal government debt is exploding, state and local governments all over the country are drowning in debt, our collective national wealth is decreasing and our ability to produce new wealth is also being reduced as our economic infrastructure is systematically gutted.

For decades, the use of the U.S. dollar has been absolutely dominant in international trade. This has had tremendous benefits for the U.S. financial system and for U.S. consumers, and it has given the U.S. government tremendous power and influence around the globe. Today, more than 60 percent of all foreign currency reserves in the world are in U.S. dollars. But there are big changes on the horizon. The mainstream media in the United States has been strangely silent about this, but some of the biggest economies on earth have been making agreements with each other to move away from using the U.S. dollar in international trade. Over the past few years, China and other emerging powers such as Russia have been been quietly making agreements to move away from the U.S. dollar in international trade. The supremacy of the U.S. dollar is not nearly as solid as most Americans believe that it is. There are also some oil producing nations which have begun selling oil in currencies other than the U.S. dollar, which is a major threat to the petrodollar system which has been in place for nearly four decades. And big international institutions such as the UN and the IMF have even been issuing official reports about the need to move away from the U.S. dollar and toward a new global reserve currency. So the reign of the U.S. dollar as the world reserve currency is definitely being threatened, and the coming shift in international trade is going to have massive implications for the U.S. economy.

Of course all of the blame should not go to Obama. The truth is that the Federal Reserve has much more power over the economy than Obama does. But the American people are constantly told that the Federal Reserve is "not political" and that we should not criticize the Fed. So it is kind of ridiculous that presidents are judged by the performance of the economy. Yes, Bush, Clinton, Bush and Obama have all greatly contributed to the mess that we are in, but they are not solely responsible for it. In the end, however, the outcome of the next presidential election will probably be very heavily influenced by how the U.S. economy performs during the rest of 2012. Sadly, as our economy declines it is bringing out the worst in many Americans.

As the economy gets even worse, millions upon millions of Americans are going to become extremely desperate and will do things for money that they never dreamed that they would do. That is a very frightening thing. America is changing, and not for the better. You better get ready for what is ahead, because Barack Obama is not going to save you.

The Democrats, the Republicans and especially Barack Obama promised that something would be done about the too big to fail banks so that they would never again be a threat to destroy our financial system. Well, those promises have not been kept and the too big to fail banks are now much bigger and much more powerful than ever. The assets of the five biggest U.S. banks were equivalent to about 43 percent of U.S. GDP before the financial crisis. Today, the assets of the five biggest U.S. banks are equivalent to about 56 percent of U.S. GDP. So if those banks were “too big to fail” before, then what are they now? They continue to gobble up smaller banks at a brisk pace, and they continue to pile up debt and risky investments as if a day of reckoning will never come. But, of course, a day of reckoning is coming, and when it arrives they will be expecting more bailouts just like they got the last time.

The size of these monolithic financial institutions is truly difficult to comprehend. They completely dominate our financial system and everywhere you look they are constantly absorbing more wealth and more power. Despite all of the talk from the politicians, they just keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger. So why isn’t anything ever done?

Well, one reason is because these gigantic financial entities funnel huge quantities of cash into political campaigns. For example, Barack Obama gives nice speeches about the dangers of the too big to fail banks, but he is also more than happy to take their campaign contributions. Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup were all ranked among his top 10 donors during the 2008 campaign. Barack Obama is not going to bite the hands that feed him. The truth is that the Obama administration and the Federal Reserve have done everything they can to make life very comfortable for the big Wall Street banks.

During the last financial crisis, the too big to fail banks were absolutely showered with bailouts. Meanwhile, hundreds of small and mid-size banks were allowed to die. When representatives from those small and mid-size banks contacted the federal government for help, often they were told to try to find a larger bank that would be willing to buy them. Sadly, the last financial crisis simply accelerated the consolidation of the banking industry in the United States that has been going on for several decades. Today, there are less than half as many banks in the United States as there were back in 1984.

So where did all of those banks go? They were either purchased by bigger banks or they were allowed to go out of existence. This banking consolidation trend has allowed the big Wall Street banks to absolutely explode in size.

Back in 1970, the 5 biggest U.S. banks held 17 percent of all U.S. banking industry assets. Today, the 5 biggest U.S. banks hold 52 percent of all U.S. banking industry assets. So where will this end?

The funny thing is that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and other Fed officials keep giving speeches where they warn of the dangers of having banks that are “too big to fail.” The truth is that he showered those banks with trillions of dollars in bailout money during the last financial crisis. The amount of money in secret loans that some of the big Wall Street banks received from the Federal Reserve was absolutely staggering. The following figures come directly from a GAO report….

Citigroup - $2.513 trillion
Morgan Stanley - $2.041 trillion
Bank of America - $1.344 trillion
Goldman Sachs - $814 billion
JP Morgan Chase - $391 billion

Bernanke has shown that he is willing to move heaven and earth to protect those big banks. So what did those banks do with all that money? They certainly didn’t lend it to us. Lending to individuals and small businesses by those big banks actually went down immediately after those bailouts. Instead, one thing that those banks did was they started putting massive amounts of money into commodities. One of those commodities was food.

Over the past few years, big Wall Street banks have made huge amounts of money speculating on the price of food. This has caused food prices all over the globe to soar and it has caused tremendous hardship for hundreds of millions of families around the planet. Speculation by large investment banks is driving up food prices for the world’s poorest people, tipping millions into hunger and poverty. Investment in food commodities by banks and hedge funds has risen from $65bn to $126bn (£41bn to £79bn) in the past five years, helping to push prices to 30-year highs and causing sharp price fluctuations that have little to do with the actual supply of food, says the United Nations’ leading expert on food. Hedge funds, pension funds and investment banks such as Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Barclays Capital now dominate the food commodities markets, dwarfing the amount traded by actual food producers and buyers.

Goldman Sachs alone has earned hundreds of millions of dollars in profits from food speculation. Can you imagine what kind of mindset it takes to do this? Can you imagine taking food out of the mouths of hungry families on the other side of the world so that you and your fellow employees can pad your bonus checks? It really is disgusting. But that is the way the game is played. It is set up so that the big guy will win and the little guy will lose.

Between 2008 and 2011, Verizon made a total profit of $19.8 billion and yet paid an effective tax rate of -3.8%.

Between 2008 and 2011, General Electric made a total profit of $19.6 billion and yet paid an effective tax rate of -18.9%.

Between 2008 and 2011, Boeing made a total profit of $14.8 billion and yet paid an effective tax rate of -5.5%.

Between 2008 and 2011, Pacific Gas & Electric made a total profit of $6 billion and yet paid an effective tax rate of -8.4%.

So why should middle class families continue to be suffocated by outrageous tax rates when hugely profitable corporations such as General Electric are able to get away with paying nothing?

The great weakness of governing classes is they absolutely depend on the acquiescence of their victims, or “support.” Take that away, they will implode or fall. No pushing is necessary; no violence, from either bullet or ballot.

Our current tax system is an utter abomination and should be completely thrown out. But as is the case with so many other things, our current system is going to persist because the “big guys” really enjoy the status quo and they are the ones that fund political campaigns. It would be bad enough if the “big guys” were beating us on a level playing field. But the truth is that the game has been dramatically tilted in their favor and they know that the politicians are going to take care of them whenever they need it. So what is going to happen the next time the too big to fail banks get into trouble? They will almost certainly get bailed out again.

Derivatives

A derivative has no underlying value of its own. A derivative is essentially a side bet. Usually these side bets are highly leveraged. At this point, making side bets has totally gotten out of control in the financial world. Side bets are being made on just about anything you can possibly imagine, and the major Wall Street banks are making a ton of money from it. This system is almost entirely unregulated and it is totally dominated by the big international banks. Over the past couple of decades, the derivatives market has multiplied in size. Everything is fine as long as the system stays in balance. But once it gets out of balance a string of financial crashes that no government on earth will be able to fix.

Five very large U.S. banks (including Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Bank of America) have combined exposure to derivatives in excess of 250 trillion dollars. Keep in mind that U.S. GDP for 2011 was only about 15 trillion dollars. So we are talking about an amount of money that is almost inconceivable.

Unfortunately, the big Wall Street banks continue to treat the financial system as if it was a gigantic casino. The derivatives bubble just continues to grow larger and larger, and it could burst and absolutely devastate the entire global financial system at any time. The too big to fail banks have complete domination over derivatives trading. Every month a secret meeting that includes representatives from JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and Citigroup is held in New York to coordinate their control over the derivatives marketplace. On the third Wednesday of every month, the nine members of an elite Wall Street society gather in Midtown Manhattan. The men share a common goal: to protect the interests of big banks in the vast market for derivatives, one of the most profitable — and controversial — fields in finance. They also share a common secret: The details of their meetings, even their identities, have been strictly confidential.

When the derivatives market fully implodes, there will not be enough money in the world to bail everyone out. According to the Comptroller of the Currency, the too big to fail banks have exposure to derivatives that is absolutely outrageous.

So what happens when that house of cards comes crashing down? Well, those big banks will come crying to the federal government again. They will want more bailouts. They will claim that if we don’t give them the money that they need that the entire financial system will collapse. And yes, if several of the too big to fail banks were to collapse all at once the consequences would be almost unimaginable. But of course all of this could have been avoided if we would have made much wiser decisions upstream.

Our financial system is more vulnerable than it ever has been before, and the too big to fail banks just continue to grow. The lessons from the financial crisis of 2008 have gone unheeded, and we are steamrolling toward an even greater crash.

The US government pretends to live under the rule of law, to respect human rights, and to provide freedom and democracy to citizens. Washington’s pretense and the stark reality are diametrically opposed. US government officials routinely criticize other governments for being undemocratic and for violating human rights. Yet, no other country except Israel sends bombs, missiles, and drones into sovereign countries to murder civilian populations. The torture prisons of Abu Gahraib, Guantanamo, and CIA secret rendition sites are the contributions of the Bush/Obama regimes to human rights.

Washington violates the human rights of its own citizens. Washington has suspended the civil liberties guaranteed in the US Constitution and declared its intention to detain US citizens indefinitely without due process of law. President Obama has announced that he, at his discretion, can murder US citizens whom he regards as a threat to the US. Congress did not respond to these extraordinary announcements with impeachment proceedings. There was no uproar from the federal courts, law schools, or bar associations.

Now Washington is forcing as much of the world as it can to overthrow international treaties and international law. Washington has issued a ukase that its word alone is international law. Any country, except those who receive Washington’s dispensation, that engages in trade with Iran or purchases Iran’s oil will be sanctioned by the US. These countries will be cut off from US markets, and their banking systems will not be able to use banks that process international payments. In other words, Washington’s “sanctions against Iran” apply not to Iran but to countries that defy Washington and meet their energy needs with Iranian oil. So far Washington has granted special privileges to Japan and 10 European Union countries to continue purchasing Iranian oil.

How did a man so devoid of professional accomplishment beguile so many into thinking he could manage the world's largest economy, direct the world's most powerful military, execute the world's most consequential job? Imagine a future historian examining Obama's pre-presidential life: ushered into and through the Ivy League despite unremarkable grades and test scores along the way; a cushy non-job as a "community organizer"; a brief career as a state legislator devoid of legislative achievement (and in fact nearly devoid of his attention, so often did he vote "present") ; and finally an unaccomplished single term in the United States Senate, the entirety of which was devoted to his presidential ambitions. He left no academic legacy in academia, authored no signature legislation as a legislator.

And then there is the matter of his troubling associations: the white-hating, America-loathing preacher who for decades served as Obama's "spiritual mentor"; a real-life, actual terrorist who served as Obama's colleague and political sponsor. It is easy to imagine a future historian looking at it all and asking: how on Earth was such a man elected president? Because Mr. Obama was black, and therefore entitled in the eyes of liberals to have hung out with protesters against various American injustices, even if they were a bit extreme, he was given a pass. Let that sink in: Obama was given a pass -- held to a lower standard -- because of the color of his skin. Holding someone to a separate standard merely because of the color of his skin is affirmative action in a nutshell, and if that isn't racism, then nothing is. And that is what America did to Obama.

Obama himself was never troubled by his lack of achievements, but why would he be? As many have noted, Obama was told he was good enough for Columbia despite undistinguished grades at Occidental; he was told he was good enough for the US Senate despite a mediocre record in Illinois ; he was told he was good enough to be president despite no record at all in the Senate. All his life, every step of the way, Obama was told he was good enough for the next step, in spite of ample evidence to the contrary. What could this breed if not the sort of empty narcissism on display every time Obama speaks?

In 2008, many who agreed that he lacked executive qualifications nonetheless raved about Obama's oratory skills, intellect, and cool character. Those people -- conservatives included -- ought now to be deeply embarrassed. The man thinks and speaks in the hoariest of clichés, and that's when he has his teleprompter in front of him; when the prompter is absent he can barely think or speak at all. Not one original idea has ever issued from his mouth -- it's all warmed-over Marxism of the kind that has failed over and over again for 100 years. And what about his character? Obama is constantly blaming anything and everything else for his troubles. Bush did it; it was bad luck; I inherited this mess. It is embarrassing to see a president so willing to advertise his own powerlessness, so comfortable with his own incompetence. But really, what were we to expect? The man has never been responsible for anything, so how do we expect him to act responsibly? In short: our president is small-minded man, with neither the temperament nor the intellect to handle his job. When you understand that, and only when you understand that, will the current erosion of liberty and prosperity make sense. It could not have gone otherwise with such a man in the Oval Office.

The new Obama budget projects a $1.33 trillion federal budget deficit for the 2012 fiscal year. That is significantly higher than the $1.15 trillion that the Congressional Budget Office was projecting because it includes a whole bunch of stimulus spending that the Obama administration plans to do. So let's do a little math. When you divide $1.33 trillion by 365 days, you get 3.6438356 billion dollars. So on average, the United States will be adding more than 3.6 billion dollars to the national debt every single day during fiscal 2012. And when you divide $3.6438356 billion by 24 hours, you get 151.8 million dollars. So on average, the U.S. national debt will be going up by more than 151 million dollars every single hour during fiscal 2012 if Obama has his way. This is a theft from our children and our grandchildren that is so vast that it is almost unimaginable.

The 2012 budget deficit that the Obama administration is projecting would be equivalent to approximately 8.5 percent of GDP. At the moment, the U.S. national debt is sitting at a grand total of $15,355,838,921,022.16. That is an amount that is so large that it is hard to even put into words. At this point our national debt is greater than 100% of our national GDP. We are on the road to national financial disaster and yet our politicians keep piling up debt at a rate that is absolutely mind blowing. The Obama administration is projecting that budget deficits will go down "in the future," but that is what our politicians always do. They always promise that the budget picture will improve "down the road," but that never actually happens. According to the Bush administration, we were supposed to be swimming in huge budget surpluses by now.

Today our world is changing at a pace that is faster than ever before, and the decisions that we all make right now are going to have a dramatic affect on the years ahead. In many ways, 2012 represents a huge turning point for America. There will be a presidential election, 33 seats in the U.S. Senate will be contested and every single seat in the U.S. House of Representatives will be up for grabs. But the changes that are happening in America go much deeper than politics. Anger and frustration are growing to frightening levels, and we have become a deeply divided nation. Our affluence is rapidly crumbling and our national values are being transformed at a staggering pace. America is drowning in debt, addicted to entertainment and full of people that think they know it all. America is arrogant, cocky, smug, brash and full of pride. But if we continue down the road that we are currently on, we will be greatly humbled someday. It is just a matter of time.

Iceland

Iceland didnt follow the rest of the world by bailing out bankers they arrested them. Now their economy is recovering faster than the EU and the United States. Remember when the United States government told the American people that action was required to save the banks? Action in the form of Billions of dollars in debt? Hundreds of Billions of dollars in National debt later, we're still chasing our tail trying to get out of debt. At the time of the 2008 collapse Iceland was in worse shape than almost any other country in the world. Imaging what America would be like today if we bailed out the victims of poor banking practices, and punished the bankers who were responsible instead of bailing them out.

Since 2008 the vast majority of the Western population dream about saying "no" to the banks, but no one has dared to do so. No one except the Icelanders, who have carried out a peaceful revolution that has managed not only to overthrow a government and draft a new constitution, but also seeks to jail those responsible for the country's economic debacle.

It has been a revolution without weapons in Iceland, the country that hosts the world's oldest democracy (since 930), and whose citizens have managed to effect change by going on demonstrations and banging pots and pans. Why have the rest of the Western countries not even heard about it? Pressure from Icelandic citizens’ has managed not only to bring down a government, but also begin the drafting of a new constitution (in process) and is seeking to put in jail those bankers responsible for the financial crisis in the country. As the saying goes, if you ask for things politely it is much easier to get them.

This quiet revolutionary process has its origins in 2008 when the Icelandic government decided to nationalise the three largest banks, Landsbanki, Kaupthing and Glitnir, whose clients were mainly British, and North and South American. After the State took over, the official currency (krona) plummeted and the stock market suspended its activity after a 76% collapse. Iceland was becoming bankrupt and to save the situation, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) injected U.S. $ 2,100 million and the Nordic countries helped with another 2,500 million.

Great little victories of ordinary people

While banks and local and foreign authorities were desperately seeking economic solutions, the Icelandic people took to the streets and their persistent daily demonstrations outside parliament in Reykjavik prompted the resignation of the conservative Prime Minister Geir H. Haarde and his entire government. Citizens demanded, in addition, to convene early elections, and they succeeded. In April a coalition government was elected, formed by the Social Democratic Alliance and the Left Green Movement, headed by a new Prime Minister, Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir.

Throughout 2009 the Icelandic economy continued to be in a precarious situation (at the end of the year the GDP had dropped by 7%) but, despite this, the Parliament proposed to repay the debt to Britain and the Netherlands with a payment of 3,500 million Euros, a sum to be paid every month by Icelandic families for 15 years at 5.5% interest. The move sparked anger again in the Icelanders, who returned to the streets demanding that, at least, that decision was put to a referendum. Another big small victory for the street protests: in March 2010 that vote was held and an overwhelming 93% of the population refused to repay the debt, at least with those conditions. This forced the creditors to rethink the deal and improve it, offering 3% interest and payment over 37 years. Not even that was enough. The current president, on seeing that Parliament approved the agreement by a narrow margin, decided last month not to approve it and to call on the Icelandic people to vote in a referendum so that they would have the last word.

The Bankers are Fleeing in Fear

Returning to the tense situation in 2010, while the Icelanders were refusing to pay a debt incurred by financial sharks without consultation, the coalition government had launched an investigation to determine legal responsibilities for the fatal economic crisis and had already arrested several bankers and top executives closely linked to high risk operations. Interpol, meanwhile, had issued an international arrest warrant against Sigurdur Einarsson, former president of one of the banks. This situation led scared bankers and executives to leave the country en masse.

In this context of crisis, an assembly was elected to draft a new constitution that would reflect the lessons learned and replace the current one, inspired by the Danish constitution. To do this, instead of calling experts and politicians, Iceland decided to appeal directly to the people, after all they have sovereign power over the law. More than 500 Icelanders presented themselves as candidates to participate in this exercise in direct democracy and write a new constitution. 25 of them, without party affiliations, including lawyers, students, journalists, farmers and trade union representatives were elected.

Among other developments, this constitution will call for the protection, like no other, of freedom of information and expression in the so-called Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, in a bill that aims to make the country a safe haven for investigative journalism and freedom of information, where sources, journalists and Internet providers that host news reporting are protected.

The people, for once, will decide the future of the country while bankers and politicians witness the transformation of a nation from the sidelines.

Municipal Debt

From coast to coast there are an increasing number of cities, towns and counties that are rapidly going broke. Financial analyst Meredith Whitney took a lot of heat when her prediction of a municipal bond crash in 2011 did not happen, but she was not fundamentally wrong in her analysis. A horrifying municipal debt crisis is starting to unfold right in front of our eyes. It just did not happen as soon as she thought that it would. When most Americans think of our "debt problem," they think of the federal government. But the truth is that we have hundreds and hundreds of smaller "debt problems" all across the country.

Once we see the first major wave of municipal defaults, creditors will become much tighter with their money and that will cause even more municipalities to get into financial trouble. This crisis could start spinning out of control at any time. The frightening thing is that all of this is happening at a time when we are supposed to be having an "economic recovery." So what will things look like when the economy gets even worse than this? If hundreds of cities, towns and counties are barely able to keep their heads above water financially right now, what is going to happen when the next recession hits?

In all, there have been 21 municipal defaults so far in 2012. The grand total of those defaults comes to 978 million dollars. Of course a lot of state governments are experiencing massive budget problems right now as well. For example, in California state government revenues for February 2012 were down by about 22 percent compared to February 2011. The state government is quickly running out of money once again, and nobody is quite sure how to fix California's rapidly deteriorating financial situation. And we all know that the biggest debt problem of all is the U.S. national debt.

$16 Trillion Fraud Exposed – Massive resignations have started

“Recently, the WhiteHats released this video of Lord James of BlackHeath urging the House of Lords to conduct an investigation into a possible bank heist to the tune of US$ 16 Trillion. This is a very significant measure as it is now put on public record, right at the very heart of the British Empire, those “wild rumors” being passed around in the alternative media. The White Dragon Society represented by Ben Fulford is also confirming that a March 31st deadline has been set by the Gnostic Illuminati against the Khazarian Satanic Cabal to transfer power over to Prince Harry before Global Settlements can be implemented.”

According to this list, there have been 611 resignations of major bankers/political figures since November 7th, 2011. More precisely, there have been 75 resignations since February 15th, 2012. This is, as of February 29, an average of 6.25 resignations a day. We’re not talking about small and random bankers here. We are talking about high influential figures, such as the head of the World Bank, the Romanian PM, Haiti PM, Pakistan PM, German President, and MANY CEOs of major banks. We also know that Goldman Sachs’ CEO will resign somewhere this summer. Now these are only public resignations. What about the behind-the-door resignations? What about quiet arrests?

As predicted, the collapse of the Satan worshipping financial mafia is accelerating. U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was detained for questioning by New York police on February 24th and was released after giving evidence about many high level financial criminals, according to New York police sources. “In most cases we have to slap people to get them to talk but in his case we had to slap him to shut him up,” one of the interrogators joked. Geithner has been released but is accompanied at all times by an armed deputy to make sure he does not leave the country. Former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy is also proving to be very talkative, sources in Europe say. Berlusconi has been released.

Meanwhile, meetings between White Dragon Society representatives and South Korean government officials last week in Seoul were very productive. is first report further on the ongoing chaos in Europe and the US before returning to the Asian negotiations. In general what has happened is that dozens of high level informants have come forth in the past weeks and detailed testimony by them is being gathered. Apart from Geithner and Berlusconi, the talking big fish include members of the Rothschild family who have come forth with startling information.

So there we go, can we expect a financial economic crisis with the banks soon? Behind the mainstream Wall Street happy talk about more stable financial markets and an improving economy are grim warnings of tough times ahead from a small cadre of doomsayers who warn that the worst of the financial crisis is still to come. Harry Dent, author of the new book The Great Crash Ahead, says another stock market crash is coming due to a bad ending to the global debt bubble. He has pulled back on his earlier prediction of a crash in 2012, as central banks around the world have been flooding markets with money, giving stocks an artificial short-term boost. But a crash is coming, he warns.

Many of you will not believe some of the things Americans are doing just to survive. Some families are living in sewers and drain tunnels, some families are living in tents, some families are living in their cars, some families will make ketchup soup for dinner tonight and some families are even eating rats. Some homeless shelters in America are so overloaded that they are actually sending people out to live in the woods. As you read this, there are close to 50 million Americans that are living below the poverty line, and that number rises a little bit more every single day. America was once known as the greatest nation on earth, but now there is decay and economic despair almost everywhere you look. Yes, money certainly cannot buy happiness, but the lack of it sure can bring a lot of pain. As the economy continues to decline, the suffering that we see all around us is going to get a lot worse, and that is a very frightening thing to think about.

Those of us that still live comfortably are often completely unaware of what life is like out on the streets of America at this point. There are millions upon millions of Americans that have lost all hope and that are living on the very edge of life and death. And more join the ranks of the hopeless with each passing day. This upcoming weekend approximately 80,000 people in the state of Michigan will lose their unemployment benefits. So what are those people going to do after that? They have already been unable to find work month after month. Their savings are most certainly gone. Now the only money they had coming in is going to be eliminated.

The pool of Americans relying on government benefits rose to record highs in 2011 as an increasing share of families tapped aid in a weak economy. Some 48.6% of the population lived in a household receiving some type of government benefit in the second quarter, up a notch from 48.5% in the first quarter, according to Census data. Only a small share of the population accessed cash welfare benefits, as the 1990s overhaul made it more onerous in many cases to receive and maintain those payments. Some 1.9% of the population lived in a household that received welfare in the second quarter.

The abuses of the last several decades are crippling the economy. The rotting hulks of thousands of Sears and Kmarts are slowly decaying; blighting the suburban landscape and beckoning criminals and the homeless. Retailers are forced to lay-off hundreds of thousands of workers. Property taxes paid to local governments will dry up, resulting in worsening budget deficits. Sales taxes paid to state governments will plummet, forcing more government cutbacks and higher taxes. Mall owners and real estate developers will see their rental income dissipate. They will then proceed to default on their loans. Bankers will be stuck with billions in loan losses, at least until they are able to shift them to the American taxpayer – again. No politician, media pundit, Federal Reserve banker, retail CEO, or willfully ignorant mindless consumer wants to admit the truth that the last three decades of debt delusion are coming to a tragic bitter end.

When Barack Obama entered the White House, the number of "long-term unemployed workers" in the United States was approximately 2.6 million. According to the April 2012 jobs report, the number of jobless American stood at 100.9 million. That’s an all-time record and it’s an increase of 26.2 million over the last 12 years. It’s as if we absorbed the entire adult population of Canada and not a single person had a job.

Expanding government programs combined with the worst downturn since the Great Depression have led to an explosion in the share of Americans relying on outside help. To combat prolonged economic weakness, Congress extended unemployment benefits to a record 99 weeks (up from the normal 26-weeks offered in most states). The food stamp program was tweaked so it was more generous. Americans flocked to Social Security disability, a last bastion of support for some of the long-term unemployed. . . . That number is up from 32.8% a year ago (when a total of 46.8% of the population lived in a home receiving benefits). The biggest increases came from an uptick in those turning to food stamps and Medicaid. Nearly 15% of Americans lived in a household receiving food stamps in mid-2010; Almost 26% had access to Medicaid.

The global economy is more interconnected today than ever. Back in 2008 the financial crisis that started on Wall Street ended up devastating economies all over the planet. The same thing will happen during this next great financial crisis. Only this time the U.S. is in a much weaker position. The U.S. debt problem has gotten much worse since the last crisis. During 2008, our national debt crossed the 10 trillion dollar mark. Less than 4 years later, we have crossed the 15 trillion dollar mark.

So what are we going to do the next time large numbers of banks fail and unemployment skyrockets? Where are we going to get the money to bail out all of those banks and to take care of all of those newly unemployed people? Some people say that socialism is the answer, but the truth is that we are already a socialist welfare state. If you can believe it, nearly half of all Americans live in a household that receives some form of financial benefits from the U.S. government. During the next great crisis, the number of people that are dependent on the government will go even higher.

If you don’t want to end up dependent on the government, you should heed the warning signs and you should use this time to prepare for the hard times that are coming. When even the World Bank tells us to hope for the best but to prepare for the worst, you know that it is late in the game. Unfortunately, the vast majority of people out there only believe what they want to believe. They don’t want to believe that a great economic crisis is coming, and so when it does happen they are going to be absolutely blindsided by it. If the sovereign debt crisis gets even worse we could be looking at an economic crisis that could be even worse than the last one: “An escalation of the crisis would spare no-one. Developed- and developing-country growth rates could fall by as much or more than in 2008/09.

Barry Soetoro (Barack Obama), a man who is probably not constitutionally eligible to hold the office in the first place has seized powers that go far beyond those that a legitimate President would wield. Obama has gone too far too many times. How many times will Barack Obama violate his oath of office before conservative in Congress, say enough is enough? What will it take for our so-called conservative leaders to stop hiding behind their desks and do what must be done to save our country? We have a Supreme Court that appears to have very little respect for the U.S. Constitution. Obama commanded the United States Supreme Court not to strike down his precious (and unconstitutional) ObamaCare. Obama’s pronouncement about the Supreme Court was so disingenuous and divisive as alone to warrant impeachment proceedings.

Obama was caught in an open mic moment and actually told Russia's Dmitry Medvedev that he would have "more flexibility" after the November election to put our national security on the back burner. The Obama Regime is telling the Catholic Church and other institutions of faith, in direct violation of the 1st Amendment, that they are now REQUIRED to pay for the birth control, sterilizations and abortions of others. And in spite of the constitutional requirement that the President of the United States enforce all the laws of the land, Barack Obama decreed that he would not enforce the Defense of Marriage Act, and that he would not defend the Act in court. It was a clear violation of the Constitution. And yet, no one in Congress has lifted a finger.

America is a seething cesspool of filth and corruption, the truth is that the United States is absolutely corrupt to the core. This is true from the very top of our society all the way to the very bottom. The current resident of the White House will likely go down in history as the most corrupt president in history. Almost every single day he adds something new to his list of corrupt deeds. He is a con-man that deserves to be impeached for a whole host of reasons, but that will never happen because we have a Congress that is also deeply corrupt. But it is not just our politicians that are corrupt. Even the men that are supposed to be in charge of protecting the president are corrupt. A whole bunch of them were recently discovered sleeping with prostitutes in Colombia. There is very deep and very pervasive corruption in our financial institutions, in our judicial system, in our police departments and in our religious institutions. It is almost as if nearly the entire nation is saturated with filth and depravity. It is becoming harder and harder to find men and women of integrity, and our young people have very few positive role models to look up to. How long is our society going to be able to continue to function normally if all of this corruption gets even worse?

It's time for our elected officials in Congress to understand what the American people already know. Our nation is under attack from within and the source of those attacks must be removed. When will these tyrannical abuses stop? How far will Barack Obama go? When will they draw a line in the sand and say: the tyranny stops today! History doesn't paint a pretty picture. Until patriotic Americans take action and lean on our elected representatives to expose Obama's dictatorial, illegal and unconstitutional behavior, the sky is the limit. But it's not too late.

The President has asked that the debt ceiling be raised another trillion or so and Congress will comply. Following World War Two, the recovering nations of Europe were rescued from Communism by the Marshall Plan, but adopted Communism-Light in the form of Socialism. The U.S. was already headed in that direction, creating programs that we now call “entitlements.” For most of the nation’s history, such “entitlements” did not exist. What binds together the financial problems of the West is the common thread of infantile behavior and thought. One might call it wishful thinking. Instead of encouraging people to provide for old age and possible illness, politicians decided to turn government into Big Daddy, the eternal source of money for everything. Need to go to college, start a business, or plan for retirement? Government would be there to help. All this ignored the need to actually pay for these programs. In the case of Social Security Congress began to dip into its funding to pay for other programs! This is what children do.

At the very beginning of our nation, Thomas Jefferson said it best. “I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.” How many commissions and special committees have earnestly produced reports intended to deal with a government grown too large? At the federal level, some two million or more Americans are employed promulgating a deluge of regulations and pushing paper. The federal government is running on “continuing resolutions.” It has not had a formal budget since Obama arrived. This is no way to run the greatest nation on the face of the Earth. America is on a suicide watch and we are just an election away from saving it. America’s economic problems will not go away until Americans insist that the shackles of Big Government be cut loose to enable the growth of an energy industry that can not only make the nation energy independent, but produce billions in revenue as far as the eye can see into the future.

The United States of America, the greatest engine of wealth the world has ever seen, is bankrupt. The national debt exceeds the Gross Domestic Product, the sum total of all revenue generated by goods and services. There is a discomfort in the air that is palapable. People sense that we are not in a good place and that we are moving further away from such a place. Our political system is seen to have failed and our economic future appears even worse. The US is headed inexorably toward a systemic failure, a complete and utter collapse of the financial system. TARP and all the other machinations have not improved the underlying insolvency of the banking system. They have, however, deferred a collapse and ensured that it will ultimately be worse. Our collapse will likely be preceded and triggered by a collapse in the financial and economic systems of several European countries. The US collapse will create economic paralysis, marked by lack of liquidity or an unwillingness to accept paper dollars. The Ponzi scheme that has been the Federal government will also collapse.

The simple fact is that the US was never as rich as it thought. The standard of living from 1990 forward was artificially inflated. Apparent prosperity was not achieved via rising incomes and wealth but through borrowing. Few lived within their means; most lived at levels that could not be sustained from current income. Eventually the debt levels became so extreme that new debt was not forthcoming. That was when the music stopped. Now the standard of living is falling. Capital and jobs are leaving the US. Consumption is shrinking as de-leveraging is required to make up for the madness of the past two decades:

For a time many must live below their long-term living standard. When you have been getting by as a result of credit cards, major adjustments are required. No one is a bigger violator of living beyond their means than government. Despite the obvious, they continue to spend rather than cut. The Obama Administration has taken spending to obscene levels. The Republicans are not much better. Bush ran deficits consistently, the largest of any President in history until Obama. The last deficit under George Bush was $160 Billion. Under Obama deficits average close to $1,500 Billion or $1.5 Trillion per year. Government spending is greater than what can be sustained via tax revenues. Politicians ask others to sacrifice but never themselves. They still try to live the myth that you can forever spend more than you make. The rules of arithmetic and economics are applicable to government as well as individuals. Regardless of what government believes, its ability to sustain itself via continued borrowing is near an end. Credit markets are unwilling to fund ongoing US debt. The US government is becoming a pariah in the world because of its excesses.

Those who understand American exceptionalism understand that our people are exceptional in many things, including rioting. Newark, Detroit, Watts and dozens of other areas are evidence of such abilities. These were pretty dramatic but they were over nothing compared to what is coming. What do you suppose will happen when the means of survival for generations of dependents suddenly dries up? Desperation is expanding. Anger is brewing even among the productive class. People looking out for their families are without jobs and angry. We are a spark away from massive protests and riots.

Those who believe they will be unaffected by what is coming are fools. Every sector of society and community will be affected. Those who believe they are well-off will learn otherwise. The inevitability of the collapse of the welfare state scares both the beneficiaries and the contributors. Everyone understands that the cessation of the goodies from Santa will mean unrest in the streets. That is the fear that drives the “extend and pretend” political behavior. For years welfare was little more than buying votes. Then it became protection money to keep the unruly in line. Now this “right” is going away and so is the peace and tranquility it purchased. Washington has put us in a death spiral from which there is no exit. Before this ends, much of the population will be broke. Folks who believed they were well off may end up living in their BMWs.

In the US, the situation appears to be very grim, with Obama signing into law the right to arrest and detain US citizens on US soil without trial. The Pentagon has refused to step in and restore constitutional rule. The corporate media, for its part, continues to spout dumbed-down lies and garbage. Countries around the world, particularly in the West, are hopelessly in the red, with debt rising every day. Even worse, politicians seem paralyzed, unable -- or unwilling -- to do anything about it. It is a global disaster that threatens the immediate future.

Have you ever wondered why top officials in the government get away with so much? Right now, 36 top officials in the Obama administration owe a combined $833,000 in back taxes. How in the world can they get away with that? And why don't they pay their "fair share" before trying to convince the rest of us that we need to pay more taxes?

If you are an American under the age of 30, you have probably figured out by now that the entire economic system is stacked against you. Approximately one out of every five Americans under the age of 30 is currently living in poverty. The way that our economy is structured today is ridiculously unfair to younger Americans. First, we endlessly push our young people to go to our ridiculously expensive colleges and universities where the pile up enormous amounts of debt. Then they get out into the real world where they find that only a handful of really good jobs are available for the vast army of college graduates entering the workforce. Sadly, most of the jobs that our young people are working these days do not pay enough to be able to support a family or buy a decent home. Meanwhile, our politicians are busy mortgaging their future. Today, only about 55 percent of all Americans between the ages of 16 and 29 have a job. Back in the year 2000, more than 50 percent of all Americans teens had a job. During the summer of 2011, only 29.6% of all American teens had a job. Our young people are expected to support a Social Security system that will not be there when they get older, and every single day more than 2 billion dollars is added to a debt that will hang around the necks of younger Americans and their children for the rest of their lives. If you stop and think about all of this for too long, your head might just explode with anger. This is going to be the first generation in U.S. history that is going to do significantly worse than their parents, and that is a terrible shame.

Right now, there are 5.9 million Americans between the ages of 25 and 34 that are living with their parents. After adjusting for inflation, U.S. college students are now borrowing about twice as much money as they did a decade ago. Average yearly tuition at private colleges and universities in the United States is now up to $27,293. That figure has increased by 29% in just the past five years. Back in 1952, a full year of tuition at Harvard was only $600. Today, it is $35,568. The cost of college textbooks has tripled over the past decade. In 2010, the average college graduate had accumulated approximately $25,000 in student loan debt by graduation day. At some point in 2012, total student loan debt in the United States will surpass the 1 trillion dollar mark for the first time ever. The total amount of student loan debt in the United States now exceeds the total amount of credit card debt in the United States. One-third of all college graduates end up taking jobs that don't even require college degrees. There are more than 3.5 million Americans that are behind on their mortgage payments. Young people that were offered "teaser rates" on their first homes before the housing collapse represent a large proportion of these mortgages. Young Americans get arrested at a far higher rate than older Americans do. Amazingly, 30% of all Americans get arrested by the time they reach the age of 23. Once you spend time in prison, getting a good job becomes much tougher. The U.S. government is stealing about 150 million dollars from our children and our grandchildren every single hour. Younger Americans will have to bear the burden of this debt far longer than older Americans will.

Why can't people make the leap to real awareness of what's going on? Why do so few people seem to care about the dangers of the unreported radiation levels and toxic debris washing across the pacific? How is it no one but local residents raise the alarm about the horrific effects of the Gulf oil spill and the poisonous seafood landing on American dinner tables? As the Orwellian American police state sweeps into place, the economy crumbles, and their faultless leader languishes on a Hawaiian beach, Americans are entering into a brave new 2012 with minimal awareness of the true dangers already dissolving their health, wealth and chances for survival in an engineered conflagration of mythic proportions that is already descending on their heads. As the gap between reality and manipulated public perception grows, it may just be too big a leap for many at this point. Having been dumbed-down and unresponsive for so long, it's too much for them to take in.

Peruse 2011's government figures for the average American family's spending and debt. The conclusion is dumbfounding: it's official, 2011 was the year the middle class died. To Americans, being middle class means two things: more or less average wages that paid for life's necessities with cash leftover for discretionary spending. In a country where those from the marginally poor to the marginally rich claim to be in the middle, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) set a factual standard: the Average American Consumer Unit. The BLS's statistically computed family, with 2.5 humans and 1.3 workers, is a fictional construct. But, it is also the one true benchmark that pinpoints the dead center of the American worker's economic situation.

Beginning last year the average American family: could not afford the average single family house... depended on their employer for health care insurance or went without... were in debt with no way out... didn't pursuing further education... saved nothing... slashed their food budget to the bone... and paid at least 30% of their gross wages in taxes. Gender, age, religion, sexual preference and marital status are of no consequence to this financial analysis. If you're human you can relate to these budget numbers. Any family earning today's average wage of $62,857 is very carefully spending every cent of their $49,067 take home pay and the details are disturbing. Much of the spending verified here is so deficient it will leave you baffled as to how today's average American family is getting by. Remember, the option of taking on more debt, not calculated here, or declaring bankruptcy, may be the last resort.

Once upon a time, the United States had the largest and most vibrant middle class that the world has ever seen. The decline of the middle class is not something that has happened all of a sudden. Rather, there has been a relentless grinding down of the middle class over the last several decades. The number of Americans that fell into poverty (2.6 million) set a new all-time record last year and extreme poverty (6.7%) is at the highest level ever measured in the United States. Millions of our jobs have been shipped overseas, the rate of inflation has far outpaced the rate that our wages have grown, and overwhelming debt has choked the financial life out of millions of American families. Every single day, more Americans fall out of the middle class and into poverty. In fact, more Americans fell into poverty last year than has ever been recorded before. The number of middle class jobs and middle class neighborhoods continues to decline at a staggering pace.

Housing: Goodbye house. Hello walk-up flat or double wide trailer. The new middle class housing is a two bedroom walk-up without the washer, dryer or dishwasher, or a double-wide trailer. The average single family home is now beyond the $1,400 monthly budget of today's average American family. The fourteen hundred dollar number must include everything that goes with a place to live: rent or mortgage payment, taxes, insurance, utilities, telephone, public services, cable/dish, equipment, supplies and furnishings. Fourteen hundred dollars will get you a two bedroom, average (not luxury) apartment, and leave enough for all your other average shelter costs, but only in smaller cities and towns where the Cost of Living Index (CLI) is at the national average: 100.

The Five Worst of The One Percent

These are just five of the people using money and powerful connections to benefit themselves while the rest of the country continues to suffer. The series could contain more than 100 installments:

18 Statistics That Prove the Economy Has Not Improved Since Barack Obama Occupied the White House

#1 Today there are 88 million working age Americans that are not employed and that are not looking for employment. That is an all-time record high.

#2 When Barack Obama was elected, the percentage of unemployed Americans that had been out of work for more than 52 weeks was less than 15%. Today, it is above 30%.

#3 There are 1.2 million fewer jobs in America today than there were when Barack Obama was inaugurated.

#4 When Barack Obama first took office, the number of "long-term unemployed workers" in the United States was approximately 2.6 million. Today, that number is sitting at 5.6 million.

#6 During the Obama administration, worker health insurance costs have risen by 23 percent.

#7 Since Barack Obama has been president, the average price of a gallon of gasoline in the United States has increased by 90 percent.

#8 Since Barack Obama has been president, home values in the United States have declined by another 13 percent.

#9 Under Barack Obama, new home sales in the U.S. set a brand new all-time record low in 2009, they set a brand new all-time record low again in 2010, and they set a brand new all-time record low once again during 2011.

#10 Since Barack Obama took office, the number of Americans living in poverty has risen by more than 6 million.

#11 Since Barack Obama entered the White House, the number of Americans on food stamps has increased from 32 million to 46 million.

#12 The amount of money that the federal government gives directly to Americans has increased by 32 percent since Barack Obama entered the White House.

#13 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the percentage of Americans living in "extreme poverty" is now sitting at an all-time high.

#14 When Barack Obama first took office, an ounce of gold was going for about $850. Today an ounce of gold costs more than $1700 an ounce.

#15 Since Barack Obama became president, the size of the U.S. national debt has increased by 44 percent.

#17 During the Obama administration, the U.S. government has accumulated more debt than it did from the time that George Washington took office to the time that Bill Clinton took office.

