IMF to investigate the FED

IMF As Grim Reaper of Austerity?

By Washington's Blog

 

The IMF has already performed a complete audit of the whole US financial system, something which they have only previously done to broke third world nations.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25330.htm

 

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The Shrinking Influence of the US Federal Reserve

By Gabor Steingart in Washington

 

Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the United States Federal Reserve Bank, faces a general investigation by the International Monetary Fund. Just one more example of the Fed losing its power. - No Fed chief in US history has been forced to submit to the kind of humiliation that Ben Bernanke is facing.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25329.htm

   

In the country of freedom (fries), sh*t happens very easily

The Borders Are Closing In

Ihre papiere, bitte: A defining demand of a police state.


Slavery consists of being "subject to the incessant, uncertain, arbitrary will of another man."
-- John Locke, Second Treatise of Civil Government

When an officer tells you to come inside and sit down, you come inside and sit down.... When an officer tells you to do something, you do it .... There is no "why" here.

-- U.S. Border Guard to a befuddled Canadian citizen arbitrarily detained while trying to visit a shopping mall in Niagara Falls, New York.

Returning to his home in Toronto following a brief visit to the States last December, author Peter Watts had the misfortune of being "randomly selected" for a search by members of the Regime's Border Guards Directorate stationed at the Blue Water Bridge in Port Huron, Michigan.

The science fiction novelist's bad luck was exacerbated by a momentary miscommunication: He saw a "flicker of motion" outside his car that he assumed was a wave, rather than a demand to pull over. His passenger understood what was happening, and urged Watts to pull over -- which he did.

"When I go like this, I'm not waving hello," sneered the border guard, assuming the snarky tone of unmerited superiority that armed functionaries use when addressing Mundanes.

"I guess we're not in Canada, because sometimes that means `hello,'" Watts replied, thereby committing a potentially fatal offense called "contempt of cop."

He compounded that supposed sin by getting out of the car and asking what the guards were doing as they pawed through the luggage in his trunk and the bags in his back seat.
As a citizen of the freest country (by default) in North America, Watts made the critical error of assuming that he had the right to ask why his privacy was being invaded, and that his question would be answered. His question was answered with repeated demands that he get back in his car.

After Watts hesitated, one of the guards seized his arm. This provoked a predictable "flinch response" from Watts, who pulled his arm away.

For reasons that make perfect sense to those attuned with Kafka's sense of reality, American law enforcement officers often construe the act of pulling away from their unwanted physical contact as a form of "assault" -- and thus as a pretext for the summary administration of "street justice."

First two, and then eventually three, of the stalwart guardians of our sacred northern frontier took turns pummeling the slender, mild-mannered 52-year-old man. Watts was punched, kicked, pepper-sprayed, handcuffed, then thrown wet and partially disrobed into an unheated cell. He was then interrogated, held overnight, and charged with "assaulting a federal officer" after being denied access to legal counsel (and pestered repeatedly to repudiate his Miranda rights).

After Watts' computer, flash drives, and loose-leaf notebook were confiscated, he was unceremoniously dumped -- in shirtsleeves, without so much as a windbreaker -- on the Canadian side of the border.

Ironically, in his novel Maelstrom, Watts -- a Hugo nominee who specializes in dystopian fiction -- appears to have anticipated his experience. Describing the abuse suffered by a character at the hands of customs officials, Watts observes: "Technically, of course, it was not an assault. Both aggressors wore uniforms and badges conferring the legal right to beat whomever they chose."

A jury of dutiful collectivist drones found Watts guilty of the supposed crime of "non-compliance with a border guard"; his "crime," reduced to its essence, was to ask, "why?"

Although Watts could have been forced to spend years as part the world's largest prison population, the presiding judge was content to pilfer $1,628 from the victim of the assault at the border -- after treating him to a patronizing lecture about the need to be "nice" to the feral armed adolescents who constitute the State's punitive caste.

Watts' experience leaves a decidedly totalitarian aftertaste. Crossing the border of a totalitarian state — in either direction — is an experience fraught with visceral anxiety. Finding himself in the unwanted company of humorless, heavily armed goons of questionable competence and dubious intelligence, the traveler is vividly aware that he can be arrested, imprisoned, beaten, or even shot at whim.

The best thing to do in such circumstances, travelers are told, is to assume a posture of utter servility, meekly and quietly enduring whatever indignity inflicted on them until they are safely through the checkpoint. In coming years, it most likely won't be necessary to visit the border in order to have a sample of what Watts endured; experiences similar to his will become increasingly commonplace for citizens and other residing legally within the United States.

Is it easier to build a police state from the inside out, or from the outside in? We may never know, since the architects of the Homeland Security State are doing both simultaneously.