Barack Obama is promising that things will be much better very soon. Congress has reduced the maximum amount of time that the unemployed can receive unemployment benefits to 73 weeks. That change will go into effect later this year. But there are still millions of very talented Americans that cannot find work after years of looking.

America as a whole is getting poorer as a nation, and as this happens wealth is becoming increasingly concentrated at the very top of the income scale. This is not how capitalism is supposed to work, and it is not good for America. In the United States today, the wealthiest one percent of all Americans have a greater net worth than the bottom 90 percent combined. When the cost of the basic things that we need – housing, food, gas, electricity – go up faster than our incomes do, that means that we are getting poorer. In the United States today, there are 240 million working age people. Only about 140 million of them are working. Today, only 55.3 percent of all Americans between the ages of 16 and 29 have jobs. According to the New York Times, approximately 100 million Americans are either living in poverty or in “the fretful zone just above it.” According to that same article, 34 percent of all elderly Americans are living in poverty or “near poverty”, and 39 percent of all children in America are living in poverty or “near poverty.”

Sadly, more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities in the United States have been shut down since 2001. The total value of household real estate in the U.S. has declined from $22.7 trillion in 2006 to $16.2 trillion today. Most of that wealth has been lost by the middle class. Many formerly great manufacturing cities are turning into ghost towns. Since 1950, the population of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania has declined by more than 50 percent. In Dayton, Ohio 18.9 percent of all houses now stand empty. Since 1971, consumer debt in the United States has increased by a whopping 1700%. Most Americans are scratching and clawing and doing whatever they can to make a living these days.

Half of all American workers now earn $505 or less per week. Incredibly, more than one out of every seven Americans is on food stamps and one out of every four American children is on food stamps at this point. Since Barack Obama took office, the number of Americans on food stamps has increased by 14.3 million. In 2010, 42 percent of all single mothers in the United States were on food stamps. Food prices continue to rise at a very brisk pace. The price of beef is up 9.8% over the past year, the price of eggs is up 10.2% over the past year and the price of potatoes is up 12% over the past year. Electricity bills in the United States have risen faster than the overall rate of inflation for five years in a row. The average American household will have spent a staggering $4,155 on gasoline by the end of 2011.

The world has become essentially schizophrenic in its outlook. Being told one thing while the exact opposite is happening before their eyes for so long, the "dissonance" created by this conflict is causing humanity to shut down. America is the perfect example. Ostensibly fighting for "freedom and liberty" we commit genocide and destroy nation after nation. To protect our liberties the government has overturned the Bill of Rights and made the Constitution a mockery. Yet the populace sits and takes it.

UPDATE: The Weather Channel says the east coast earthquake was caused by an unknown fault line running under D.C. and through Virginia. It is now being called Obama's Fault, though Obama says it's really Bush's Fault. Other theories are that it was the founding fathers rolling over in their graves or that what we all believed to be an earthquake was actually the effects of a 14.6 trillion dollar check bouncing in Washington.

The road that we are taking as a nation in America and as a human race on the planet Earth is being paved for us in advance and sold to us for a profit. As information comes down the pipeline it becomes distorted and confused because most of the people passing along the information do not know the entire story, they have not researched much information themselves, and they tend to be biased as well. They tend to have an angle in the information they put out, usually because they have an ulterior motive.

The western world is drowning in an ocean of debt unlike anything the world has ever seen before, and our financial markets are gigantic casinos that are dependent on huge mountains of risk and leverage remaining very stable. In the end, this house of cards that has been built on a foundation of sand is going to come crashing down in a horrifying manner. Most people out there have no idea what is about to happen. Most people out there are working hard and are busy preparing for the holidays and they are hopeful that the economy will turn around soon. But that is not going to happen. We are heading for another major global financial collapse, and when it happens the U.S. economy is going to get even worse.

$11 Billion to $22 billion is spent on welfare to illegal aliens each year by state governments. $22 Billion a year is spent on food assistance programs such as food stamps, WIC, and free school lunches for illegal aliens. $2.5 Billion a year is spent on Medicaid for illegal aliens. $12 Billion a year is spent on primary and secondary school education for children here illegally and they cannot speak a word of English! $17 Billion a year is spent for education for the American-born children of illegal aliens, known as anchor babies. $3 Million a DAY is spent to incarcerate illegal aliens. 30% percent of all Federal Prison inmates are illegal aliens. $90 Billion a year is spent on illegal aliens for Welfare & social services by the American taxpayers. $200 Billion dollars a year in suppressed American wages are caused by the illegal aliens. In 2006, illegal aliens sent home $45 BILLION in remittances to their countries of origin. The total cost is a whopping $338.3 BILLION A YEAR. THIS AMOUNT OF MONEY IS $338,300,000,000.00, IT IS ENOUGH TO STIMULATE THE ECONOMY FOR THE CITIZENS OF THIS COUNTRY.

When Carlo Ponzi, a dishwasher from Parma, Italy, immigrated to the United States in 1903, he had $2.50 in his pocket and a million-dollar dream in his head. He was able to fulfill that dream, at least temporarily. Ponzi promised people that he would multiply their money in a miraculous way: by 50 percent in six weeks. With his carefully parted hair and charming accent, Ponzi beguiled investors and fueled their avarice. The first investors raked in fantastic returns. What they didn't know was that Ponzi was simply using the next investors' money to pay them their profits. The scheme continued. Ten investors turned into 100, and 100 investors turned into 1,000, until the scam was discovered. Ponzi spent many years in prison, and he died a pauper in 1949. But his name remains important to every criminologist today -- and every economist.

Economists use the term "Ponzi scheme" to describe a disastrous mechanism in which someone pays off old debt by constantly taking on new debt. The repayment of the debt -- the most recent loans, plus interest -- is deferred into the distant future, fueling an eternal process of debt refinancing. It's the classic pyramid, or snowball scheme, practiced by thousands of con artists after Ponzi. The most spectacular case was that of New York financier Bernard Madoff, who was responsible for losses of about $20 billion by 2008. Snowballs are set into motion, becoming bigger and bigger as they roll along. In the worst case, they end in an avalanche that takes everything else with it. Western economies have not acted much differently than the fraudster Madoff. The Federal Reserve is the most brazen of all ponzi schemes.

Anyone with intellectual integrity and moral courage can affirm that the Federal Reserve system is guilty of financial fraud at its core. The reason is they lie in omission and commission with a fiduciary responsibility: they create debt for what we use as money, charge the 99% increasing aggregate interest, and then tell us this is responsible leadership for the public good.

The reality is that the Federal Reserve has more control over the performance of the U.S. economy than the president even does, and yet most Americans never spend much time thinking about the Fed at all. It is almost as if someone has instructed us to "ignore the man behind the curtain" and most of us just blindly obey. With the economy in such a mess and with the national debt exploding so dramatically, isn't it about time that we had a national conversation about the performance of the Federal Reserve? Isn't it about time that we evaluated whether the Federal Reserve is doing a good job or not?

The U.S. National Debt Is 5000 Times Larger Than When The Federal Reserve Was Created! When the Federal Reserve was created, the U.S. national debt was less than 3 billion dollars. Today, it is more than 5000 times larger. What is the appropriate word to use when something is 5000 times worse than it used to be? At the moment, the U.S. national debt is sitting at a grand total of $15,416,323,644,046.76. We are passing the biggest debt in the history of the world on to our children, and it is increasing at a rate of 150 million dollars an hour. When will the American people finally wake up?

Right now, about the only things that the American people can agree on is that they are angry and that they do not like the direction that this country is headed. Of course a lot of this is being caused by the economy. Unemployment is rampant, millions of families have been kicked out of their homes and our country is drowning in debt. But the economy is not the only cause of what is happening. There is a growing restlessness in America today. An increasing number of people feel very empty and very frustrated. We still have a very high standard of living compared to the rest of the world, and yet there is this growing sense that our country is right on the verge of something really bad. The very fabric of our society is coming apart at the seams and the thin veneer of civilization that we all take for granted is beginning to disappear. You can almost feel the fear in the air.

The markets are telling us that a major crisis is now brewing. So be prepared for another Lehman type of collapse which will bring the financial structure to its knees. The media has been portraying these problems as a crisis of capitalism, but they have it completely wrong. What we’re witnessing is a crisis of socialism. Governments have been making far too many promises which have been based on borrowed money coming mainly from the banks. Gold is the real safe haven where individuals should store their savings if they want to keep their purchasing power.

It is not a king this time who is exerting ownership over the land and its people, but it is a similar top-down tyrannical system that employs police-state enforcers in much the same manner. In America, this tyranny has remained largely disguised behind pleasantries and a growing bureaucracy centered around Orwellian safety measures, but those days are over; the king (the tyranny) has returned to make its move from the shadows out into the open square for public view. Its kid gloves have transformed to an iron fist, which always seems to herald the final phase.

Transnational giants are the dominant institution of our time - especially financial ones with money power control of everything. 147 powerful transnational corporations control an inordinate amount of economic activity - about 40%. Among the top 50, 45 are financial firms. They include Barclays PLC (called most influential), JPMorgan Chase, UBS, and other familiar and less known names. Twenty-four companies are US-based, followed by eight in Britain, five in France, four in Japan, and Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands with two each. Canada has one. Moreover, "top ranked" companies "hold a control ten times bigger than what could be expected based on their wealth." As a result, they have enormous influence over political, financial, and economic activity. They're able to transfer enormous amounts of power, wealth and resources from public to private hands with government complicity.

These forces have transformed" financial institutions and other corporate predators "into instruments of a market tyranny that is extending its reach across the planet like a cancer, colonizing ever more of the planet's living spaces, destroying livelihoods, displacing people, rendering democratic institutions impotent, and feeding on life in an insatiable quest for money" and profits as a be and end all. Only bottom line priorities and market dominance matter, not human welfare, environmental sanity, peace, equity and justice. They decide who governs and how, who serves on courts, what laws are enacted, and whether or not wars are waged. Corporate dominance, especially financial power, and democratic values are incompatible. They operate ruthlessly as private tyrannies. They're predators. We're prey, and every day we're eaten alive. They do it because they can, and in America by mandate.

Publicly owned US corporations, including financial ones, must serve shareholders by maximizing equity value through higher profits. They do it by exploiting nations, people and resources ruthlessly. Social responsibility doesn't matter. Neither does being worker-friendly, a good citizen, or friend of the earth. Bottom line priorities alone matter. Failure to pursue fiduciary responsibilities means possible dismissal or shareholder lawsuits. Yet nothing in America's Constitution or statute laws endow corporations with their rights. They usurped them by co-opting Washington, the nation's courts, state capitals, and city halls. As a result, over half the world's largest economies are corporations. Financial ones controlling the power of money are most dominant.

Although corporations aren't human, they can live forever, change their identity, reside in many places globally, can't be imprisoned for wrongdoing, and can transform themselves into new entities for any reason. They have the same rights and protections as people without the responsibilities. As a result, they operate freely unrestrained, especially financial giants controlling the power of money at the public's expense. Corporations are now seen as bundles of assets, the more liquid the better. A new monopoly finance capitalism developed to exploit it. A burgeoning financial superstructure gained a life of its own. Today it's omnipotent, especially in America and Europe. Their business model involves grabbing everything that smells money, no matter what harm is caused. Money doesn't buy everything, but it buys enough influence to matter.

The central banks of the world are acting as if it is 2008 all over again. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and right now the central bankers are pulling out all the stops. The Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, the Bank of Canada, the Bank of Japan and the Swiss National Bank have announced a coordinated plan to provide liquidity support to the global financial system. According to the plan, the Federal Reserve is going to substantially reduce the interest rate that it charges the European Central Bank to borrow dollars. In turn, that will enable the ECB to lend dollars to European banks at a much cheaper rate. The hope is that this will alleviate the credit crunch which has gripped the European financial system by the throat. So where is the Federal Reserve going to get all of these dollars that it will be loaning out at very low interest rates? You guessed it - the Fed is just going to create them out of thin air. Our currency is being debased so that Europe can be helped out. Unfortunately, the impact of this move will be mostly "psychological" because it really does nothing to address the fundamental problems that Europe is facing. It is up to Europe to solve those problems, and so far Europe has shown no signs of being able to do that.

The Federal Reserve system has now been in place for about 100 years. That is certainly long enough to evaluate how well it has performed. So has the Federal Reserve done a good job? Well, one of the things that the Federal Reserve is charged with doing is to protect the value of our currency. In other words, they are supposed to keep inflation under control. In that regard, the Federal Reserve has failed miserably. The U.S. dollar has lost 96.2 percent of its value since 1900, and almost 100 percent of that decline has come during the Federal Reserve era.

The other half of the Federal Reserve's "dual mandate" is to keep unemployment low. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that the Fed has failed there too. In the United States today, there are less jobs than there were a decade ago even though we have added more than 30 million more people to the population since then. The average duration of unemployment in the U.S. is about 40 weeks, and if you gathered together all of the unemployed people in America in one place, they would constitute the 68th largest country in the world. So, no, the Federal Reserve is not doing a good job of keeping us all employed.

We are also told that the era before the Federal Reserve was created was a time when great "financial panics" happened on a regular basis and that the Federal Reserve was created to stop them from happening. So has the Federal Reserve been effective at preventing financial panics? Well, current Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has openly admitted that the Federal Reserve helped cause the Great Depression of the 1930s. And there have been 10 separate economic recessions since 1950. So that is not a really great track record. In addition, it seems very clear that the foolish low interest rate policies of the Fed fueled the massive housing bubble that plunged the U.S. economy into the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression when it finally crashed. Shouldn't the Federal Reserve receive some criticism for that?

Of course one of the biggest problems with the Federal Reserve is that it is a perpetual debt machine. The Federal Reserve system was designed to perpetually expand the money supply and to perpetually expand U.S. government debt. On both counts, it has performed brilliantly. When the Federal Reserve was created, the U.S. national debt was less than 3 billion dollars. Today, it is more than 5000 times larger.

When you simply look at performance, the truth is that it is really hard to deny that the Federal Reserve has been a complete and total nightmare for the United States. But instead of shutting it down, Congress has been giving the Federal Reserve even more power. The Dodd-Frank bill gave the Fed significant new powers and substantial new responsibilities, and the Fed has been exercising those new powers in almost complete secrecy.

Central banking is one of the few things that almost every nation on earth can agree on. All 187 nations that belong to the IMF have a central bank. Sadly, the vast majority of the people out there have no idea that central banking is just a giant money making scam.

Central banks are allowed to create money out of thin air which is then lent to national governments. In turn, the citizens of those nations have to pay higher taxes in order to pay the interest on those debts. Central banking is a way to systematically take wealth from the citizens of a nation and transfer it into the pockets of those that enjoy getting rich by lending money to governments. When it comes to taking money out of the pockets of the American people, the Federal Reserve is definitely doing a good job.

Our entire economic system is based on debt, and such a system is inevitably going to fail eventually. We need to shut down the Federal Reserve and quit using debt-based currency. We need to educate the American people about where money comes from and about why central banking is so destructive.

The major central banks of the world say that they want to "enhance their capacity to provide liquidity support to the global financial system." But essentially what is happening is that the Federal Reserve is going to be zapping large amounts of dollars into existence and loaning them out to the ECB very, very cheaply. Think of it as a type of "quantitative easing" on a global scale. The decision to do this was reportedly made by the Federal Reserve on November 28, 2011. This intervention by the central banks is merely just a speed bump on the road to financial oblivion. Most Americans are not going to understand what the central banks of the world just did, but it really is not that complicated.

In an attempt to stave off the consequences of a global credit freeze, the Federal Reserve, in coordination with major central banks, has created a credit line available to those central banks, whereby they can borrow dollars at reduced interest rates for periods of three months. The central banks, in turn, can lend to commercial banks in their respective countries. This is meant to reduce the cost of short-term borrowing for troubled European banks and to give them immediate access to dollars. This was done immediately after the collapse of Lehman Brothers as well, to alleviate the consequences of banks being largely unwilling to lend to other banks, even for short periods, for fear that the borrowing banks could fail.

The Fed is not going to lower interest rates, they can’t. If they increase them the bond market would collapse and all confidence in the system would be gone. These zero interest rates are killing mutual funds and pension plans. Public pension plans are short $327 billion. Having really nowhere to go to they are buying bonds. The 2011 shortfall was $85 billion and that should worsen unless the stock market reaches substantial new highs. Since 2000 the Fed has entrapped itself in perpetual issuance of money and credit and now the ECB has done the same thing. Once begun there is no going back. It either works or the system collapses.

So the Federal Reserve is loaning giant piles of cheap money to the European Central Bank. Where in the world does all of that money come from? All of this money is created right out of thin air by the Federal Reserve.... Neither the dollars nor the Euros come from anywhere. They aren’t moved or debited from anywhere. They are invented right on the spot with a few taps on the key pad. And that’s all. There’s no printing press fired up to make new dollars or euros. This is called “fiat money.” But that makes it sound as if some command from a sovereign created the money. It’s really closer to “keyboard money,” since it is created by data entry in a computer. Just think of it as "comfort food" for the financial markets.

The reality is that the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank would have never taken coordinated action like this if they did not believe that there was some sort of imminent threat to the global financial system. This "liquidity" is going to dramatically increase the size of the U.S. monetary base.... Any use of the Fed’s swap facility expands the Fed’s monetary base: all dollars, no matter where they are deposited, whether it be Kazakhstan, Japan, or Mexico, wind up back in an American bank. This means that any time a foreign central bank engages in a swap with the Federal Reserve, the Fed will create new money in order to make the swap. Use of the Fed’s liquidity swap line in late 2008 was the main cause of a surge in the Fed’s monetary base at that time. The peak for the swap line was about $600 billion in December 2008. Some observers will therefore say that the swap line is a backdoor way to engage in more quantitative easing.

When there is more money floating around out there but the same amount of goods and services, prices go up. So we will eventually see more inflation in the United States because of all this. Meanwhile, politicians in Europe have failed to come up with a plan to address the European financial crisis once again. They are calling it a "delay," but the truth is that it should be called a "failure." The reality is that this latest move by the major central banks of the world does not change the fact that Europe is in a huge amount of trouble and is most likely headed for a very painful financial collapse.

All of these central banks are run by unelected bureaucrats that answer to nobody. The decisions that these central bankers make affect all of our lives in a very significant way, and yet we have zero input into these decisions. Most of the decisions that these central bankers make seem to benefit big banks and big financial institutions. They always claim that the benefits will "filter down" to the rest of us. But most of the time what ends up filtering down to us is the economic pain that comes from their bad decisions.

The large investment and commercial banks saw an opportunity and concocted securities backed by dicey "sub-prime" loans, in which borrowers paid higher interest based on questionable credit. These mortgage-backed instruments were a hot item, yet when the banks learned that the underlying values had vanished, they lent money to mortgage origination firms to gin up even more bad loans at higher and higher interest rates to shape into even more mortgage-backed securities to sell to their customers--and each other. The banks, knowing that the instruments were worthless when they sold them to their own clients, purposefully bought "insurance" (credit default swaps) against their own products, thus doubly swindling their customers. And they made millions doing it--first on the commissions from the sale, and then from their short position as the securities tanked. In 2008, the house of cards came tumbling down, taking with it the American economy.

Then enters Treasury Secretary and former chief of Goldman Sachs, Hank Paulson, who insisted that we must save the hides of the big banks (his compatriots) with the stimulus bailout to "rescue the financial system."Originally stated to be $787 billion, the total reached $11.6 trillion--all secured by American taxpayers. The result was the near-destruction of the consumer sector, which represents 80% of the economy, all to save the criminals who committed the illegal acts that brought down the economy. But worse, commercial and community banks are still burdened with bad real estate loans and investments. Consequently, they are under orders from banking regulators not to lend, which further exacerbates the decimation of the middle class and small business owners who cannot find loans to recover and grow. The stimulus should have been distributed--via tax breaks and rebates--to households to stimulate consumer spending, which in turn would have stabilized the small business sector that could have kept workers and hired for new positions.

Obama and his cohorts--like Paulson, now replaced at Treasury by Timothy Geithner, another investment-bank rent boy--have not only failed in their approach to the recession, but they may be the architects of an economic calamity more painful than the Great Depression when all is said and done. Nothing is being done to expose and prosecute these criminals who caused the economic collapse. The Securities and Exchange Commission has tried to wipe the shame from its face by investigating some of the sleazy practices, but this comes well after the fox has left the coop with all the eggs. And indeed, fines have been levied against some of the best-known bank brands in the world: JP Morgan Chase, CitiGroup, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, and others to come. But the fines are paltry, the banks are not required to admit guilt, and the individual culprits are not identified. It turns out that the SEC cannot bring criminal charges under its charter, and Congress has refused to haul the perpetrators in front of an investigative committee.

The top donor to former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney's presidential campaign, investment banking and securities firm Goldman Sachs, received over $10 billion in emergency lending and bailouts from the Federal Reserve after the 2008 financial meltdown, according to public sources and published reports. Goldman backed Obama for election in 2008, and the firm, like many Wall Street institutions, is now backing Mitt Romney for president. Romney has long had a close relationship with Goldman Sachs. In 1999 Romney purchased initial IPO shares in Goldman that netted him $1.1 million in profits when he sold them in 2010. Today, Goldman is Romney's largest donor. And nine of Romney's top 20 campaign contributors are big Wall Street Banks like Goldman.

The Three Who Brought Down Wall Street

Here's a quick look into the three former Fannie Mae executives who brought down Wall Street. Franklin Raines was a Chairman and Chief Executive Officer at Fannie Mae. Raines was forced to retire from his position with Fannie Mae when auditing discovered severe irregularities in Fannie Mae's accounting activities. Raines left with a "golden parachute valued at $240 Million in benefits. The Government filed suit against Raines when the depth of the accounting scandal became clear. Tim Howard - was the Chief Financial Officer of Fannie Mae. Howard "was a strong internal proponent of using accounting strategies that would ensure a "stable pattern of earnings" at Fannie. Investigations by federal regulators and the company's board of directors since concluded that management did manipulate 1998 earnings to trigger bonuses. Raines and Howard resigned under pressure in late 2004. Howard's Golden Parachute was estimated at $20 Million! Jim Johnson - A former executive at Lehman Brothers and who was later forced from his position as Fannie Mae CEO. Investigators found that Fannie Mae had hidden a substantial amount of Johnson's 1998 compensation from the public, reporting that it was between $6 million and $7 million when in fact it was $21 million." Johnson is currently under investigation for taking illegal loans from Countrywide while serving as CEO of Fannie Mae. Johnson's Golden Parachute was estimated at $28 Million.

Where Are They Now?

FRANKLIN RAINES? Raines works for the Obama Campaign as his Chief Economic Advisor.

TIM HOWARD? Howard is a Chief Economic Advisor to Obama under Franklin Raines.

JIM JOHNSON? Johnson was hired as a Senior Obama Finance Advisor and was selected to run Obama's Vice Presidential Search Committee.

Obama refuses to go after the bad guys, to stand up for the people against the crooks on Wall Street, who walked away with all our money derived from a gigantic criminal conspiracy. The criminals who brought down the American economy have not been identified personally and brought before the bar of justice. These central banks need to be abolished. The American people need to tell Congress to shut down the Federal Reserve and to start issuing debt-free United States currency. We do not want a bunch of unelected central bankers to "centrally plan" the U.S. economy or to "centrally plan" the global economy.

Americans have been snookered into renouncing their citizenship and converting to being mindless consumers. Citizenship requires a person to be actively engaged in the community with obligations to fellow citizens and future generations. Consumerism requires people to love things, embrace debt, worry about what others have, and become driven by the accumulation of possessions and the appearance of wealth. The disgusting exhibition that Madison Avenue maggots have coined Black Friday is the ultimate display of consumerism. In a nauseating display of senseless spending driven by retail conglomerates, Americans act like Pavlov’s salivating dogs by lining up for hours to stampede over and pepper spray other consumers to get the ultimate deal on that Chinese made toaster oven, Vietnamese made laptop, Korean made HDTV, or Mexican made tortilla maker.

They don’t seem to grasp the irony of going deeper into debt buying cheap crap made in foreign countries by the workers who took their jobs. The mainstream media proclaims a hugely successful Black Friday as millions bought crap they didn’t need with money they don’t have, while millions more ate their Thanksgiving meals in food shelters – unreported by the media. This repulsive manifestation of consumerism is applauded and encouraged by our government. The masses have been brainwashed by those in power into thinking consumer spending, utilizing debt, is essential for a strong economy, when the exact opposite is the truth. Saving and investment are the essential ingredients to a strong economy. Debt-based spending only benefits bankers, mega-corporations, and politicians.

A highly-educated engaged citizenry would be a danger to the existing social order. The 1%, educated at our finest universities, does not want average Americans to obtain a great education for a reasonable price. They want them to get a worthless diploma at an excessively high price tag and become debt slaves to the Wall Street 1%. They want uneducated, indebted consumers, not educated productive citizens. Our republic has been slowly perverted since the time of its inception. The insidious process had been slow and methodical until 1913. The establishment of the Federal Reserve, by an elite group of bankers and their politician friends and the establishment of a personal income tax, created the conditions that has allowed a small cabal of powerful men to dictate the course of our economic, political, social, and military policies for the last 98 years. Anyone that chooses to open their eyes and awake from the propaganda-induced stupor can see the result of allowing a small group of corrupt authoritarian men using their power to pervert our government into tyranny. The majority remains oppressed, buried under trillions of debt, while the shysters reap obscene profits, poison the worldwide economic system, and walk away unscathed in the aftermath of their crimes.

The ruling oligarchy has become so brazen in the last few years that it has attracted the attention of the critical thinking minority. The advent of the internet has allowed these critical thinking few to analyze the un-sanitized facts, discuss the issues, and provide truth amidst a blizzard of lies. The proliferation of truth-telling websites has allowed truth-seekers to bypass the government sanctioned corporate media. The pillaging of society by the politically powerful, corrupt 1% is plain to see. But, most Americans, on this catastrophic economic highway to collapse, are passively accepting the continued plundering and pillaging of the national treasury by criminal Wall Street bankers, non-enforcement of existing laws against those who committed the largest crime in history, and reaction to young people across the country getting beaten, bludgeoned, shot with tear gas and pepper sprayed by police. The majority of Americans are responding with silent acquiescence to the transfer of trillions in taxpayer dollars to the criminal bankers that have destroyed the worldwide financial system. Americans have chosen willful ignorance over thoughtful critical thinking due to their own intellectual laziness and the overpowering mind manipulation by the elite through their propaganda emitting media machines. Some people are awaking from their trance, but the vast majority is still slumbering.

There is confusion and misunderstanding regarding the culprits in this drama. The divergence in household income was the result of the 1% capturing the economic and political system of the United States and using it to ransack the wealth of the formerly working middle class. They are psychopaths, unable to feel empathy for their fellow man. Enough is never enough. They always want more. Life is a game to them. They truly believe they can pull the right strings and continue to accumulate more riches. The world is crumbling under the weight of crippling debt created by these Wall Street psychopaths, while the corrupted bought off politicians try to shift the losses from the bankers who incurred them to the citizens who have already been fleeced.

In addition to controlling the monetary system and brainwashing the inhabitants with relentless propaganda, the ruling class has used their control of the political process to impose thousands of laws, statutes, rules, and regulations upon the citizens. An apathetic, distracted, trusting populace has been easily convinced that more laws will make them safe and secure. They have willingly sacrificed liberty, freedom and self reliance for the façade of safety, security and protection. The overwhelming number of government rules and regulations are designed to control you and insure your compliance and obedience to those in power. In a non-corrupt society inhabited by citizens willing to honor their obligations, government’s function is to insure property rights and defend the country from foreign invaders. Citizens don’t need to be herded like sheep with threats of imprisonment to do what is right. We don’t need 90,000 pages of regulations telling us the difference between right and wrong.

-Do you ever wonder why you pay more taxes than a billionaire Wall Street hedge fund manager? Do you think our tax system is designed to benefit billionaires and mega-corporations when corporations with billions of income pay little or no taxes? Complexity and confusion benefits those who can create and take advantage of the complexity and confusion. Corporations and special interests have used their wealth to bribe politicians to design loopholes, credits, and exemptions that benefit their interests. The corruption of the system is terminal.

IRS

The U.S. tax code is a complete and utter abomination and it needs to be thrown out entirely. Nobody in their right mind would ever read the whole thing – it is over 3 million words long. Each year, Americans spend billions of hours and hundreds of billions of dollars trying to comply with federal tax requirements. Sadly, it is the honest, hard working Americans in the middle class that always get hit the hardest.

The tax code is absolutely riddled with loopholes that big corporations and the ultra-wealthy use to minimize their tax burdens as much as possible. Many poor people do not pay any income taxes at all. The dishonest are rewarded for cheating on their taxes (if they can get away with it) and the ultra-wealthy have moved trillions of dollars to offshore tax havens where they can avoid U.S. taxation altogether. Our system is incredibly unfair to the millions of hard working people in the middle class and upper middle class that drag themselves out of bed and go to work each day and try to do the right thing. In addition, the current U.S. tax system is incredibly inefficient, it diverts a tremendous amount of resources away from more valuable economic activities, and it has chased thousands of businesses and trillions of dollars out of the United States. The U.S. tax code is such a complete and utter mess at this point that it can never be “fixed.” The only rational thing to do is to abolish it completely, and any politician that tells you otherwise is lying to you.

The U.S. tax code is now 3.8 million words long. If you took all of William Shakespeare’s works and collected them together, the entire collection would only be about 900,000 words long. According to the National Taxpayers Union, U.S. taxpayers spend more than 7.6 billion hours complying with federal tax requirements. Imagine what our society would look like if all that time was spent on more economically profitable activities. 75 years ago, the instructions for Form 1040 were two pages long. Today, they are 189 pages long. There have been 4,428 changes to the tax code over the last decade. It is incredibly costly to change tax software, tax manuals and tax instruction booklets for all of those changes. According to the National Taxpayers Union, the IRS currently has 1,999 different publications, forms, and instruction sheets that you can download from the IRS website.

Our tax system has become so complicated that it is almost impossible to file your taxes correctly. For example, back in 1998 Money Magazine had 46 different tax professionals complete a tax return for a hypothetical household. All 46 of them came up with a different result. In 2009, PC World had five of the most popular tax preparation software websites prepare a tax return for a hypothetical household. All five of them came up with a different result.

The IRS spends $2.45 for every $100 that it collects in taxes. According to The Tax Foundation, the average American has to work until April 17th just to pay federal, state, and local taxes. Back in 1900, “Tax Freedom Day” came on January 22nd. When the U.S. government first implemented a personal income tax back in 1913, the vast majority of the population paid a rate of just 1 percent, and the highest marginal tax rate was just 7 percent.

Residents of New Jersey pay $1.64 in taxes for every $1.00 of federal spending that they get back. The United States is the only nation on the planet that tries to tax citizens on what they earn in foreign countries.

According to Forbes, the 400 highest earning Americans pay an average federal income tax rate of just 18 percent. Warren Buffett had an effective tax rate of just 17.4 percent for 2010. The top 20 percent of all income earners in the United States pay approximately 86 percent of all federal income taxes. Sadly, as Bill Whittle has shown, you could take every single penny that every American earns above $250,000 and it would only fund about 38 percent of the federal budget.

The United States has the highest corporate tax rate in the world (35 percent). In Ireland, the corporate tax rate is only 12.5 percent. This is causing thousands of corporations to move operations out of the United States and into other countries. Some tax havens are doing a booming business in setting up sham headquarters for U.S. corporations. For example, the city of Zug, Switzerland only has a population of 26,000 people but it is the headquarters for 30,000 companies.

In 1950, corporate taxes accounted for about 30 percent of all federal revenue. In 2012, corporate taxes will account for less than 7 percent of all federal revenue. Many of our largest corporations make huge profits and yet pay less than nothing in taxes….

Exxon-Mobil paid $15 billion in taxes in 2009, but not a single penny went to the U.S. government. Many wealthy Americans hide enormous amounts of money outside the country in order to avoid paying taxes. According to the IMF, a total of 18 trillion dollars is currently being hidden in offshore banks. The number of traffic accidents spikes each year right around April 15th. Deaths from traffic accidents around April 15, traditionally the last day to file individual income taxes in the U.S., rose 6 percent on average on each of the last 30 years of tax filing days compared with a day during the week prior and a week later, according to research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Most of the tax debate is focused on income taxes, but the truth is that Americans pay dozens of other taxes every single year. The following are just a few of the taxes that many Americans pay….

When you account for all forms of taxation on the federal, state and local levels there are many Americans that pay out more than half of their incomes in taxes. We are being taxed into oblivion, and yet most Americans do not even realize that it is happening. It is kind of like being killed by thousands of tiny cuts.

So what do all of these taxes buy us? They buy us a massively bloated government that wastes money on some of the craziest things imaginable. Millions of Americans work for the federal government, and yet most of them produce very little of real economic value. By 2005, the federal government employed 14.6 million people: 1.9 million civil servants, 770,000 postal workers, 1.44 million uniformed service personnel, 7.6 million contractors, and 2.9 million grantees. This amounted to a ratio of five and a half “shadow” government employees for every civil servant on the federal payroll. Since 1999, the government had grown by over 4.5 million employees. When you add in state and local government workers the numbers are even more dramatic….

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are 3.8 million full-time and 1.5 million part-time employees on state payrolls. Local governments add a further 11 million full-time and 3.2 million part-time personnel. This means that state and local governments combined employ 19.5 million Americans.

Yes, we do need some government. For example, without any law enforcement at all our society would descend into complete chaos, and without any military at all we would be completely open to foreign conquest. In order to have a stable, secure society we do need some government. However, we definitely do not need the massively bloated government that we have today.

The truth is that most government employees are a drain on the system. Most of them just push paper around. I used to work in Washington D.C. so I know what pushing paper around is all about. There are millions of other Americans that enjoy a comfortable existence at the expense of the federal government without doing any work whatsoever. Of course the biggest welfare recipients of all are the big corporations. All forms of corporate welfare should be eliminated immediately. When are U.S. taxpayers going to get sick and tired of paying for all of this?

Every single year, the federal government, state governments and local governments drain massive amounts of desperately needed money from hard working middle class families. Then they take that money and spend it on incredibly foolish things. When are American voters going to stand up and boldly declare that they have been taxed enough already and they aren’t going to take it anymore?

The current tax code is completely and utterly broken and it is beyond repair. Unfortunately, neither the Republicans or the Democrats are proposing that we should get rid of it. So we are just going to continue to get more of the same year after year, and it is the middle class that will feel the pain.

The American people are paying the price for allowing a few evil men to gain control of our government. The American people cowered in fear as the 342 page Patriot Act was somehow written in a few weeks after 9/11, introduced in Congress on October 23, passed the House on October 24 with no debate, passed the Senate on October 25 with no debate, and signed into law on October 26 by George Bush. A law passed by the ruling elite that stripped Americans of their freedoms and liberties was passed using fear mongering false patriotism propaganda to squelch dissent and the American people had no say in the matter. The government has used fear to keep the American people under control. We now unquestioningly accept being molested in airports. We shrug as our intelligence agencies eavesdrop on our telephone conversations and emails without the need for a court order. It is now taken for granted that we imprison people without charging them with a crime and assassinate suspected terrorists in foreign countries with predator drones. Invading countries and going to war no longer requires a declaration of war by Congress as required by the Constitution. The State grows ever more powerful.

Therefore, it is no surprise that Americans sit idly by, watching their 52 inch HDTVs, as young people across the country are beaten, pepper sprayed, shot with rubber bullets and tear gas, and scorned and ridiculed by corporate media pundits for exercising their free speech rights to peacefully protest our corrupt system. The American tradition of civil disobedience is considered domestic terrorism by those in authority. Our beloved protectors in the Orwellian-named Department of Homeland Security write reports classifying Ron Paul supporters and returning Iraq veterans as potential terrorists. If the powers that be get their way, the internet will be locked down and controlled, as it poses a huge threat to their thought control endeavors. Freedom to think, learn, question and organize resistance is unacceptable in the eyes of the elite.

It is almost always the working class poor in any society that first sees the effects of a corrupt government and a faulty economic system. Those who legitimately hold to the principles of self sufficiency, and fair play, are usually the first to be stabbed in the back by the establishment and, so, they are the first to become politically active against it. Sometimes we have to lose almost everything before we are able to see the bigger picture.

Occupy Our Homes

After being treated like animals by militarized police for exercising their right to free speech, many of the protesters are learning that begging and pleading with this kind of corrupt organization is not going to get them anywhere. playing nice and “working within the system” all comes to an end when the politicians are just laughing while they send in their goons to violently attack you. Playing nice and “working within the system” all comes to an end when the politicians are just laughing while they send in their goons to violently attack you. The only way that “we the people” will truly win this revolution is if we take matters into our own hands in a series of small battles where we call the enemies bluff every time they attempt to assert their illegitimate authority.

Occupy our homes has become the next step for this movement because people are simply taking back the homes that were fraudulently ripped from under their feet, instead of getting distracted with political demands that won’t do the downtrodden any good when all is said and done anyway. Getting everyone back into their vacant homes on the other hand, is beneficial for everyone and hurts no one else in the process. Victims of foreclosure and community activists in dozens of cities across the country are beginning to team up to “re-occupy” foreclosed homes. Yet, it doesn't really hurt the banks though as they got the homes for nothing in the first place because they made loans out of thin air, collected all sorts of fees and payments, sold the note a thousand times, and then ultimately got the asset. What a racket!

This kind of direct action is the only approach that will bring us progress, the political system isn’t going to work because one of its main objectives is keep us in our place. The courts, the government, the politicians and the media have all been put here as a means to uphold the status quo and prevent any kind of change from actually taking place, so naturally we aren’t going to have any luck creating social change using these platforms.

The country has reached a tipping point. Will enough right thinking Americans stand up and fight to bring down this corrupt system, or will we be herded silently to slaughter. The truth is there is something terribly wrong in this country. We are facing a myriad of problems that will require courage and common sense to overcome. We need only look in the mirror to find the guilty party. It is time to stop letting fear dictate our actions. Conflict is coming to this country due to the evil sanctioned by our corrupt leaders and the upright men and women who will bear the burden of destroying that evil. Our civilization has adopted the worst aspects of the two most famous dystopian novels in history – Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World. The question is whether the population of this country is too far gone to recover. The answer to that question will determine whether the country chooses authoritarian dictatorship or a renewal of our founding principles. Aldous Huxley understood the three pillars of Western civilization fifty years ago and that their destruction would result in a collapse of our economic system.

Those in power are beginning to lose control. You can sense their desperation. Their propaganda is losing its impact as the pain for millions of Americans has become acute. The young people leading the protests across this land are showing tremendous courage and a tenacity of spirit that has been dormant for decades among the lethargic, distracted, over-medicated public. Despite being subjected to government education conditioning, these young people have zeroed in on the enemy. They may not have all the solutions, but they have correctly identified the corrupt banking system as the central nervous system of this vampire squid sucking the life out of our nation. The outrage and anger flaring across the country on a daily basis, reflected in the OWS movement, is just the beginning of a revolutionary period descending upon this nation. The existing social order will be swept away, but they will not go without a fight. They will use their control of the police, military and media to try and crush the coming rebellion. The three pillars sustaining the American empire edifice of never ending war, ever accumulating debt and excessive consumerism are crumbling. The growing corruption and weight of un-payable debt have weakened the very foundation of our grand experiment. The existing structure will surely collapse.

The average American has become apathetic, willfully ignorant of facts and reality, distracted by the techno-gadgets that run their lives, uninterested in anything beyond next week’s episode of Dancing with the Stars or Jersey Shore, and willing to let the corporate media moguls form their opinions for them through relentless propaganda, the only thing that will get their attention is an absolute collapse of our economic scheme. Uninformed, unconcerned, intellectually-vacant Americans will get exactly that in the not too distant future. The oligarchy of moneyed interests have done a spectacular job convincing the working middle class they should be angry at 20 year old OWS protestors, illegal immigrants and the inner city welfare class, rather than the true culprits – the Federal Reserve, Wall Street banks and mega-corporations. This is a testament to the power of propaganda and the intellectual slothfulness of the average American.

The New York Times reported that "New York cops have arrested, punched, whacked, shoved to the ground and tossed a barrier at reporters and photographers" covering protests. Reporters were asked by NYPD to raise their hands to prove they had credentials: when many dutifully did so, they were taken, upon threat of arrest, away from the story they were covering, and penned far from the site in which the news was unfolding. Other reporters wearing press passes were arrested and roughed up by cops, after being – falsely – informed by police that "It is illegal to take pictures on the sidewalk." In New York, a state supreme court justice and a New York City council member were beaten up; in Berkeley, California, one of our greatest national poets, Robert Hass, was beaten with batons. The picture darkened still further when Wonkette and Washingtonsblog.com reported that the Mayor of Oakland acknowledged that the Department of Homeland Security had participated in an 18-city mayor conference call advising mayors on "how to suppress" Occupy protests. Our system of government prohibits the creation of a federalized police force, and forbids federal or militarized involvement in municipal peacekeeping.

Why this massive mobilization against these not-yet-fully-articulated, unarmed, inchoate people? Protesters against the war in Iraq, Tea Party rallies and others have all proceeded without this coordinated crackdown. The Department of Homeland Security's coordinated a violent crackdown is answerable up a chain of command: first, to New York Representative Peter King, head of the House homeland security subcommittee, who naturally is influenced by his fellow congressmen and women's wishes and interests. And the DHS answers directly, above King, to the president. In other words, for the DHS to be on a call with mayors, the logic of its chain of command and accountability implies that congressional overseers, with the blessing of the White House, told the DHS to authorize mayors to order their police forces – pumped up with millions of dollars of hardware and training from the DHS – to make war on peaceful citizens.

The No 1 agenda item: get the money out of politics. Most often cited was legislation to blunt the effect of the Citizens United ruling, which lets boundless sums enter the campaign process.

No 2: reform the banking system to prevent fraud and manipulation, with the most frequent item being to restore the Glass-Steagall Act – the Depression-era law, done away with by President Clinton, that separates investment banks from commercial banks. This law would correct the conditions for the recent crisis, as investment banks could not take risks for profit that create kale derivatives out of thin air, and wipe out the commercial and savings banks.

No 3 was the most clarifying: draft laws against the little-known loophole that currently allows members of Congress to pass legislation affecting Delaware-based corporations in which they themselves are investors.

If legislating away lobbyists' privileges to earn boundless fees once they are close to the legislative process, reforming the banks so they can't suck money out of fake derivatives products, and, most critically, opening the books on a system that allowed members of Congress to profit personally – and immensely – from their own legislation, are two beats away from the grasp of an electorally-organized Occupy movement … well, you will call out the troops on stopping that advance. This is a civil war; a civil war in which, for now, only one side is choosing violence. It is a battle in which members of Congress, with the collusion of the American president, sent violent, organized suppression against the people they are supposed to represent.