Whenever a society descends into totalitarianism, the ruling clique will eventually close the borders -- not just to prevent contamination by politically troublesome foreign influences, but also to prevent the egress of refugees and (most importantly) the flight of capital to more congenial economic environments.

In our case, the invasive and arbitrary powers exercised by in the name of border security are becoming embedded in routine law enforcement within the interior. Although the geography of the contiguous 48 states remains unchanged, there is a very real sense in which the borders are closing in on us.

The Border Patrol -- the kind folks who treated Mr. Watts to a dose of uniquely Amerikan hospitality -- already carries out warrantless, suspicionless checkpoints as far as 100 miles inside the national boundary. The Department of Homeland Security insists that the Fourth Amendment proscription of "unreasonable searches and seizures" doesn't apply to "border enforcement" searches. This would mean that the two-thirds of the U.S. population living within 100 miles of an international border are residents of a "Constitution-Free Zone."

Tragically, the expansion of the immigration control "Constitution-Free Zone" is being propelled by some of the most outspoken critics of "big government."

Last week, many (by no means all) adherents of the Tea Party movement briefly suspended their campaign against invasive government to promote and applaud the enactment of a measure turning Arizona into an authentic police state -- that is, one in which police can demand identity papers from practically anyone and arrest those who don't comply.

Under SB 1070, signed into law by Gov. Jan Brewer on April 24, any "lawful contact" between a law enforcement officer and a citizen can end with the latter being arrested and detained if he cannot satisfy a "reasonable suspicion" that he is in the country without official permission.

An incident that occurred two days before that law was signed by Brewer demonstrates that a valid driver's license may not be sufficient to allay that suspicion, and that it's entirely possible for a native-born U.S. citizen who fully cooperates with the police to end up being handcuffed, arrested, detained and humiliated.

On April 22, an Arizona resident who identifies himself as Abdon (he hasn't chosen to disclose his surname) pulled his truck into a weigh station. As his vehicle was being inspected, Abdon was asked by an official to display proof of legal residency. He promptly handed over a valid Arizona commercial driving license; he also supplied his Social Security number and additional personal details.

For some reason this was considered insufficient, and Abdon ended up being cuffed and hauled away to an ICE detention facility while his wife -- who was dragged out of work -- was dispatched to their home to retrieve Abdon's birth certificate and other documents.

The unfortunate truck driver's birth certificate listed his birthplace as Fresno, California. This means that he -- unlike one, or possibly both, major party candidates in the last presidential election -- has an unassailable claim to being a "native-born United States citizen." He had complied with every demand made of him at the weigh station, and did nothing to suggest that he harbored criminal intent of any kind.

The only source of the "reasonable suspicion" that led to Abdon's arrest was his visible ethnicity. This is the standard under which American citizens (particularly, but not exclusively, of Latino ancestry) can now be harassed, arrested, and detained in the State of Arizona.

The more frequently this kind of thing happens, the likelier it becomes that innocent people will be seriously hurt -- as if being accosted, questioned, and detained by armed strangers for reasons beyond one's control weren't sufficient injury.


SB 1070 has been the equivalent of a public works project for the "tolerance" industry, which is busy planning boycotts and other expressions of punitive sanctimony against Arizona. This had the predictable, albeit unfortunate, effect of leading at least some honorable people of goodwill to assume the best about the measure without examining its impact on individual liberty.

Every invasion of individual rights happens with the eager support of people acting in the sincere and thoroughly mistaken confidence that what they permit the state to do to others will never be done to them.

The seminal error is to insist on exceptions to the principle that government -- assuming, of course, that one should be permitted to exist -- must be strictly limited to protecting the life, liberty, and property of every individual.

When that error is coupled with a fertile topic of public concern -- such as terrorism, drug addiction, child abuse, or illegal immigration -- politics becomes pregnant with large-scale abuses of individual rights.

Supporters of the Arizona immigration law define the controversy as an issue of "sovereignty" -- preservation of Arizona's reserved powers under the Tenth Amendment and the national independence of the United States. Political sovereignty, valuable as it is, must be regarded as a "good of second intent" -- something that, while of great worth, is derivative of, or subordinate to, a much greater good. The paramount political good, according to America's founding premise, is individual liberty protected by law.

In dealing with immigration, as with all other matters of public concern, government's only legitimate role is to protect individual rights against criminal aggression -- such crimes of violence, fraud, or trespassing on private property.

Current policy, however, is to abet and reward aggression in the form of participatory plunder by illegal immigrants by way of welfare subsidies, which obviously have to be abolished (and not just for immigrants, but for everyone -- beginning with the corporate welfare whores on Wall Street and in the military-industrial-homeland security complex).