In recent years, members of Congress have started entering the system as members of the middle class (or upper middle class) – but they are leaving DC privy to vast personal wealth, as we see from the "scandal" of presidential contender Newt Gingrich's having been paid $1.8m for a few hours' "consulting" to special interests. The inflated fees to lawmakers who turn lobbyists are common knowledge, but the notion that congressmen and women are legislating their own companies' profits is less widely known – and if the books were to be opened, they would surely reveal corruption on a Wall Street spectrum. Indeed, we do already know that congresspeople are massively profiting from trading on non-public information they have on companies about which they are legislating – a form of insider trading that sent Martha Stewart to jail.

In 2009, Congress was only scheduled to be in session for 137 days out of the 365 days of the year. In 2010, Congress was also only scheduled to be in session for 137 days out of the entire year.

The anger directed at OWS protestors by middle class Americans is a misdirected reaction to a quandary they can’t quite comprehend. Their lives are getting more difficult but they aren’t sure why. They are paying more for energy, food, tuition, and real estate taxes, while the price of their houses decline and their wages stagnate. More than a quarter of all homeowners are underwater on their mortgage and many are drowning in credit card and student loan debt. At the same time, government drones tell them the economy is in its second year of recovery and corporate profits are at all-time highs. Government statistics, false storylines, and entitlement programs are designed to confuse the public and obscure the fact we are in the midst of another Depression. The economic conditions today are as bad as or worse than the Great Depression. This Depression is hidden from plain view because there are no unemployment lines, bread lines, or soup lines. We are experiencing an electronic Great Depression, as food stamps, unemployment compensation, Social security payments and welfare benefits are electronically delivered to millions of recipients.

In reality, the 1929 Depression was likely caused by the New York Fed over-printing dollars – a policy that created first the Roaring ’20s and then the Depressed ’30s. FDR first shut down banks and then confiscated gold to ensure that US citizens wouldn’t find out there was not enough gold to redeem their over-printed dollars. Now, in our view, the power elite is replaying this tactic. In order to create world government, it helps if governance in general is strengthened. This is taking place around the world even now via austerity measures and a campaign through the West to “punish corruption.” The same patterns that made the 1930s such a tragic decade are being repeated as the 21st century faces its second decade. When government has too much power, things can go wrong very quickly. And then the temptation is to point fingers at the private sector to find a scapegoat.

Today, the Global Power Elite are wrapping up globalization and ushering in World Government. The Private Global Power Elite embedded in major governments is dead set on imposing World Government on us sooner rather than later. Macro-managing planet Earth is no easy matter. It requires strategic and tactical planning by a vast think-tank network allied to major elite universities whereby armies of academics, operators, lobbyists, media players and government officers interface, all abundantly financed by the global corporate and banking superstructure. They do this holistically, knowing that they operate on different stages moving at very different speeds:

Risk-managing this whole process takes into account the many pitfalls and surprises in store. So each plan in every field counts, with “Plan B’s” – even Plans “C” and “D” – which can be implemented if needed. Those in power can only impose tyranny over us as long as they have men who will obey those orders. So, the danger is not in the chain of command, but the chain of obedience.

The Food Stamp program has been a smashing success as we’ve added 13.8 million Americans to this fine program since Obama’s inauguration, a mere 43% increase in less than three years. There are now 45.8 million Americans dependent upon food stamps for survival, 14.7% of the U.S. population. The number of Americans on food stamps has risen by 6.8 million during this government sponsored “recovery.” Obama’s good buddy – Jamie Dimon – and his well run machine at JP Morgan earns hundreds of millions administering the SNAP (food stamp) program.

Bernanke’s zero interest rate policy has stolen $400 billion per year from senior citizens and savers and handed it to the very bankers who caused the pain and suffering of millions. The game plan of the oligarchy has been to transfer hundreds of billions from taxpayers to bankers, report profits through accounting entries reducing loan loss reserves, pump up their stock prices and convince clueless investors to buy newly-issued shares at inflated valuations. The plan has failed. The zero interest rate policy’s unintended consequences have caused revolutions throughout the Middle East and massive food inflation across the developing world.

The single biggest reason the middle class feel frustrated, angry and like they are falling behind is due to the Federal Reserve and the relentless never ending inflation they produce in order to support their masters on Wall Street and provide cover for the trillions in debt spending by politicians in Washington DC. It is no surprise that beginning in 1980 when government spending began to accelerate much more rapidly than government revenues, the government decided to “tweak” how it measured inflation. The government reports inflation at 3.5% today. The truth is inflation is running in excess of 10% if measured exactly as it was in 1980. That’s right, we have a recession and we have inflation in double digits. No wonder the masses are restless.

The reason middle class Americans are being methodically exterminated and driven into poverty is the monetary policies of the Federal Reserve. Since 1971, when Nixon extinguished the last vestiges of the gold standard and unleashed politicians to spend borrowed money without immediate consequence, the U.S. dollar has lost 82% of its purchasing power using the government manipulated CPI. In reality, it has lost over 90% of its purchasing power. The average American, after decades of being dumbed down by government sanctioned education, is incapable of understanding the impact of inflation on their lives. As their wages rise 2% to 3% per year and inflation rises 5% to 10% per year, they get poorer day by day. The Wall Street banks, who own the Federal Reserve, step in and convince the average American to substitute debt for real wealth in order to keep living the modern techno-lifestyle sold to them by mainstream corporate media.

Edward Bernays, the father of propaganda to control the masses, would be so proud of his disciples running our country today. He clearly believed only an elite few were intellectually capable of running the show. Essentially, he hit upon the concept of the 1% telling the 99% what they should think and believe over eighty years ago. The mechanisms for controlling the thoughts, beliefs, and actions of the population are so much more efficient today. The conditioning begins when we are children, as every child will be bombarded with at least 30,000 hours of propaganda broadcast by media corporations by the time they reach adulthood. Their minds are molded and they are instructed what to believe and what to value. Those in control of society want to keep the masses entertained at an infantile level, with instant gratification and satisfying desires as their only considerations. The elite have achieved their Alpha status through intellectual superiority, control of the money system, and control of the political process. Their power emanates from eliminating choices, while giving the illusion of choice to the masses. People think they are free, when in reality they are slaves to a two party political system, a few Wall Street banks, and whatever our TVs tell us to buy.

Our entire system is designed to control the thoughts and actions of the masses. In many ways it is done subtly, while recently it has become more bold and blatant. It is essential for the ruling elite to keep control of our minds through media messages and the educational system. It is not a surprise that our public education system has methodically deteriorated over the last four decades. The government gained control over education and purposely teaches our children selected historical myths, social engineering gibberish and only the bare essentials of math and science. The government creates the standardized tests and approves the textbooks. We are left with millions of functionally illiterate children that grow into non-critical thinking adults. This is the exact result desired by the 1%. If too many of the 99% were able to ignore the media propaganda and think for themselves, revolution would result. This is why the moneyed interests have circled the wagons, invoked police state thug tactics, and used all the powers of their media machine to squash the OWS movement. It threatens their power and control.

U.S.-based mega-corporations fired 864,000 higher wage American workers between 2000 and 2010, while hiring almost 3 million workers in low wage foreign countries, using their billions in cash to buy back their own stocks, and paying corporate executives shamefully excessive compensation. The corporate mainstream media treats corporate CEO’s like rock stars as if they deserve to be compensated at a level 185 times the average worker. The S&P 500 consists of the 500 biggest companies in America and while the executives of these companies have reaped millions in compensation, the stock index for these companies is at the exact level it was on July 9, 1998. Over the last thirteen years workers were fired by the thousands, shareholders earned 0% (negative 39% on an inflation adjusted basis), and executives got fabulously rich.

Man-made inflation has stealthily devastated millions of lives over the last four decades. When the weekly wages of the average worker are adjusted for inflation, they are making 12% less than they did in 1971. Using a real, non-manipulated measure of inflation, the average worker is making 30% less than they did in 1971. Sadly, our math-challenged populace only comprehend that their wages have doubled in the last forty years, without understanding the true impact of inflation. Thankfully, the Wall Street debt dealers with a helping hand from Madison Avenue propaganda peddlers stepped up to the plate and imprisoned the middle class with the shackles of $2.5 trillion in consumer debt. So, while real wages have fallen 30% since 1971, consumer debt has increased by 1,700%.

There have been over 12 million foreclosure actions since 2007, with millions of Americans losing their homes. Another 16 million homeowners are underwater on their mortgages as home prices continue to fall and the economy sinks further by the day. The value of household real estate has fallen from $22.7 trillion in 2006 to $16.2 trillion today, a loss of $6.5 trillion concentrated among the middle class. In contrast, mortgage debt has only decreased by $600 billion mostly due to write-offs by the banks that created fraudulent mortgage products to lure Americans into debt. The unemployment rate in the United States reached 25% during the Great Depression. The government manipulated fictional unemployment rate reported to the public is currently 9.0%. Today, the true number of unemployed/underemployed is 23%.

Today, the average American is working harder than ever, for less and less. And the comfortable retirement that we all hope for will not be possible for most people. According to research by Wells Fargo, 75% of the American middle class expects to work through their retirement. In fact, the middle class itself is on the verge of extinction. This is the single greatest economic threat facing the United States today — and yet, hardly anyone is talking about it. The epicenter for the coming global financial collapse is almost certainly going to be in Europe. Financial professionals all over the world are sounding the alarm about Europe. It is a disaster that everyone can see coming but that nobody seems to be able to prevent. There is already talk that we may soon see another downgrade for U.S. debt. It is hard to even describe how incompetent the U.S. Congress is. There is a tremendous lack of leadership both in the United States and in Europe right now. The financial world is more interconnected than ever before, and when the financial dominoes start to fall it is going to take a miracle to keep a complete and total disaster from unfolding. The whole system is going down. Pull your money out your Fidelity account, your Scwhab accout, and your ETFs.

A devastating financial collapse really is coming. It will severely damage our financial system and our economy. According to Willem Buiter, chief economist at Citigroup: “Time is running out fast. I think we have maybe a few months—it could be weeks, it could be days—before there is a material risk of a fundamentally unnecessary default by a country like Spain or Italy which would be a financial catastrophe dragging the European banking system and North America with it.” Credit Suisse’s Fixed Income Research unit: “We seem to have entered the last days of the euro as we currently know it. That doesn’t make a break-up very likely, but it does mean some extraordinary things will almost certainly need to happen – probably by mid-January – to prevent the progressive closure of all the euro zone sovereign bond markets, potentially accompanied by escalating runs on even the strongest banks.” Right now, panic and fear are spreading like wildfire in the financial world and nobody knows for sure what is going to happen next. But one thing is for certain. Pessimism is growing stronger by the day. Are you starting to get the picture?

You could see it coming. An average of 23 manufacturing facilities were shut down every single day in the United States in 2010. According to U.S. Representative Betty Sutton, America has lost an average of 15 manufacturing facilities a day over the last 10 years. Sadly, it looks like this trend is picking up momentum. During 2010, an average of 23 manufacturing facilities a day were shut down in the United States. Since 2001, the U.S. has lost a total of more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities. America’s industrial might is being gutted like a fish and both political parties seem totally unconcerned. Since 2001, the U.S. has lost a total of more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the U.S. economy loses approximately 9,000 jobs for every $1 billion of goods that are imported from overseas. The United States has had a negative trade balance every single year since 1976, and since that time the United States has run a total trade deficit of more than 7.5 trillion dollars with the rest of the world.

Back in 1979, there were 19.5 million manufacturing jobs in the United States. Today, there are 11.6 million. That represents a decline of 40 percent during a time period when our overall population experienced tremendous growth. Between December 2000 and December 2010, 38 percent of the manufacturing jobs in Ohio were lost, 42 percent of the manufacturing jobs in North Carolina were lost and 48 percent of the manufacturing jobs in Michigan were lost. Back in 1970, 25 percent of all jobs in the United States were manufacturing jobs. Today, only 9 percent of all jobs in the United States are manufacturing jobs. The United States has lost an average of 50,000 manufacturing jobs per month since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. The Economic Policy Institute says that since 2001 America has lost approximately 2.8 million jobs due to our trade deficit with China alone.

All over the United States, road and bridge projects are being outsourced to Chinese firms. The United States spends about 4 dollars on goods and services from China for every one dollar that China spends on goods and services from the United States. The U.S. trade deficit with China rose to an all-time record of 273.1 billion dollars in 2010. This is the largest trade deficit that one nation has had with another nation in the history of the world. The U.S. trade deficit with China in 2010 was 27 times larger than it was back in 1990. The new MLK memorial on the National Mall was made in China. The new World Trade Center tower is going to be made with imported glass from China and imported steel from Germany.

The United States was always the dominant manufacturer of automobiles and trucks on the globe. In 2010 the U.S. ran a trade deficit in automobiles, trucks and parts of $110 billion. In 2010, South Korea exported 12 times as many automobiles, trucks and parts to us as we exported to them. Even in high technology products we are being destroyed. In 2002, the United States had a trade deficit in “advanced technology products” of $16 billion with the rest of the world. In 2010, that number skyrocketed to $82 billion. China has now become the world’s largest exporter of high technology products. Back in 1998, the United States had 25 percent of the world’s high-tech export market and China had just 10 percent. Ten years later, the United States had less than 15 percent and China’s share had soared to 20 percent. Manufacturing employment in the U.S. computer industry was actually lower in 2010 than it was in 1975.

In 2008, 1.2 billion cellphones were sold worldwide. So how many of them were manufactured inside the United States? Zero. The United States now has 10 percent fewer “middle class jobs” than it did just ten years ago. Today, American workers are bringing home a much smaller share of economic pie. Over the past decade, the ratio of wages to GDP has been declining very steadily. Now that millions of our jobs have been exported, there aren’t nearly enough jobs left for all of us. Right now, the average amount of time that a worker stays unemployed in the United States is approximately 39 weeks. There are fewer payroll jobs in the United States today than there were back in 2000 even though we have added 30 million extra people to the population since then. If you gathered together all of the workers that are “officially” unemployed in the United States today, they would constitute the 68th largest country in the world.

According to one study, between 1969 and 2009 the median wages earned by American men between the ages of 30 and 50 dropped by 27 percent after you account for inflation. As the number of good paying jobs declines, America’s middle class is rapidly shrinking. In 1970, 65 percent of all Americans lived in “middle class neighborhoods.” By 2007, only 44 percent of all Americans lived in “middle class neighborhoods.” In the United States today, corporate profits are at a record high, and yet employment numbers have still not rebounded. Obviously something is structurally wrong. The Obama administration says that there are certain things that “we don’t want to make in America” anymore.

Jeffrey Immelt, the head of Barack Obama’s highly touted “Jobs Council,” has shipped tens of thousands of good jobs out of the United States. According to Professor Alan Blinder of Princeton University, 40 million more U.S. jobs could be sent offshore over the next two decades. One recent poll found that 41 percent of all Americans believe that “the American Dream has been lost.” Our addiction to cheap foreign products is incredibly self-destructive. If we stay on this current path, even more of our formerly great manufacturing cities will turn into post-industrial hellholes. This nation is losing jobs, factories and wealth at a pace that is almost unbelievable.

We are witnessing a WAR AGAINST HUMANITY on every front – waged by the global Elites who have hijacked the government of almost every country.

These Bills, that are being drafted in secret and passed with barely a nod to, or from, the public, enact conditions that were thoroughly condemned by the Nuremberg trial after WWII, and for which capital punishment was dealt out. Never again were such conditions to be tolerated on the face of the planet.

Now the Trojan Horse government of the same country that headed the Nuremberg Trials is racing down the very same footsteps as Hitler, only worse given today’s technologies! It is waging a war against all of humanity on every front. American citizens should have researched and immediately rejected the Patriot Act in 2001. They would have discovered in 2001 that they had permitted the passing of an Act that essentially dissolves the functionality of their “democratic institutions and erases all Constitutional Rights.”

The P.A and Homeland Security was literally a translated duplicate copy of the legislation that Hitler wrote for himself and implemented to dissolve Democratic institutions of governance in Germany. American citizens were not told either that the two people hired to organize Homeland Security were drawn from the top echelons of the former KGB and the East German Secret Service. Even the mention of such a law should have caused every American Citizen to stand up with an unequivocal “NO WAY! Over My Dead Body!”

If Canadians think that they are safe and that this does not apply to them, they had better give their heads a shake -- they need to be reminded that Harper has integrated the military of the two countries so that the American military is now free to operate on Canadian soil.

Hitler is beginning to look more and more like a “trial run” for the New World Order (Disorder), with our hijacked governments racing down the same expressway to Hell. Very rapidly, governmental lawlessness and criminality is enveloping the planet as these Global Elites “Decriminalize Criminality” and Write Themselves Empowerment Laws that permit them to commit the most outrageous Crimes against humanity, laws under which NO human being is safe, anywhere.

Thousands of young men and women were sacrificed in WWII to defeat Hitler’s Goal for “a New WORLD Order.” Did they all die in vain? If ever there was a time to make a definitive stand, it is NOW - or else it will soon be too late.

What Happened?

On April 3, 1024, the imperial Sung Dynasty began to print and circulate chiao-tzu notes [paper money] in the province of Szechwan. In China, paper money was a monetary form of ‘Hamburger Helper’, an addition to the royal treasury that allowed Chinese dynasties to stretch their budgets by allowing them to spend what they didn’t have. In the West, paper money had a different purpose. There, the invention of paper money would also allow governments to spend more than they possessed; but, in the West, governments would have to borrow their own money from bankers. When money is issued as debt, everyone becomes a debtor.

Paper money and fractional monetary reserves appeared first in China in 1024 and, although China’s monetary advances were noted by Jewish traders, it would be the Scots who 600 years later would transform China’s paper money into a credit-based conveyer of debt in the West. Note: It’s no coincidence that today’s largest bank in terms of market value and profits is HSBC, incorporated by Sir Thomas Sutherland in 1865. Sutherland was a Scot. In 1694, a Scottish banker, William Patterson, convinced England’s King William III to establish a central bank that would issue debt-based paper money alongside gold and silver coins. The king agreed to do so in return for loans to pay his war debts and more loans to fight more wars. The Scots’ bogus paper banknotes - marginally backed by gold - would eventually replace gold as money throughout the world, proving again the ancient dictum, bad money drives out good.

Invented in China and transformed by the Scots, it would be the Jews, however, who would leverage paper money and credit and debt into untold wealth and power. William Patterson’s combination of paper money and money lending would catapult the Jews from societal outcasts to rulers of the financial world; but because of deeply ingrained anti-Semitic attitudes in the West, it would take almost a century for this to occur. After Patterson’s invention of debt-based money, the highly profitable world of banking remained off-limits to Jews during the 1700s; but as the century ended, banking’s doors opened to the Jews because of the West’s need for money to fight their wars.

…prior to the beginning of the revolutionary wars in France, in the mid-1790s, European merchant banking was dominated by non-Jews, including the “Barings of London, the Hopes of Amsterdam and the Gebrüder Bethmann of Frankfurt”. The financial demands of war opened room for newcomers, including a German-Jewish group with the Oppenheims, Rothschilds, Heines, and Mendelssohns among them.-- Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews, pp. 314-315

The West’s costly wars gave Jewish bankers entry into the exclusive and waspish world of banking; and one family in particular, the Rothschilds, would leverage this opportunity into the financial equivalent of world dominion. The Rothschild’s ascent would be fueled by their highly profitable trade in sovereign debt, i.e. government bonds, whereby governments could spend whatever they wanted by indebting their citizens ad infinitum - an indebtedness limited only by government’s ability to borrow.

ROTHSCHILD & SONS: BANKERS PAR EXCELLENCE AND INDEBTORS OF NATIONS

The way to a man’s purse is through his ambitions and the most costly of these is war. Wars are expensive and the Rothschilds discovered a highly lucrative way to profit by loaning money to nations preparing for war. The Rothschilds allowed nations to fight wars on credit by their underwriting and sale of government bonds.… the Rothschilds created the world of banking as we know it today. Nathan Rothschild operated principally as an underwriter and speculator in the early 19th-century bond market. He and his brothers invented, or at any rate popularised, the government bond, which allowed investors, big and small, to buy bits of the debts of sovereign states by purchasing fixed-interest bearer bonds. Governments liked this because they could use them to raise colossal sums of money. Investors liked them because they could be traded - at prices that fluctuated in relation to the performance of the issuing government - and shrewd investors could make big sums... The Rothschilds got a cut of everything. Through the sale of British bonds, the Rothschilds profitably underwrote England’s wars and the spread of its empire. Later, England would return the favor by sponsoring a Jewish state in Palestine, much to the dismay of the Arab world.

BANKING, WAR AND BANKRUPTCY

It was the cost of war whereby William Patterson was able to convince King William III to issue debt-based paper banknotes; just as it was the cost of war that gave Jews access to the bankers’ trough of greed. But, in the end, it would be war that would take away everything the bankers’ paper money built. The costs of war would end up costing bankers the gold their paper banknotes required.

At the end of WWII, the world monetary system was backed by 21,775 tons of US gold. But two decades later, most of that gold was gone, spent to maintain America’s vast overseas military presence; and, in 1971, the US was forced to end the convertibility of US dollars to gold. The removal of gold-backing from the US dollar would eventually undermine the world monetary system; leading to unrestrained global credit creation, runaway borrowing and dangerous destabilizing levels of debt - and the transformation of America from a creditor state into the world’s largest debtor.

US MILITARY SPENDING, DEBT AND FISCAL INSOLVENCY

In the 1980s, no longer needing to exchange gold for US dollars, President Reagan used debt instead of taxes to pay for America’s military buildup. In only two terms, President Reagan tripled the US deficit. Two decades later, debt was again used by President Bush to fund America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Although central banking and the debt-based warfare state had its genesis in England, it would reach fruition in America. There, the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank, a carbon copy of England’s central bank, allowed America to follow in England’s debt-based imperial footsteps. America’s vast post-WWII military machine fueled by central bank credit and unprecedented borrowing propelled America, like England, to world dominion. That dominion, however, would cost America its gold reserves, its savings and its future.

CENTRAL BANKERS AND THE DEATH RATTLE OF DEBT

We are living in extraordinary times. An economic paradigm is being swept away and another paradigm is about to take its place. Change always takes time and paradigm changes are deeper and more significant than others; and while it will be some time before the changes are over, they will happen with a rapidity and swiftness for which most are unprepared. Very few people understand that if you start off with $1 million and loan it from one institution to another to another to another, you may have a net of $1 million. But if somebody defaults and that $1 million asset disappears, you get cascading defaults of every institution that had that $1 million asset. It's really simple. The Greek default-and Greece has defaulted even though they won't admit it-will cause a default in Spain and Italy, and that's going to cause a default in France and that's going to cause a default in the U.S. When they default, the banks close.

We have more debt in the world than assets, so we have to write off the bad debt. Unfortunately, no government in the world is talking about that. If and when that happens here, people with three to six months in liquid assets would be the best off. The top three liquid assets of choice are gold, silver, and cash. They will be the most valuable in the midst of a banking system meltdown. It is wiser to have cash money as opposed to money in T-bonds with a negative interest rate. Fiat currencies will crash and burn as the U.S. returns to a gold standard. Our current financial system simply isn't working anymore. On the other hand, gold and silver have worked for 5,000 years. Governments have been spending money they don't have since 1944 and "it's time to pay the piper."

Today’s European debt crisis can be traced to toxic levels of government debt, a toxicity encouraged, aided and abetted by bankers. The desire of governments to spend what they don’t have has been more than equaled by bankers loaning money ad infinitum to governments irrespective of the ability to repay, e.g. Greece, Italy, etc. The government bonds popularized by the Rothshilds are now the undoing of the world financial system. Bankers profit by the indebting of others and the Rothschild’s strategy of indebting governments was so successful that, today, both governments and banks are in serious trouble.

Central bankers are desperately searching for answers that do not exist. They caused the problem with excess credit and their role in doing so has blinded them to what’s obvious to others. Central bank credit caused the problem. Central banking is the problem. Today US debt, not gold, is the foundation of the world’s financial system. US treasuries are thought by most to be a safe haven. In the short term, they are. In the long term, they’re not. In the long term, there is no short term.

In truth, America’s US treasuries are no safer than Europe’s troubled sovereign debt. The daisy chain of sovereign debt is now unraveling and although who’s next is of paramount importance to those betting on the declining value of government IOUs; almost all -- creditors and debtors alike -- will disappear into the gaping maw of the Rothschild’s now defaulting bonds. The last journey of paper money is a funeral procession.

TODAY, TOMORROW AND THE DAY AFTER

The Chinese experiment with paper money began almost 1,000 years ago. Today, paper money in the East and West is no longer is backed by gold and there’s nothing to prevent the economic chaos that ended the five Chinese dynasties that used paper money from ending the current Chinese regime as well. Paper money is no respecter of ideology. State-sponsored capitalism will be no more effective than banking-sponsored capitalism in preventing the economic chaos inevitably spawned by fiat paper money.

Today’s economic crisis wasn’t happenstance. It was well planned, willful policy to transfer unprecedented wealth to private hands. Super-rich crooks got richer. Social inequalities deepened. Unmanageable debt levels skyrocketed. “Bailouts” metaphorically mean grand theft. Unknown trillions of dollars, euros and pounds vanished to secret accounts and offshore tax havens. Currencies are being debased. Crisis conditions worsen. At issue is subverting democracy, ending social justice, and consolidating global power in private hands. It is a well orchestrated master plan to swindle trillions of taxpayer dollars from so many countries.

On September 11, 1990, preparing America for Operation Desert Storm, GHW Bush told a joint session of Congress that war on Iraq presented “a rare opportunity to move toward an historic period of cooperation. Out of these troubled times….a New World Order can emerge.” New world order strategy dictates major global economic, political, and military policies. Nothing happens accidentally. Events are manipulated. At issue is world dominance. America, Israel, and key NATO nations are partnered to achieve it. Wars, economic disruption, financial terrorism, and other upheavals play out in real time.

General Smedley Butler’s 1935 book titled, War is a Racket followed his 1933 speech on the same theme. America’s global empire stretches everywhere. Super-weapons Butler couldn’t have imagined enforce it. By going public, he was an American hero. On September 21, 1992, GHW Bush told the UN General Assembly that multinational troops would become a New World Order army, saying: “Nations should develop and train military units for possible UN peacekeeping operations.” America’s permanent war agenda wasn’t explained. Neither was using “peacekeepers” as imperial occupiers. Post-9/11, Dick Cheney warned of wars that won’t end in our lifetime. Former CIA Director James Woolsey said America “is engaged in World War IV, and it could continue for years….This fourth world war, I think, will last considerably longer than either World Wars I or II did for us.” In its 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), Pentagon commanders called it the “long war.” In fact, throughout US history, America has waged continual wars at home and abroad.

Credit Boom

A bank draws its income from three main sources: shareholders, depositors and lenders. The shareholders provide the risk capital, as in any capitalist business. Depositors seeking a safe and convenient place to store their money traditionally provide the bulk of the funds which the bank then lends to its clients, while holding a modest proportion in reserve to meet any possible withdrawals by depositors. And lenders provide additional funds by buying marketable securities issued by the bank in the form of bonds. In the run-up to the 2007-08 banking crisis, banks expanded their activities very rapidly by increasing their income especially from the last of these three. The higher risk attached to equity means that it is an expensive source of funds, ruled out except when absolutely necessary or required by state regulators. Growth in deposits is broadly limited by the rate of growth of economic activity, since winning a higher share of total deposits from one's competitors involves costly investments in marketing or service quality. But in the conditions of feverish growth at the height of the boom, borrowing is easy and cheap, so banks like Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and Lehman Brothers threw caution to the winds. Not only did they increase their debt levels massively in relation to their equity capital and reserves, but they also kept down the cost by borrowing for relatively short periods of 1 to 5 years. They believed that they would have no difficulty in ‘rolling over’ these debts when they fell due – or even that they could redeem them with cash, either from the vast profits they expected to make, or from new equity issues.

But like all credit booms, this one ended in a massive crash. Beginning in the sub-prime household mortgage sector in the USA, rising default rates on loans opened up the fantasy world of no-risk finance. The widespread use of derivatives, developed on the basis of models that bore little or no relation to the actual functioning of financial markets, had meanwhile created chains of potential contagion that reached to the furthest corners of global finance. As investors began to appreciate the real risk to the market value of their financial assets, there ensued a classic flight to cash; as a consequence the wholesale money markets, in which banks borrow from each other and from other investors, began to freeze up. Bank debts falling due could not, in this situation, be rolled over; the main source of discretionary funding for banks disappeared. As so often Britain led the way, with the collapse of Northern Rock in September 2007, and the slide into the global banking crisis began.

"It is a matter of simple mathematics to realize the Western banking system is doomed. Even if you take the latest BIS statistics on outstanding derivatives contracts of $707 trillion as of June 2011 at face value (the true numbers are in the quadrillions or more according to some sources) you can see the system is doomed. With world GDP at around $65 trillion, you have banks betting over ten times that amount against each other. Each derivative is a bet against a counterparty. That means for every winner there is an equal loser. Some very big banks have certainly lost more money than exists in the real world. Every year January is a month for settlements of accounts among major banking players. January of 2012 is going to be a very interesting month. The talk is that Citibank, J.P. Morgan and Bank of America are among the doomed entities. Then of course there is the universal disgust at Goldman Sachs that is not going to go away quietly," according to Benjamin Fulford.

Obama is Washington’s latest warrior president. Earlier ones included Washington, Madison, Jackson, Lincoln, T. Roosevelt, Wilson, F. Roosevelt, Truman, Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, GHW Bush, Clinton, and GW Bush. America glorifies wars in the name of peace. The business of America is war and grand theft. One nation after another is pillaged. Libya was the latest. Are Syria and Iran next? It’s part of the imperial “New World Order/New Middle East” project to control North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia to Russia’s borders. For over a decade, planned regime changes targeted Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Iran, Somalia, Sudan, Libya, Syria, and other global countries. Iran threatens no one. Its nuclear program is peaceful and nonmilitary. No evidence disproves it. Clinton, Obama and other top US officials are inveterate liars and war criminals. America thrives on “deception and denial,” raging lawlessly on a global scale.

The New World Order is a supranational authority to regulate world commerce and industry; an international organization that will control the production and consumption of oil; an international currency that will replace the dollar and other major currencies; a world development fund that will make funds available to free and communist nations alike; and an international police force to enforce the edicts of the New World Order. It is tyrannical money power in private hands. Dictating global policies, what it says goes. Major banks and financial institutions call the shots. Political leaders genuflect and obey, including when to wage wars against what enemies.

The elite ‘New World Order’ (rulers) got into bed with the banking and financial sectors, who then got into bed with the governments of the world, who then got into bed with senior political figures, who then told us, the taxpayers, that all your money will now have to be used to bail them out or face economic collapse.” It’s a con, a scam to loot wealth from nations and households. Anyone facing default gets in trouble. Individual borrowers have their assets seized by creditors.

Governments have to deal with the loan shark of last resort – the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Its terms require privatizing public enterprises, mass layoffs, deregulation, deep social spending cuts, wage freezes or cuts, unrestricted access for Western corporations, corporate-friendly tax cuts, increases for working people, undermining trade unionism, and enforcing harsh repression against those who balk. In sum, its financial terrorism, New World Order tyranny, waging war on nations and humanity for profit and power. Since the 19th century, it was engineered by Rothschilds, Rockefellers, and other visible ones in league with complicit politicians to the highest levels.

Here are the Top 10 Richest People of All-Time

1. John D. Rockefeller Fortune: $336 billion--Source of wealth: He founded Standard Oil in 1870, at the age of 31, and bought up most of the oil refineries in the United States, eventually controlling about 90% of the American oil business.

2. Andrew Carnegie Fortune: $309 billion--Source of wealth: Carnegie invested in the steel business when the market was booming, eventually ending up at the head of the U.S. Steel empire.

3. William the Conquer Peak fortune: $209 billion--Source of wealth: Was called William the Bastard until he led the last successful foreign invasion of England in 1066. Although he became a monarch, we’re counting the spoils of war before he took the throne, based on what he gave out to his sons Odo and Robert.

4. Cornelius Vanderbilt Fortune: $185 billion--Source of wealth: In 1862, he began to buy railroad lines. Although already 70 years old, his wealth mostly comes from this business of the 19th century. Prior to that, he was known as a cold-blooded steam-boat entrepreneur.

5. Alan Rufus Fortune: $149 billion--Source of wealth: A Norman who joined William The Conqueror in the invasion of Britain in the 11th century, Alan “The Red” had 250,000 acres of land from Yorkshire to London. He also owned Richmond Castle in North Yorkshire, which, for the time, was considered very comfortable.

6. Bill Gates Peak fortune: $136 billion--Source of wealth: Founded Microsoft with Paul Allen in 1975. He held onto shares as Microsoft dominated the age of computers, peaking in personal wealth at the top of the Dot Com Bubble.

7. William de Warenne Peak fortune: $134 billion--Source of wealth: Originally from Normandy, William I de Warenne participated in the battle of Hastings and was rewarded with properties in Sussex, Northfolk and Yorkshire. He became the first Earl of Surrey.

8. John Jacob Aster Peak fortune: $121 billion--Source of wealth: A successful fur trader, he established a near monopoly within the U.S. by around 1800. He subsequently switched trades and went on to investing in real estate, focusing on New York City.

9. Richard Fitzalan 10th Earl of ArundelPeak fortune: $108 billion--Source of wealth: The Earl of Arundel and quite the military leader. He fought in the Scottish Independence wars and in the Hundred Years’ War.Subsequent Earls of Arundel — his sons — would make this list, but we’re only counting that money once.

10. Stephen Girard Peak fortune: $105 billion--Source of wealth: Successful in the shipping trade, he was a French-born American merchant who went into the banking business later in his life, owning a bank that was called “Girard’s Bank”.

Deep-Pocket Diplopia

Some people suffer from Motivated Blindness; they don’t see what is not in their interest to see. Some people don’t look at the things that make them uncomfortable. Most people in America are in total denial. But the dollar is done. Most probably don't think it's done, because we all still use dollars to buy things. But, as you notice, prices are going up. That's the key sign that the dollar is done. The dollar is abandoning you, the dollar does not care about you, and you have to deal with it. People in denial will repeat the many lies taught to us all by the media and schools.

Banks acquired the power to create money by default, when Congress declined to claim it at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. The Constitution says only that “Congress shall have the power to coin money [and] regulate the power thereof.” The Founders left out not just paper money but checkbook money, credit card money, money market funds, and other forms of exchange that make up the money supply today. All of them are created by private financial institutions, and they all come into the economy as loans with interest attached.

Our money is created, not by the government, but by banks. The only money the government creates today are coins, which compose less than one ten-thousandth of the money supply. Federal Reserve Notes, or dollar bills, are issued by private Federal Reserve Banks, all twelve of which are owned by private banks in their district. Most of our money comes into circulation as bank loans, and it comes with an interest charge attached. Interest now composes 40% of the cost of everything we buy. We don’t see it on the sales slips, but interest is exacted at every stage of production. Suppliers need to take out loans to pay for labor and materials, before they have a product to sell. For government projects, the average cost of interest is 50%.

If the government owned the banks, it could keep the interest and get these projects at half price. That means governments—state and federal—could double the number of projects they could afford, without costing the taxpayers a single penny more than we are paying now. The Fed’s own figures show that the money supply has shrunk by $3 trillion since 2008. That sum could be spent into the economy without inflating prices. Three trillion dollars could go a long way toward providing the jobs and social services necessary, and guaranteeing employment to anyone willing and able to work would increase GDP, allowing the money supply to expand even further without inflating prices, since supply and demand would increase together.

College loans collectively now exceed a trillion dollars, more even than credit card debt. Students are coming out of universities not just without jobs but carrying a debt of $80,000 or so on their backs. For medical students and other post-graduate students, it can be $200,000 or more. Again, that’s as much as a mortgage, with no house to show for it. The justification for incurring these debts was supposed to be that the students would get better jobs when they graduated, but now jobs are scarce.

After World War II, the G.I. Bill provided returning servicemen with free college tuition, as well as cheap home loans and business loans. It was called “the G.I. Bill of Rights.” Studies have shown that the G.I. Bill paid for itself seven times over and is one of the most lucrative investments the government ever made. The government could do that again—without increasing taxes or the federal debt. It could do it by recovering the power to create money from Wall Street and the financial services industry, which now claim a whopping 40% of everything we buy.

When the country was founded, people could stake out some land, build a house on it, farm it, and be self-sufficient. The Great Depression saw people turned out of their homes and living in the streets—a phenomenon we are seeing again today. Few people now own their own homes. Even if you have signed a mortgage, you will be in debt peonage to the bank for 30 years or so before you can claim the home as your own. Health needs have changed too. In 1791, foods were natural and nutrient-rich, and outdoor exercise was built into the lifestyle. Degenerative diseases such as cancer and heart disease were rare. Today, health insurance for some people can cost as much as rent.

Total home mortgage debt in the United States is now about 5 times larger than it was just 20 years ago. Overall, U.S. home prices are 34 percent lower than they were back at the peak of the housing bubble. The total value of household real estate in America has declined from $22.7 trillion in 2006 to $16.2 trillion today. The latest Census data shows 50,339,500 homes with a mortgage. If 28.6 percent of these are underwater you have 14.3 million homeowners in a negative equity position. Low interest rates or other enticements like tax breaks can only go so far when the economy is getting worse or muddling along on the employment front. The approach to solving this crisis was wrong from the beginning because it was banking-centric instead of focusing on shoring up households and looking at the job market. So entering the half decade mark since the crisis hit little has really been done to help middle class American families. The large shadow inventory will keep pressure on pushing home prices lower. That is why year over year home prices are still falling. Bubble regions like Los Angeles are seeing more severe contractions in price compared to national trends.

There are tens of millions of Americans that are deeply frustrated about losing their homes, losing their jobs or barely being able to survive in this economy. People are sick and tired of the status quo and they want something to be done about our broken system. Unemployment is rampant, millions of families are being kicked out of their homes and more than 45 million Americans are on food stamps. There is more economic frustration in this country today than there has been at any other time since the Great Depression. We are watching pressure build to very dangerous levels.

Today, many among the elite are savagely mocking the poor. You shouldn’t kick people when they are down. There are huge numbers of families out there right now that have just about reached the end of their ropes. Wall Street executives have been spotted sipping champagne while watching the Occupy Wall Street protests from their balconies. Many columnists for major financial publications have had no fear of mocking the Occupy Wall Street protesters. Barack Obama continues to mock the poor by telling them to cut back on vacations and little luxuries like going out to eat while at the same time sending his own family out on incredibly expensive vacations. Unfortunately, most of the protesters do not understand how we have gotten to this point or what it is going to take to fix things. We desperately need to educate America.

According to a brand new Fox News poll, 76 percent of all Americans are “dissatisfied with how things are going in the country.” As the economy crumbles, thieves are becoming bolder and more desperate. Nothing is too big for thieves to steal these days. Some thieves have become so bold that they will literally steal thousands of animals at a time from ranchers. All over the United States, livestock is being stolen from ranchers in unprecedented numbers. Instead of becoming incredibly angry and frustrated, some Americans are simply giving in to depression. We still have one of the highest standards of living in the entire world, and yet a staggering number of Americans are incredibly depressed. More than one out of every ten Americans is currently on antidepressants. Other Americans are freely giving in to all of the anger that is building up inside of them. The reality is that a lot of Americans are so frustrated right now that even the silliest things will set them off.

One of the clearest signs of rising anger and frustration in America is the Occupy Wall Street movement. The Wall Street elite should be taking these protests as a signal that they need to get their house in order. The status quo just is not going to cut it. But instead of taking leadership and calling for significant change, many among the elite are openly mocking the protesters. The incredible arrogance displayed by so many on Wall Street and by so many in Washington D.C. is absolutely appalling. The protesters are being told that nothing that they can do will change anything and that they should be grateful for what Wall Street and the ultra-wealthy have done for them. They are essentially being told that they should just shut up and go home. These protests are a precursor to the mass economic riots that are coming to this nation. All of this is just a preview of coming attractions. The economy is going to get a lot worse in the years ahead and all of the craziness and all of the violence is just going to intensify. It is not going to be a great time to be living in highly congested urban areas.

'Mortgage giant Fannie Mae is asking the federal government for $7.8 billion in aid to cover its losses in the July-September quarter. The government-controlled company said November 8, that it lost $7.6 billion in the third quarter. Low mortgage rates reduced profits and declining home prices caused more defaults on loans it had guaranteed.'

So why doesn’t the government just step in and fix things? It is because we are drowning in debt. Collectively, the 50 U.S. states are trillions of dollars in debt at this point. The U.S. government is so far in debt that it is hard to even put it into perspective. It is hard for the human mind to even conceive of how much money 15 trillion dollars is. We basically used up all of our financial ammunition creating a false level of prosperity over the last 30 years. Now we are too broke to fix our problems. Decades of really, really bad decisions are starting to catch up with us, and things are going to get progressively worse from here on out. If you and your family do not have a plan for the tumultuous years ahead, you might want to start coming up with one.

Are the outages the first warning shots in a move to “devalue the dollar,” just days after Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke sparked an international currency war by announcing that the Fed will buy $600 billion of U.S. government bonds over the next eight months? Any perceived inability of banks to deal with a sudden demand for cash would undoubtedly place in peril the United States’ triple A credit rating and spark a fresh dollar crisis.

All those who can get their money out of their banks should do so, even if you have to pay your upcoming bills manually. It would be foolish not to keep at least a small amount of your savings in physical cash. The “bank holiday” rumor reared its ugly head once again, after a story emerged that a pastor was told by one of the managers of a prominent east coast bank that banks would close for an undetermined amount of time, and that when they reopened, “all withdrawals by checks would be limited to $500 per week – no matter what the balance in the account is.” Though the story is still an unconfirmed rumor, banks have been preparing for limiting withdrawals. In February, Citigroup sent an advisory to its customers at the start of the year which stated that the bank reserved “the right to require (7) days advance notice before permitting a withdrawal from all checking accounts.” The advisory stoked fears that financial institutions are preparing for bank runs. The current financial turmoil has been likened with the post 1929 period, during which newly elected Franklin Roosevelt declared a “bank holiday” that lasted four days, therefore such a scenario is not without historical precedent.

Italy needs a bail out too. Italy has two trillion euros of debt. That’s greater than the total amount of debt owned by Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain combined. It’s the fourth largest amount of debt in the world. It’s estimated that over half of this is owned by banks around the world. Four hundred billion euros of it is owned by the French banks alone. They can no longer kick the can down the road because it’s become a two ton boulder. The European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) doesn't have the financial resources to rescue a country the size of Italy. The clearly dysfunctional behavior of the Italian and Greek governments has made it all but impossible to erect a firewall around the crisis at this point. The credibility of the Eurozone decision making process, allready severly weakened by the endless inconclusive summits, is now completely non-existent.

With all of the problems in Europe, protests on Wall Street, and middle east conflicts over the last year, something that has escaped scrutiny by prime time media stars and the general population is the consistent rise in prices across all consumer goods and services. While the Federal Reserve says they have inflation under control, their continued intervention into the financial and monetary systems of the global economy is leading us down a road that may very well lead to high inflation rates similar to those we saw in the 1980's, or perhaps something much, much worse.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, a higher percentage of Americans is living in extreme poverty than they have ever measured before. In 2010, we were told that the economy was recovering, but the truth is that the number of the “very poor” soared to heights never seen previously. One out of every 15 Americans is now considered to be “very poor.” The plight of the poorest of the poor continues to deteriorate all across the United States. Tonight, there are more than 20 million Americans that are living in extreme poverty. This number increases a little bit more every single day. About 20.5 million Americans, or 6.7 percent of the U.S. population, make up the poorest poor, defined as those at 50 per cent or less of the official poverty level. Those living in deep poverty represent nearly half of the 46.2 million people scraping by below the poverty line. In 2010, the poorest poor meant an income of $5,570 or less for an individual and $11,157 for a family of four. That 6.7 percent share is the highest in the 35 years that the Census Bureau has maintained such records.

The less poor people and the less unemployed people we have, the better it is for our economy. When as many people as possible in a nation are working and doing something economically productive, that maximizes the level of true wealth that a nation is creating. But today we are losing out on a massive amount of wealth. We have tens of millions of people that are sitting at home on their couches. Instead of creating something of economic value, the rest of us have to support them financially. That is not what any of us should want. The more people that are doing something economically productive, the more wealth there will be for all of us. That is why it is so alarming that the ranks of the “very poor” are increasing so dramatically. When the number of poor people goes up, the entire society suffers.

When you look into the eyes of many Americans these days, it almost seems as if all the hope has been sucked right out of their hearts. Economic despair is at epidemic levels, and unfortunately the economy is about to get a whole lot worse. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the percentage of “very poor” rose in 300 out of the 360 largest metropolitan areas during 2010. Last year, 2.6 million more Americans descended into poverty. That was the largest increase that we have seen since the U.S. government began keeping statistics on this back in 1959. There are 314 counties in the United States where at least 30% of the children are facing food insecurity. More than 20 million U.S. children rely on school meal programs to keep from going hungry. One out of every six elderly Americans now lives below the federal poverty line. Today, there are over 45 million Americans on food stamps. According to the Wall Street Journal, nearly 15 percent of all Americans are now on food stamps (the modern day food lines). The number of Americans on food stamps has increased 74% since 2007. We are told that the economy is recovering, but the number of Americans on food stamps has grown by another 8 percent over the past year. Right now, one out of every four American children is on food stamps.

There are millions upon millions of empty homes right now in the United States. Millions of American families have been foreclosed upon in recent years and home prices keep falling with no end in sight. In fact, today, home prices are now the lowest that they have been in eight years. So why aren’t people renting or buying more homes? Well, the truth is that you can’t afford a mortgage payment or a rent payment if you don’t have a decent job. When someone can’t find a good job, then none of the other economic statistics that many of us love to talk about so much really matter. Today, big corporations are shipping as many jobs as they can out of the country.

More than 50 million Americans are now on Medicaid. Back in 1965, only one out of every 50 Americans was on Medicaid. Today, approximately one out of every 6 Americans is on Medicaid. One out of every six Americans is now enrolled in at least one government anti-poverty program. The number of Americans that are going to food pantries and soup kitchens has increased by 46% since 2006. It is estimated that up to half a million children may currently be homeless in the United States. All over the United States (and all around the world), there are orphans that are desperately hurting. As you celebrate the good things that you have during this time of the year, don’t forget to remember them. The reality is that millions of people fall through the “safety net.” We should be more generous and more compassionate than we have ever been before.

According to Shadowstats, we are now seeing price inflation rates of over 11% – almost three times higher than the official numbers.

When evaluating the health of America’s economy, it is important not to look at the short-term numbers. Rather, the key is to look at the long-term trends and the balance sheet numbers. For example, if a mother and a father gave their teenage kids a bunch of credit cards and told them to go out and buy whatever they wanted, that would create a lot of “economic activity,” but it would also send that family to the poorhouse really quickly. Well, we have basically done the same thing as a nation. We are drowning in debt, and all of this debt is going to destroy us financially. Unfortunately, the federal government continues to spend money as if there was no tomorrow. Right now, spending by the federal government accounts for about 24 percent of GDP. When you are running up a credit card, it can be a lot of fun and it can seem like there aren’t any consequences. Obviously, the course that we are on is not anywhere close to sustainable. Even now, a lot of state and local governments all over the country are flat broke and they are cutting back on assistance for the poor.

Tens of millions of American families are living on the edge of desperation. The more money we seem to spend on social programs, the more that poverty seems to grow. 2.6 million more Americans fell into poverty last year. That was a new all-time record. Right now, there are over 45 million Americans on food stamps. One out of every seven Americans is on food stamps and one our of every four U.S. children is on food stamps. The economy is supposed to be “recovering,” but the number of Americans on food stamps has grown by over 8 percent in just the past year. Food stamps are the modern equivalent of the old-fashioned bread lines. The federal government is now feeding an almost unbelievable number of Americans. According to the Wall Street Journal, nearly 15 percent of all Americans are now on food stamps. That means that approximately one out of every seven Americans is dependent on the federal government for food. That is not just a crisis – that is a total nightmare. What these people really need are good jobs. Unfortunately, our “leaders” have created a business environment in this country that is incredibly toxic, and they have stood by as millions upon millions of good jobs have been shipped out of the country.

Only 30 of 50 states currently offer any form of general assistance – down from 38 in 1989. And recently, Washington State formally ended its “Disability Lifeline” program for an estimated 18,000 to 22,000 economically desperate residents. Sadly, even more of us may be joining the ranks of the poor soon. The layoffs just keep on coming. So many jobs are being lost all around the nation. These days, there is massive competition for just about any job that is available. People are getting desperate. They just want to be able to pay the bills and take care of their families. Obama is not putting people back to work. He has been helping big corporations ship jobs out of the country at a record pace.

Both major political parties promised us that globalization would be wonderful for the U.S. economy. Well, in the first decade of this century less net jobs were created than in any other decade since the Great Depression. The “free trade” polices of the globalists have been an abysmal failure. Tens of thousands of factories, millions of jobs, and hundreds of billions of dollars of our national wealth have gone to countries that engage in predatory trade practices and that exploit slave labor pools. In this one world economic system, American workers will increasingly be forced to compete for jobs with the cheapest labor on the planet. This will continue to force the standard of living of American workers way, way down and it will continue to absolutely destroy the middle class.

In the United States, we love to have the government spend money on all sorts of things, but we never want to pay for it. So the debt just keeps piling up higher and higher. A lot of Republicans say that spending on social programs has gotten out of control. A lot of Democrats say that spending on the military has gotten out of control. They are both right. Tens of millions of Americans have become absolutely addicted to government money. Nobody ever wants “their government benefits” to be cut, but nobody ever seems to want to have their taxes raised to pay for them. The U.S. military accounts for close to half of all the military spending in the world. In fact, U.S. military spending is greater than the military spending of the next 15 countries combined. We will always need a very powerful military, but we can have one without going broke in the process.

Things simply do not look very promising for the economy right now. There are a lot of signs that the American people are already extremely angry and frustrated by what is happening to the economy. So what is going to happen if things get significantly worse? Unfortunately, there simply are not any “quick fixes” which are going to put us back “on course.” The consequences that we are experiencing now are the result of decades of bad decisions. The American people kept sending incompetents, con-men and charlatans back to Washington D.C. over and over and over and now we are going to pay the price. You might as well call Barack Obama “Captain Clueless” when it comes to the economy. Obama keeps giving great speeches about jobs while at the same time signing more “free trade” agreements that will send thousands more businesses and millions more jobs out of the country. Even the CEOs on Obama’s jobs creation panel are shipping huge numbers of jobs out of the United States.

Shame on the politicians that have rolled up so much debt in our name and shame on us for continuing to send those same politicians back to Washington D.C. time after time after time. Both political parties are responsible for us being 15 trillion dollars in debt. Both political parties are responsible for 45 million Americans being on food stamps. Both political parties are responsible for the fact that there are not nearly enough good jobs. If Barack Obama, Mitt Romney or Rick Perry is elected in 2012, we are just going to have more of the same. America is running out of time. If we are going to change course, we need to do it immediately.The borrower is the servant of the lender. We are enslaving ourselves and we are enslaving future American generations by going into so much debt.

A new law (S. 1867) is being pushed through the U.S. Senate that is extremely frightening. If this bill becomes a law, the United States of America would officially become part of the “battlefield” in the war on terror, and any American citizen could easily be flagged as a “potential terrorist.” Once identified as a “potential terrorist”, the U.S. military would be able to arrest you, take you to a foreign prison and detain you for the rest of your life without ever having to charge you with anything. What in the world is happening to America? Unfortunately, as the economy gets even worse civil unrest in this country is going to intensify and the thin veneer of civilization that we all take for granted is going to start to disappear. In response to the coming civil unrest, the U.S. Congress will try to pass laws that will be even more repressive than S. 1867. Our nation has entered a downward spiral and things are going to become very frightening if this thing is not turned around.

Ron Paul is Our Only Hope.

Ron Paul is America's leading voice for limited, constitutional government, low taxes, free markets, a return to sound monetary policies, and a sensible foreign policy that puts America first. At 76, this former obstetrician has seven years on the oldest man ever to take office as president, Ronald Reagan. But where Reagan was the genial conservative, Paul is an evangelical libertarian – a prophet who preaches that the United States is flat broke, foundering under the too-great weight of a bloated bureaucracy and its imperial foreign interventionism. This is a man who would eliminate five of the 15 cabinet-level departments (Commerce, Education, Energy, Housing and Urban Development, and Interior – he has no problem reciting them all); recall American troops from all foreign lands, not just war zones; repeal the 16th Amendment, which created the federal income tax; reduce his own presidential salary from $400,000 to $39,336 – the median salary of an American worker. The date when he decided to enter politics was Aug. 15, 1971, the day President Richard Nixon decoupled the U.S. dollar from the nation’s gold reserves. “After that day, all money would be political money rather than money of real value,” he told a writer from Texas Monthly. “I was astounded.”

He refused to vote for any tax increase or any budget that was not balanced, and eschewed most “pork barrel” projects for his district. He has refused to enroll in the House pension program, saying it would be “hypocritical and immoral” to accept a benefit unavailable to the taxpayers who fund it. He also discouraged his five children – including the future Kentucky U.S. senator and tea party darling Rand Paul – from applying for government-backed student loans. In 1981, Dr. No teamed up with “Senator No” (North Carolina’s Jesse Helms) to pass legislation that formed the 17-member Gold Commission, which was to study “the role of gold in the monetary system.” Appointed by Reagan, Paul argued for a gold coin – “without a dollar denomination” – as legal tender. “I wanted people to think of money as weight,” he wrote. In 1984, Paul ran for the U.S. Senate. When that bid failed, he returned full time to his medical practice. Four years later, Paul won the Libertarian Party’s presidential nomination. He placed third in the election, with less than 1 percent of the popular vote, but he now had a national base. In 1997, Paul retired from medicine and returned to Congress; he’s been there ever since. In 2008, he made his second run for president, this time as a Republican. He raised almost $35 million, including more than $6 million on Dec. 16, 2007, the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party.

He speaks repeatedly of our “recession/depression” and says the No. 1 cause of the current financial crisis was the Federal Reserve. “THEY are the ones who are responsible for so much suffering,” he says, his already high-pitched voice rising to a near squeak. The Fed, he declares, is a “counterfeiter.” He's attracting a hard-core following and collecting millions in contributions. He applies the lessons learned in a life that stretches back to the Depression. Paul served two years in the Air Force as a flight surgeon and three more in the Air National Guard. He says he’s seen enough of war’s aftermath to convince him that the way we go to war so often is the reason that we have difficulty getting out of war. His firm belief is that the founders were absolutely correct in going to war very, very cautiously, very, very rarely, and NOT by one individual deciding.

It’s impossible to understand politics unless you understand liberty – that we should all be free, and that all of our inalienable rights come from our creator and not government. Once you understand this, it is easy to differentiate good government from bad. We’ve all heard that inalienable rights are granted by our creator and that government exits to protect them. But do we live it, breath it, and really believe it? Many of us take this for granted, and many more of us, simply do not care. There is one candidate who shares our feeling of dread for this country, one candidate who understands the vision of a free nation and one candidate who, time and again, over the course of several election bids, has been scorned by the media...and this same candidate has answers the others don't! With clear insight into the problems facing our nation, only Ron Paul has been able to identify the problems and failures of past administrations, offer sound suggestions for moving forward and has never wavered in the consistency of his ideals. Ron Paul is willing to stand firm on the principles that created this country, in the first place. Ron Paul says his rivals’ militant stances on “the defense of liberty” would make it difficult for him to support any of them for president should he not get the Republican nomination, because their positions would lead to bigger government. The loyalty to the party should be secondary to loyalty to your oath of office. "The Republican Party is supposed to be a party, you know, of defining small government — but when it came to the civil liberties, and the Patriot Act, and the invasion of privacy, and the Fourth Amendment — all these things — they wanted more government."

Dr. Ron Paul believes in a ‘non-interventionist’ foreign policy as did our founding fathers. Jefferson summed up the noninterventionist foreign policy position perfectly in his 1801 inaugural address: "Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations — entangling alliances with none." George Washington similarly urged that the US must "Act for ourselves and not for others," by forming an "American character wholly free of foreign attachments.” Ron Paul is in favor of a strong national defense, but we will not be in any position to help anyone, if we cannot first help ourselves. Our government is fallible when it comes to foreign policy. Our annual national security budget is now $1.2 trillion dollars and growing. Our young men and women need not be risking their lives to protect foreign empires. Our government lies and exaggerates issues that happen in the home front, so it is conceivable that they are also lying about their reasons for foreign intervention in the middle east. The globalist and the elitists do have a foreign policy agenda, and it is not to spread democracy around the world.

These are the themes he has been addressing, consistently, since he entered politics in 1974, over the course of 12 terms in Congress, through his third bid for the White House: Free markets are good. The Federal Reserve is evil. The gold standard should be restored. Government is the cause, not the cure, of the nation’s troubles. “If it tries to make us virtuous and it tries to make us better people and fairer people and make us more generous and make sure that nobody’s richer than the other person, redistribute your wealth, the ONLY way they can do that is the undermining of our personal liberties, Paul said. “And that isn’t the purpose of government. The purpose of government is exactly the opposite. The purpose of government is to protect our liberties.”

We need to question our leader’s motives and, we need to rethink some of our positions that are based on what neocon and progressive war mongers in our government spread for their own reasons. Ron Paul supports the true position of freedom and conservatism which is nonintervention and peace, without nation building. He does not accept, irrefutably, what our government peddles, and this is how it should be. We need to move away from the foreign policy disasters we’ve had under Clinton, The Bushes, and the Obama administrations, otherwise, the world will detonate from war because that is where they are taking this. The current actions by our government will never solve the hostilities that are taking place in this region because they hate our interference, and because we are inflaming an already dangerous situation with our interventionist foreign policy. It’s time to try something different, because nothing else has worked. We need to remember that America is broke, we do not have the funding to engage in any more wars. Dr. Paul is a true constitutionalist that follows the Constitution to the letter. Dr. Paul will diligently, and unfalteringly respond to any form of attack against the U.S.

Dr. Paul is the most searched candidate on Youtube, Facebook and Google.He is authentic, what you see is what you get. He is principled, trustworthy, consistent, honorable, noble, truthful, sincere, plainspoken, wise, ethical, honest, educated and smart. In all the years of public office, he has never voted to raise taxes, or voted for an unbalanced budget, or voted for any kind of federal restriction on gun ownership, or voted to raise congressional pay. He has never voted to increase the power of the executive branch or has taken a government-paid junket. He voted against the Patriot Act, voted against the Sarbanes-Oxley which was created as a result of the Enron scandal and it’s costing taxpayers millions; he voted against regulating the Internet, voted against the Iraq war, does not participate in the lucrative congressional pension program, returns portions of his annual congressional office budget back to the U.S. Treasury every year. Dr. Paul is also against a National ID, and he is against all bailouts. Lobbyists avoid knocking on his door. It has been said that even under great pressure from the Texas branch of the American Medical Association and the Texas Medical board, Dr. Paul refused to accept Medicare and Medicaid payments even as he served many of the poorest residents in his county. Unquestionably, he has set the bar for standards for politicians higher than anyone else. He is the only veteran running for office. He has received more donations from active military than all candidates combined. The overwhelming majority of donations come from folks like you and me. He is a man of consistent principled integrity and a Christian leader who does not use religion for political gains.

Ron Paul is called the Champion of the Constitution. He tried to warn legislators about the housing bubble with Fanny and Freddie a decade before it occurred, but no one listened. He also has been warning about the Student Loan bubble, and the possible collapse of the U.S. dollar, and the dealings in Wall Street, and many are still not listening. Because of his persistance, for the first time in 100 years the Federal Reserve was audited, and it was not even a complete audit by any means. It was discovered that they gave themselves, their crony bankers in the US and abroad, and their favorite corporations, $16 trillion dollars over three years without congressional approval! Why wasn't more made of this raid on our Treasury by the media and on Capitol Hill? Because they are all somehow benefiting from this theft. Dr. Paul’s forecasts so accurate, and powerful because he understands the monetary cycles and is a disciple of the Austrian school of economics. He knows what the problems are, and he has the solutions to fix them. He also believes that we must return to the gold standard, stop the Federal Reserve from raiding our treasury of trillions of taxpayers dollars, and stop them from printing fiat currency before we reach the point of no return. One of the reasons is that it will prevent overall inflation as it did for over 100 years before the Federal Reserve was established, because gold cannot be created like paper money or computer generated money. The cruelest tax of all is inflation caused by the Federal Reserve printing and borrowing that lowers the purchasing power of the U.S. dollar, and that it is at the root of why the U.S. dollar is now at the point of collapsing.

The policy of limiting air time to certain candidates is once again being applied to Congressman Ron Paul, despite the fact that he has consistently won straw polls and proven himself as a top tier candidate in national polls. Despite his popularity the establishment media has deliberately downplayed and sidelined Paul’s campaign. A scientific study undertaken by the University of Minnesota in October, 2011 confirmed that Ron Paul had been given the least speaking time out of all the Republican candidates during the debates. During the GOP debate, CBS twice removed a candidate poll because the support for Ron Paul showed that he was far and away the leading choice for Republican voters and that was not supposed to happen! Why wouldn’t the Republican party run what is clearly a winning candidate? Because Ron Paul would put an end to much of the power Republicans and Democrats enjoy as a result of their own self-pandering, power grabbing and unconstitutional activity. Instead they are offering the sorriest collection of non-starters most likely ever assembled for a presidential race and are actively blacking out and refusing to acknowledge the popularity of Paul with the voters and what would be a sure-fire land-slide election.

Why would the Republican party shun a candidate who can obviously win against all comers, and instead support candidates they know have no chance of winning anything unless the electronic voting machines are rigged yet again? Obama is their candidate also. As president he has been far more effective at dismantling the Constitution, passing oppressive legislation, issuing unlawful and unconstitutional Executive Orders, and expanding the death grip of the federal government on the states than Baby Bush and his neo-conservative collection of psychopaths, ideologues, new world order, corporate pandering and UN suck-ups than any of these supposed candidates now offered for consideration. Make no mistake, the Republicans want Obama re-elected just as much as the Democrats do, after all there really is only one party in the District of Criminals and all concerned are quite happy with Obama. There is no way the Republican party is going to run a sure fire winner whose intentions are to reign in the federal corporation when they already have the perfect man in office who has done more to deconstruct the US than even “W” did.'...

Congressman Ron Paul was a victim of what later transpired to be a deliberate policy on behalf of CBS News to restrict the air time of certain candidates during the November 12th Republican debate, after he was afforded just 90 seconds of speaking time in what was a 90 minute-long debate in South Carolina. The mainstream media once again silenced the one sane voice in this election. The one dissenter to a decade of unchecked war. The one candidate who stands for true defense and actual constitutional government. Ron Paul was silenced, in perhaps the most important debate of the cycle.”

In a Republican debate on Fox network 5 December, 2011, Ron Paul was asked "What book would you most recommend?" His answer? The Law, by Frederic Bastiat. It is a 44 page pamphlet written in 1850. Though Bastiat gives examples from the political issues of France, "The Law" could have been written yesterday about America. We strongly recommend getting and reading this book--a great way to understand where Ron Paul is coming from, and why RON PAUL is the best answer for anyone who truly wants liberty!

We need a president who will follow the Constitution and inspire other politicians to do the same. Dr. Paul is the only politician who has reliably shown unwavering adherence to the Constitution. The rest of the candidates will continue to drift away from our founding principles, perhaps even more. And, very little will change. Under Ron Paul’s plan he will create jobs and turn our economy around. Ron Paul supporters are growing by the minute, a fact that many politicos and elitists are afraid of. Ron Paul has a brilliant mind, read his books and see for yourself. He is the only constitutional candidate running that will return our country to the founding principles of liberty and freedom.

Fast and Furious

Congress is currently investigating Fast & Furious. Attorney General Eric Holder has already been caught making at least one false statement under oath. Gun rights advocates have been asking why Republicans aren’t calling for criminal charges against Eric Holder. Many have criticized FOX News for giving the story little coverage. CBS national news has been breaking most of the new details related to Fast & Furious.

Presidential candidate Ron Paul said Attorney General Eric Holder should be fired immediately and Congress should investigate his role in the Fast and Furious operation run by the ATF and the Justice Department. The covert operation provided a large number of firearms to Mexican drug cartels waging war with one another and the Mexican government. “He should be immediately fired,” Paul told Alex Jones, “and then there should be an investigation and find out if charges should be made.” He specifically criticized the government for continuously engaging in politically motivated and criminal behavior he characterized as false flag operations. Documents released by CBS News reveal Fast and Furious was exploited to demonize the Second Amendment. Paul said the government “constantly” engages in such criminal behavior. He cited the example of an allegation made in October by the United States that Iran was involved in an alleged plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador. Paul characterized the incident as a “propaganda stunt.” Following the arrest of a suspect it was discovered the plot was concocted by the FBI.

How does a country end up 15 trillion dollars in debt? 30 years ago, we were just a little over a trillion dollars in debt. It really takes something special to be able to roll up 15 trillion dollars of debt. To get to this level, we really had to indulge in some wild spending. How in the world do supposedly rational people living in “the greatest nation on earth” allow themselves to commit national financial suicide by allowing government debt to explode like that? The U.S. national debt grows by more than 2 million dollars every single minute. All of this debt has fueled an unprecedented boom of prosperity for the last 30 years, but now that prosperity is drying up. The prosperity of the last 30 years was a false prosperity. We squandered our national inheritance and we lived the “high life” by piling up mountains of debt unlike anything that the world has ever seen before. In the end, there is always a very high price for “living for today” at the expense of the future. Tomorrow always ends up arriving way too soon, and future generations will curse us for being so foolish. The party was great while it lasted, but it is coming to an end. A whole lot of economic trouble is on the horizon, and it is going to be very, very painful.

Today, there are over 45 million Americans that are on food stamps. America is being deindustrialized at a blinding pace and there are not nearly enough jobs for everyone. Poverty is exploding all over the nation, and millions of families have lost their homes to foreclosure. Unfortunately, there are zero solutions on the horizon. The leaders of both major political parties seem even more clueless right now than in past years.

Today there is a horrific derivatives bubble that threatens to destroy not only the U.S. economy but the entire world financial system as well, but unfortunately the vast majority of people do not understand it. Most Americans have no idea what it means. In fact, even most members of the U.S. Congress don't really seem to understand them. Basically, derivatives are financial instruments whose value depends upon or is derived from the price of something else. A derivative has no underlying value of its own. It is essentially a side bet. Most Americans don't realize it, but derivatives played a major role in the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008. Financial derivatives have come to represent the principal business of the financier oligarchy in Wall Street, the City of London, Frankfurt, and other money centers. A concerted effort has been made by politicians and the news media to hide and camouflage the central role played by derivative speculation in the economic disasters of recent years. Journalists and public relations types have done everything possible to avoid even mentioning derivatives.

In Q4 2011, of the total $230.8 trillion in US outstanding derivatives, the Top 5 banks (JPM, BofA, Morgan Stanley, Goldman and HSBC) accounted for 95.7% of all Derivatives. The sheer size of over-the-counter derivative markets is staggering. According to the Bank for International Settlements, OTC derivatives stood at $707 trillion at the end of June, nearly fourteen times global GDP and forty seven times that of the United States. The derivatives market has become so monolithic that even a relatively minor imbalance in the global economy could set off a chain reaction that would have devastating consequences. Today, the worldwide derivatives market is approximately 20 times the size of the entire global economy. Because derivatives are so unregulated, nobody knows for certain exactly what the total value of all the derivatives worldwide is, but low estimates put it around 600 trillion dollars and high estimates put it at around 1.5 quadrillion dollars.

Counting at one dollar per second, it would take 32 million years to count to one quadrillion. To put that in perspective, the gross domestic product of the United States is only about 14 trillion dollars. In fact, the total market cap of all major global stock markets is only about 30 trillion dollars. So when you are talking about 1.5 quadrillion dollars, you are talking about an amount of money that is almost inconceivable. The danger that we face from derivatives is so great that Warren Buffet has called them "financial weapons of mass destruction." It would be hard to understate the financial devastation that we could potentially be facing. When this bubble pops there won't be enough money in the entire world to fix it. So what is going to happen when this insanely large derivatives bubble pops?

More than five million US homeowners and counting have had their homes foreclosed upon by banks since the “economic crisis” first began several years ago. But the Massachusetts Supreme Court recently ruled that the vast majority of the foreclosures that took place in the Commonwealth (and likely in most other states) within the past five years are illegitimate because the banks did not, and do not, actually hold the promissory notes for the properties. This means that all mortgage payments made to banks for illegitimately foreclosed upon properties are fraudulent since such banks do not technically own the properties in question. It also means that anyone who purchased a foreclosed property, or who is threatened currently with potential foreclosure, does not necessarily have a legal obligation to continue paying their mortgage.

Even homeowners who do not face foreclosure are not necessarily required to continue paying their mortgages — if their lenders are unable to produce valid promissory notes showing true ownership of the property. Then those who follow through with mortgage payments to such lenders are technically participating in fraud because there is no way to verify whether or not mortgage payments are going to the true note holders, or even who the true note holders are in the first place. “In essence, the ruling upholds that those who had purchased a foreclosure property that had been illegally foreclosed upon (which is virtually all foreclosure sales in the last five years), did not in fact have title to the property,” writesThe Daily Bail. “Given the fact that more than two-thirds of all real estate transactions in the last five years have also been foreclosed properties, this creates a small problem.”

Recognizing that the federal government’s bailout plan was beneficial only to banks and not homeowners, Rep. Marcy Kaptur of Ohio told those facing foreclosure back in 2009 to “be squatters in their own home.” Now that these foreclosures have been exposed as largely fraudulent, it turns out that her advice was sound. “Radical though it may seem, we believe the only way to stop the chaos of fraud and the breakdown of the rule of law in our courts, and most importantly to ensure that we ourselves are not participants in the fraud, is for homeowners who can afford their mortgage to stop paying it,” saysThe Daily Bail.

As the housing market began its collapse, Wall Street firms and sophisticated investors searched for ways to profit. Some of them found an easy method: Stuff a portfolio with risky mortgage-related investments, sell it to unsuspecting customers and bet against it. The entire world financial system is a house of cards sitting on a foundation of sand. When you go play penny slots, it's called gambling. When financial advisors with initials after their name make larger bets, it's called investing. And when countries do the same, but with still more and bigger piles of paper, it's called economic policy. Almost everyone in the financial world has gotten so used to making wild bets that they couldn’t even imagine a world without futures, options and swaps. Today, Wall Street has become one giant financial casino. More money is made on Wall Street by making side bets (commonly referred to as derivatives) than on the investments themselves. If the bets pay off for the big financial institutions, mind blowing profits can be made. But if the bets go against the big financial institutions (as we saw in 2008), firms can collapse almost overnight. In fact, it was derivatives that almost brought down AIG. The biggest insurance company in the world almost folded in 2008 because of a whole bunch of really bad bets.

Citigroup has settled one case stemming from the crisis. In 2010, it agreed to pay $75 million to settle federal claims that it hid from investors vast holdings of subprime mortgage investments that were losing value during the crisis and that ultimately prompted the federal government to rescue the bank. Citigroup on October 19, 2011 agreed to pay $285 million to settle a civil complaint by the Securities and Exchange Commission that it had defrauded investors who bought just such a deal. The transaction involved a $1 billion portfolio of mortgage-related investments, many of which were handpicked for the portfolio by Citigroup without telling investors of its role or that it had made bets that the investments would fall in value. In the four years since the housing market began its steady descent, securities regulators have settled only two cases related to the financial crisis for a larger sum of money. This is also the third case brought by the S.E.C. accusing a major Wall Street institution of misleading customers about who was putting together a security and about their motive.

Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase & Company both settled similar cases in 2010. The settlement will refund investors with interest and include a $95 million fine — a relative pittance for a giant like Citigroup. On October 17, the company reported that in the third quarter alone it earned profits of $3.8 billion on revenue of $20.8 billion. The case highlights a growing frustration felt by foreclosed homeowners, investors, and Wall Street protesters alike, that few, if any, senior banking executives have faced criminal charges for losses growing out of the financial crisis. A prosecution of two former executives of Bear Stearns, the failed investment bank, ended in acquittals.

The danger from derivatives is so great that Warren Buffet once called them “financial weapons of mass destruction.” It has been estimated that the notional value of the worldwide derivatives market is somewhere in the neighborhood of a quadrillion dollars. The largest banks have tens of trillions of dollars of exposure to derivatives. When the next great financial collapse happens, derivatives will almost certainly be at the center of it once again. These side bets do not create anything real for the economy–they just make and lose huge amounts of money. We never know when the next great derivatives crisis will strike. The dream of financial sanity and government responsibility is as remote as integrity from the political class.

A University of Zurich study 'proves' that a small group of companies - mainly banks - wields huge power over the global economy. The study is the first to look at all 43,060 transnational corporations and the web of ownership between them - and created a 'map' of 1,318 companies at the heart of the global economy. The study found that 147 companies formed a 'super entity' within this, controlling 40 per cent of its wealth. All own part or all of one another. Most are banks - the top 20 includes Barclays and Goldman Sachs. But the close connections mean that the network could be vulnerable to collapse. In effect, less than one per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network.

The Four Horsemen of Banking (Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup and Wells Fargo) own the Four Horsemen of Oil (Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch/Shell, BP Amoco and Chevron Texaco); in tandem with Deutsche Bank, BNP, Barclays and other European old money behemoths. But their monopoly over the global economy does not end at the edge of the oil patch. According to company 10K filings to the SEC, the Four Horsemen of Banking are among the top ten stock holders of virtually every Fortune 500 corporation.

One important repository for the wealth of the global oligarchy that owns these bank holding companies is US Trust Corporation – founded in 1853 and now owned by Bank of America. A recent US Trust Corporate Director and Honorary Trustee was Walter Rothschild. Other directors included Daniel Davison of JP Morgan Chase, Richard Tucker of Exxon Mobil, Daniel Roberts of Citigroup and Marshall Schwartz of Morgan Stanley. The control that these banking families exert over the global economy cannot be overstated and is quite intentionally shrouded in secrecy. Their corporate media arm is quick to discredit any information exposing this private central banking cartel as “conspiracy theory.” Yet the facts remain. They may be too big to fail, but they aren't too big for jail.

One day soon, an event will happen which will cause a sudden shift in world financial markets and trillions of dollars of losses in derivatives will create a tsunami that will bring the entire house of cards down. All of the money in the world will not be enough to bail out the financial system when that day arrives. The truth is that we should have never allowed world financial markets to become a giant casino. We will all pay the price, and when that disastrous day comes, most Americans will still not understand what is happening. Financial experts have predicted that the failure of 300-500 U.S. banks would absorb all of the FDIC’s insurance funds. This is why there is a genuine fear that the FDIC is completely incapable of containing a run on the banks.

If Europe implodes - and there's little chance it will not - then Bank of America's derivative position will go to sub-zero and if the FDIC is insuring their losses, that will be the end of the FDIC which means every bank deposit in the US will be uninsured overnight after 70 plus years or so of "nothing can ever go wrong" protection. In the real world, when banks fail and they are not backed up by deposit insurance, depositors lose their deposits. The entire PLANET's GDP: ~$65T; BofA derivatives total $75T; Wells-Fargo derivatives $73T. And they have moved those phony dollars to their commercial side, making them FDIC insured. We are now on the hook for their crimes, for more money than the entire world produces over several years. This is the result of the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999. Additionally, the UN estimates that the total cost to END WORLD HUNGER would be just under $200 BILLION per year. JP Morgan could feed the world for more than a decade with the money they currently sit on.

A bank revolt appears to be underway, people withdrawing money from big banks and, in some cases, getting arrested. There are several videos on the movement. It’s interesting that, if you try to view these videos or any others on the same topic from Youtube, most of them will not play due to “invalid parameters.” There are too many for which this happens to think it could be an accident. The only question that remains now is when the collapse will take place and how bad it will be.

Bad corporate governance — and not fundamental weaknesses of capitalism — is at the heart of why so many people distrust banks. Big banks that haven’t been performing should be broken up before they become a threat to the entire financial system; shareholders should be able to step in and remove ineffective executives. Let’s go bank by bank, company by company, CEO by CEO, chairman by chairman, let’s just go down the list…and start cleaning house. If you have a company like Citigroup — maybe one or two others out there — that haven't performed over more than a decade, then I say let's break them into more manageable pieces. Citi's bad bets on subprime mortgage served as one of the first warning signs of the credit crisis. The company faced up to $11 billion in mortgage writeoffs and survived primarily thanks to a government bailout.

Bank of America is going down. Bank of America’s holding company is moving troubled assets held by an entity not insured by the public (Merrill Lynch) to the Bank of America, which is insured by the public. Bank of America’s holding company — the parent of both the retail bank and the Merrill Lynch securities unit —held almost $75 trillion of derivatives at the end of June, according to data compiled by the OCC. About $53 trillion, or 71 percent, were within Bank of America NA, according to the data, which represent the notional values of the trades. JP Morgan’s deposit-taking entity, JP Morgan Chase Bank NA, contained 99 percent of the New York-based firm’s $79 trillion of notional derivatives. If you’re a Bank of America customer and continue to be one you deserve whatever you get down the line, whether it comes in the form of higher fees and costs assessed upon you or something worse.

Bloomberg reports that Bank of America has shifted about $22 trillion worth of derivative obligations from Merrill Lynch and the BAC holding company to the FDIC insured retail deposit division. Along with this information came the revelation that the FDIC insured unit was already stuffed with $53 trillion worth of these potentially toxic obligations, making a total of $75 trillion.Derivatives are highly volatile financial instruments that are occasionally used to hedge risk, but mostly used for speculation. They are bets upon the value of stocks, bonds, mortgages, other loans, currencies, commodities, volatility of financial indexes, and even weather changes. Many big banks, including Bank of America, issue derivatives because, if they are not triggered, they are highly profitable to the issuer, and result in big bonus payments to the executives who administer them. If they are triggered, of course, the obligations fall upon the corporate entity, not the executives involved. Ultimately, by allowing existing gambling bets to remain in insured retail banks, and endorsing the shift of additional bets into the insured retail division, the obligation falls upon the U.S. taxpayers and dollar-denominated savers.

Even if we net out the notional value of the derivatives involved, down to the net potential obligation, the amount is so large that the United States could not hope to pay it off without a major dollar devaluation, if a major contingency actually occurred and a large part of the derivatives were triggered. But, if such an event ever occurs, Bank of America's derivatives counter-parties will, as usual, be made whole, while the American people suffer. This all has the blessing of the Federal Reserve, which approved the transfer of derivatives from Merrill Lynch to the insured retail unit of BAC before it was done. Contrary to popular belief, which blames the global financial crisis on subprime borrowers, it was the derivatives, based upon the likelihood that those borrowers would pay their debts, that were the primary catalyst triggering the global economic crisis of 2008. Back then, the derivative obligations of AIG imploded the insurer. Under the pressure of fear-mongering from the Federal Reserve and the financial industry, the U.S. government committed hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out AIG's counter-parties, including the biggest banks of Europe and America. Had the government not stepped in, virtually all the banks on Wall Street would have gone bankrupt. A host of European and Asian banks would have followed.

AIG was not FDIC insured. It could have been allowed to fail, and should have been allowed to fail. All the banks on Wall Street that would have failed should have failed. Their speculator counter-parties should have been bankrupted, and their retail depositors should have been made whole. The retail divisions could have been temporarily nationalized and sold off as soon as possible to more prudent management. Had this occurred, America would have experienced a deep but very temporary economic downturn, and, by now, the downturn would be over. But, with derivatives obligations tied intimately with FDIC insured depositary units, the debt will need to be paid by the government, as a matter of law. We will have no legal choice except to default, or pay them off.

In 2008, politicians in Washington D.C., and Trojan horse operatives within the financial organs of our government, bailed out imprudent managements of big casino-banks. Bank executives not only didn't go bankrupt, as they should have, but collected huge bonuses. Later, in response to the abuse, Congress passed the Dodd-Frank legislation and the Volcker rule. These were supposed to insure that such bailouts were not needed in the future. Supposedly, this would prevent further abuse of the American taxpayer. The most recent abuse-event, involving BAC, illustrates the uselessness of such laws. Bank of America NA is FDIC insured, and has the blessing of the Federal Reserve, in spite of such a transaction being prohibited by Section 23A of the Federal Reserve Act.

The Federal Reserve is an institution largely controlled by those who are probably the counter-parties to the Merrill Lynch derivatives. No doubt, its approval of the transaction, in spite of the prohibitions of section 23A arise out of a claim that Merrill is not a "bank" as defined under the Act, and, therefore, not an affiliate. Merrill Lynch is clearly an affiliate of Bank of America, and the Federal Reserve is clearly violating the law by approving this particular transaction. But, here is the kicker. Congress has given ultimate power to the Federal Reserve to ignore its own enabling Act legislation. The FDIC opposed the move, but there is nothing the FDIC can do, except file a petition for a writ of mandamus in court, against the Federal Reserve, seeking a declaration that the approval was illegal. But, the FDIC would lose, because Congress has given the Federal Reserve Board ultimate power to do whatever it wishes.

When something bad happens, and the derivative obligations are triggered, the FDIC will be on the hook, thanks to the Federal Reserve. The counter-parties of Bank of America, both inside America and elsewhere around the world, will be safely bailed out by the full faith and credit of the USA. Meanwhile, the taxpayers and dollar denominated savers will be fleeced again. This latest example of misconduct illustrates the error of allowing a bank-controlled entity, like the Federal Reserve, complete power over the nation's monetary system. The so-called "reforms" enacted by Congress, in the wake of the 2008 crash, have vested more, and not less, power in the Federal Reserve, and supplied us with more, rather than less instability and problems.

This is not an isolated instance. JP Morgan Chase (JPM) is being allowed to house its unstable derivative obligations within its FDIC insured retail banking unit. Other big banks do the same. So long as the Federal Reserve exists and/or other financial regulatory agencies continue to be run by a revolving door staff that moves in and out of industry and government, crony capitalism will be alive and well in America. No amount of Dodd-Frank or Volcker rule legislation will ever protect savers, taxpayers or the American people. Profits will continue to be privatized and losses socialized.

There are some “derivatives” that should be eliminated, period, like credit default swaps, which have virtually no legitimate economic uses. They are an inherently defective product, since there is no way to margin adequately for “jump to default” risk and have the product be viable economically. CDS are systematically underpriced insurance, with insurers guaranteed to go bust periodically, as AIG and the monolines demonstrated.

The financial markets across the globe are facing one of the most massive sell-offs in recent history. The Europeans have been pulling their money out of banks for weeks and so have many of the world’s most important corporations.Things look a little bit more like 2008 every single day. None of the problems that caused the financial crisis of 2008 have been fixed, and the world financial system is more vulnerable today than it ever has been since the end of World War II. The U.S. economy has never really recovered from the last financial crisis.

Investors all over the world are realizing that absolutely nothing has been solved in Europe. The solutions being proposed by the politicians in Europe are just going to make things worse. You don’t solve a sovereign debt crisis by shredding confidence in sovereign debt. But that is exactly what the “voluntary 50% haircut” has done. You don’t solve a sovereign debt crisis by pumping up your “bailout fund” with borrowed money from China, Russia and Brazil. More debt is just going to make things even worse down the road. You don’t solve a sovereign debt crisis by causing a massive credit crunch. By giving European banks only until June 2012 to dramatically improve their credit ratios, it is going to force many of them to seriously cut back on lending. A massive credit crunch would significantly slow down economic activity in Europe and that is about the last thing that the Europeans need right now. If the deal that was reached in late October was the “best shot” that Europe has got, then we are all in for a world of hurt.

If we see another major financial crash in the coming months, the consequences would be absolutely devastating. According to a study that was recently released by Merrill Lynch, the U.S. economy has an 80% chance of going into another recession. When financial markets get really jumpy like this, all it takes is one really big spark to set the dominoes in motion. Israel has dumped 46 percent of its U.S. Treasuries and Russia has dumped 95 percent of its U.S. Treasuries. According to CNN, the number of bets against the S&P 500 rose to the highest level in a year in August 2011. But that was nothing compared to what they are seeing for October. The number of bets against the S&P 500 for the month of October is absolutely astounding. Somebody is going to make a monstrous amount of money if there is a stock market crash in October.

One place where nominal and real income data can absolutely not be fudged is the Social Security Average Wage Index, based on withholding data reported by employers, particularly the median wage, whose nominal change can then be extrapolated in real terms using CPI to create a chained series. And here is where things get messy: real income based on median wages, dropped (in real terms) by 1.2% – the biggest year over year slide in over 20 years of data… What we are seeing is a perfect storm of horrendous economic data on almost all fronts. Manufacturing costs are up, essential basic goods have skyrocketed in price over the last three years, and more people are left unemployed every single month than the month before.

The paradigm is shifting, and there is no turning back. The jobs bill won’t save us. More stimulus won’t save us. The worthless, counterproductive actions of our elected representatives have failed miserably – likely even made things worse. The economic situation of this nation is dire. This is not a recession. We’re talking deep depression levels of economic inactivity that may potentially span decades. It is time now to make the psychological, intellectual, spiritual, occupational and physical adjustments that will prepare you to live in a paradigm where the world as we know it today does not exist. There are people who are still connected to the old one and can’t conceive of life without that old paradigm. We saw that in the Great Depression. A lot of people never recovered from it because once that hit it was the end of their lives.

You can embrace the changes and accept them as the new paradigm – or, you can bury your head in the sand and pretend you live in a magical utopia, the consequences of which will severely impact your quality of life for years to come – so choose wisely.

In the less-than-three-years Obama has been in office, the federal debt has increased by $4.212 trillion–more than the total national debt of about $4.1672 trillion accumulated by all 41 U.S. presidents from George Washington through George H.W. Bush combined. This $4.212-trillion increase in the national debt means that during Obama’s term the federal government has already borrowed about an additional $35,835 for every American household–or $44,980 for every full-time private-sector worker.

The Fed doled out $16 trillion in the wake of the credit crisis of 2008. Domestic banks and companies got the money, right along with foreign banks and companies. In effect, the Federal Reserve bailed out the world financial system. Now, we are right back to square one facing another financial meltdown with European banks and sovereign debt. If the Fed spent $16 trillion, why in the heck is this problem not fixed and why isn’t the world economy taking off like a rocket?” The simple answer is it wasn’t enough money.

The Bank of International Settlements pegs the total world over-the-counter (OTC) derivative exposure at around $600 trillion, but many experts say the real figure is more than twice that amount. No matter which figure you use, it is a gargantuan sum. OTC derivatives are an unregulated dark pool of money with no public market. These are basically debt bets between two entities on things such as credit risk, currencies, interest rates and commodities. According to the latest report from the Comptroller of the Currency, just four U.S. banks have an eye popping $235 trillion of OTC derivative leverage. As a nation, U.S. banks have a total OTC derivative exposure of $250 trillion. So, the fact that just four U.S. banks have this much leverage and risk is astounding!

Considering that the total assets of these four banks are a little more than $5 trillion, there is a frightening amount of risk with a total derivative exposure of $235 trillion! This is nearly 50 to 1 leverage. On top of that, assets such as real estate or mortgage-backed securities can be held on the books at whatever value the banks think they can sell them for in the future. This is government sanctioned accounting fraud. Who knows what the true value of the banks “assets” really are.

It is not the color of your skin that matters - it is the nature of your soul.

Years from now, historians may regard the 2008 election of Barack Obama as an inscrutable and disturbing phenomenon, a baffling breed of mass hysteria akin perhaps to the witch craze of the Middle Ages. How, they will wonder, did a man so devoid of professional accomplishment beguile so many into thinking he could manage the world's largest economy, direct the world's most powerful military, execute the world's most consequential job?

Imagine a future historian examining Obama's pre-presidential life: ushered into and through the Ivy League despite unremarkable grades and test scores along the way; a cushy non-job as a "community organizer"; a brief career as a state legislator devoid of legislative achievement (and in fact nearly devoid of his attention, so often did he vote "present"); and finally an unaccomplished single term in United States Senate, the entirety of which was devoted to his presidential ambitions. He left no academic legacy in academia, authored no signature legislation as legislator. And then there is the matter of his troubling associations: the white-hating, America-loathing preacher who for decades served as Obama's "spiritual mentor"; a real-life, actual terrorist who served as Obama's colleague and political sponsor.

It is easy to imagine a future historian looking at it all and asking: how on Earth was such a man elected president? Not content to wait for history, the incomparable Norman Podhoretz addressed the question recently in the Wall Street Journal: To be sure, no white candidate who had close associations with an outspoken hater of America like Jeremiah Wright and an unrepentant terrorist like Bill Ayers would have lasted a single day. But because Mr. Obama was black, and therefore entitled in the eyes of liberaldom to have hung out with protesters against various American injustices, even if they were a bit extreme, he was given a pass.

Let that sink in: Obama was given a pass -- held to a lower standard -- because of the color of his skin. Unfortunately, minorities often suffer so that whites can pat themselves on the back. Liberals routinely admit minorities to schools for which they are not qualified, yet take no responsibility for the inevitable poor performance and high drop-out rates which follow. Liberals don't care if these minority students fail; liberals aren't around to witness the emotional devastation and deflated self esteem resulting from the racist policy that is affirmative action. Yes, racist. Holding someone to a separate standard merely because of the color of his skin is affirmative action in a nutshell, and if that isn't racism, then nothing is. And that is what America did to Obama.

Obama himself was never troubled by his lack of achievements, but why would he be? As many have noted, Obama was told he was good enough for Columbia despite undistinguished grades at Occidental; he was told he was good enough for the US Senate despite a mediocre record in Illinois; he was told he was good enough to be president despite no record at all in the Senate. All his life, every step of the way, Obama was told he was good enough for the next step, in spite of ample evidence to the contrary. What could this breed if not the sort of empty narcissism on display every time Obama speaks?

And what about his character? Obama is constantly blaming anything and everything else for his troubles. Bush did it; it was bad luck; I inherited this mess. It is embarrassing to see a president so willing to advertise his own powerlessness, so comfortable with his own incompetence. But really, what were we to expect? The man has never been responsible for anything, so how do we expect him to act responsibly? In short: our president is a small and small-minded man, with neither the temperament nor the intellect to handle his job. When you understand that, and only when you understand that, will the current erosion of liberty and prosperity make sense. It could not have gone otherwise with such a man in the Oval Office.

The following are 12 reasons to be extremely pessimistic about the direction that the economy is headed right now….

#1 A big chunk of the American people are flat broke. According to one recent survey, one-third of all Americans say that they have absolutely no spare cash.

#2 The budgets of American families are being stretched incredibly thin and the savings rate is going down again. In fact, the savings rate in September was the lowest that it has been since December 2007.

#3 Back in 2001, Gallup began asking Americans about how they feel about the state of their own personal finances. In October, Gallup once again asked this question, and 22 percent of the respondents rated their personal financial situations as “poor.” That is the highest number that Gallup has ever seen. In addition, the gap between the number of Americans that said that their finances were “getting worse” and the number of Americans that said their finances were “getting better” was also the largest that Gallup has ever seen.

#4 Overall, Americans are very depressed about the state of the U.S. economy. According to a recent Associated Press-GfK poll, 43 percent of all Americans believe that the economy is in “very poor” shape.

#5 Big corporations continue to lay off more American workers. For example, Whirlpool has just announced that it will be slashing 5,000 more jobs in the United States and Europe.

#6 Americans seem to have an incredibly dim view of the job market. One recent survey discovered the following….

In October, 2011, just 9% of Americans would rate the job market of their region of the nation as good while 67% would rate it as bad and one-quarter (24%) say it is neither good nor bad.

#7 If nearly all Americans believe that something bad is going to happen, does that make it more likely that it actually will happen? A recent IBOPE Zogby Interactive Poll found that 95 percent of all Americans are “somewhat concerned” or “very concerned” that we are headed for a double-dip recession.

#8 The American people are also overwhelmingly pessimistic about the housing market. In fact, the same IBOPE Zogby Interactive Poll referenced above found that 89 percent of all Americans are “somewhat concerned” or “very concerned” that there will be an increase in foreclosures over the next two years.

#9 Older Americans tend to be cranky in general, but the amount of pessimism that they are exhibiting about the economy right now is absolutely stunning. The following comes from a recent article in the Huffington Post…. Older workers are gloomier about the economy now than they were last year. Nearly two thirds of workers older than 50 first surveyed by AARP’s Public Policy Institute in 2010 said things had gotten worse by the time the senior lobbying powerhouse followed up in August. Fewer than one in 10 said their view of the economy had improved. The rest said things had stayed the same.

#10 The consensus among the American people seems to be that the economy will get even worse leading up to the election in 2012. The following is what one recent telephone survey discovered…. By a 49%-35% margin, Americans say they expect the U.S. economy to worsen between now and the November 2012 presidential election.

#11 The U.S. national debt is an anchor around our necks that just gets heavier and heavier as time goes by. The U.S. government is now about 15 trillion dollars in debt, and a recent Allstate-National Journal poll discovered that 79 percent of all Americans “believe the federal debt and deficit have a meaningful impact on their personal finances.”

#12 The financial crisis in Europe just seems to get worse by the day. The United States is already teetering on the edge of an economic disaster, and if Europe experiences a big time financial crash it seems extremely unlikely that we would be able to avoid another major recession.

The five largest banks in the U.S. (JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and HSBC) are carrying $238 TRILLION dollars in derivative exposure. JP Morgan alone is carrying $78 TRILLION in derivative exposure BY ITSELF. The total GDP of the United States is $14.5 Trillion. The total GDP of China is $6 Trillion. The total land mass on earth is 36.8 billion acres. If every acre of land on earth was “sold” for $6467 per acre, that would total $238 Trillion. JP Morgan BY ITSELF has derivative exposure equal to over FIVE TIMES the value of the entire US GDP. These banks are carrying these OTC futures contracts with NO exchange to guarantee anything. And they are carrying these contracts largely WITH EACH OTHER. So JP Morgan might be the long and Goldman Sachs, or some insolvent bank in Europe is the short on the other side. If these banks default, which is now a mathematical certainty because they are not only insolvent, but insolvent multiple times over and there isn’t enough money in the world to bail them out, there is going to be a cascading default on all of these OTC contracts.

A shocking new Bloomberg survey has found that approximately one out of every three international investors expects a “global economic meltdown” within the next 12 months, and 70 percent of them believe that the global economy is “deteriorating.” On both sides of the Atlantic, the big banks are highly leveraged, they have taken on a ton of risk and they are very deeply exposed to derivatives. It is as if virtually nobody learned any lessons during the financial crisis of 2008. Once again we are facing a situation where if a couple of financial dominoes fall it could send dozens of others tumbling to the ground. Martha Stewart has been the only high profile individual arrested for insider trading and bankers who committed the same crime have been protected.

By the end of 2007, all the Too-Big-to-Fail (TBTF) banks were writing these things hand-over-fist because they already knew they were in doo-doo. All this did was put massive leverage into the system…..debt, leveraged upon debt, with no asset value behind much of it. THEY DID THIS KNOWING FULL WELL THE MAJORITY OF THE DERIVATIVES THEY WERE CREATING WERE FRAUDULENT AND BACKED BY NOTHING. The TBTFs have lobbied against any whiff of the idea of forcing these things onto an exchange where they would be made transparent. That’s pretty much a tipoff that they’re hiding something very bad. If the used car salesman won’t let you look under the hood, you can be pretty sure there’s something there you won’t like much.

The idea Wall Street had here with creating these fraudulent pieces of toxic waste was that if even a fraction of these ‘paid out’ for them, they could ‘save themselves.’ Unfortunately this doesn’t work when Wall Street runs out of suckers; you know, pension plans, insurance companies, retail investors and other places they could sell these things to without anyone understanding what they were buying. Most importantly, when they ran out of suckers they could put into home loans they couldn’t afford, this was the beginning of the end and the whole scheme began to unravel.

President Obama has proposed the first step in stealth nationalization and forced investment of our retirement benefits. Obama’s stealth proposal is billed by him as an "effort to increase retirement savings by requiring all businesses to offer automatic IRA accounts.” There is an estimated $15 trillion worth of private retirement plans in the United States; $4 trillion in IRAs alone; this constitutes 35 percent of all private assets in America. That is what the Obama government is eyeing to help plug the multi-trillion dollar deficit in his big spending budget. You could call this move Obama’s attempt to "pull an Argentina." In October 2008, Argentine President Cristina Kirchner—a peronista—confiscated US$30 billion worth in that country’s 10 privately managed pension funds. This was presented as an emergency measure to meet her faltering government’s financing costs. The Argentine congress went along with this radical property grab of individual retirement accounts, 401Ks and the like.

The Too-Big-To-Fails are chasing corruption. They’re chasing legalized theft sanctioned by our government and you can watch it in real-time every day….just pull up a stock chart. Any stock chart. Our government not only looked the other way when they were made aware of what was going on, they began to aid and abet the criminal activity….because the TBTFs convinced the government that ‘economic meltdown could be avoided’ if they were just given time for the ‘asset values to come back.’ This whole game was facilitated by none-other than Hank Paulson.

These entities will tear each other apart in a mad dogfight and this dogfight will take the entire world down with it. TWO HUNDRED AND THIRTY-EIGHT TRILLION DOLLARS. And THAT IS JUST FIVE BANKS. And THE MASSIVELY CORRUPT AND INCOMPETENT SECURITIES REGULATORS, BOTH GOVERNMENTAL AND PRIVATE, SAT BY AND WATCHED THIS HAPPEN. That is what happens when you let a group of criminals run a bureaucracy of affirmative action hires to “audit” the financial industry.

It’s over. There is no coming back from this. The only thing that can happen is a total and complete collapse of EVERYTHING we now know, and humanity starts from scratch.

If Europe should fail this is what we can expect to happen – European banks will crash and burn and take down major US banks, which are already in trouble anyway. We are likely to see a lengthy unscheduled "bank holiday" – banks will slam their doors and if your money is still inside their vaults then you are out of luck. Major disruptions in supply and distribution of food and fuel in particular will trigger general panic, and riots and mob violence will spread rapidly – what we have seen on TV happening in Greece will suddenly happen on the streets of the US and many other countries. Stockmarkets will crash in a manner that will make 2008 seem like a "walk in the park." Virtually every asset class and investment will crater – especially commodities, stocks and Real Estate. The euro will be vaporized. The tidal wave of funds liberated by this mass panic are going to have to go somewhere and normally we would expect them to go into the US dollar and Treasuries, but with US banks failing even this cannot be relied upon. The one surefire investment category that will shine – provided that is that the markets or brokerage houses etc involved with these transactions don't themselves fail – is "misfortune securities", meaning bear ETFs and Puts.

We are not simply talking about protecting investments and making opportunistic gains out of the mayhem that will ensue, if Europe should fail, we are talking survival issues as well, due to the interconnected nature of the global economy things could become very ugly, very fast across a broad front. If you want to learn what life is like when banks suddenly slam their doors, then you should read up on the Argentinian crisis of the early nineties. The middle class suddenly found themselves disconnected from their savings, and as many of them lost their jobs at about the same time, they became instantly destitute, and forced to swap their possessions for food. Crime soared and people who had been used to living relatively cushy lives suddenly found themselves living on the edge in a law-of-the jungle nightmare. If Europe should fail this is what may quickly become reality not just in Europe but in the acutely fragile and vulnerable US, and many other other countries as well. Other undesirable consequences will be unemployment rising to incredible unprecedented levels, so that students leaving college will have almost ZERO chance of finding work. The travel industry, much of which is non-essential, will be devastated with airlines slashing flights and going bust and hotels suffering extremely low occupancy rates.

With things rapidly coming to a head in Europe, this catastrophic chain of events could be set in motion as early as next week. So stop and think about this for a moment – What will you do, and what situation will you find yourself in, if banks slam their doors within the next couple of weeks?

Move Your Money

The nation's largest banks have certainly made a lot of mistakes in the past few years and consumers are angry about it -- for good reason. As major banks move to stick consumers with a widening range of new fees, a revolt is underway.

With November 5 being hailed as Bank Transfer Day, the final day in a month-long demonstration to move money from out of the big banks and into smaller, localized credit unions, the tally of those that took up the cause has come through and it shows that the movement was more than just a fluke. Bank Transfer Day is about the power of individuals to take their money out of institutions whose profits go almost entirely to Wall Street and keep that money in our community, where we can control it. Leading up to November 5, $4.5 billion was taken out of major financial institutions. That number comes from a just released report from ABC News that reveals that credit unions across the country accumulated around 650,000 new customers in the month of October. Bank Transfer Day began out of the Occupy Wall Street movement as thousands of Americans took to rallying in Lower Manhattan against, among other things, the bailout of the institutions that have made many homeless and broke.The campaign -- Bank Transfer Day, launched on Facebook -- signed up nearly 70,000 consumers to take action (with more than 30,000 likes on the page).

In the weeks leading up to Bank Transfer Day, around 80 percent of the credit unions in the country saw an increase in membership, with nearly half of the states in the US experiencing membership increases of more than 10,000 among their credit unions. Credit unions in California alone saw an increase in membership by around 90,000 customers, who added $624 million into new accounts. Banks have apparently woken up and smelled the coffee. JP Morgan (NYSE: JPM), for example, which operates the Chase network of banks, has quietly pulled the plug on plans to charge a $3 monthly fee for debit card users.

U.S. Bancorp (NYSE: USB), Citigroup (NYSE: C), KeyCorp (NYSE: KEY) and others have also announced that they will cancel plans to start charging for debit card usage. Yet consumers shouldn't be fooled. With or without these debit cards, these banks still offer a bum deal. By virtually every measure, they offer consumers the toxic combination of low interest rates on their savings and obnoxious penalties for a range of infractions.

With the exception of mortgages, credit unions offer a better deal -- across the board. Purchasing a $30,000 new car? The credit union will charge you $423 less in interest each year, or more than $2,000 less over the course of a five year loan. What's more, many credit unions won't charge to use out-of-network ATMs (though the bank-owned ATM fee where you withdraw still applies). Bounce a check? The credit union is likely to ding you about $15, roughly half of what most banks charge.

Major banks like Bank of America (NYSE: BAC), Citigroup and others are hurting right now, posting profits that are far weaker than a few years ago. That's not the consumers' fault. Banks face tough times because of their own poor decisions, using their capital on risky investments that turned sour. Member-owned credit unions offer more attractive interest rates on loans and checking accounts, have fewer and less penalizing fees and aim to serve the needs of their account holders, rather than a select group of shareholders. If you're interested in transferring your money, you can research your area's local credit unions by visiting the Find A Credit Union website.

1. Open Your New Account In most cases, you should be able to open a checking account with an initial deposit of $35 to $100. At a credit union, you'll also become a member and co-owner at the same time.

2. Order New Checks and an ATM/Debit Card These typically arrive within 1 to 2 weeks. You should also consider applying for a credit card from your new local bank or credit union at the same time.

3. Ask Your Employer to Reroute Your Direct Deposit When you open your new account, ask the bank or credit union for a direct deposit authorization form that includes your new account information. Give this form to your employer and anyone else who makes direct deposits to your account. It may take one or more pay cycles for the change to be made, so keep your old checking account open and watch for the swith.

4. Contact Companies that Direct-Debit Your Account Using your last bank statement, make a list of any businesses that you've authorized to directly debit your account. Ask your new bank or credit union for an automatic payments authorization form that includes your new account information. Send this to the businesses on your list.

5. Set-up Online Bill Paying for Your New Account If you like to pay bills online, set up bill payment information for your new accoutn. Also, top automatic, recurring payments you have established through your old account.

6. Close Your Old Account Once you have started receiving direct deposit into your new account and are sure that there are no outstanding checks or automatic debits that need to clear, close your account. Warning: do not just withdraw the last dollar and assume the account will fade away on is own. Your old big bank may start chargin you fees for having an empty or inactive checking account. Instead, follow the bank's procedure for closing out the account.

MoveYourMoneyProject.org

The time has come when citizens and companies aren’t the only ones being forced to file for bankruptcy… Major cities are among the ranks of those in dire straits. Is your city or town next to fall onto the sword and file for Chapter 9? Washington, D.C.; Detroit, Michigan; Honolulu, Hawaii; New York City, New York; Chicago, Illinois; Cincinnati, Ohio; Camden, New Jersey; San Diego; San Jose; San Francisco; and Los Angeles.

I.O.U.S.A.

Sept. 14, 2011, the World Bank President Robert Zoellick said the world had entered a new economic danger zone and Europe, Japan and the United States all needed to make hard decisions to avoid dragging down the global economy. His bluntly-worded speech highlighted mounting fears among global policymakers about an escalating sovereign debt crisis in Europe, which has for now overshadowed investor concerns about public finances and reforms in the United States and Japan. Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao weighed in earlier and called on developed countries to take responsibility for fiscal and monetary policies to avoid the European crisis from spreading.

Yes, our system is a joke, but the joke is on us. Our entire global economy is a giant Ponzi Scheme. Makes Social Security look like a rounding error. This also gives one a better perspective on the stock market movements. Fiat money is entering its death spiral. Banks use crooked accounting methods to hide losses and enrich employees with bonuses. It's another form of looting... At least 46 out of 50 US states are insolvent. What the market is now is merely the TBTF banks chasing government cheese. Where is the next bailout coming from? Who is going to get the next exemption from the law?

Wake up and smell the tyranny, and stop defending the criminals with your cries of ‘it’s anti-capitalist to protest against Wall Street.’ It’s not about your neighbor getting a free house, it’s about massive, global, legalized financial rape. Wall Street a/k/a the Too-Big-To-Fails are chasing corruption. They’re chasing legalized theft sanctioned by our government and you can watch it in real-time every day…. just pull up a stock chart. Wave after wave of bad economic news has come out of the United States recently, and Europe is embroiled in an absolutely unprecedented debt crisis.

The first major European bank bailout of 2011 has now happened. French/Belgian banking giant Dexia has failed and both governments have pledged to participate in a rescue plan. But Dexia will not be the last major European bank to fail. Even now, governments all over Europe are feverishly developing plans to bail out major national banks in the event that the current financial crisis goes from bad to worse. Instead of learning the lessons of 2008, most major European banks have continued to pile up huge mountains of debt, leverage and risk. Now the bill for that stupidity is about to be passed on to the taxpayers of those nations.

French banks are down to 1% capital, institutional panic is underway. We are looking at the collapse of the very foundation of the entire European banking system which in turn means the collapse of an essential pillar of the entire global banking banking system. The Europeans have been pulling their money out of banks for weeks and so have many of the world’s most important corporations. Don’t be a fool and wait until the last minute to do the same. Major stock market indexes, commodities, currencies and everything in between is being dumped by investors across the globe in the midst of a global financial meltdown.

The run on the banks and the collapse it will cause is already underway and “If it persists” the French Banks will have “no choice but to de-lever their balance sheets in a very drastic and disorderly fashion” which means forget about the plans of propping up or bailing out Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Italy and Spain. In fact, such an event is happening in a “very drastic and disorderly fashion” it will trigger a Lehman style collapse wiping out any hope of those nations being able to pay off their debt. The resulting financial turmoil will drag down Germany and the entire Euro-zone resulting in sovereign debt defaults in many of those nations as well. From there the counter-party risk turns to contagion and drags down banks in Great Britain, China and even the U.S., resulting in the greatest economic crash in the history of man kind.

The last week of September was the 3rd worse week on Wall Street ever. Most of the worst financial panics in history have happened in the fall. Just recall what happened in 1929, 1987 and 2008. September 2011 has begun and there are all kinds of signs that the financial world is about to hit the big red panic button.

The Wealth In Congress and Insider Trading

In a shocking article published in Reuters, Felix Salmon confirmed what the so-called conspiracy theorists have said all along: former Secretary of the U.S. Treasury Hank Paulson was giving insider tips to roughly a dozen hedge-fund managers and Wall Street executives, including no less than five former colleagues of Paulson’s from Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street titans which directly benefited them. The article is entitled, “Hank Paulson’s inside jobs,” emphasizing the fact that this wasn’t some one-off lapse of ethics on Paulson’s part, but instead a disturbingly regular practice. Paulson was the CEO and chairman at Goldman Sachs from 1999-2006 and he clearly provided them with actionable information that epitomizes the plague upon our economy, and the greater global economic system, that is crony capitalism. During the meeting Paulson, went on to describe a possible scenario for placing Fannie and Freddie into 'conservatorship' — a government seizure designed to allow the firms to continue operations despite heavy losses in the mortgage markets.

In October of 2009 Andrew Ross Sorkin exposed that Paulson met with the entire Goldman Sachs board in a hotel suite in Moscow at the end of June 2008. Salmon covered this at the time, after Sorkin’s book was released, which detailed the meeting held after the Goldman Sachs boys had dinner with Mikhail Gorbachev. At the time the Treasury chief of staff Jim Wilkinson told Goldman Sachs chief of staff John Rogers, “Let’s keep this quiet,” indicating that despite the fact that the Treasury’s general counsel Bob Hoyt claimed “it wouldn’t run afoul of the ethics guidelines,” they were well aware that wasn’t the case. Hoyt said that it was acceptable so long as it was solely a “social event”, but unsurprisingly, Paulson didn’t record the so-called “social event” in his official calendar. It is undeniable that these individuals knew very well what they were doing, and clearly they had no misgivings whatsoever. Just a few weeks later on July 28th, 2008, Paulson met with a who’s-who of the hedge-fund world in the Eton Park Capital Management headquarters. Unsurprisingly, Eton Park Capital Management was created by Eric Mindich, formerly of Goldman Sachs as well.

Everyone knows the words of the Treasury Secretary heavily affect global markets almost instantly, just like speeches by the likes of Ben Shalom Bernanke, the Chairman of the Board of Governors of the private Federal Reserve. Getting this kind of information ahead of time is critical, and through Sorkin’s writing it is clear that Paulson enlightened them as to the situation with Lehman Brothers, giving Goldman Sachs an unfair advantage over those who didn’t happen to have someone on the inside. Paulson spoke of the possibility that Lehman Brothers very well might collapse, along with giving the Goldman Sachs board other insights into how he was viewing the economic climate and what was to come. Maybe it’s not so surprising that Goldman Sachs turned out to be so well positioned when Lehman did indeed blow up a few months later. This egregious breach of ethics is a perfect example of the corporatism that pervades Wall Street and has brought us to the brink of collapse where we are precariously perched today.

The U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives are absolutely packed with wealthy people that are very rapidly becoming even wealthier. The collective net worth of the members of Congress is now measured in the billions of dollars. The people that we have elected to the House and Senate are absolutely swimming in money. Unfortunately, it is not easy to get elected to Congress. In this day and age you generally have to be heavily connected to those that are very wealthy to get into Congress because it takes gigantic amounts of cash to win campaigns. But if you can get in to the club, you pretty much have it made. Congress has become all about money. Congressional races are mostly financed by wealthy people, most of the people that we elect to Congress are very wealthy, and they rapidly get wealthier after they are elected. All of this money has turned our republic into something far different than our founding fathers intended.

The collective net worth of all of the members of Congress increased by 25 percent between 2008 and 2010. The collective net worth of all of the members of Congress is now slightly over 2 billion dollars. This happened during a time when the net worth of most American households was declining rapidly. According to the Federal Reserve, the collective net worth of all American households decreased by 23 percent between 2007 and 2009. One study from 2004 found that members of Congress do even better in the stock market than corporate insiders do.

The average net worth for a member of Congress is now approximately 3.8 million dollars. Former Speaker of the House–and current Minority Leader–Nancy Pelosi apparently bought $1 million to $5 million of Visa stock in one of the most sought-after and profitable initial public offerings (IPO) in American history, thwarted serious credit card reform for two years, and then watched her investment skyrocket 203%. The investment came at the same time a piece of legislation that was opposed by credit-card companies was making its way through the House. It should be illegal for lawmakers to buy stocks in companies directly affected by their legislative efforts. The net worth of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi increased by 62 percent from 2009 to 2010. In 2009 it was reported that she had a net worth of 21.7 million dollars, and in 2010 it was reported that she had a net worth of 35.2 million dollars.

But what is even worse is what many members of Congress did with secret information that they were told by U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke at the start of the financial crisis of 2008. On September 16, 2008 Paulson and Bernanke held “closed door meetings” with members of Congress and warned them that the financial system was about to totally collapse. But instead of racing out to save the financial system, author Peter Schweizer says that many of our representatives in Congress raced out to save their stock portfolios.

*U.S. Senator Dick Durbin sold $74,715 worth of stock on September 17th and $42,000 worth of stock on September 18th.

*U.S. Representative Jim Moran sold off shares in 90 different corporations on September 17th.

*U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse sold off at least $250,000 worth of stock between September 18th and September 24th.

*U.S. Representative Spencer Bachus bet very heavily against the stock market in the days following the September 16th meeting and made tens of thousands of dollars doing so.

*U.S. Senator John Kerry bought up approximately $350,000 of Bank of America stock and approximately $550,000 of Citigroup stock during October 2008 and November of 2008. It was during this time period that the bailout programs for the big banks were being developed and debated.

Are you feeling sick to your stomach yet? But it isn’t just members of Congress that are using secrets to make money in the stock market. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, quite a few Congressional staffers have also been making questionable trades….

So why doesn’t Congress just pass a law to make it illegal for members of Congress to make trades based on insider information? Well, a few members of Congress have actually tried to introduce such legislation, but it has never gone anywhere. It turns out that members of Congress like things just the way that they are. Being a member of Congress is one of the best jobs in the country. It is a great way to become famous, get rich and live the high life. Only 11 percent of the American people think that Congress is doing a good job, and yet we keep sending the same people back to Congress time after time.

The top Republican in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, saw his wealth grow by 29 percent from 2009 to 2010. He is now worth approximately 9.8 million dollars.

More than 50 percent of the members of the U.S. Congress are millionaires. In 2008, the average cost of winning a seat in the House of Representatives was $1.1 million and the average cost of winning a seat in the U.S. Senate was $6.5 million. Spending on political campaigns has gotten way out of control. Insider trading is perfectly legal for members of the U.S. Congress – and they refuse to pass a law that would change that. The percentage of millionaires in Congress is more than 50 times higher than the percentage of millionaires in the general population.

U.S. Representative Darrell Issa is worth approximately 220 million dollars. His wealth grew by approximately 37 percent from 2009 to 2010. The wealthiest member of Congress, U.S. Representative Michael McCaul, is worth approximately 294 million dollars.

So how are members of Congress becoming so wealthy? Well, there are lots of ways they are raking in the cash, but one especially alarming thing that goes on is that members of Congress often make investments in companies that will go up significantly if legislation that is being considered by Congress “goes the right way.” This is called a “conflict of interest”, but it happens constantly in Congress and nobody seems to get into any trouble for it.

A law that would ban insider trading by members of Congress has been stalled for years on Capitol Hill. So has this been a significant benefit to members of Congress? Well, there has been at least one study that appears to indicate that members of Congress have been much more successful in the stock market than members of the general public have…. A 2004 study of the results of stock trading by United States Senators during the 1990s found that that senators on average beat the market by 12% a year. In sharp contrast, U.S. households on average underperformed the market by 1.4% a year and even corporate insiders on average beat the market by only about 6% a year during that period. A reasonable inference is that some Senators had access to – and were using – material nonpublic information about the companies in whose stock they trade. Meanwhile, members of Congress keep telling the rest of us that we are just going to have to cut back because times are tough. During an interview with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News, Nancy Pelosi actually claimed that we should try to encourage poor people to have less children because it costs the government so much money to take care of them.

This elitist attitude extends all the way into the White House as well. Earlier this year, Barack Obama made the following statement: “If you’re a family trying to cut back, you might skip going out to dinner, or you might put off a vacation.” Meanwhile, the Obamas are living the high life at taxpayer expense. How about the outrageously expensive vacation taken by the Obamas that was paid for by our taxes. Back in August, Michelle Obama took her daughter Sasha and 40 of her friends for a vacation in Spain. So what was the bill to the taxpayers for that little jaunt across the pond? It is estimated that vacation alone cost U.S. Taxpayers $375,000.

There is a massive disconnect between what our politicians say and what our politicians do. The high life is good enough for them, but the rest of us have got to “cut back” and suffer becomes times are hard. But when it comes to money and Congress, the most corrupting influence of all is probably all of the campaign money that gets thrown around. In America today, it takes gigantic mountains of money to run a successful campaign. Sadly, the candidate that raises the most money almost always wins. In federal elections the candidate that raises the most money wins about 90 percent of the time. More than 5 billion dollars were spent on political campaigns back in 2008. That represents a huge number of favors that need to be paid back.

In 2012, it is being projected that 8 billion dollars could be spent on political campaigns. When big corporations and wealthy individuals shovel huge piles of money into political campaigns, it is generally because they expect something in return. Most of those that get sent to Congress realize that they never would have won if wealthy donors had not showered cash on them. Most of them understand that they should not bite the hands that feed them if they want the cash to keep rolling in.

Politics in America has become a game that is played by the elite for the benefit of the elite. Average Americans have the perception that they are involved in the process and that their opinions really matter, but mostly it is just an illusion. It is so sad. Meanwhile, members of Congress rapidly get wealthier and average American families continue to suffer. In fact, the standard of living in the United States has fallen farther over the past three years than at any other time that has ever been recorded in U.S. History.

But for members of Congress the good times just keep on rolling. Just as it has been for most of human history, the rich rule over the poor.

Mortgage-Backed Securities Fraud

Congress members, except Ron Paul, were invested in the Wall Street Firms behind the Mortgage-Backed Securities Fraud; the biggest financial swindle since the Great South Seas Bubble of 1721. Congress passed an $8000 first-time home-buyer credit to lure more suckers into the scam, to front-load the fraud with fresh mortgages of questionable worth, and raked in huge profits from the "tulip mania" sales of the MBS.

Then the scam fell apart. Foreign banks and investment companies (and indeed entire nations) were brought to the edge of ruin by the fraud and demanded that Wall Street refund their money.

Wall Street does not like to surrender profits, even ill-gotten ones, and neither does the Congress. So Congress voted for the "bailouts," which are actually buy-backs, to use public money (and more funds borrowed from the Federal Reserve) to purchase back the bad paper and cover the credit swaps, dropping the costs of the scam onto the American people. This was done despite 90% of the American people opposing the use of tax money to save the bankers from their own reckless behaviors (Taxation without representation).

At the same time, in 2008, the White House set a policy that nobody on Wall Street was going to be investigated or charged for this fraud, because inevitably the scandal would envelope all the members of the Congress who had their personal fortunes tied up in the swindle. Obama had Tim Geithner go up to New York to intercede with NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to make certain no Wall Street CEOs were investigated in connection with the mortgage-backed Securities scam (obstruction of justice—a felony in itself).

During the Bush administration, and accelerating under Obama, tax incentives were created for corporations that encouraged the off-shoring of high-paying jobs to other countries.

Americans, stripped of their ability to pay their mortgages, became easy prey for banks, who needed the entire value of the foreclosed homes on their balance sheets to stay solvent as the cash flowed out the door to buy back all the fraudulent investment bundles. In other words, the government took your jobs—so the banks could take your homes—to save themselves from going to prison for the crimes that made themselves—and Congress—incredibly rich.

US home prices fell 6.3% in May 2011, from a year earlier as foreclosures weighed down values and purchases slumped. The decline was led by a 9.9% decrease in the region that includes California, the Federal Housing Finance Agency said in a report from Washington. The second-largest drop was 9.2% in the area that includes Nevada and Arizona.

Roughly 10.4 million mortgages, or one in five outstanding home loans in the U.S., will likely default if Congress refuses to implement new policy changes to prevent and sell more foreclosures. At the end of the second quarter, more than 2.7 million long-delinquent loans, others in foreclosure and REO properties sat in the shadow inventory, more than double what it was in the first quarter of 2010. With the market averaging roughly 90,000 loan liquidations per month, it would take 32 months, nearly three years, to move through the overhang. And that number is contingent on no other loans going into default.

Many analysts looking at the housing problem mistakenly assume it is limited to loans that are currently non-performing (or 60-plus days past due). Such borrowers have a high probability of eventually losing their homes. However, the problem also includes loans with a compromised pay history; these are re-defaulting at a rapid rate.

This puts today's US government debt mountain startingly into context. By removing several zeros, one can place the debt situation in terms we all can understand--that of a family's income and expenses.

A family who takes in an annual income of $21,700 but spends $38,200 will soon be in dire straights. The large outstanding balance on the credit card only exacerbates the situation. Clearly, spending cuts need to be made, but eliminating only $385 fromthe family's budget would be a drop in the bucket. Either a substantially higher amount of income needs to be made, or the family will have to learn to live with less.

Of course, thefiscal situation is more complicated when it comes to a "family" of 311 million. It is only one part of a large conundrum for the global economy.

The Federal Reserve

The Federal Reserve is not a legitimate government institution. It is a private banking cartel and a criminal organization that is acting against the interests of the American people and the American economy. Since its founding in 1913, the Federal Reserve has been a blood-sucking leech on the American economy, the American nation and the American people. The Federal Reserve must be abolished, and its directors must be brought to justice for their crimes against America and humanity. People can't back down in the face of this aggression by the treasonous banksters and their treasonous agents. They are the enemies of the American people, freedom, and mankind.

The first ever GAO (Government Accountability Office) audit of the Federal Reserve was carried out in the past few months due to the Ron Paul, Alan Grayson Amendment to the Dodd-Frank bill, which passed last year. Jim DeMint, a Republican Senator, and Bernie Sanders, an independent Senator, led the charge for a Federal Reserve audit in the Senate, but watered down the original language of the house bill (HR1207), so that a complete audit would not be carried out. Ben Bernanke, Alan Greenspan, and various other bankers vehemently opposed the audit and lied to Congress about the effects an audit would have on markets. Nevertheless, the results of the first audit in the Federal Reserve’s nearly 100 year history were posted on Senator Sander’s webpage.

Sixteen trillion dollars ($16,000,000,000,000.00) were secretly given out to US banks and corporations and foreign banks everywhere from France to Scotland. From the period between December 2007 and June 2010, the Federal Reserve had secretly bailed out many of the world’s banks, corporations, and governments. 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. Why the Federal Reserve had never been public about this or even informed the United States Congress about the $16 trillion dollar bailout is obvious--the American public would have been outraged to find out that the Federal Reserve bailed out foreign banks while Americans were struggling to find jobs.

To place $16 trillion into perspective, remember that the GDP of the United States is only $14.12 trillion. The entire national debt of the United States government spanning its 200+ year history is "only" $14.5 trillion. The budget that is being debated so heavily in Congress and the Senate is "only" $3.5 trillion. Take all of the outrage and debate over the $1.5 trillion deficit into consideration, and swallow this Red pill: There was no debate about whether $16,000,000,000,000 would be given to failing banks and failing corporations around the world.

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.

The Federal Reserve is an entity unto itself, which has no oversight and no accountability. Americans should be swelled with anger and outrage at the abysmal state of affairs when an unelected group of bankers can create money out of thin air and give it out to megabanks and supercorporations like Halloween candy. If the Federal Reserve and the bankers who control it believe that they can continue to devalue the savings of Americans and continue to destroy the US economy, they will have to face the realization that their trillion dollar printing presses will eventually plunder the world economy.

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

History

The Federal Reserve Bank was born in 1913, the same year US banking scion J. Pierpont Morgan died and the Rockefeller Foundation was formed. The House of Morgan presided over American finance from the corner of Wall Street and Broad, acting as quasi-US central bank since 1838, when George Peabody founded it in London. Peabody was a business associate of the Rothschilds. In 1952 Fed researcher Eustace Mullins put forth the supposition that the Morgans were nothing more than Rothschild agents. Mullins wrote that the Rothschilds, “…preferred to operate anonymously in the US behind the facade of J.P. Morgan & Company.” Morgan’s activities in 1895-1896 in selling US gold bonds in Europe were based on an alliance with the House of Rothschild.

The Morgan financial octopus wrapped its tentacles quickly around the globe. Morgan Grenfell operated in London. Morgan et Ce ruled Paris. The Rothschild’s Lambert cousins set up Drexel & Company in Philadelphia. The House of Morgan catered to the Astors, DuPonts, Guggenheims, Vanderbilts and Rockefellers. It financed the launch of AT&T, General Motors, General Electric and DuPont. Like the London-based Rothschild and Barings banks, Morgan became part of the power structure in many countries. By 1890 the House of Morgan was lending to Egypt’s central bank, financing Russian railroads, floating Brazilian provincial government bonds and funding Argentine public works projects. A recession in 1893 enhanced Morgan’s power. That year Morgan saved the US government from a bank panic, forming a syndicate to prop up government reserves with a shipment of $62 million worth of Rothschild gold.

Morgan was the driving force behind Western expansion in the US, financing and controlling West-bound railroads through voting trusts. In 1879 Cornelius Vanderbilt’s Morgan-financed New York Central Railroad gave preferential shipping rates to John D. Rockefeller’s budding Standard Oil monopoly, cementing the Rockefeller/Morgan relationship. The House of Morgan now fell under Rothschild and Rockefeller family control. Morgan and Edward Harriman’s banker Kuhn Loeb held a monopoly over the railroads, while banking dynasties Lehman, Goldman Sachs and Lazard joined the Rockefellers in controlling the US industrial base.

In 1903 Banker’s Trust was set up by the Eight Families. Benjamin Strong of Banker’s Trust was the first Governor of the New York Federal Reserve Bank. The 1913 creation of the Fed fused the power of the Eight Families to the military and diplomatic might of the US government. If their overseas loans went unpaid, the oligarchs could now deploy US Marines to collect the debts. Morgan, Chase and Citibank formed an international lending syndicate. The House of Morgan was cozy with the British House of Windsor and the Italian House of Savoy. The Kuhn Loebs, Warburgs, Lehmans, Lazards, Israel Moses Seifs and Goldman Sachs also had close ties to European royalty. By 1895 Morgan controlled the flow of gold in and out of the US. The first American wave of mergers was in its infancy and was being promoted by the bankers. In 1897 there were sixty-nine industrial mergers. By 1899 there were twelve-hundred. In 1904 John Moody – founder of Moody’s Investor Services – said it was impossible to talk of Rockefeller and Morgan interests as separate.

The Federal Reserve is the most brazen of all ponzi schemes. A one-time limited GAO audit of the Federal Reserve that was mandated by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act has uncovered some eye-popping corruption at the Fed and the mainstream media is barely even covering it. It turns out that the Federal Reserve made $16.1 trillion in secret loans to their bankster friends during the financial crisis, between Dec. 1, 2007 and July 21, 2010. Last year, the gross domestic product of the entire U.S. economy was $14.5 trillion. Many Americans have a hard time grasping just how large 16.1 trillion dollars is. It is an amount of money that is almost inconceivable. It is more than the GDP of the United States for an entire year. It is more than the U.S. government has spent over the last four years combined. The Federal Reserve was just creating gigantic piles of cash out of thin air and throwing them around with wild abandon.

But it just wasn't U.S. banksters that were showered with nearly interest-free loans. It turns out that approximately $3.08 trillion went to foreign financial institutions all over Europe and Asia. 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. Of the $16.1 trillion loaned out, $3.08 trillion went to financial institutions in the U.K., Germany, Switzerland, France and Belgium, the Government Accountability Office's (GAO) analysis shows. Additionally, asset swap arrangements were opened with banks in the U.K., Canada, Brazil, Japan, South Korea, Norway, Mexico, Singapore and Switzerland. Twelve of those arrangements are still ongoing, having been extended through August 2012. Out of all borrowers, Citigroup received the most financial assistance from the Fed, at $2.5 trillion. Morgan Stanley came in second with $2.04 trillion, followed by Merill Lynch at $1.9 trillion and Bank of America at $1.3 trillion. The GAO investigation revealed some absolutely stunning conflicts of interest, and yet the mainstream media does not even seem interested. Solid evidence of the looting of America has been put right in front of us, and yet hardly anyone wants to talk about it.

So who in the world gave the Federal Reserve permission to bail out financial institutions all over the world? Nobody did. But under our current system the Federal Reserve doesn't have to get permission. They literally get to do whatever they want. The Federal Reserve is run like a dictatorship. They get to do what they want and nobody can stop them. Not only did the Fed dish out over $16 trillion in secret loans to their friends, but they also paid their bankster friends over 600 million dollars to help them do it. According to the GAO, the Federal Reserve paid $659.4 million to the very financial institutions which caused the financial crisis to help the Fed manage all of these emergency loans, they delegated contracts largely on a no-bid basis. Not only were the banksters raking in trillions in secret loans, they were also paid to help run the lending process.

Why the Federal Reserve had never been public about this or even informed the United States Congress about the $16 trillion dollar bailout is obvious, the American public would have been outraged to find out that the Federal Reserve bailed out foreign banks while Americans were struggling to find jobs. But wait, there is more. It turns out that many Fed officials had very large investments in the financial institutions that were receiving these secret loans. The Fed provided conflict of interest waivers to employees and private contractors so they could keep investments in the same financial institutions and corporations that were given emergency loans. It was the banksters that caused the financial crisis. They were the only ones that the Federal Reserve helped. In fact, the Federal Reserve ended up having the banksters basically run the entire emergency lending program.

Most Americans do not realize that the Federal Reserve is not actually part of the federal government. It is a privately-owned central bank that is not accountable to anyone. But most Americans still believe that the Fed is a government agency. The truth is that the Federal Reserve is about as "federal" as Federal Express is. Basically, an unaccountable private monopoly creates our money, sets our interest rates, regulates our banking system and makes secret loans to whoever they want. The Federal Reserve has more power over our economy than any other institution and nobody can overrule any decisions that they make. So why isn't the mainstream media talking about this?

The GAO report recommends new policies that would eliminate such conflicts of interest, and suggests that in the future the Fed should keep better records of their emergency decision-making process. The Fed agreed to "strongly consider" the recommendations, but as it is not a government-run institution it cannot be forced to do so by lawmakers. The seven-member board of governors and the Fed chairman are, however, appointed by the President of the United States and confirmed by the Senate.

The CEO of JP Morgan Chase served on the New York Fed's board of directors at the same time that his bank received more than $390 billion in financial assistance from the Fed. Moreover, JP Morgan Chase served as one of the clearing banks for the Fed's emergency lending programs. In another disturbing finding, the GAO said that on Sept. 19, 2008, William Dudley, who is now the New York Fed president, was granted a waiver to let him keep investments in AIG and General Electric at the same time AIG and GE were given bailout funds. The way theses banks have paid back the 'right pocket' is by borrowing from the left! Take the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) money, they borrow more money from the Fed, then pay back TARP and while the public attention is distracted, they borrow from the Fed and pretend the situation is fixed.

What’s happening right now is not just a market crash, bear market, deflation, or any other item related to just one asset class. Instead, this is a collapse of the entire US monetary and political system and the mentality of spending one’s way to wealth. For 80+ years, the US has operated under a crony capitalist system in which politicians dole out political and economic favors to the chosen few whose bribes/donations funded their campaigns. This system was aided and abetted by the US Federal Reserve, which dealt with any and all economic issues by printing more money. Whether it was the Asian Crisis, Long Term Capital Management, or the 2008 Crash, the Fed dealt with the issue by opening the floodgates and flooding the financial system with liquidity.

The Fed also blew a credit bubble which in-turn funded bubbles in virtually every asset class: bonds, stocks, real estate, emerging markets, even some commodities. Indeed, the vast majority of US economic growth over the last 40 years has been fueled by the Fed’s loose money policies. When we account for inflation, the US economic “miracle” of the last 30 years is in fact not all that miraculous. Take away easy credit and Fed funny money and the US GDP has barely grown at all since the ‘70s. When your entire financial system is built on debt eventually you hit a brick wall. We did this in 2008. The Fed barely held the system together by going “all in” and funneling over $11 trillion in bailouts, backstopping the major US banks, and transferring north of $2 trillion in garbage debt to the public’s balance sheet.

This effort has now failed as the world collectively realizes that the Fed cannot hold the system together. In simple terms, we’ve now entered the Real Crisis, the END GAME, for our current monetary system. Before the dust settles on this mess, the US and its political, economic, monetary structure will look very very different. However, before we get there, we will see riots, civil unrest, possibly martial law, for certain a Government shutdown, bank holidays, a debt default/ restructuring, the re-instatement of the Gold standard or something like it (possibly a basket of commodities), food shortages, and more. We’re entering a period in history that will rival the Revolutionary war. This country will be very very different by the time it has ended. Many people will lose everything in this mess. Yes, everything. So if you have yet to take steps to prepare for this, you need to get moving NOW!

Ron Paul Leads Hearing On First Ever Audit Of Fed

If you consider yourself a true American, then it is important to learn about Dr. Ron Paul and then educate others. Some people are just now wising up to how great this country could be if only a few of Ron Paul's amazing ideas were implemented. It is important to remember that Dr. Paul's message is not entirely his own. The true source of knowledge & information behind everything he says and does starts with the the United States Constitution. The Constitution is the source behind ALL of his words. That is why Ron Paul is known as the "Champion of the Constitution."

It is not too late to fix America, we just need to listen to this true American patriot and then act upon those ideas. Be a part of the Ron Paul revolution and visit his newest website located at campaignforliberty.com. True change in America is possible, it's not too late. Ron Paul has started this avalanche of knowledge & freedom, it's now time for you to learn it and then pass it on.

One thing that has made Ron Paul stand apart from not just the present set of Presidential contenders, but from any contender in recent history, has been his unfailing stance on principles. He stands for freedom as vouchsafed in the Constitution of the United States, and he doesn't waver. He has been rightfully compared to a modern Thomas Jefferson. Even people who disagree with some of his positions still admire him because he stands with principle. It has been his unfaltering stance on eternal principles that makes him so popular. It isn't his charisma that people are drawn to, though he does have some of that. It is the magnetism of the message. It resonates deep in their soul. Freedom is eternal, and is perhaps the most fundamental principle embedded in our eternal make-up.

"Obama has violated the Constitution by issuing executive orders that bypass Congress and the American people. The idea they can just do this and take over the legislative function and brag about it – and Congress does nothing and the courts do nothing about it, it’s very, very bad,” Ron Paul told Fox News. In October, Obama said “we can’t wait for an increasingly dysfunctional Congress to do its job. Where they won’t act, I will.” Obama said that he has looked at ways to violate the Constitution “every single day” and promised to issue “executive actions on a regular basis.” Both Democrats and Republicans love to violate the Constitution. Bush ruled by executive fiat too, but Obama has taken the practice to a new level.

Serious constitutional violations through executive orders began in earnest when FDR was in office. Obama said that “the normal balance of Executive and legislative authority may be wholly adequate to meet the unprecedented task before us” and called for a “temporary departure from that normal balance of public procedure.” FDR asked Congress to approve of his violation of the Constitution. “I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis – broad Executive power,” FDR said. Obama has not asked for permission from a usually compliant Congress. He has dismissed Congress and the American people as “dysfunctional” and has promised to act like a dictator.

Texas Congressman and 2012 presidential candidate Ron Paul held hearings October 4, 2011 into a recent and rare one off audit of the Federal Reserve’s crisis-response emergency lending programs of 2008. In his role as chairman of the Domestic Monetary Policy subcommittee, Paul relished the glimmer of transparency that was afforded as part of the Dodd-Frank Act, signed into law last year. “More people now are starting to realize that the Fed isn’t independent of political independence because indirectly and some times more directly it is involved in political decisions or at least private decisions to serve some political interest.” Paul told those gathered at the hearing. Along with Paul, Republicans in attendance argued that the audit should pave the way for regular reviews of the Fed’s policies, as well as more complete disclosure of exactly who has received upwards of $27 trillion in bail-out funds since 2008.

The Fed’s mythical flag of independence from politics, a favorite Fed mantra to avoid individual responsibility, is merely a shield intended to protect the institution from being forced to act in a more transparent fashion. Some banks and firms that “borrowed” from the Fed, and by extension the American taxpaying public, as part of the Bear Sterns and AIG relief packages, have yet to pay back the funds. The GAO’s report found several instances of conflicts of interest and questionable practices involving Fed officials. It was also revealed that the Fed made $16.1 trillion in secret loans to Wall Street firms at the height of the crisis.

“We have too much spending and too much debt, so they’re trying to solve the problem with more debt. There’s not a chance that we can get out of the recession this way.” Ron Paul told host Judge Andrew Napolitano. “The people here don’t want to change because they have been conditioned by Keynesian economics. Where I’m encouraged is that people outside this place are getting the message. The answers are well known but how do you translate this new message that we have of free markets and the constitution, and get the people that are managing the affairs now out of office?” the Congressman stated.

Paul added that as president he would implement some immediate measures that would cut the deficit and reduce spending in a meaningful way. “Immediately you could bring all our troops home and have them spend money here at home, that would give us some reprieve. We could change our foreign policy and indicate to the world that we are going to get our budget under control.” Paul said.

“We could remove taxation on all the money that is held overseas by our corporations and not double-tax them. We could remove the interest paid by the Federal Reserve to the banks. The banks won’t invest their money because it’s too risky, but the Federal Reserve gives them their money, essentially, for free, and then they invest it back into Treasury bills, so they help monetize the debt too.” “Those are a few things, but sending a signal will be most important, ‘we’re going to quit this spending’. Right now I’m working on a plan where in one year I want to cut a trillion dollars.” Paul revealed.

“The appetite for big government is the problem. The taxes and the Federal Reserve inflating, that is the symptom, and the budget problem is a symptom of the appetite for big government.” Paul continued. “Too often the leadership is only in the business of preserving power… It’s a shame that despite all this arguing and bickering going on between the two parties, there is no difference. Regardless of which party it is they still don’t change the definition of entitlements, they don’t change the foreign policy and they don’t go after the Fed.”

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In a forthcoming event dubbed Ron Paul Is The Choice Of The Troops, thousands of veterans and active duty military personnel are expected to march on the White House in support of the Texas Congressman’s presidential bid. The event, to be held on President’s Day, February 20th, is being organized by activist group Veterans for Ron Paul 2012, co-founded by Adam Kokesh, Iraq war veteran turned activist and talk show host. In a press release, Kokesh announced that the march will progress from the Washington Monument to the White House, where those taking part will salute a “folded American flag... for as many seconds as troops have died under the Presidency of Barrack Obama.”

“The purpose of this event is to make it clear to the American people that Ron Paul is the choice of the troops and the candidate who will have the greatest support from those he would lead as commander-in-chief.” writes Kokesh. “This is already evidence by the fact that Ron Paul has received more campaign contributions from active duty service members than all other presidential candidates combined, INCLUDING Barrack Obama.”

This statistic was once again confirmed last week with figures showing Paul has collected $95,567 from individuals who listed their occupation as one of the branches of the US military or US Department of Defense.

Wall Street Protestors

Donor	Obama	Romney	Gingrich	Paul	Santorum
National Guard	$1,262	$0	$0	$4,068	$0
US Air Force	$9,785	$4,400	$4,400	$23,736	$0
US Army	$15,600	$3,500	$250	$24,503	$250
US Coast Guard	$6,002	$0	$0	$3,716	$0
US Dept of Defense	$27,613	$2,150	$0	$9,527	$0
US Marine Corps	$1,700	$250	$0	$7,662	$0
US Military	$200	$0	$0	$2,083	$0
US Navy	$10,454	$3,000	$250	$20,272	$500
TOTAL	$72,616	$13,300	$4,900	$95,567	$750

The protesters have the right to be there! They are US citizens, unhappy of how the government is managing THEIR tax-money. The increasingly out of control debt, irrational money spending and big corporation & bank bailouts will collapse the floor from under our feet and we will end up jobless, homeless and starving to death - like it happened before. Not only that, but nobody will be blamed for this!

The president and government members are not our bosses - in fact, we are their bosses. They offered their services in leading positions, to manage our money & the economy and we are the ones who chose them by vote (at least, this is the official version). Their duty is to take care of our well-being. They clearly are incapable of taking care of the country and its inhabitants, and now they must answer for their crimes! While thousands of peaceful US citizens are unjustly imprisoned, no banker or politician is even blamed - not to mention tried or convicted. What the police must understand, is that the Occupy protesters are their friends, not their enemies. They are representing their interests as well, by pointing out the flows of our current society, in a peaceful manner.

The Federal Reserve bankers have offered billions of dollars to the CIA mercenaries in Libya to come to the United States and start a bloody rebellion. The Federal Reserve bankers sent Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to make their offer and terms. According to high ranking U.S. military officials the plot by the Federal Reserve bankers calls for Libyan mercenaries to enter the United States as guest of the Federal Reserve banks. Once on U.S. soil they are to hook up with CIA and DHS contacts and immediately prepare and execute their mission to start shooting New York City cops who are assigned to police the Occupy Wall Street protests. The Occupy Wall Street Protests were actually planned for by the Federal Reserve bankers. They financed it – by financing the Vancouver-based advocacy magazine, Adbusters who planned for and organized the Occupy Wall Street Protests. On September 14, 2011 they officially kicked off their campaign for Occupy Wall Street.

Why would the Federal Reserve bankers finance protests that call for their being abolished? The European controlled Federal Reserve bankers have been trying to destroy the United States as we know it. First by financing the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. That assassination started WWI. Then they orchestrated the Great Depression. Then they financed a little known Austrian named Adolf Hitler who they ordered to start WWII. Then the Korean War and the Vietnam War. When all those attempts failed to destroy the United States – through war, they tried through debt. They illegally took the gold and silver backed U.S. dollar out of circulation and began issuing their own worthless interest bearing counterfeit Federal Reserve Notes. Their intent was to cause the United States to be destroyed through debt.

Now that the United States is bankrupt the Federal Reserve bankers want another major war – WWIII. They need a war in order to bring about the Vatican’s Fourth Reich – aka New World Order. They tried to start a major war by using false flag attacks against the United States on the anniversary of 9/11 but the United States Air Force thwarted those attacks. On August 23, 2011 the CIA tried to transport improvised nuclear bombs into Washington DC and New York City via the underground tunnel systems that links the United States Deep Underground Military Bases. The U.S. Air Force intercepted these CIA nuclear warheads and they were prematurely detonated during a battle underground. The World inadvertently became aware of this major incident when 2 large earthquakes were felt by the American people on August 23, 2011.

The peaceful movement 'Occupy Wall Street' started in New York, USA. Even though the protesters are not receiving any help from the main stream media, the police are brutalizing and arresting thousands and the government doesn't seem to mind them, this movement is gaining momentum and is about to become a worldwide peaceful revolution. After years of economic distress and huge financial problems, the world is about to fall into an even deeper, global financial crisis - specialists say.

Bought-and-paid-for Obama--the man who has done everything Wall Street wanted from day one--continues to claim common cause with Wall Street Protests. Our governments are corrupt and obsolete. Our world is led by the bankers and the big corporations. 35,000 children die of hunger each day, while our governments allocate billions of dollars each year for building more weapons. The big pharmaceutical companies are making profits of $ billions/year for keeping us ill & addicted to their drugs, without healing us. The police are gaining more and more power each day, while our constitutional rights are broken. Each day our liberty is restrained.

Anti-corruption protests in the US, which started from the Wall Street in New York, have now spread to 847 cities across the country. The “Occupy Wall Street” movement started its demonstrations about four weeks ago and it has continued gatherings until now, October 7, 2011. Demonstrators protest against corporatism, unemployment, poverty and social inequality among other things. They blame Wall Street practices and corporate influence on White House policies for the deepening US economic crisis. The members of the Occupy Wall Street movement have vowed to stay out through winter. Protesters use the slogan “We are the 99 percent” to call attention to the fact that they are not part of the one percent of Americans in possession of the nation’s wealth.

One of the financial institutions being targeted by protesters is foreclosure mill and government bailout recipient Bank of America (BOA). In Boston, thousands of people marched against BOA’s greed and in Los Angeles, numerous people were arrested while staging a sit-in at a local branch. While many Americans may feel powerless against this banking behemoth, the truth is that Americans have a simple way to protest its greed and corporate malfeasance: simply move your money out of the bank to one of its competitors, such as a local credit union.

Bank of America just unveiled a shocking new debit card fee. Late last month, BOA announced that it would start charging a $5-a-month fee simply for consumers to use their debit cards for purchases. Bank of America has spent millions lobbying to gut reforms with your tax dollars. Despite being bailed out to the tune of billions of dollars by the federal government, Bank of America has still had the gumption to spend millions of dollars in Washington battling new reforms meant to re-regulate the financial sector. It spent nearly $4 million hiring a double-digit number of lobbyists in 2010, mostly aimed at gutting legislation related to banking regulations. Meanwhile, it spent a million dollars on campaign contributions in the 2010 electoral cycle.

Bank of America’s practices are at the nexus of the foreclosure crisis. Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan raised eyebrows recently when he excitedly cheered for faster foreclosures of Americans’ homes. Despite being found to be a major user of error-ridden “robo-signing” foreclosure practices last year, the mega-bank only briefly halted its foreclosure proceedings nationwide. It is also facing lawsuits by multiple states over its mortgage practices.

Bank of America just announced that it was laying off 30,000 people. The “firm’s 30,000 job cuts are more than double what any other U.S.-based employer has announced so far this year. Despite the poor economy, Bank Of America continues to reward its executives with multi-million dollar salaries. Despite blaming economic woes for layoffs of employees and its new debit card fee, the mega-bank continues to deliver huge paydays to its executives. The bank just announced that two of its former executives, Sallie Krawcheck and Joe Price, will receive a salary of $850,000 and a payment of $5.15 million and a salary of $850,000 and a payment of $4.15 million respectively. Meanwhile, BOA maintained its CEO’s salary of $950,000 plus $9.05 million in performance-based stock awards this year.

Americans do not have to stand by and allow a mega-bank to continue to rip off its consumers, to develop and foster abusive mortgage practices, reward its executives lavishly, and shortchange own workforce. They can strike a blow against this institution by simply moving their money away from it, either to its major competitors or into the country’s large network of community banks and credit unions. Organizers are putting together a “Bank Transfer Day” on November 5th and are encouraging Americans to pull their money out of big banks and put their savings instead into credit unions.

There are still some within these movements who believe the answer to fighting back against the corruption of banking cartels and puppet politicians is to hand even MORE power over to the state, and to collectivize our culture still further. The ignorance of this mentality is no less than astonishing. The only practical strategy for combating the tyranny of centralized systems has been and always will be decentralization. Individuals must stop relying on the rules of a rigged game to see them through to the truth. This means that while mass protests are certainly a powerful tactic for voicing concerns on an international stage, they accomplish little to nothing in the way of meaningful change in the long run unless they are backed by individual actions to break away from dependency upon a poisoned political and economic framework.

The common assumption amongst Americans is that nothing can be done without mass action resulting in “compromise” from leadership. That the healing of our cultural dynamic is a “top down” process. That one person alone has little at his disposal for bettering the world. In fact, it is always self aware and self sustaining individuals who build better societies, not angry mobs without understanding or direction. Individuals blaze the path that the rest of the world eventually follows, and they do this through one very simple and effective act; walking away. By walking away from the corrupt system, and building our own, we make the establishment obsolete.

David Icke's List of Requirements

Any ‘protest’, any ‘change’ or ‘revolution’ not founded on the list below – at the very least the list below – has got no chance of changing anything. These very pillars of the system must fall or they will block any transformation of the human condition. The system does not need to be tinkered with or even fundamentally changed (on the surface). The whole bloody lot must go … starting with:

1. An end to creating money out of thin air on computer screens and charging interest on it (fractional reserve lending).

2. An end to governments borrowing fresh-air money called ‘credit’ from private banks and the people paying interest on this ‘money’ that has never, does not and will never exist. Governments (and that concept must change radically) can create their own currency – interest free.

3. An end to private banks issuing non-existent money called ‘credit’ at all and thus creating ‘money’ as a debt from the very start.

4. An end to casinos like Wall Street and the City of London betting mercilessly on the financial and commodity markets with the lives of billions around the world.

5. An end to all professional lobby groups that earn their living and their clients’ living from corrupting the professionally corruptible – vast numbers of world politicians and the overwhelming majority on Capitol Hill.

6. An end to no-contract government in which mendacious politicians can promise the people they will do this and that to win their support and then do the very opposite after they have lied themselves into office (see Obama).

7. An end to the centralisation of power in all areas of our lives and a start to diversifying power to communities to decide their own lives and thus ensure there are too many points of decision making for any cabal to centrally control.

That is just for starters. There is so much more where that came from. What good will come from rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic? NONE. The banking system as we know it does not need to be changed - it needs to be gone. It is a criminal activity based on fraud, extortion and, through its effect, on worldwide mass murder. Its replacement needs to be decided by the population - not the very people who created it in the first place and are covertly manipulating a new global structure of financial control based on a world central bank.

In a police state like modern America, even peaceful resistance is considered violence and cause for even more brutality. Passive resistance is considered “violence” and aggression in today’s militarized police state. For example, protesters peacefully linking arms is considered “violence” by the UC Berkeley police. And failing to get on the ground is grounds to beat a peaceful war hero so bad that his spleen is ruptured (and then denying him medical treatment for 18 hours). Of course pregnant women, old ladies, judges, legal observers, reporters , veterans and skinny students are all scary and violent enemies who need to be beaten into submission. So in today’s “standard” police state procedure, curling into a ball to avoid violence from police is considered “active resistance” which warrants more force, including baton strikes? The real problem, of course, is that the criminal class that defrauded our country out of prosperity is now sending in the mercenaries to keep the peasants in line.

But these are people who are so committed to the ideals of the Occupy movement that they abandoned the soft conveniences of modern existence - walls, a roof, a bed, plumbing, locks on the doors and the soothing babble of cable TV - to sleep in a park surrounded by strangers for almost two months. Have you ever gone camping for two full months, anywhere? It has been hot, it has been cold, it has rained, it has snowed, and, oh yeah, there was the ever-present threat of catching a billy club over the head or a face full of NYPD mace for their trouble. You think they're going away after enduring all that? They are the message, that things have gone badly wrong in these United States, that the American Dream of even minimal upward mobility and the promise of a better future for our children were sold for pennies on the dollar to the bastards and whores who have perverted this democracy past the point of recognition. It's a fantastic bit of irony, a towering example of cognitive dissonance, that the same people who attack the Occupy movement are also the ones packing guns to Tea Party protests because they think the country is headed in the wrong direction.

C'mon police. Get with it. The revolution is here. Keep up the pepper spraying and you may show up for work to find a thousand people with pepper-spray ready to hose YOUR face down with! That is just human nature. It's time to grow up, wake up and face reality--you are in it with the rest of us!

As more people became dissatisfied with federal government controls and land grabs, it was inevitable that local law enforcement would eventually see the bigger picture. At the northern California fairgrounds of Yreka last month, seven California sheriffs and another from Oregon gathered with a large group of citizens to say that they are finally going to do something about it.

Here is an example of an outstanding sheriff setting the example for police everywhere: Outstanding public servants like the sheriff in the video below show that

20% of the people do 80% of the work--and we can never ever forget that brave 20%.

Attention Law Enforcement: The Feds are selling guns to gangsters to kill your brothers! And all you have time to do is beat up and pepper-spray peaceful protesters, women, and ....what? Where is YOUR SELF-RESPECT? Or is that the problem--you have none--and therefore none for the citizens paying your way?

Law enforcement: Are you Brave? PROVE IT! Stand up for what is GOOD AND RIGHT and lose the "cop-out" bullshit "following orders" excuse.

YOUR OWN FATE AND THAT OF YOUR OWN FAMILIES REST ON A VERY THIN BLUE LINE INDEED.

Pick a side. Just remember - you and your family will live with your decision for a very long time.

The Sheriff

Some weighty titles have been attached to the stars Sheriffs wear on their chests. "Ultimate enforcers of the Constitution." "Protectors against government tyranny." "America's last hope." "Brave oath keepers." Sheriffs, need to protect their citizenry from much more than local lawbreakers. In today's world, public enemy No. 1 just might be the federal government — or the out-of-control federal bureaucracy. The person who will "stand tall against federal tyranny," even if it means armed resistance, is the county sheriff. Sheriffs have the supreme law enforcement power in their counties under the Constitution and the 10th Amendment. Much of what federal agents are doing in counties is unconstitutional. Federal agents have no authority beyond policing treason, piracy, treaty violations and counterfeiting. Thus, the scofflaws that sheriffs might encounter today — and who should be run out of town by a SWAT team, if that's what it takes — include agents for the U.S. Forest Service; the Bureau of Land Management; the IRS; the FBI; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; the Environmental Protection Agency; and even the Food and Drug Administration.

The sheriff's position overrides any federal agents or even the arrogant FBI agents who attempt to assume jurisdiction in our cases.

Occupy Wallstreet is Being Hijacked by " Move On" and Michael Moore

We produce so much military equipment that inventories of military robots, M-16 assault rifles, helicopters, armored vehicles, and grenade launchers eventually start to pile up and it turns a lot of these weapons are going straight to American police forces to be used against US citizens. The "1033 Program" gave more than $500 million of military gear to US police in 2011 alone. 1033 was passed by Congress in 1997 to help law-enforcement fight terrorism and drugs, but despite a 40 year low in violent crime, police are snapping up hardware like never before. While this years staggering take topped the charts, next years orders are up 400 percent over the same period. This upswing coincides with an increasingly military-like style of law-enforcement most recently seen in the Occupy Wall Street crackdowns. The trend toward militarization was well under way before 9/11, but it’s the federal policy of making surplus military equipment available almost for free that has poured fuel on this fire. It’s kind of had a corrupting influence on the culture of policing in America.

The momentum for a second American revolution is stirring, but the establishment is working overtime to steer the public’s anger into easy controlled avenues and big government solutions. Instead, by striking at the root of the true problems, we can attempt to reign in the predatory banking powers that plague our nation and begin to restore the Republic. The Federal Reserve banking system is at the root of that problem and a perpetual impediment towards ending the global economic crisis that continues to grow. Without the Fed the bad boys of Wall Street could not do so much damage to our country.

A Baltimore police union and two firefighters unions have written to Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake (who wants to shut down Occupy Baltimore) asking that the protests be allowed to continue. And city employees from Irvine, California to Providence, Rhode Island have correctly said that – whether or not they agree with the protesters’ views – the protesters’ have the right of free speech and free assembly under the Constitution. Perhaps this is the start of justice for 99% … instead of just the top 1%.

People are continuing to learn more about Wall Street and New York City and the nature of the people in the upper echelons. Not only have Americans watched the players on Wall Street shove the nation’s future into their wallets, but there are more specific reasons that the police are behaving in a corrupt manner, they’re being paid off. The Occupy Wall Street movement took a lot of unnecessary heat from, "The Heat" on the first weekend of October. First, Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna maced women in an act of clear, unwarranted police brutality, and then there were mass arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge for absolutely no good reason. So, as if the NYPD didn't already look like total jerks, there's more disturbing news coming out about who's backing their movement to break up the peaceful Occupy Wall Street demonstration. JPMorgan Chase -- one of the biggest banksters that Occupy Wall Street is standing up to -- made the largest donation in the history of the New York City Police Foundation to the NYPD's nonprofit organization ... just in the nick of time! They donated $4.6 million, supposedly to fund new laptops in patrol cars and security monitoring software.

This kind of shady corruption and government in bed with greedy corporations is so outrageous, it's an insult to New Yorkers and the American people. Regardless of when the donation took place, You'd be hard-pressed to think of any other reason that JPMorgan would have given such a "generous" chunk of change other than to influence the city-run institution. It's indicative of the very disease that pervades all levels of government. We can't even vote in politicians who haven't been bought in some way, shape, or form by these white-collar criminals anymore. That's why there has never been a better time for the "99 percent" to stand up and call for an end to corporate corruption.

Who/what are the police pepper-spraying and beating the Wall Street protesters for? Do they know? Do they care? Time to put on your thinking caps "public servant" friends.

First: Their soon-to-disappear paycheck - as funds dry up for their swollen ranks. Yes - that fat blue line will become a thin blue line shortly - why? The money is drying up! We don't have anymore money for cops fighting a fake "war on drugs" - a fake "war on horror" or any other idiot undefinable charade. No more money for these public "servants."

Second: Following orders. What are the orders and who is giving them? Are the orders to pepper-spray women you have penned in with a plastic "police line" fence that the dumbass lot of you can't erect with the words right-side-up? Anyone following orders that are unethical and immoral will find that the "wheels of justice grind slowly" - whether you wear a blue suit or blue hair. It doesn't matter.'

Third: Donations from the political action committees and executives of Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo - banks that received $95 billion in federal bailout funds - account for one-fifth of the $4.3 million in campaign cash donated by commercial banking interests to the 12 supercommittee members. Supercommittee co-chair Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas) received the most from the big banks. Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo have given Hensarling a total of $188,962 during his Congressional career. Hensarling also serves as the vice chair of the House Financial Services Committee and has received a total of $3.9 million from financial interests.

Illustrating the fact that the Democratic Party establishment has hijacked and is now steering the ‘Occupy’ movement, an aide to Deputy Mayor Esther Sanchez was caught organizing and leading the ‘Occupy Oceanside’ event which took place October 28, in San Diego County, California.

Most Americans are being kept in the dark about the US Day of Rage on September 17, by the corporate cable news giants at CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC who have imposed a de-facto blackout on the protest. Even though an estimated 50,000 protesters have flooded into Manhattan to, “nonviolently disrupt the disloyal, incompetent, and corrupt special interests which have usurped our nation’s civil and military power, spawning a host of threats to our liberty, lives and national security,” the three cable news networks have devoted no airtime to the story. This is becoming an all too familiar scene. In Wisconsin hundreds of thousands of regular people took to the streets each weekend to protest the theft of their rights, and were completely ignored by CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC. Sarah Palin’s Iowa tea party speech was 1/50 as big as the Wisconsin protests, yet she was deemed worthy of national media coverage.

As the demonstration began, as many as 1,000 people congregated in the Chase Manhattan Plaza area and, after speakers with a bullhorn rallied the crowd, broke into groups to discuss the event’s goals. Protesters waved red flags and toted cardboard signs with statements such as “represent the 99%.” Others donned white, mustachioed masks of the anti-authoritarian protagonist from the graphic novel and film “V for Vendetta.” A few people played instruments, including guitars, ukuleles and maracas. Chants and applause periodically erupted around the plaza. Police encircled the plaza and partitioned Wall Street’s pedestrian walkway.

As the day continued and turned to night, the crowds grew with protestors on the ground saying a crowd of 50,000 had gathered in Wall Street. A little after 9:00 PM, police began ordering protestors they had to leave by 10:00 PM or face arrest. The protestors began speaking in union, describe by some as “chanting” in solidarity they would not disperse and would remain in solidarity in the spirit of the protestors at Egypt’s Tahrir square. The 10:00 PM deadline passed and protestors report remained on scene via various social networking sites, even as police begin to gather en-mass, surrounding the site of the protests. NYC police reportedly cut internet service to the area were 50,000 protestors have gathered to participate in the Occupy Wall Street Protests, apparently in an attempt to stop the live video stream and other live reports of the event from making it online.

According to a Washington Post poll released on August 10, 2011, just 21 percent of Americans are satisfied with the way the country’s political system is working, down 17 points from November 2009. Forty-five percent of Americans now consider themselves “very dissatisfied” and 33 percent consider themselves “mostly dissatisfied. Just 26 percent of Americans believe that the federal government can actually solve the country’s economic problems, down 21 points from October 2010 and down 37 points from February 2002.

The dollar has fallen in value by more than 80 percent from the day when Richard Nixon took the world off the tattered remnants of the gold standard. August 15 marks the 40th anniversary of the avowedly "temporary" abandonment of the gold standard by President Richard Nixon. "Closing the gold window" was part of a series of dramatic but shocking and destructive tactics by Washington, including wage-price controls, a tariff barrier, and other measures, all leading to economic and financial-market hell. There is ample evidence that restoring gold convertibility would put the world back on the path to jobs, growth, and a balanced federal budget.

Bloomberg has been engaged in a long, frustrating FOIA litigation battle with the Federal Reserve over that entity’s reluctance publicly to reveal what it has been doing with our money. Slowly, the stone wall has been coming down. And looking at what’s behind it, it’s pretty obvious why the Fed would have preferred to keep its deeds locked away from all prying eyes. On August 22 Bloomberg reported: Wall Street Aristocracy received $1.2 Trillion from Fed. This money is not a part of the $16.1 trillion in emergency loans the Fed handed to US and foreign financial institutions between Dec. 1, 2007 and July 21, 2010, according to figures produced by the first-ever, one-time-only GAO audit of the central bank ordered by Dodd-Frank. Nor is it part of the $2 trillion quantitative easing program. Nor is TARP’s $700 billion in there, either. Read that again. This $1.2 trillion — and that’s a lot of money — is separate from all that other stuff. It’s another hitherto secret funding program that we never would have heard of if Bloomberg hadn’t torn it from the Fed’s mouth like a rotten tooth.

The list of who got the bucks is a basic guide to the American banking industry. $107 billion to Morgan Stanley. $99 billion to Citigroup. $91 billion to Bank of America. Over $75 billion to State Street and just under that to Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase. And the list goes on. And on. And on. Even the disgraced Countrywide Financial got in on the act, claiming about $12.5 billion. Almost half of the Fed’s top 30 borrowers were European firms. They included the Royal Bank of Scotland, which was propped up to the tune of $84.5 billion, the most of any non-US lender, and Zurich-based UBS, which got $77.2 billion. The big foreign borrowers also included Dexia, Belgium’s biggest bank by assets, the French Société Générale, Deutsche Bank, Barclays, and Crédit Suisse.

Finally, after trillions in fraudulent activity, trillions in bailouts, trillions in printed money, billions in political bribing and billions in bonuses, the criminal cartel members on Wall Street are beginning to get what they deserve. As the Eurozone is coming apart at the seams and as the US economy grinds to a halt, the financial elite are starting to turn on each other. The lawsuits are piling up fast. The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), as conservator for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (the Enterprises), on September 3, 2011, filed lawsuits against 17 financial institutions, certain of their officers and various unaffiliated lead underwriters. The suits allege violations of federal securities laws and common law in the sale of residential private-label mortgage-backed securities (PLS) to the Enterprises.

Complaints have been filed against the following lead defendants, in alphabetical order:

1. Ally Financial Inc. f/k/a GMAC, LLC - $6 billion
2. Bank of America Corporation - $6 billion
3. Barclays Bank PLC - $4.9 billion
4. Citigroup, Inc. - $3.5 billion
5. Countrywide Financial Corporation -$26.6 billion
6. Credit Suisse Holdings (USA), Inc. - $14.1 billion
7. Deutsche Bank AG - $14.2 billion
8. First Horizon National Corporation - $883 million
9. General Electric Company - $549 million
10. Goldman Sachs & Co. - $11.1 billion
11. HSBC North America Holdings, Inc. - $6.2 billion
12. JPMorgan Chase & Co. - $33 billion
13. Merrill Lynch & Co. / First Franklin Financial Corp. - $24.8 billion
14. Morgan Stanley - $10.6 billion
15. Nomura Holding America Inc. - $2 billion
16. The Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC - $30.4 billion
17. Société Générale - $1.3 billion

These complaints were filed in federal or state court in New York or the federal court in Connecticut. The complaints seek damages and civil penalties under the Securities Act of 1933, similar in content to the complaint FHFA filed against UBS Americas, Inc. on July 27, 2011. In addition, each complaint seeks compensatory damages for negligent misrepresentation. Certain complaints also allege state securities law violations or common law fraud. [read full FHFA release] Noticeably absent from the list of companies being sued is Wells Fargo.

S&P’s downgrade of the US Treasury’s credit rating reflects a loss of confidence in the political system was confirmed by the rating agency itself. S&P explained the downgrade as the result of heightened political risks, not economic ones. The game of chicken over the debt ceiling increase and the GOP’s ability to block tax increases indicate that “America’s governance and policymaking is becoming less stable, less effective, and less predictable.” The reduction in the government’s credit rating to AA+ from AAA is a cosmetic change. It remains a very high investment grade rating and is unlikely to have any effect on interest rates. It is revealing that despite the downgrade, US bond prices rose. It was stocks that fell. The financial press is blaming the stock market decline on the bond downgrade. However, stocks are falling because the economy is falling. Too many jobs have been moved offshore.

The beltway-bottom-feeders know just how to scare their fluoride-head constituents. With the complicity of the corporate controlled media, the task of getting away with murder has been elevated to a supreme political art form. We just witnessed another piece of legislation to destroy Social Security, Medicare and to usurp the US Constitution's power to govern America via a "star chamber" group of 12, bought and paid for political operatives. Their style of government is very reminiscent of Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. Historically borrowers have been going bankrupt for centuries, thus, the conditions in the six European countries in trouble, England and the US, are not at all unusual. The key to preventing insolvency is in the hands of the lenders, the banks. Why do banks make the same mistakes over and over again? Often it is for political expediency but, in today’s cases, it is to break down the financial system as much as possible to force the inhabitants of the US, UK, Europe and the remainder of the world to accept World government. S&P announced August 5, that they have downgraded the U.S. debt rating from AAA to AA+ with a negative outlook.

All major currencies are falling vs. gold and silver, particularly the US dollar and that doesn’t say much for fiat currencies. These weaknesses affect the cost of goods sold in these currencies. Commodities are generally sold in US dollars. If the dollar is falling in terms of gold and silver the price of commodities will rise. As central banks and governments struggle to keep their economies afloat they smother any chance of deflation at least until they have created hyperinflation. The implementation of QE3 and its ultimate cost, probably $2.3 trillion, means that 2 to 2-1/2 years from now we will probably be entering hyperinflation. In the meantime the results of QE1 and stimulus 1 is hitting the economy with 10.6% inflation and 14% by the end of the year. As a result of QE2 and stimulus 2 we see 25% to 30% and when QE3 hits the economy we should approach 50% and hyperinflation. Like the secret issuance by the Fed of $16 trillion, the introduction of QE3 will be by stealth and secret.

The corporate cable news media ignored Wisconsin, and now they are ignoring the protests of regular Americans who want their democracy placed back into their hands. The corporate media have proven time and time again that they are an obstacle to, not a provider of truth. Unlike the bogus tea party movement, the Occupy Wall Street protest features people of all ages, colors, shapes, sizes, and political affiliations. These people are protesting a broken system. They are protesting a loss of freedom. They are protesting inequality, and they are fighting for our rights.

Whether or not the corporate media cameras are in attendance, the protests will go on. Americans will continue to march, and those who love their country will continue to battle to make it better. The conservative media bias of the cable news industry can and will be overcome. We don’t need video to feel the heart of America beat strong.

Free Insider Newsletter

The Golden Years

Instead of valuing the experience and wisdom of our elders, our society openly makes fun of them and treats them as undesirables. If you are afraid of getting old, you are not being irrational. Getting old is indeed something to fear in this society. The truth is that there is simply no way that we can keep all of the financial promises that we have made to elderly Americans even if the most optimistic projections for our economy play out. If the worst happens, we are going to see a lot more elderly Americans eating out of trash cans and freezing to death in their own homes. The United States is facing a retirement crisis of unprecedented magnitude. A comfortable, happy retirement is rapidly going to become a luxury that only the wealthy will enjoy. For most of the rest of us, our golden years are going to mean a whole lot of pain and suffering.

All over America, millions of elderly Americans are wondering if their money is going to run out before it is time for them to die. Those that are now past retirement age are not going to be rioting in the streets, but that doesn’t mean that large numbers of them are not deeply suffering. Approximately 3 out of every 4 Americans start claiming Social Security benefits the moment they are eligible at age 62. Most are doing this out of necessity. Even though prices for necessities such as food and gas have been exploding, those receiving Social Security benefits have not received a cost of living increase for two years in a row. Many elderly Americans that are living on fixed incomes are being squeezed like they have never been squeezed before. There are millions of Americans out there that have done everything “right” all of their lives, but that now find the system letting them down in their golden years.

Remember, not only did you contribute to Social Security but your employer did too. It totaled 15% of your income before taxes. If you averaged only $30K over your working life, that's close to $220,500. If you calculate the future value of $4,500 per year (yours & your employer's contribution) at a simple 5% (less than what the govt. pays on the money that it borrows), after 49 years of working you'd have $892,919.98. If you took out only 3% per year, you'd receive $26,787.60 per year and it would last better than 30 years (until you're 95 if you retire at age 65) and that's with no interest paid on that final amount on deposit! If you bought an annuity and it paid 4% per year, you'd have a lifetime income of $2,976.40 per month. The folks in Washington have pulled off a bigger Ponzi scheme than Bernie Madhoff ever had. Entitlement my ass, we paid cash for our social security insurance!!!! Just because they borrowed the money, doesn't make our benefits some kind of charity or handout!! Congressional benefits--free healthcare, outrageous retirement packages, 67 paid holidays, three weeks paid vacation, unlimited paid sick days, now that's welfare, and they have the nerve to call our social security retirement entitlements? We're "broke" and can't help our own Seniors, Veterans, Orphans, Homeless.

In the last months we have provided aid to Haiti, Chile, and Turkey. And now Pakistan ......home of bin Laden. Literally, BILLIONS of DOLLARS!!! Our retired seniors living on a 'fixed income' receive no aid nor do they get any breaks while our government and religious organizations pour Hundreds of Billions of $$$$$$'s and Tons of Food to Foreign Countries! They call Social Security and Medicare an entitlement even though most of us have been paying for it all our working lives and now when it’s time for us to collect, the government is running out of money. Why did the government borrow from it in the first place? Imagine if the *GOVERNMENT* gave 'US' the same support they give to other countries.

We tend to treat elderly Americans like garbage. There are millions of elderly Americans that are leading lives of “quiet desperation” as they try to get by on meager fixed incomes. Many are surviving on Ramen noodles, oatmeal, peanut butter or whatever other cheap food they can find in the stores. There are some that are so short on cash that they will not turn on the heat in their homes until things get really desperate. As health care costs soar, millions of elderly Americans find themselves deep in debt and facing huge medical bills that they cannot possibly pay. A lot of older Americans would go back to work if they could, but jobs are scarce and very few companies seem to even want to consider hiring them.

On January 1st, 2011 the very first Baby Boomers turned 65. From then on, every single day more than 10,000 Baby Boomers reach the age of 65. That is going to keep happening every single day for the next 19 years. A massive tsunami of retirees is coming, and America is not ready for it. Sadly, most retirees have not adequately prepared for retirement. For many, the recent economic downturn absolutely devastated their retirement plans. Many were counting on the equity in their homes, but the recent housing crash crushed those dreams. All over the United States predatory lenders are coldly and cruelly foreclosing on elderly homeowners. Others had their 401ks shredded by the stock market. Over 30 percent of all U.S. investors currently in their sixties have more than 80 percent of their 401k retirement plans invested in equities. Meanwhile, corporate pension plans all across America are vastly underfunded. Many state and local government pension programs are absolute disasters. The federal government has already begun to pay out significantly more in Social Security benefits than they are taking in, and the years ahead are projected to be downright apocalyptic for the Social Security program.

Today you will find a disturbingly large number of elderly Americans flipping burgers or welcoming people to Wal-Mart. But most of them are not doing it because they are bored with retirement. Rather, most of them are working as wage slaves because that is what they have to do in order to survive. Americans that are 55 years of age or older now account for 20 percent of all bankruptcies in the United States. Most of the bankruptcies among the elderly are caused by our deeply corrupt health care system. According to a report published in The American Journal of Medicine, medical bills are a major factor in more than 60 percent of the personal bankruptcies in the United States. Of those bankruptcies that were caused by medical bills, approximately 75 percent of them involved individuals that actually already have health insurance. The U.S. government now says that the Medicare trust fund will run dry five years faster than they were projecting just last year.

Social Security

Why did Bernie Madoff go to prison? To make it simple, he talked people into investing with him. Trouble was, he didn't invest their money. As time rolled on he simply took the money from the new investors to pay off the old investors. Finally there were too many old investors and not enough money from new investors coming in to keep the payments going. Next thing you know Madoff is one of the most hated men in America and he is off to jail. Some of you know this. But not enough of you. Madoff did to his investors what the government has been doing to us for over 70 years with Social Security. There is no meaningful difference between the two schemes, except that one was operated by a private individual who is now in jail, and the other is operated by politicians who enjoy perks, privileges and status in spite of their actions.

BERNIE MADOFF	SOCIAL SECURITY
Takes money from investors with the promise that the money will be invested and made available to them later.	Takes money from wage earners with the promise that the money will be invested in a "Trust Fund" (Lock Box) and made available later.
Instead of investing the money Madoff spends it on nice homes in the Hamptons and yachts.	Instead of depositing money in a Trust Fund the politicians transfer it to the General Revenue Fund and use it for general spending and vote buying.
When the time comes to pay the investors back Madoff simply uses some of the new funds from newer investors to pay back the older investors.	When benefits for older investors become due the politicians pay them with money taken from younger and newer wage earners to pay the older geezers.
When Madoff's scheme is discovered all hell breaks loose. New investors w on't give him any more cash.	When Social Security runs out of money the politicians try to force the taxpayers to send them some more; or they cancel S/S to all those who paid into it.
Bernie Madoff is in jail.	Politicians remain in Washington .. With fat medical and retirement benefits.

'The taxpayer: That's someone who works for the federal government but doesn't have to take the civil service examination.'

Remember, not only did you contribute to Social Security but your employer did too. It totaled 15% of your income before taxes. If you averaged only $30K over your working life, that's close to $220,500. If you calculate the future value of $4,500 per year (yours & your employer's contribution) at a simple 5% (less than what the govt. pays on the money that it borrows), after 49 years of working (that was me) you'd have $892,919.98.

If you took out only 3% per year, you'd receive $26,787.60 per year and it would last better than 30 years (until you're 95 if you retire at age 65) and that's with no interest paid on that final amount on deposit! If you bought an annuity and it paid 4% per year, you'd have a lifetime income of $2,976.40 per month. The folks in Washington have pulled off a bigger Ponzi scheme than Bernie Madhoff ever had.

They call Social Security and Medicare an entitlement even though most of us have been paying for it all our working lives and now when its time for us to collect, the government is running out of money. Why did the government borrow from it in the first place? Entitlement??? We paid cash for our social security insurance!!!! Just because they borrowed the money, doesn't make my benefits some kind of charity or handout!! Congressional benefits, aka, free healthcare, outrageous retirement packages, 67 paid holidays, three weeks paid vacation, unlimited paid sick days, now that's welfare, and they have the nerve to call social security retirement entitlements?

We're "broke" and can't help our own Seniors, Veterans, Orphans, Homeless etc.! In the Last months we have provided aid to Haiti, Chile, and Turkey. And now Pakistan......home of bin Laden. Literally, BILLIONS of DOLLARS!!! Our retired seniors living on a 'fixed income' receive no aid nor do they get any breaks while our government and religious organizations pour Hundreds of Billions of $$$$$$'s and Tons of Food to Foreign Countries!

Imagine if the "GOVERNMENT" gave 'US' the same support they give to other countries.

F.U.B.A.R.

The power of life and death over what’s left of the American economy and the millions of people who depend on Social Security checks now rests in the hands of twelve bought off officials who will make up the new Super Congress. According to NPR, Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor, Harry Reid, and Mitch McConnell could be tapped to serve as the top destroyers of America, taking direct orders from the criminal bankers on Wall Street. The Super Congress will use dictatorial powers to bypass constitutional checks and balances and ram a fascist agenda through the Congress under the flawed premise that they are bringing the fiscal house in order. What is not mentioned is that America’s fiscal house was destroyed when Congress was bullied into handing over trillions of dollars to banks that committed fraud in September 2008. That act of high treason was preceded by another act of high treason seven years earlier, when the Bush administration staged the false flag 9/11 attacks. The attacks were used to justify a manufactured war on terrorism that has channeled trillions of dollars from the American people into a tiny oligarchy that controls the financial-military-industrial complex. But that history is missing in the corporate media. Instead of informing the American people about the robbery and treason that has taken place, news anchors and reporters are spreading lies and disinformation that Social Security is an unfunded liability and needs to be cut in order for America to have a sound economic future.

The Peter G. Peterson Foundation is behind a billion dollar propaganda campaign that is injecting these lies into the media to control the political discourse and help the financial parasites and oligarchs to loot Social Security and Medicare. Peterson is a connected insider and a surrogate for the financial parasites that have occupied and looted America since the creation of the private Federal Reserve Bank in 1913. Peterson served as the Chairman of the corrupt Council on Foreign Relations from 1985 to 2007, following the chairmanship of David Rockefeller. He was also Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York from 2000 to 2004, the most important of the Federal Reserve banks. Peterson’s aims are the aims of the global private banking cartel that wants to get rid of the social safety net, destroy the American middle class, abolish nation states, and establish a new world authoritarian government that they will control.

If Pete Peterson, David Rockefeller, and other criminal financiers have their way, the American people’s pensions will be looted along with America’s national infrastructure as soon as they are privatized and handed over to politically connected banks and corporations. The crooks in the Super Congress will try to sell the massive rip-off to the American people as “fiscal sanity.” Once the riots begin and martial law is declared, the Super Congress will take over and run Washington while the rest of the Congress will be told to go home for their own safety. The media propaganda machine might say something like: “Congressmen and Senators are being threatened with assassination as protests increase in Washington, so for their own safety they have been sent back to their districts with security guards assigned to them. Meanwhile, the Super Congress that was created back in August will stay behind to carry out their congressional duties.” Can you see the bigger picture? It may not be evident now, but in six months or a year from now we will see the real reasons why the Super Congress was created.

Can you see the death and destruction that awaits America because of the treason that has been committed against the American people and U.S. Constitution? The reason this new power grab by the Super Congress is so dangerous is because it represents the official end of constitutional government in the United States. Combine the power of the Super Congress with the power of dictatorial executive orders that have been used by Bush and Obama, and what you get is the absolute destruction of freedom, the American Constitution, and the rule of law.

The Super overlords in the new imperial Congress and President Obama will force austerity cuts on the American people, just like the paid-off politicians are doing in Greece. America will go through what Greece is going through right now, and what Argentina went through in the beginning of the last decade except it will be ten times worse in America. The traitorous and criminal parasites who control the private Federal Reserve Bank, IMF, WTO, and World Bank are responsible for the collapse of nations and the destruction of national economies. They are not capitalists and representatives of the free-market, they are corporate fascists and oligarchical monopolists. So don’t blame capitalism for America’s destruction. Blame plutocracy. Blame stupidity. Blame media brainwashing. Blame treason.

August 15 marks the 40th anniversary of the United States' abandonment of the last vestiges of the gold standard (actually a gold-exchange standard under the Bretton Woods system ratified by Congress in 1945. In President Richard Nixon's address to the nation on that fateful day in 1971, where he compounded his economic error by imposing wage and price controls and a 10% tariff on imported goods, he announced: "I have directed the Secretary of the Treasury to take the action necessary to defend the dollar against the speculators. I have directed Secretary [John] Connally to suspend temporarily the convertibility of the dollar into gold or other reserve assets, except in amounts and conditions determined to be in the interests of monetary stability and in the best interests of the United States."

The "speculators" were blamed for the nation's economic ills—just as they were during the financial and housing crisis of 2008 and the European debt crisis now—rather than unsustainable central bank credit expansions and government spending. Note also that this government directive was purportedly a temporary measure.

The dollar has lost 82% of its purchasing power since the government abandoned the Bretton Woods system. The Bretton Woods system was not a classical gold standard, so it ultimately proved to be unsustainable, but the fiat (paper) money system that replaced it was destined to be even worse. Freed of any constraints on printing ever more money out of thin air, the United States, through the Federal Reserve, has run the printing presses with impunity (as has the rest of the world), resulting in higher inflation and an even more rapid devaluation of the currency. Gold climbed to about $800 an ounce within a decade.

Politicians hate the gold standard because it prevents them from supporting unsustainable spending habits by printing money to pay off ever-expanding debts and passing off the costs to unsuspecting taxpayers through the hidden tax of inflation. A true free market in money would also negate the need for a central bank monopoly and all the machinations it uses to expand credit and create volatile asset bubbles and excessively painful corrections. This is why the gold standard is said to be critical to preserving freedom, and why the Fed's expansion of its balance sheet by trillions of dollars in recent years is so alarming. The surest way to put an end to government manipulations of the monetary system and get the economy on a healthy growth path once again is to return to a classical gold standard because the only money "as good as gold" is gold.

The 400 richest Americans used to pay 30% of their income on the average to Uncle Sam. Today, they pay 18% on the average. The main reason for the drop in their tax rate of some 40% is the tax cuts by George Bush in 2003, taking the rate paid on dividends and capital gains down to 15%. This reduction in the investment class’s taxes powered the bull market in stocks from the fall of 2003 until the fall of 2007. Shockingly, the plan to raise the debt ceiling collects nothing from the wealthiest Americans to reduce our budget deficit.

Obama is saying that if a solution is not found by August 2nd, that he will let US bonds fall into default and terminate government’s Social Security obligations. To loot Social Security is absurd, because there is nothing to loot. The bonds held in behalf of the Social Security Trust are valueless. They cannot be traded on the open market and must be redeemed by the US government, which is broke. All the President has to do is issue new bonds, sell them to the Fed, and fund SS and Medicare for that matter. The extension of the short-term debt solves nothing and only throws problems into the future. Like so many things the elitists do, the debt extension is a distraction. The congressional game is being played to keep people’s attention away from the very real economic and financial problems. How can anyone believe that creating more debt will solve the debt problem?

For 25 years the war on terror has been the excuse to move forward most any agenda. The latest is that is why we need the debt extension. That is totally ludicrous foolishness some actually believe. There is little talk of making real budget cuts or raising taxes. Almost the entire House is interested in maintaining the status quo. Congress is a sad lot. They are happy to receive the benefits of deficit spending without additional taxation. They know very well the way to reducing the budget deficit is to cut military spending. Because the military and industrial machine has paid these so-called public servants too much money in campaign contributions to say no. Deficit spending is never going to end until the rules are changed or there is revolution. 95% of both parties have sold out, so how can anyone expect change.

The debt limit negotiations are not what they appear to be. The negotiations are being used as a diversion to cover up a devious plan to push the USA into a default. Americans are being 'played like a fiddle,' all the theater is a smokescreen for what is taking place behind the scenes. A select number of US Senators are in collusion with Barack Obama to bring about an intentional economic default, declare Martial Law, and then bring about a dissolution of the Senate and the House of Representatives. This plan has been engineered and ordered by the New World Order Financial Elite who put Obama into power.

In the days immediately following the hard-fought agreement to raise the country's debt ceiling, Americans voice an historic level of criticism of Congress, and disillusionment with leaders in Washington. According to a CBS News/New York Times Poll released Thursday August 4, 2011, Just 14% now approve of Congress, and disapproval is at an all-time high. Majorities disapprove of how both parties have handled the debt ceiling negotiations, and 84% are dissatisfied or angry with the government in Washington. Americans are split on how President Barack Obama handled the negotiations, and on his approval rating overall. Americans are also divided on the agreement reached to raise the debt ceiling itself: 46% approve and 45% disapprove. Just under half think the spending cuts mandated in the agreement did not go far enough; Republicans and Tea Party supporters are especially likely to feel that way. 86% say the economy is in bad shape, the highest percentage in two years, and most don't think the debt ceiling deal will make it better.

The U.S. debt is totally out of control—now sitting at $14.3 Trillion, raising the debt ceiling will only buy a little more time until a massive crash takes place and total chaos ensues—both economic and physical; a total fall of the republic. The so-called debt ceiling crisis has nothing to do with the government running out of money. It is about the creation of a super-committee, a council of thirteen, designed to circumvent Congress and ignore the will of the American people. The ruling elite have a plan to take America down. The handpicked "super Congress"—six members from the Senate, six from the House, and the president forming a committee or gang of 13—will now push through the elite's agenda behind closed doors in direct violation of the Constitution. This plan would essentially create a national high council of liberal and conservative elites who could completely circumvent Congress. If the American people do not immediately start a large scale protest movement against this Super Congress our country is dead as we know it. Regardless of campaign rhetoric, 99% of politicians from both parties have long ago sold out to gigantic multinational corporations. No transparency, no accountability, unconstitutional, and outright illegal. How much more will you take America?

Like the Supreme Soviet, the Council of 13 will take on the trappings of democracy—because the committee was proposed by elected officials, namely Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and his counterpart Majority Leader Harry Reid with the consent House Speaker John Boehner—but will act as dictatorship by committee. If allowed to stand, the United States will have its own Central Committee, just like the former Soviet Union. The Constitution allows each house of Congress to set its own rules. Early on, debate and filibuster were added to the rules. The Committee of 13, however, will strip Congress of its power to filibuster. It will prevent the Speaker from stopping a vote in the House. It will fast-track the entire globalist agenda—from carbon taxes to the total destruction of the Second Amendment. It will end amendments to laws and only allow an up or down vote on legislation. It will turn Congress into a rubber stamp even more than it is already.

In their wisdom, the framers envisioned the House as a place of heated debate and the Senate as more staid place where rhetoric would cool down. It has its origins in the concept integral to our political system that the rights of the minority must be protected from the force of the majority. The idea and practice of a super Congress, a Committee of 13, puts an end to this tradition. It is a totalitarian steamroller. By voting for the so-called debt ceiling bill, both houses of Congress are voting to legitimize the Soviet-style super committee of 13 globalist grocery clerks. It is another step by the elite to throw the Constitution under the bus.

As a first step, the Gang of 13 will impose taxation as a solution to the astronomical debt placed on the American people by the international bankers who own the private Federal Reserve. A super committee will be required to keep the debt and debt slavery scam going now that an increasing number of Americans understand that the Fed is nothing but a money printing machine designed to devalue the worth of our currency under the guise of stimulating the economy and the perpetually unfulfilled promise to create jobs and prosperity. It is contempt for the Constitution and the intellectual and spiritual laziness of our so-called representatives that has allowed this atrocious state of affairs to exist under the excuse of confronting a debt the American people do not owe.

Now that the Super Congress drops any vestige of equal representation within the House or the Senate, many people ask what is next? The concept of a republic form of government is a core element that separates the American experience from that of most “so called” democratic countries. Direct political action will be required to put and end to this monstrosity. Short of that, we can expect another dagger to be stuck in the heart of our liberty as the global elite continue step by step to build their authoritarian control structure designed to turn the earth into a sprawling slave labor gulag and plantation. Most oblivious taxpayers do not even know that the death of the constitution occurred well before any of us were born. Yet, the country carries along with the myth that out vote counts in elections and that we have representation in the halls and corridors of government.

Former head of the Government Accountability Office and Comptroller General of the United States, David Walker has issued a stark warning following the compromise deal to raise the debt ceiling. “We are less than three years away from where Greece had its debt crisis as to where they were from debt to GDP,” Walker highlighted in an interview with CNBC August 3. Greece’s ratio of debt to GDP has surpassed 100% and is heading towards 150%, a factor that has meant without bailouts from the EU and the IMF, the country would have defaulted. The US is now nearing the same 100% margin with GDP growth floundering below 1%. “We should recognize that this could be a leading indicator for us,” Walker said, adding that something must be done now to significantly restructure government spending if a major collapse is to be avoided in the future. “We are not exempt from a debt crisis,” he said. “We’re never going to default, because we can print money. At the same point in time, we have serious interest rate risk, we have serious currency risk, we have serious inflation risk over time. If it happens, it will be sudden and it will be very painful.”

The 14th Amendment states: “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.” This is the new tactic that the powers that be plan on using to obtain their goal (create more debt). Obama can also use PDD51 or other Executive Orders provided to him under Pandemic Level 6 (which was extended by Obama until March of 2012) to raise the debt ceiling. Pandemic Level 6 gives them all they need to do what ever they want, we are technically in a silent martial law. Obama stated that “Any solution to avoid the default must be bipartisan, supported by both parties and the American people, not just one faction.” But yet, one faction (Obama and the powers that be) will use Executive Orders to get this passed.

What would extending the debt really do, but bring us more into debt, more into trouble as stocks and paper money dwindle to nothing. The DOW fell as the August 2 deadline approaches. Investors are worried about the country's AAA credit rating. Expect to see even more of a staged circus sideshow in the coming days and possibly some type of major staged event.

We have reached fiscal insanity. According to a brand new ABC News/Washington Post poll, 80 percent of Americans say that they are either dissatisfied or angry with the government. Americans are deeply divided about what the solutions to our problems are, but what almost everyone can agree on is that our problems are getting worse. The United States is a declining power. Every month our nation is bleeding more jobs, more factories and more wealth. Every month our debt problems on the federal, state and local levels get even worse. We have been living far beyond our means for decades, and we are rapidly getting to the point where that simply will not be possible anymore. We are now starting to pay the price for decades of bad decisions. As the consequences of our decisions become more apparent, the American people are going to get angrier and angrier.

Can the next major crisis come from the student loan market? There is currently close to $1 trillion in student loan debt outstanding. College costs are soaring while incomes are stagnant or falling. So you have graduates coming out with heavier debt burdens and their incomes are much lower. It is a mathematical problem that was destined to cause issues. It is an odd sort of American situation where the economy contracts but the student loan market is exploding. No other country faces this kind of issue. Yet this is symptomatic of our current perpetual bubble banking system that is designed to increase liquidity in all sorts of markets so Wall Street traders can make a buck on suckering the public into more debt from previously secure sectors like housing or even education. The fact that more debt is being taken on is troubling for a variety of reasons but one of the most insidious is the fact that many recent graduates are starting to pay on loans with no jobs or jobs that pay just enough to get by. This is the issue of a low wage capitalism system that has a financial system designed to filter money back to the top one percent through crony politics and protection. No other sector in our economy has seen costs rise so quickly like those of colleges. Tuition and fees have far outpaced every other sector in our economy even surpassing items like healthcare and housing which is hard to believe. But just like housing, since incomes have gone nowhere for decades people are simply financing the pursuit without looking at the real long-term costs of what they are diving into. Being educated is incredibly important. That goes without saying. But how much is too much when it comes to tuition?

We are closing in on an event that will “set fire to the heart of the global financial system. There is a shock coming soon, probably in the autumn of 2011 where the collective experience will literally be the ground giving way beneath our feet as the underpinnings of our global financial system come apart. Every tick upward of interest rates will ring the bells of doom since servicing trillions upon trillions of debt becomes that much more impossible. Consumers are increasingly “using credit cards to pay for basic necessities as income gains fail to keep pace with rising food and fuel prices. Consumers, particularly in the lower-income end, are being forced to use their credit cards for everyday spending because there’s been no other positive catalyst, like an increase in wages, to offset higher prices. It’s a cash-flow problem. It is not only governments that are in serious trouble but an entire generation or even two generations that are drowning in debt and fiscal insanity. There are perhaps a billion debt slaves in the world and we can count most countries within those numbers.

We The Sheeple

What you could buy for $1.00 in 1965 will cost you $7.17 today. Sadly, the devaluation of our money is actually accelerating. That is one reason why we are seeing precious metals soar right now. Not only that, but the Federal Reserve was also designed to be a perpetual government debt creation machine. We’re on a collision course with the Euro Currency with the finish line at the bottom of the barrel. First, the credit card companies reduce everyone’s credit limits, even if they’ve never been late, and claim it’s important we all reduce our debt. Yet, this is not what the central banks do to cure their own malfeasance, they print and lie about it, then print more, and no one goes to jail. The Federal Reserve gave Libya $2 billion and no one is questioning Geithner or Bernanke, WTF is going on here? These guys should be in jail.

The American government cannot pay its bills, not with real money at least, only with the fabricated stuff, the kind of money that can be created out of thin air. Its funny money and it is taking the whole world down to a place where it will probably take many decades from which to recover. Congressman Ron Paul said, “It isn’t too late to return to fiscal sanity. We could start by canceling out the debt held by the Federal Reserve, which would clear $1.6 trillion under the debt ceiling. Or we could cut trillions of dollars in spending by bringing our troops home from overseas, making gradual reforms to Social Security and Medicare, and bringing the federal government back within the limits envisioned by the Constitution. Yet no one is willing to step up to the plate and make the hard decisions that are necessary. Everyone wants to kick the can down the road and believe that deficit spending can continue unabated.”

Contemporary civilization has already committed financial suicide and we are now just waiting for the poison to take full effect, but many millions are already feeling the poison flooding through their veins. The only answer the governments have been able to come up with to resolve the situation is to drink much more poison (debt) and ram it down the throats of their citizens. The future of the world is at stake and we have mad politicians at the helm so we do indeed have much to be concerned about.

Eventually the dumbed-down, medicated American taxpayer will get so fed up with this bunch of spineless morons in Washington—Republican and Democrat—they are going to demand we take real action with real numbers; cut through the crap and start dealing with this debt and we CAN do it. President Obama and his allies in Congress believe they know better than you do what is in your own best interest. There is little desire or regard for the middle class from the people at the top of the human heap because a big portion of their wealth is derived from robbing the lower classes. The Federal Reserve acts at the top of the line as the greatest robber of them all, raping the entire system to serve the people at the top.

The United States currently has more than $14 trillion in official National Debt. There is another $50 trillion in unofficial debt to deal with the promised benefits of Medicare, Social Security and government pensions, not to mention Medicaid and ObamaCare, which will add even more. Forget about the National Debt Ceiling. In fact, it would probably good if the US Credit Rating is downgraded by the rating agencies because just maybe it will shake our elected representatives into doing what is necessary to prevent the bankruptcy of the United States. Right now, there is no viable plan in place to begin paying off the $14.3 trillion debt on the books let alone dealing with Social Security, Medicare and federal pensions. Our current National Debt is fast approaching 100% of annual US Gross Domestic Product. In other words, the Debt is equivalent to all the good and services produced and sold in the United states each year. Though a downgrade of the US credit rating would be very painful, causing higher interest rates and a likely stock market crash in the short term, in the long run it might be just the medicine needed to force Washington politicians, including Socialist Obama, to face reality.

The real story relates to the National Debt itself and unfunded liabilities for Social Security, Medicare and federal pensions. This is the time bomb that will explode on the American people in the years ahead. Unfortunately, it is likely to take a complete financial collapse before our elected Representatives and particularly Socialists will do what is necessary to preserve and protect our nation. Like junkies on a crack habit, Obama and his Socialist pals in Congress will be forced to go cold turkey because at some point the capital markets won't be there to bail them out with more borrowing. It is time for our country to take control of our destiny because if we don't, foreign countries will dictate our fate as is happening in Greece and Ireland. If that were to occur, there would be civil strife on our streets. We can do it. We must do it to preserve our freedom, our nation and way of life for the sake of our children and grandchildren.

In the end, the story is not about the National Debt Ceiling; but rather the National Debt. Our nation is drowning in an ocean of debt, jobs are being shipped overseas at an alarming rate, thousands of stores are closing, poverty is exploding, greed has become a national pastime and corruption is seemingly everywhere. The American people are incredibly frustrated because the vast majority of our “leaders” appear to be too incompetent or too corrupt to deal with our problems. The health insurance companies keep jacking up rates on all of us, and yet they also continue to report record breaking profits. The amount of wealth leaving our country and being transferred to the rest of the world is absolutely mind blowing.

The United States has wasted some $34 billion on service contracts with the private sector in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a study being finalized for Congress. The analysis by the Commission on Wartime Contracting, details of which were first reported by the Wall Street Journal, offers the most complete look so far at the misuse of U.S. contracting funds in Afghanistan and Iraq, where more than $200 billion has been doled out in the contracts and grants over nearly a decade. More than 200,000 contractors have been on the U.S. payroll at times in Iraq and Afghanistan--outstripping the number of U.S. troops currently on the ground in those countries. The United States has fewer than 100,000 troops in Afghanistan and some 46,000 forces in Iraq.

The private Federal Reserve gives out tens of billions of dollars of nearly interest-free loans to their bankster friends while tens of millions of American families desperately try to survive an economic downturn that was caused by those same banksters. Thanks to insane tax loopholes, a substantial percentage of the billions of dollars of income that hedge fund managers make is only taxed at a maximum rate of 15 percent. Meanwhile, middle class American families are being absolutely hammered with taxes. Our tax system is fundamentally unjust. An example: General Electric is a favorite of the Obama administration and somehow they get away with not paying taxes year after year. The company reported worldwide profits of $14.2 billion, and said $5.1 billion of the total came from its operations in the United States. Its American tax bill was zero. In fact, G.E. claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion.

Americans have always complained about the government, but the madness that we are seeing today is really unprecedented in modern U.S. history. Something has fundamentally changed. The U.S. government and most of our other major societal institutions are rapidly losing the faith of the American people. According to Newsweek, close to one out of every five American men between the ages of 25 and 54 does not have a job at the moment. So why is the “greatest economy on earth” unable to provide jobs for nearly 20 percent of the men that are in their prime working years?

6 Monolithic Corporations Control Almost Everything We Watch, Hear And Read

The U.S. media landscape is dominated by massive corporations that, through a history of mergers and acquisitions, have concentrated their control over what we see, hear and read. In many cases, these giant companies are vertically integrated, controlling everything from initial production to final distribution. They don't call it "programming" for nothing.

Back in 1983, approximately 50 corporations controlled the vast majority of all news media in the United States. Today, ownership of the news media has been concentrated in the hands of just six incredibly powerful media corporations. These corporate behemoths control most of what we watch, hear and read every single day. They own television networks, cable channels, movie studios, newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, music labels and even many of our favorite websites. Sadly, most Americans don't even stop to think about who is feeding them the endless hours of news and entertainment that they constantly ingest. Most Americans don't really seem to care about who owns the media. But they should. The truth is that each of us is deeply influenced by the messages that are constantly being pounded into our heads by the mainstream media. The average American watches 153 hours of television a month. In fact, most Americans begin to feel physically uncomfortable if they go too long without watching or listening to something. Sadly, most Americans have become absolutely addicted to news and entertainment and the ownership of all that news and entertainment that we crave is being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands each year.

The six corporations that collectively control U.S. media today are Time Warner, Walt Disney, Viacom, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., CBS Corporation and NBC Universal. Together, the "big six" absolutely dominate news and entertainment in the United States. But even those areas of the media that the "big six" do not completely control are becoming increasingly concentrated. For example, Clear Channel now owns over 1000 radio stations across the United States. Companies like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft are increasingly dominating the Internet. But it is the "big six" that are the biggest concerns. When you control what Americans watch, hear and read you gain a great deal of control over what they think. Back in 1983 it was bad enough that about 50 corporations dominated U.S. media. But since that time, power over the media has rapidly become concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people....

These gigantic media corporations do not exist to objectively tell the truth to the American people. Rather, the primary purpose of their existence is to make money. These gigantic media corporations are not going to do anything to threaten their relationships with their biggest advertisers (such as the largest pharmaceutical companies and junk food corporations, that literally spend billions on advertising), and one way or another these gigantic media corporations are always going to express the ideological viewpoints of their owners.

The American corporate-controlled establishment media presents a picture of the world that is meant to placate and pacify the people of the United States in favor of presenting reality as it is. While much of the economies of the world are in shambles, uprisings both real and manufactured are occurring around the globe, brutal police crackdowns are taking place in the United States and the federal governmentis attempting to legalize indefinite military detention of civilians, even American citizens, without trial or charge, they opt for fluff stories with little-to-no meaning whatsoever. The “infotainment” industry appeals to the lowest common denominator instead of attempting to inform and educate their audience. A recent study found that viewers of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News are actually less informed about current events than people who watched no news at all. While this probably seems like a somewhat obvious conclusion to anyone who has sat down and watched Fox News, the fact that it was actually shown in a study is quite surprising.

How can this happen? Is it just that they are seeking to entertain and not really inform? Or are news outlets like Murdoch’s Fox News actually there to make the American people perpetually ignorant? The mainstream media presents such a limited spectrum of the information out there, especially when it comes to broadcast television, that it is hard to believe that it could simply be a natural result of the push for ratings over all else. The world view presented by the establishment media is so consistent and carefully crafted. Thankfully, there is the alternative media which is growing independent of traditional news organizations and funding sources thanks to readers and business owners who are willing to support the new wave in journalism.

Do you think that anyone in the mainstream news would actually tell you that the Federal Reserve is bad for America or that we are facing a horrific derivatives bubble that could destroy the entire world financial system? Do you think that anyone in the mainstream media would actually tell you the truth about the deindustrialization of America or the truth about the voracious greed of Goldman Sachs? Sure there are a few courageous reporters in the mainstream media that manage to slip a few stories past their corporate bosses from time to time, but in general there is a very clear understanding that there are simply certain things that you just do not say in the mainstream news. But Americans are becoming increasingly hungry for the truth, and they are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the dumbed-down pablum that is passing as "hard hitting news" these days. Fortunately, an increasing number of Americans are starting to wake up and are realizing that the mainstream media should not be trusted.

A number of student organizers in the US have unveiled what they call an 'Occupy Student Debt' campaign, urging borrowers across the country to default on their college loans. The student movement has four major objectives, apart from convincing all students to default on their loans, a move for which they have collected one million signatures in a petition. They want student loans to be interest-free, tuitions at public institutions to be federally funded, students' debt to be written off and financial records of for-profit and private institutions to be made public. For students faced with debt, this campaign is important because it will help provide them with a collective organizing vehicle. The campaign emerged as an offshoot of the OWS, which has now spread across major US cities as well as many capitalist countries in the world. Members of the OWS movement have for months been protesting against corporate greed, unemployment, corruption and poverty in the United States.

The Department of Education shows two-year default rates at for-profit colleges up to 15 percent. Student loan debt is increasing at a rate of $170,000 per minute. We seem to have entered an era of perpetual and unshakeable financial bubbles and the next ripe bubble to burst is in the student loan market. Student loan debt has become the fastest growing debt sector throughout the economic recession. Growth at for-profit colleges has been incredible and tactics used at these institutions reflects patterns seen with the subprime mortgage operators. They target low income markets and exploit government backed loans and pump them through local area lenders. It is a bubble of mammoth proportions and it is no surprise that data released by the Department of Education only a few days ago reflects a default pattern reminiscent of the subprime crisis. Default rates on student loans at for-profit institutions are absolutely abysmal.

The U.S. Department of Education released the official FY 2009 national student loan cohort default rate, which has risen to 8.8 percent, up from 7.0 percent in FY 2008. The cohort default rates increased for all sectors: from 6.0 percent to 7.2 percent for public institutions, from 4.0 percent to 4.6 percent for private institutions, and from 11.6 percent to 15 percent at for-profit schools.

This rate is horrifying. The ways these are measured are reflected by two-year default cohorts so you have 15 percent of the entire group defaulting within two-years! The real default rate is much worse if we tracked these out for the life of the loan. In other words, you have many going to for-profit paper mills and coming out with very little job prospects but with the added burden of massive student loan debt. Clearly the student did not benefit, but the profits at these institutions are enormous. The government-backing is the only way these lenders and schools even survive. There is no question now that the student loan bubble is now the next market to pop.

Norway Attack

The terror attack in Norway represents a textbook example of a "strategy of tension" event designed to create social and political chaos at precisely the moment that resistance to the financial elite and the bankers is growing exponentially. The new terrorism arrives just in time—as large numbers of Europeans reject multiculturalism, mass immigration, and often question the inclusion of their nations into a dictatorial European Union lorded over by unelected apparatchiks who create laws in secret and answer to international bankers and globalists. Millions of Europeans are opposed to bailing out a growing number of countries—Greece soon to be followed by Portugal, Spain, Ireland, and others—hopelessly locked in the maw of a debt scam perpetuated by the IMF, the World Bank, and the European financial and political elite. As demonstrations across Europe—in Spain, Italy, France, Portugal, Lithuania, Latvia, and Germany—have shown, large numbers of Europeans oppose and denounce austerity measures cynically designed to lower living standards and decimate social norms.

Any opposition to the banker scam represents a serious threat to the elite. In order to counter this growing populist movement, the globalists have manufactured the myth of "far right" extremism and the largely bogus threat of xenophobic terror to counter and replace Islamic extremism and terror. At the same time, government is rolling out even more draconian police state measures. In the United States and especially Britain, the police state with its high-tech surveillance technology is already well developed and deployed. The re-branding of terror is the next phase of a contrived war against phantom enemies the global elite are using as a pretext to build their nightmare control grid. Far away enemies hidden in caves represent the old version of international terror. The new version is domestic and therefore more frightening and ominous. The new terror paradigm is designed to inspire fear and loathing and will accomplish its goal of total enslavement if we remain ignorant and unquestioningly accept the fallacy. They are trying to create separateness amongst us to divert attention away from themselves.

Today, over half of all American families live paycheck to paycheck. According to a new Gallup poll, "lack of money/low wages" is the number one financial concern for American families. To make ends meet, many American families are going into even more debt and more American families than ever are turning to government assistance.

10 facts about the financial condition of American families that will blow your mind:

#2 Only 56 percent of Americans are currently covered by employer-provided health insurance.

#5 Only the top 5 percent of U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.

#6 At this point, American families are approximately 7.7 trillion dollars poorer than they were back in early 2007.

#7 The poorest 50% of all Americans now own just 2.5% of all the wealth in the United States.

#8 According to one study, approximately 21 percent of all children in the United States were living below the poverty line in 2010.

#9 Today, there are more than 44 million Americans on food stamps, and nearly half of them are children.

#10 According to Newsweek, close to 20 percent of all American men between the ages of 25 and 54 do not have a job at the moment.

This country is a complete and total mess. Tens of millions of American families are flat broke and are about to slip into poverty. Our politicians continue to prove that they are some of the most corrupt on the planet. Our politicians promised us that merging our economy with the economies of other nations where it is legal to pay slave labor wages to workers would not create more unemployment inside America. They were dead wrong. Now we are being told that we just need to accept a lower standard of living. It doesn't take a genius to figure out where all of our jobs are going. But unfortunately, most Americans don't understand what is happening because neither the mainstream media nor our politicians are telling them the truth. Hiring workers has become so complicated and so expensive that many small business owners want to avoid it at all cost.

As our economic system continues to degenerate, Americans are going to become increasingly desperate. Desperate people do desperate things. Already we are starting to see signs that the fabric of American society is starting to be ripped to shreds. Across the financial sector, many are preparing for a debt doomsday scenario, in which the U.S does in fact default, the New York Times reports. Firms are "taking steps to reduce the risk of holding Treasury bonds or angling for ways to make profits from any possible upheaval." It's clear hedgefunds have changed gears and many are in heavy de-risking mode, with billion dollar firms like Moore Capital and Soros Fund Management moving their flagships into majority cash. This was a tactic implemented by a ton of hedge funds when the financial world imploded in 2008--so it's a very big statement on how bad they think things may get.

The “too big to fail” banks now control 77 percent of all of the banking assets in the country. Last year, over a million homes were repossessed by financial institutions. This year a similar number of repossessions is expected. The government keeps telling us that the economy is improving, and yet more stores keep closing. Government services all over the nation are being cut back. An atmosphere of austerity has descended on the entire country. Corruption appears to be rampant on every level of American society today. We are in so much debt to China that we have to constantly be concerned about how they feel about our financial status. The national debt continues to spiral out of control and our politicians seem unwilling to do anything serious about it. Our politicians see no problem with running trillion dollar deficits year after year. No wonder the American people are losing faith. It is hard to keep believing when you see rampant corruption and decay everywhere you look. Unless our politicians do something dramatic, the federal government is headed straight toward financial hell.

All over the United States, highways, water treatment plants, libraries, parking meters, airports and power plants are being sold off (much of the time to foreigners) in order to plug short-term holes in state and local budgets. The U.S. housing crash shows no signs of abating. Real estate construction is absolutely dead. In fact, right now we are on track for the lowest number of total housing completions that the U.S. government has ever recorded in a single year. Without good jobs, the American people cannot afford to buy homes. Many of those that do have good incomes are being turned down by mortgage lenders. The value of U.S. homes has fallen by a total of approximately 6.6 trillion dollars since the peak of the housing market. It isn’t just banks that are kicking people out of their homes. All over the country, homeowners’ associations are aggressively using their powers to boot American families out on to the streets. Instead of being used by families, all over the country thousands of foreclosed homes are rapidly filling up with mold.

The number of Americans that are going to food pantries and soup kitchens has increased by 46% since 2006. But instead of being treated with kindness, many communities are treating the growing ranks of the poor as “outcasts” or criminals. Authorities continue to insist that violent crime is going down, and yet the number of police officers killed by gunfire is on pace to easily set another all-time record for the second year in a row.

You Can Stop Foreclosure

Right now, we are witnessing a truly historic collapse of the economy, and yet most Americans do not understand what is going on. One of the biggest reasons why the American people do not understand what is happening to the economy is because the criminal syndicate that masquerades as elected representatives just continue their schemes of deceit and subterfuge and the mainstream media are not telling the truth. We’ve seen not billions, but trillions upon trillions of dollars committed to bank bailouts, toxic asset purchases, stock market liquidity infusion, so-called job creation programs, tax breaks and mortgage modifications. The Obama administration has taken every opportunity to tout these programs as evidence of success. Barack Obama and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke keep repeating the phrase “economic recovery” over and over, and this is really confusing for most Americans because things sure don’t seem to be getting much better where they live.

On the one hand, we’re told that the recovery, albeit slower than expected, is in full swing. On the other hand, Tim Geithner told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that it’s a very tough economy. "Many Americans will face hard times for a long time to come." He says that for a lot of people “it’s going to feel very hard, harder than anything they’ve experienced in their lifetime now, for a long time to come.” Geithner says it will be some time before many people feel like the country is recovering. Of course, Geithner is a large part of the reason that it will be so hard. To say that what Americans are facing will be “harder than anything they’ve experienced in their lifetime now, for a long time to come” is very, very strong language.

There are millions upon millions of Americans that are sitting at home on their couches right now wondering why they lost their jobs and why nobody will hire them. Millions of others are wondering why the only jobs they can get are jobs that a high school student could do. Families all across America are wondering why it seems like their wages never go up but the price of food and the price of gas continue to skyrocket. According to Forbes, the United States has been losing an average of 50,000 manufacturing jobs per month since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. There are no signs that our rampant unemployment problem is going to end any time soon. In fact, right now it takes the average unemployed worker about 40 weeks to find a new job. New unemployment claims came in at 423,000. Bank of America Corp. said it is cutting 30,000 jobs.

None of us will remain untouched by the events playing out in the world around us. We can take steps to prepare to the best of our abilities, but circumstances may get the better of us. There are millions of Americans right now that are struggling to keep a roof over their heads. Inevitably, as things get worse, many more will join those who have already been forced to abandon their old lifestyles to live in short-term low cost motels, homeless shelters, tent cities or in their cars. To be sure, some of those living on the streets made mistakes and poor decisions that have brought them where they are today. Others, however, are the collateral damage from a government run amok and the decades long unfettered sociopathic thievery of law abiding hard working Americans.

Economic despair is beginning to spread rapidly in America. As you read this, there are millions of American families that are just barely hanging on by their fingernails. For a growing number of Americans, it has become an all-out battle just to be able to afford to sleep under a roof and put a little bit of food on the table. Sadly, there are more people than ever that are losing that battle. Tonight, tens of thousands of formerly middle class Americans will be sleeping in their cars, even though that is illegal in many U.S. cities. Tens of thousands of others will be sleeping in tent cities or on the streets. Meanwhile, communities all over America are passing measures that are meant to push tent cities and homeless people out of their areas. It turns out that once you lose your job and your home in this country you become something of an outcast. Sadly, the number of “outcasts” is going to continue to grow as the U.S. economy continues to collapse. Most Americans that end up living in their cars on in tent cities never thought that it would happen to them.

This is a world economic depression of unprecedented proportion, of genocidal potential, and we cannot have business as usual; these are not market events, these are not boom and bust cycles, this is a break down crisis it is a disintegration of the entire world system. If you’ve haven’t guessed, it is very likely that the reason Americans are going to experience times tougher than anything they have experienced in their lifetimes is because our nation is fully engrossed in the next Great Depression. There is no better example of this than our 21st century version of soup lines:

Who relies on food stamps?

The average amount food stamp recipients receive is $4 a day per person. In 2009 the amount was raised temporarily from $3 to $4, which makes a big difference. However this temporary increase was instituted as part of the economic recovery program and is due to expire in October 2013. For four dollars a day you can buy a fair amount of cheap, processed, sugar-laden food. What you can’t buy is very much unprocessed, organic, responsibly raised fresh food. To be eligible to receive any food stamps, gross income for a family of four must not exceed 130 percent or less of the Federal poverty guidelines ($2,389 per month/$28,668 per year for a family of four).

JP Morgan and Bank of America obtain profits by issuing government funded food stamps/subsidies. JP Morgan is the largest processor of food stamp benefits in the United States. JP Morgan has contracted to provide food stamp debit cards in 26 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. JP Morgan is paid for each case that it handles, so that means that the more Americans that go on food stamps, the more profits JP Morgan makes. Currently, approximately 44.2 million Americans (1 in 7) are receiving food stamps, (44 million is twice the population of Australia) which means JP Morgan will continue to reap great profits in addition to their regular derivatives and fractional reserve banking scams. Not to be left out, Bank of America and Visa struck a deal with the State of California. The Employment Development Department (EDD) Debit CardSM from Bank of America is the new and more efficient way of delivering California State Disability Insurance (Disability Insurance [DI], Paid Family Leave [PFL]), and beginning July 8, 2011 Unemployment Insurance (UI) benefit payments. The EDD Debit CardSM can be used everywhere Visa debit cards are accepted. Of course, using the fascist debit card is subject to bank fees. Therefore, rather than issuing checks directly to recipients, California chose a debit card system that will guarantee fees and profits paid to BofA and Visa.

It’s real. It’s happening right now. Prepare yourself financially, mentally, spiritually, and physically – because it’s only going to get worse. More Americans than ever are desperate for money and many of them will do just about anything to get it. The crumbling U.S. economy has pushed millions of ordinary Americans to the brink of utter desperation. When it comes time to choose between being able to survive or breaking the law, many people are choosing to break the law. These days it seems like Americans will do just about anything for money. All over the country, there are areas where just about anything that is not bolted down is being stolen. A lot of people have resorted to making money however they can–selling drugs, selling their bodies, shoplifting, invading homes, taking bribes, running credit card scams and even stealing from their own family members.

When people have their backs pushed up against the wall, often they find that they are willing to do things that they never imagined that they would do. Things are getting crazy out there on the streets of America, and as the economy continues to decline things are going to get a lot crazier. The thin veneer of civilization that we all take for granted is starting to disappear. As society continues to unravel, prison is going to look like an appealing option for more and more people. At least in prison you get fed, you have a roof over your head and they will take care of your medical needs. For a whole lot of Americans, that would be a major step up.

The dollar collapse will be the single largest event in human history. This will be the first event that will touch every single living person in the world. All human activity is controlled by money. Our wealth,our work,our food,our government,even our relationships are affected by money. No money in human history has had as much reach in both breadth and depth as the dollar. It is the de-facto world currency. All other currency collapses will pale in comparison to this big one. All other currency crises have been regional and there were other currencies for people to grasp onto. This collapse will be global and it will bring down not only the dollar but all other fiat currencies, as they are fundamentally no different. The collapse of currencies will lead to the collapse of ALL paper assets. The repercussions to this will have incredible results worldwide.

Rest assured this dollar collapse is coming. It is a mathematical inevitability. We will not be as fortunate to muddle through this collapse like we did in 2008 when it was a corporate problem. This time around, it is a national and global problem. The global Ponzi scheme has run out of gas as the demographics decline, as cheap abundant oil declines, as hegemonic power declines. This comes at a time when we reach the exponential or collapse-phase of our money. That crisis is coming very soon; at the end of this summer or fall. The money and emergency measures are worn out.

The Federal Reserve banking system is privately owned. Its shareholders are private banks. It creates money out of nothing and loans it to the government with interest, thereby transforming citizens into collective debt slaves called “taxpayers.” The Federal Reserve is not held accountable by Congress, which is supposed to have the power of the purse, and openly admits such. Congress has abdicated its responsibility, the Federal judiciary has become the oligarchy Thomas Jefferson warned about, and the result is we now have an imperial Presidency.

The Federal Reserve Act was written in secret during 1910 on Jeykll Island by the following banksters and their minions:

1. Nelson W. Aldrich, Republican “whip” in the Senate, Chairman of the National Monetary Commission, business associate of J.P. Morgan, father-in-law to John D. Rockefeller, Jr.;

3. Frank A. Vanderlip, president of the National City Bank of New York, the most powerful of the banks at that time, representing William Rockefeller and the international investment banking house of Kuhn, Loeb & Company;

5. Charles D. Norton, president of J.P. Morgan’s First National Bank of New York;

7. Paul M. Warburg, a partner in Kuhn, Loeb & Company, a representative of the Rothschild banking dynasty in England and France, and brother to Max Warburg who was head of the Warburg banking consortium in Germany and the Netherlands.

Congress and President Woodrow Wilson committed treason in 1913 by passing the Federal Reserve Act, which meant that the U.S. government would now borrow money from private banks at interest. Also in 1913, the Internal Revenue Service started to collect income taxes under the 16th Amendment, which for the most part is used to pay interest on the national debt to the private banks that own the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve owners also profit by making favorable loans to the their private banks and allies: Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs and Royal Bank of Scotland each borrowed at least $US30 billion ($29 billion) in 2008 from a Federal Reserve emergency lending program whose details weren’t revealed to shareholders, members of Congress or the public. Units of 20 banks were required to bid at auctions for the cash. They paid interest rates as low as 0.01 per cent that December, when the Fed’s main lending facility charged 0.5 per cent. In essence, such loans are “free money” to giant banks. Even the least savvy investor could turn a profit if they were loaned billions of dollars at 0.01 percent interest. Small banks and individuals need not apply for such “borrowing programs.” Approval ratings are another indication that Congress and CFR/Bilderberg Obama clearly represent corporate/banking interests and not the will of the people.

In conclusion, JP Morgan and Bank of America profit from government assistance programs. The Federal Reserve is a private bank that loans money to the government, thereby enslaving its citizens with the national debt. These two examples of fascism in the United States banking structure form the basis for ushering in the New World Order. Fortunately, we as a people can easily remove these fascist systems. The largest banks must be boycotted and the Federal Reserve System abolished like previous and more open forms of slavery.

A home on wheels is a classic American affair, from the wagon train to the RV. Now, for some formerly upwardly mobile Americans, the economic storm has turned the backseat or the rear of the van into the bedroom. A recent survey found that 48 percent of Americans believe that it is likely that another great Depression will begin within the next 12 months. The American people are in a really bad mood and investors around the world are in a really bad mood. More bad financial news seems to come out every single day now. Everyone seems to be waiting for that one “moment” that is going to set off another financial panic.

We need to fix America’s looming credit default, failing economy and our screwed-up banking system. Now, with a Good Depression. If we just kick the can down the road one more time, we’ll be trapped into repeating our 1930’s tragedy, a second Great Depression. Wake up America, recessions do not work. Won’t work in the future. Remember that 30-month recession after the dot-com crash? It didn’t work. Because in the decade since that 2000 peak, Wall Street’s lost an inflation–adjusted 20% of America’s retirement money.

The so-called Great Recession of the 2008 credit meltdown didn’t work either. In fact, it made matters worse: Wall Street got richer by stealing from the other 98% of Americans, the middle class, the poor. And now their conservative puppets in Washington want to make matters worse, by widening the wealth gap further to benefit the Super Rich. Seems like nobody really gives a damn about our great nation any more. America’s now a capitalists anarchy: “Every (rich) man for himself.” Proxy battles are fought by high-priced lobbyists in a broken political system. America needs a 21-gun wake-up call. That’s why America needs a Good Depression. The economy’s bad now. But kicking the can down the road again will make matters much worse later.

The general consensus is that if we don't raise the ceiling, the U.S. will default on some of its payments--probably not the debts to foreign holders of securities, but Medicare payments, Social Security payments, some debts will go unpaid if the debt ceiling isn't raised by August 2nd--and the effects of even a "strategic default" will be negative to an extreme.

It isn’t just the debt ceiling crisis that is causing apprehension in the United States. There are a host of indications that the U.S. economy is continuing to struggle. About a month before the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), also known as Obamacare, then Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Cal.) stated at a health summit that, if passed, the health care overhaul would create four million jobs over the course of “it’s life,” and 400,000 jobs “almost immediately.” Now that it has been nearly a year and a half since she made those statements, where exactly are those 400,000 new jobs?

Even big Wall Street banks are laying people off. Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS.N), Morgan Stanley (MS.N) and some other large U.S. investment banks are not just laying off weak performers and back-office employees. They are also cutting the pay of those they are keeping, scrutinizing expense reports and expecting even the most profitable workers to bring in more business for the same amount of compensation. That is not a good sign for the U.S. economy. If the corrupt Wall Street banks are even struggling, what does that mean for the rest of us?

For decades, the U.S. government has had a AAA rating. On the scales used by the big three credit rating agencies, that is the highest credit rating that a government can get. Right now, the U.S. government is closer than ever to losing its AAA rating. The threat of a rating downgrade is going to continue to grow regardless of how the political theater that we are watching unfold in Washington D.C. plays out. The truth is that the federal government has accumulated a debt that is so vast that it will never be paid back. In fact, we are rapidly approaching the point when this debt will no longer be serviceable. If the credit rating of the U.S. government is not slashed right now, it will be soon enough. In fact, the U.S. government is such a financial mess that it should have been done long ago. But whenever the United States does lose its AAA rating, we could potentially see financial hell unleashed because it will also mean that there will almost certainly be a wave of credit rating downgrades from coast to coast.

Right now, the U.S. government is able to borrow gigantic quantities of money at ridiculously low interest rates. This is the primary reason why the debt disaster predicted by so many in the past has not arrived yet. If the credit rating of the U.S. government is downgraded, it could finally get investors all over the world to realize that the game is over and that they should be demanding much higher returns on debt issued by the U.S. government. The truth is that the U.S. government is already “insolvent” and at some point we are all going to have to face reality. So whether or not it happens right now, the truth is that at some point the credit rating of the U.S. government is going to go down and interest rates are going to go up. Unfortunately, it appears that this might happen sooner rather than later.

In early July, Moody’s Investors Service publicly announced that it would be reviewing the US's Aaa bond rating for a possible downgrade. Then S&P actually went so far as to announce that there is a “50 percent chance” that it will downgrade the credit rating of the U.S. government within the next three months. S&P has been warning of trouble for some time now. Back on April 18th, Standard & Poor’s altered its outlook on U.S. government debt from “stable” to “negative” and warned that a downgrade was likely at some point soon if nothing changed.

If the credit rating of the U.S. government gets slashed and if that results in higher interest costs on the national debt, that is going to make it much harder to balance the budget. The U.S. government will take in somewhere around 2.2 or 2.3 trillion dollars this year. It will spend somewhere in the neighborhood of 3.5 or 3.6 trillion dollars in 2011. Included in that spending is about 400 billion dollars that goes for interest on the national debt. If our interest costs double or triple it is going to make it basically impossible to balance the budget under our current system. If interest rates on U.S. government debt were to rise to moderate levels, we could soon be easily paying a trillion dollars a year just in interest on the national debt. If interest rates on U.S. government debt were to rise to the levels that Greece, Portugal and Ireland are now facing, it would be beyond catastrophic. But a reduced credit rating and higher interest rates would not just hurt the finances of the U.S. Government. Any financial institution that is linked to the U.S. government in any way would also probably be downgraded.

In conjunction with this action, Moody’s has placed on review for possible downgrade the Aaa ratings of financial institutions directly linked to the government: Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the Federal Home Loan Banks, and the Federal Farm Credit Banks. Just think of the financial carnage that would cause. At least 7,000 top-rated municipal credits would have their ratings cut if the U.S. government loses its Aaa grade,Moody’s Investors Service said. An “automatic” downgrade affecting $130 billion in municipal debt directly linked to the U.S. would occur if the federal level is reduced.Additionally, top-rated securities with no direct links to the national government will be reviewed for similar action. But the nightmare would not end there. The truth is that the credit ratings of large numbers of state and local governments from coast to coast would likely be reviewed and downgraded as well. Right now, many state and local governments are scratching and clawing in a desperate attempt to survive financially, and a significant rise in interest costs would be enough to wipe many of them out. The ripple effects of a U.S. government credit downgrade would be endless.

It’s inevitable that the U.S. will default—it’s essentially an empire which is overextended and in decline—and that its financial system will go with it. At this point, a very high percentage of U.S. government debt is short-term debt. That means that gigantic amounts of debt must be “rolled over” each year in addition to any new debt that we take on. So even if interest rates rise significantly on just the existing debt that we have it is going to be a total nightmare. And make no mistake, whether it happens now or later a collapse of U.S. government finances is coming.

Right now it is being projected that the U.S. national debt will hit 344% of GDP by the year 2050 if we continue on our current course. We are on a runaway train that is heading straight for a brick wall. Europe is also a complete financial wreck. The sovereign debt crisis over in the EU continues to grow worse by the day and there is no end in sight. If the U.S. collapses, Europe is not strong enough to save it. If Europe collapses, the U.S. is not strong enough to save it.

We really are entering an unprecedented time in world history. We are on the verge of the first truly global financial disaster. It is going to be interesting to see which major currency crashes and burns first. Some think that it will be the euro. Others think that it will be the dollar. In any event, the reality is that the current global financial system is not sustainable. The folks that are in charge can try to keep things together for as long as possible, but at some point the dominoes are going to start to fall and the house of cards is going to crash. It is an open secret that our financial system is fundamentally unsound. Even a lot of people working on Wall Street will admit that. It is just that people are so busy making such big piles of money that nobody wants the party to stop.

We have entered a time when there is going to be financial crisis after financial crisis. Even if the EU and the U.S. government can somehow fix things for the moment, more problems are going to be just around the corner. The world has become incredibly unstable and the entire globe is going to be shaken. Most people cannot even conceive of the kind of financial hell that is coming our way as a nation. It is a bit sad to think about what is happening, but it is much better to be armed with the truth than to be totally clueless and totally unprepared.

Who holds America's debt?

Hong Kong: $121.9 billion (0.9 percent)
Caribbean banking centers: $148.3 (1 percent)
Taiwan: $153.4 billion (1.1 percent)
Brazil: $211.4 billion (1.5 percent)
Oil exporting countries: $229.8 billion (1.6 percent)
Mutual funds: $300.5 billion (2 percent)
Commercial banks: $301.8 billion (2.1 percent)
State, local and federal retirement funds: $320.9 billion (2.2 percent)
Money market mutual funds: $337.7 billion (2.4 percent)
United Kingdom: $346.5 billion (2.4 percent)
Private pension funds: $504.7 billion (3.5 percent)
State and local governments: $506.1 billion (3.5 percent)
Japan: $912.4 billion (6.4 percent)
U.S. households: $959.4 billion (6.6 percent)
China: $1.16 trillion (8 percent)
The U.S. Treasury: $1.63 trillion (11.3 percent)
Social Security trust fund: $2.67 trillion (19 percent)

So the United States owes foreigners about $4.5 trillion in debt. But the United States owes Americans $9.8 trillion.

The Midwest floods will seriously impact food and gas prices over the next year. It is suspected that the lost farmland is behind the price spike to $7.55 a bushel for corn–twice last year's price. The corn shortage will have far-reaching consequences: Corn is a key ingredient in ethanol gasoline, feeds America's livestock and is found in many food products including soft drinks and cereal. Prices will undoubtedly increase steadily at the grocery store, gas pump and butcher shop throughout the summer as Midwest flooding continues along the Missouri River basin. Not only are farmers losing their homes, land and fields–ultimately their bank accounts will also suffer this season. And let's not forget all that genetically modified seed washing south to contaminate natural fields.

LONDON, June 5, 11(Reuters)–The world’s top 14 derivatives dealers may need extra cash to handle a surge in transaction clearing, especially in choppy markets, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) said. Clearing is being favored by regulators because it is backed by a default fund that ensures a trade is completed even if one side goes bust, as with the collapse of Lehman Brothers during the financial crisis. World leaders have agreed that chunks of the $600 trillion off-exchange derivatives market must be standardized and cleared by the end of 2012 to broaden transparency and curb risk. Researchers at the BIS, a global forum for central bankers, looked at whether the "Group of 14" dealers (G14) that dominate derivatives trading would have enough capital to handle the anticipated surge in trades that will have to be cleared. The real number is over one quadrillion in OTC derivatives, not 600 trillion. The G14 dealers comprise Bank of America-Merrill Lynch, Barclays Capital, BNP Paribas, Citi, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, RBS, Societe Generale, UBS and Wells Fargo Bank.

The current economic recovery in the United States has been unusually skewed in favor of corporate profits and against increased wages for workers. In a newly released study, Economists at Northeastern University found that since the recovery began in June 2009 following a deep 18-month recession, “corporate profits captured 88 percent of the growth in real national income while aggregate wages and salaries accounted for only slightly more than 1 percent” of that growth. The study said it was “unprecedented” for American workers to receive such a tiny share of national income growth during a recovery.

Housing is still languishing two years into the supposed "economic recovery." The median selling price of a new home rose from a year earlier, while inventories fell to the lowest on record. Builders have little incentive to start projects as the prospect of more distressed properties entering the foreclosure pipeline depresses home values. The figures underscore Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s comments that demand for homes has been held back by slow job growth and restrained consumer optimism.

Bank of America is bulldozing foreclosed homes it does not want on its books because of their low value. However, part of the reason for their low value is that the bank failed to maintain them on behalf of investors. They were stripped for copper and appliances, or got moldy, or had squatters move in and make a mess of the place.. Wells Fargo, Citigroup, JP Morgan, and Fannie Mae are considering similar action.

The homeownership rate in April 2010 was significantly lower than previously thought. The age-adjusted homeownership rate was lower in April 2010 than in April 1990! We are facing some very serious long-term economic problems in this country, and we need to educate the American people about why the collapse of the economy is happening. If the American people don’t understand why they are losing their jobs, why they are losing their homes and why they are drowning in debt then they are going to keep on doing all of the same things that they have been doing. They will also keep sending the same idiot politicians back to Washington to represent us. There are some fundamental things about the economy that every American should know. The American people need to be shocked out of their entertainment-induced stupor long enough to understand what is really going on and what needs to be done to solve our nightmarish economic problems. If we do not wake up enough Americans in time, the economic collapse that is coming could tear this nation to shreds.

In a newly released study, the Northeastern economists found that since the recovery began in June 2009 following a deep 18-month recession, “corporate profits captured 88 percent of the growth in real national income while aggregate wages and salaries accounted for only slightly more than 1 percent” of that growth. The study said it was “unprecedented” for American workers to receive such a tiny share of national income growth during a recovery.

November 2, Occupy Oakland's General Assembly did something that is likely to catch on with occupations across the country. They voted to encourage the occupation of foreclosed properties across their city. After all, the bursting of the property bubble is part of why they're on the streets right now. There is a movement similar to this under the overall Occupy umbrella, It's called Occupy Vacant Properties, and it has been most visible in San Francisco, where families are even reclaiming their old homes post-foreclosures. Considering all the attention focused on Occupy Oakland right now, it wouldn't be surprising if this caught on like wildfire. Plus, in northern cities during the winter months, this could provide spots to house protesters and maintain the occupations.

Economic Tsunami

Economic Tsunami is a term used to describe a set of economic forces that are propelled by a single triggering event and which creates significant financial distress and destruction. As with a natural tsunami, in an economic tsunami the resulting effects can be felt far and wide, across numerous geographic regions and/or industrial sectors. For example, in 2008 the subprime mortgage meltdown in the U.S. created an economic tsunami that effectively froze world credit markets. The resulting impact was devastating and included the government takeover of the secondary mortgage market giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the collapse of investment bank titans Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, the bailout of insurance giant AIG and near-bankruptcy of the country of Iceland.

When the world's third largest economy suffers a natural disaster of the magnitude of the earthquake, tsunami, and multiple nuclear meltdowns in Japan, it is inevitable that its economic impacts will permeate through the world's economies. The full extent of the economic impact of the Japan earthquake and tsunami is becoming apparent, with hundreds of factories shut across Japan, warnings of rolling blackouts and predictions from economists that the disaster would push the country into recession. Japan's economy is export-led. Japan is the one of the world's largest importers of oil but demand is likely to drop as industrial activity falters. So with such an inordinately large budget deficit, it will be imperative to get those factories open again. Japan is the third largest consumer of oil in the world, behind the United States and China, and the second-largest net importer of crude oil, according to the Department of Energy.

The Bank of Japan is preparing to pump billions of yen into the economy when it announces an emergency "quake budget" to prevent the disaster derailing the country's fragile economic recovery. Toyota and Nissan said they were halting production at all of their 20 factories. Toyota, the world's largest carmaker, evacuated workers from two plants in the worst affected regions and has not been able to reach the sites to inspect the damage. The plants make up to 420,000 small cars each year, mostly for export. Two of Honda's three plants remain closed.

Other manufacturers have also reported major damage to their factories, with Kirin Holdings, Fuji Heavy Industries, GlaxoSmithKline and Nestlé among those to halt operations. Sony, the electronics group, has suspended production at eight plants. At one plant, 1,000 workers had to take refuge on the second floor after the tsunami hit. Tire company Bridgestone, camera maker Canon and Citigroup Holdings Japan reportedly have not faced major damage to their facilities in the region. All ports have been closed amid warnings of aftershocks to come.
Post-disaster disruptions to Japan's supply chain may cause a more widespread and damaging ripple effect on American industry than has previously been recognized. Based on economic data rather than anecdotes, there is much more widespread U.S. industrial dependence on imports from Japan than post-earthquake accounts have typically indicated. U.S. auto and electronics companies aren't the only vulnerable sectors.

Based on import penetration data, many of the highest rates of dependence on Japan are found in non-electronics capital goods sectors — industrial machinery and components vital to high-value production throughout the domestic U.S. manufacturing base.

The overriding view in the marketplace is that the Japanese investors may have to sell U.S. government securities to pay for rebuilding of the economy and their infrastructure.
The U.S. has an overly high dependence on Japanese and other foreign suppliers, especially considering these are sectors where you would think the U.S. maintains a competitive advantage, as they are not labor intensive and represent large capital investments. That dependence on Japanese-made goods could greatly slow America's already-sluggish economic depression, as these industries generate an outsized share of the country's best-paying jobs and technological innovation.

Japan's import penetration rate for motor vehicle transmission and power train more than doubled to 11% since 1997 and rose by nearly one-third in 2010 alone. Japanese-made capacitors held 33% of the U.S. market in 2009, up from 15% 12 years earlier, while its share of semiconductor production equipment increased from 13% to 16%. Nearly 21% of metal-cutting machine tools purchased by U.S. companies came from Japan, down from 29% in 1994, but the report noted that imports of those products rose by almost half last year.

While imports of Japanese-made power turbines and turbine generator sets fell by 47%, that was largely due to a pause in the construction of new energy-generation systems. However, Japan's share of the market soared from 0.7% to 15%. The data underscores the many crucial economic and security benefits of achieving greater national self-reliance in these sectors while substituting domestically-made products for imports from Japan and elsewhere would greatly strengthen the recovery. But the big trouble recently has been in Europe. The sovereign debt crisis continues to get worse and worse. The emerging financial crisis in Italy has EU officials in a bit of a tizzy. If Italy requires a bailout it is going to be an unmitigated disaster. One of the most respected financial journalists in Europe, Ambrose Evans Pritchard, says that financial tensions in the EU are rising to dangerous levels… If the ECB’s Jean-Claude Trichet is right in claiming that Europe was on the brink of a 1930s financial cataclysm a year ago – and I think he is – it is hard see how the threat is any less serious right now. Fall-out from Greece flattened Portugal and Ireland last week. It is engulfing Spain and Italy, countries with €6.3 trillion of public and private debt between them. The ECB has a ratio of non-AAA rated assets to equity of 14 to 1. The New York Fed is leveraged 100 to one.

It is well-documented that big banks like Goldman Sachs made money by betting against investments which they themselves bundled and sold to their own clients, such as packages of subprime mortgage-related products such as collateralized debt obligations. This practice not only was illegal and unethical, but actually worsened the subprime crisis. In the same way that homeowners take out a second mortgage to pay off their credit card debt, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase and other U.S. banks helped push government debt far into the future through the derivatives market. This was done in Greece, Italy, and likely several other euro-zone countries as well. In several dozen deals in Europe, “banks provided cash upfront in return for government payments in the future, with those liabilities then left off the books.” Because the deals are not listed as loans, they are not listed as debt (liabilities), and so the true debt of Greece and other euro-zone countries was and likely to a large degree remains hidden. Greece effectively mortgaged its airports and highways to the major banks in order to get cash up-front and keep the loans off the books, classifying them as transactions. So while Goldman Sachs engaged in long-term trades with Greek debt (meaning Greece would owe Goldman Sachs a great deal down the line), the firm simultaneously was betting against Greek debt in the short-term, profiting from the Greek debt crisis that it helped create.

Last year it was just small countries like Greece and Ireland that were causing all the trouble. Now Italy (the fourth largest economy in the EU) and Spain (the fifth largest economy in the EU) are making headlines. Up to this point, the EU has had nightmares trying to bail countries like Greece out. What is going to happen if Italy or Spain goes under? At this point things with Greece have gone so badly that some EU officials are actually suggesting that Greece should just default on some of the debt.

The only way that any of these nations that are drowning in debt can keep going is if they can borrow more money at low interest rates. There are very few nations on earth that would be able to survive very high interest rates on government debt for an extended period of time. Pay attention to what is happening in Europe, because it will eventually happen in the United States. Right now we are only paying a little more than $400 billion in interest on the national debt each year because of the super low interest rates we are able to get. When that changes, our interest costs are going to absolutely skyrocket.

Any new European rescue plan, no matter how big and bold, is bound cause an even greater debt catastrophe. Here’s why:

First, they’re running out of time! The crisis is already too far gone — Greek bonds trading at 40 cents on the dollar, Spain and Italy in a death spiral, and massive damage to the continent’s megabanks already done. They can’t turn back the clock. And they’re nearly out of time.

Second, not enough money! The PIIGS countries alone have over $4 trillion in debts, much of which they’ll never be able to repay. And Europe’s troubled banks have far more.

This leaves a gaping hole that’s so large, even the richest countries in the world could not possibly fill it without gutting their own finances. In fact, European leaders are trying so desperately to figure out where to get all that money, they’ve even asked emerging market countries to chip in.

Third, no way to stop a vicious cycle already in motion! Before they can get a dime of bailout money, the PIIGS countries must promise to drastically reduce their budget deficits. Result: They’re forced to cut their government spending, crush their economy, kill their corporate profits, drive down their tax revenues, and, in the end, create even larger deficits.This is why Greece is sinking so fast. And this is why, despite its Draconian austerity measures, Greece’s deficit for the first nine months of 2011 actually GREW to 19.2 billion euros, compared to 16.65 billion euros last year.And this is also why we’re seeing similar vicious cycles in nearly every borrower that may need a bailout — not just banks but entire nations … not merely countries like Greece and Portugal, but also far larger economies like Spain and Italy … not just PIIGS countries, but also countries in Eastern Europe and elsewhere.

The countries and institutions downgraded by the major credit agencies in the last two weeks alone have $7.3 trillion in debts outstanding. But the most shocking news about this crisis is not how often banks and governments have already been downgraded … it’s how many MORE deep downgrades are now on the way! The credit agencies themselves have warned that most of the downgraded countries are now on the chopping block for still more rating cuts. The government bonds of countries like Spain and Italy are already trading at prices that imply far lower ratings. And the cost of insuring those bonds against default has already surged to levels that also signal far lower ratings. Moody’s itself admits that these kinds of market indicators can often warn you about coming troubles far sooner than their own ratings!

Back during the financial crisis of 2008, the American people were told that the largest banks in the United States were “too big to fail” and that was why it was necessary for the federal government to step in and bail them out. The idea was that if several of our biggest banks collapsed at the same time the financial system would not be strong enough to keep things going and economic activity all across America would simply come to a standstill. Congress was told that if the “too big to fail” banks did not receive bailouts that there would be chaos in the streets and this country would plunge into another Great Depression. Since that time, however, essentially no efforts have been made to decentralize the U.S. banking system. Instead, the “too big to fail” banks just keep getting larger and larger and larger.

Back in 2002, the top 10 banks controlled 55 percent of all U.S. banking assets. Today, the top 10 banks control 77 percent of all U.S. banking assets. Unfortunately, these giant banks are also colossal mountains of risk, debt and leverage. They are incredibly unstable and they could start coming apart again at any time. None of the major problems that caused the crash of 2008 have been fixed. In fact, the U.S. banking system is more centralized and more vulnerable today than it ever has been before. It really is difficult for ordinary Americans to get a handle on just how large these financial institutions are. For example, the “big six” U.S. banks (Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo) now possess assets equivalent to approximately 60 percent of America’s gross national product.

These huge banks are giant financial vacuum cleaners. Over the past couple of decades we have witnessed a financial consolidation in this country that is absolutely unprecedented. This trend accelerated during the recent financial crisis. While the big boys were receiving massive bailouts, the hundreds of small banks that were failing were either allowed to collapse or they were told that they should find a big bank that was willing to buy them. As a group, Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo held approximately 22 percent of all banking deposits in FDIC-insured institutions back in 2000. By the middle of 2009 that figure was up to 39 percent. That is not just a trend – that is a landslide.

Smaller banks continue to fail in large numbers and the big banks just keep growing and getting more power. Today, there are more than 1,000 U.S. banks that are on the “unofficial list” of problem banking institutions. In the absence of fundamental changes, the consolidation of the banking industry is going to continue. Meanwhile, the “too big to fail” banks are flush with cash and they are getting serious about expanding. The Federal Reserve has been extremely good to the big boys and they are eager to grow.

Citigroup is becoming extremely aggressive about expanding; they've been hiring dozens of investment bankers, dialing up advertising and drawing up plans to add several hundred branches worldwide, including more than 200 in major cities across the United States. The whole idea behind the bailouts and all of the “quantitative easing” that the Federal Reserve did was to get money into the hands of the big banks so that they would lend it out to ordinary Americans and get the economy rolling again. But the big banks just sat on a lot of that money. In particular, what they did was they deposited much of it at the Fed and drew interest on it. Since 2008, excess reserves parked at the Fed have grown by nearly 1.7 trillion dollars.

The American people were promised that TARP and all of the other bailouts would enable the big banks to lend out lots of money which would help get the economy going for ordinary Americans again. Well, it turns out that in 2009 (the first full year after Congress passed the bailout legislation) U.S. banks posted their sharpest decline in lending since 1942. Lending has never fully recovered since the crash of 2008. The big financial institutions like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan Chase have been able to get all the cash that they need, but they have not passed that generosity along to ordinary Americans. In fact, the biggest U.S. banks have actually reduced small business lending by about 50 percent since the crash of 2008. That is not what we were promised.

These “too big to fail” banks have been able to borrow gigantic amounts of money from the Fed for next to nothing and yet they still refuse to let credit flow to local communities. Instead, the big banks have found other purposes for all of the super cheap money that they have been getting from the Fed. The purpose of the near-zero interest rates was supposed to be to get banks to lend again. Instead, they are, indeed, paying “outrageous bonuses to their top executives; using the money to engage in the same sort of unregulated speculation that nearly brought down the economy in 2008; buying up smaller banks; or investing this virtually interest-free money in risk-free government bonds, on which taxpayers are paying 2.5 percent interest (more for longer-term securities). What makes things even worse is that these big banks often pay next to nothing in taxes.

The big financial giants have not learned their lessons and they continue to do business pretty much as they did it prior to 2008.

The United States is rapidly becoming the very first "post-industrial" nation on the globe. All great economic empires eventually become fat and lazy and squander the great wealth that their forefathers have left them, but the pace at which America is accomplishing this is absolutely amazing. It was America that was at the forefront of the industrial revolution. It was America that showed the world how to mass produce everything from automobiles to televisions to airplanes. It was the great American manufacturing base that crushed Germany and Japan in World War II.

But now we are witnessing the deindustrialization of America. Tens of thousands of factories have left the United States in the past decade alone. Millions upon millions of manufacturing jobs have been lost in the same time period. The United States has become a nation that consumes everything in sight and yet produces increasingly little. Do you know what our biggest export is today? Waste-paper. Yes, trash is the number one thing that we ship out to the rest of the world as we voraciously blow our money on whatever the rest of the world wants to sell to us. The United States has become bloated and spoiled and our economy is now just a shadow of what it once was. Once upon a time America could literally out-produce the rest of the world combined. Today that is no longer true, but Americans consume more than anyone else in the world. If the deindustrialization of America continues at this current pace, what possible kind of a future are we going to be leaving to our children?

Any great nation throughout history has been great at making things. So if the United States continues to allow its manufacturing base to erode at a staggering pace how in the world can the U.S. continue to consider itself to be a great nation? We have created the biggest debt bubble in the history of the world in an effort to maintain a very high standard of living, but the current state of affairs is not anywhere close to sustainable. Every single month America goes into more debt and every single month America gets poorer.

The U.S. government is expected to hit the $14.294 trillion debt ceiling, setting in motion an uncertain, 11-week political scramble to avoid a default. The Treasury Department is announcing that it will stop issuing and reinvesting government securities in certain government pension plans, part of a series of steps designed to delay a default until Aug. 2. The Treasury’s moves buy time for the White House and congressional leaders to reach a deficit-reduction agreement that could clear the way for enough lawmakers to vote to raise the amount of money Congress allows the nation to borrow.

The deindustrialization of the United States should be a top concern for every man, woman and child in the country. But sadly, most Americans do not have any idea what is going on around them. When the economy collapses, as it must, the money people have invested almost anywhere except under their mattresses will be gone. We are now at the crossroads. The economic collapse IS coming. The radiation IS coming.

545 vs. 300,000,000 People

Politicians are the only people in the world who create problems and then campaign against them.

Have you ever wondered, if both the Democrats and the Republicans are against deficits, WHY do we have deficits?

Have you ever wondered, if all the politicians are against inflation and high taxes, WHY do we have inflation and high taxes?

You and I don't propose a federal budget. The President does.

You and I don't have the Constitutional authority to vote on appropriations. The House of Representatives does.

You and I don't write the tax code, Congress does.

You and I don't set fiscal policy, Congress does.

You and I don't control monetary policy, the private Federal Reserve Bank does.

One hundred senators, 435 congressmen, one President, and nine Supreme Court justices equates to 545 human beings out of the 300 million are directly, legally, morally, and individually responsible for the domestic problems that plague this country.

I excluded the members of the Federal Reserve Board because that problem was created by the Congress. In 1913, Congress delegated its Constitutional duty to provide a sound currency to a federally-chartered, but private, central bank.

I excluded all the special interests and lobbyists for a sound reason. They have no legal authority. They have no ability to coerce a senator, a congressman, or a President to do one cotton-picking thing. I don't care if they offer a politician $1 million dollars in cash. The politician has the power to accept or reject it. No matter what the lobbyist promises, it is the legislator's responsibility to determine how he votes.

Those 545 human beings spend much of their energy convincing you that what they did is not their fault. They cooperate in this common con regardless of party.

What separates a politician from a normal human being is an excessive amount of gall. No normal human being would have the gall of a Speaker, who stood up and criticized the President for creating deficits. The President can only propose a budget. He cannot force the Congress to accept it.

The Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land, gives sole responsibility to the House of Representatives for originating and approving appropriations and taxes. Who is the speaker of the House? John Boehner. He is the leader of the majority party. He and fellow House members, not the President, can approve any budget they want. If the President vetoes it, they can pass it over his veto if they agree to.

It seems inconceivable to me that a nation of 300 million cannot replace 545 people who stand convicted--by present facts--of incompetence and irresponsibility. I can't think of a single domestic problem that is not traceable directly to those 545 people. When you fully grasp the plain truth that 545 people exercise the power of the federal government, then it must follow that what exists is what they want to exist.

If the tax code is unfair, it's because they want it unfair.

If the budget is in the red, it's because they want it in the red.

If the Army & Marines are in Iraq and Afghanistan it's because they want them in  Iraq and Afghanistan...

If they do not receive social security but are on an elite retirement plan not available to the people, it's because they want it that way.

There are no insoluble government problems.

Do not let these 545 people shift the blame to bureaucrats, whom they hire and whose jobs they can abolish; to lobbyists, whose gifts and advice they can reject; to regulators, to whom they give the power to regulate and from whom they can take this power. Above all, do not let them con you into the belief that there exists disembodied mystical forces like "the economy," "inflation," or "politics" that prevent them from doing what they take an oath to do.

Those 545 people, and they alone, are responsible.

They, and they alone, have the power.

They, and they alone, should be held accountable by the people who are their bosses.

Provided the voters have the gumption to manage their own employees...

We should vote all of them out of office and clean up their mess!

Charlie Reese is a former columnist of the Orlando Sentinel Newspaper.

What you do with this article now that you have read it... is up to you.
This might be funny if it weren't so true.
Be sure to read all the way to the end:

                               Tax his land,
                               Tax his bed,
                               Tax the table,
                               At which he's fed.

                               Tax his tractor,
                               Tax his mule,
                               Teach him taxes
                               Are the rule.

                               Tax his work,
                               Tax his pay,
                               He works for
                               peanuts anyway!

                               Tax his cow,
                               Tax his goat,
                               Tax his pants,
                               Tax his coat.

                               Tax his ties,
                               Tax his shirt,
                               Tax his work,
                               Tax his dirt.

                               Tax his tobacco,
                               Tax his drink,
                               Tax him if he
                               Tries to think.

                               Tax his cigars,
                               Tax his beers,
                               If he cries
                               Tax his tears.

                               Tax his car,
                               Tax his gas,
                               Find other ways
                               To tax his ass.

                               Tax all he has
                               Then let him know
                               That you won't be done
                               Till he has no dough.

                               When he screams and hollers;
                               Then tax him some more,
                               Tax him till
                               He's good and sore.

                               Then tax his coffin,
                               Tax his grave,
                               Tax the sod in
                               Which he's laid...

                               Put these words
                               Upon his tomb,
                               'Taxes drove me
                               to my doom...'

                               When he's gone,
                               Do not relax,
                               Its time to apply
                               The inheritance tax.

                               Accounts Receivable Tax
                               Building Permit Tax
                               CDL license Tax
                               Cigarette Tax
                               Corporate Income Tax
                               Dog License Tax
                               Excise Taxes
                               Federal Income Tax
                               Federal Unemployment Tax (FUTA)
                               Fishing License Tax
                               Food License Tax
                               Fuel Permit Tax
                               Gasoline Tax (currently 44.75 cents per gallon)
                               Gross Receipts Tax
                               Hunting License Tax
                               Inheritance Tax
                               Inventory Tax
                               IRS Interest Charges IRS Penalties (tax on top of tax)
                               Liquor Tax
                               Luxury Taxes
                               Marriage License Tax
                               Medicare Tax
                               Personal Property Tax
                               Property Tax
                               Real Estate Tax
                               Service Charge Tax
                               Social Security Tax
                               Road Usage Tax
                               Recreational Vehicle Tax
                               Sales Tax
                               School Tax
                               State Income Tax
                               State Unemployment Tax (SUTA)
                               Telephone Federal Excise Tax
                               Telephone Federal Universal Service Fee Tax
                               Telephone Federal, State and Local Surcharge Taxes
                               Telephone Minimum Usage Surcharge Tax
                               Telephone Recurring and Nonrecurring Charges Tax
                               Telephone    State   and Local Tax
                               Telephone Usage Charge Tax
                               Utility Taxes
                               Vehicle License Registration Tax
                               Vehicle Sales Tax
                               Watercraft Registration Tax
                               Well Permit Tax
                               Workers Compensation Tax

STILL THINK THIS IS FUNNY?
Not one of these taxes existed 100 years ago, & our nation was the most prosperous in the world.

We had absolutely no national debt, had the largest middle class in the world, and Mom stayed home to raise the kids.

30 incredibly stupid things that the federal government is spending money on

#1 The U.S. government is spending $750,000 on a new soccer field for detainees held at Guantanamo Bay.

#2 The Obama administration plans to spend between 16 and 20 million dollars helping students from Indonesia get master's degrees.

#3 If you can believe it, the U.S. government has spent $175,587 "to determine if cocaine makes Japanese quail engage in sexually risky behavior".

#4 The U.S. government spent $200,000 on "a tattoo removal program" in Mission Hills, California.

#5 The federal government has shelled out $3 million to researchers at the University of California at Irvine to fund their research on video games such as World of Warcraft. Wouldn't we all love to have a "research job" like that?

#6 The Department of Health and Human Services plans to spend $500 million on a program that will, among other things, seek to solve the problem of 5-year-old children that "can't sit still" in a kindergarten classroom.

#7 Fannie Mae is about to ask the federal government for another $4.6 billion bailout, and it will almost certainly get it.

#8 The federal government once spent 30 million dollars on a program that was designed to help Pakistani farmers produce more mangos.

#9 The U.S. Department of Agriculture once gave researchers at the University of New Hampshire $700,000 to study methane gas emissions from dairy cows.

#10 According to USA Today, 13 different government agencies "fund 209 different science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education programs — and 173 of those programs overlap with at least one other program."

#11 A total of $615,000 was given to the University of California at Santa Cruz to digitize photos, T-shirts and concert tickets belonging to the Grateful Dead.

#12 China lends us more money than any other foreign nation, but that didn't stop our government from spending 17.8 million dollars on social and environmental programs for China.

#13 The U.S. government once spent 2.6 million dollars to train Chinese prostitutes to drink responsibly.

#14 One professor at Stanford University was given $239,100 to study how Americans use the Internet to find love.

#15 The U.S. Postal Service spent $13,500 on a single dinner at Ruth's Chris Steakhouse.

#16 The National Science Foundation once spent $216,000 to study whether or not politicians "gain or lose support by taking ambiguous positions".

#17 A total of $1.8 million was spent on a "museum of neon signs" in Las Vegas, Nevada.

#18 The federal government spends 25 billion dollars a year maintaining federal buildings that are either unused or totally vacant.

#19 U.S. farmers are given a total of $2 billion each year for not farming their land.

#20 The U.S. government handed one Tennessee library $5,000 for the purpose of hosting a series of video game parties.

#21 A few years ago the government spent $123,050 on a Mother's Day Shrine in Grafton, West Virginia. It turns out that Grafton only has a population of a little more than 5,000 people.

#22 One professor at Dartmouth University was given $137,530 to create a "recession-themed" video game entitled "Layoff".

#23 According to the Heritage Foundation, the U.S. military spent "$998,798 shipping two 19-cent washers from South Carolina to Texas and $293,451 sending an 89-cent washer from South Carolina to Florida".

#24 The U.S. Department of Agriculture once shelled out $30,000 to a group of farmers to develop a tourist-friendly database of farms that host guests for overnight "haycations".

#25 The National Institutes of Health paid researchers $400,000 to find out why gay men in Argentina engage in risky sexual behavior when they are drunk.

#26 The National Institutes of Health also once spent $442,340 to study the behavior of male prostitutes in Vietnam.

#27 The National Institutes of Health loves to spend our tax money on really bizarre things. The NIH once spent $800,000 in "stimulus funds" to study the impact of a "genital-washing program" on men in South Africa.

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