Enactment of Arizona's "your papers, please" legislation -- which, Judge Andrew Napolitano predicts, won't survive constitutional scrutiny -- comes at a time when the problem of illegal immigration is in remission, both in that border state and nation-wide. It's entirely likely that with immigration beginning to taper off, the border enforcement apparatus being built today will increasingly be directed inward.

As the government consummates its transformation into an undisguised corporatist kleptocracy, many Americans seeking to preserve some portion of what they have earned and saved will be driven to expatriate themselves.

The Regime already treats Americans living abroad as tax slaves, irrespective of their current place of residence. Economist Doug Casey warns that currency export controls are all but inevitable -- indeed, in a small but significant way, they are already a tangible reality.

Many of Obama's conservative critics simultaneously condemn him for building an invasive collectivist state and for his inadequate zeal in closing down the border. If their perception of Obama's intentions is sound, those critics had better hope and pray that he doesn't reverse course and become a border control zealot.




Related: Killer Cocktail: PTSD and Your Local Police

(AntiWar) – The moment that Austin police officer Wayne Williamson began unloading his pistol in a filled parking lot was probably the first time he realized he hadn’t left Iraq too far behind. Williamson never hit his target –a fleeing, “possibly armed” suspect – but only one of the bullets he discharged in the parking [...]

Zio-scam of the day: Darfur aid dollars funding West Bank settlements

By Thomas C. Mountain
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_5708.shtml

ASMARA, Eritrea -- Persons working with aid organizations assisting the victims of the Darfur conflict have passed on the news that they have confirmed through their contacts in the so called "Save Darfur Coalition" that millions of dollars raised to help the Darfur refugees have ended up in Israeli bank accounts. These accounts help fund programs that include illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

These sources inside the pro-Israel organizations that control the "Save Darfur Coalition" estimate that over $100 million was raised for Darfur, though the exact amount may never be known due to the murky nature of the financial statements these organizations submit. What is known is that over half the money raised for Darfur was consumed by "operational expenses" for these organizations, meaning bloated salaries, expense accounts and the multimillion dollar publicity campaign that helped generate the donations. Only about 10 percent of the donations received ever made it to the Darfur refugees, with several million ending up in Israeli bank accounts.

The Darfur funds were diverted to Israel by either co-mingling the funds with those used to support the Israeli projects or through a more complex system of grants to other "aid" or "relief" organizations that allowed the eventual destination of the funds to be almost impossible to trace.

For some time now, aid workers in Darfur have been quietly pressuring the Save Darfur Coalition to turn over more of the tens of millions of dollars they have been collecting on the behalf of the Sudanese people in Darfur. People working inside the organizations that make up the coalition became upset when they discovered that aid raised on behalf of Darfur was being diverted to Israel and began supplying information to the aid workers on the ground in Darfur. Some of these aid workers finally broke their silence on the matter and passed on to us what they had confirmed from these Save Darfur insiders.

As previously reported, the so-called "Darfur Genocide" was a myth, or more accurately, a fraud, perpetuated by the Western media and governments along with the pro-Israel "human rights" NGOs to raise over a $100 million. UN and international aid workers involved in the Darfur relief effort are quietly proud of the fact that Darfur refugees are the beneficiaries of one of, if not the largest, best run relief works in history. These aid workers also acknowledge the fact that the Sudanese government played a critical role in support of the relief effort, which could not have succeeded without such support. It doesn't add up that, on one hand, the Sudanese government was committing genocide against the people of Darfur while at the same time playing a critical role in operating the largest best run relief works in history in support of the Darfur people.

As previously reported, a Western funded genocide is being committed in the Ethiopian Ogaden by the Ethiopian government, but no genocide has ever been committed in Darfur. The whole "Darfur Genocide" campaign is nothing more than a smokescreen to vilify the Sudanese government in an attempt to promote Western military intervention in oil and mineral rich Sudan, Africa's largest and potentially wealthiest country, as well as to help divert attention from the real, Western-funded genocide being carried out in the Ogaden by the Western cop on the beat in East Africa, Ethiopia.

The brazenness and breadth of this propaganda campaign has even surprised experienced observers of the long, dirty history of aid diversion in the Horn of Africa. Western governments, the UN, the Western media, even Hollywood became part of the act with story lines "exposing" the Darfur "genocide" appearing in dramas such as Boston Legal amongst others.

Bernie Maddoff went to prison for his fraud, but it is highly unlikely that an investigation will be launched into the "Darfur Genocide" scam. And only an investigation by the US Justice Department has the power to search, seize and subpoena that will be required to expose this whole criminal fraud.

So next time you hear about a campaign to "save" Africans be suspicious and remember just how big a lie was told about Darfur and how your hard earned money ended up somewhere you least expected, helping building Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Thomas C. Mountain was, in a former life, an educator, activist and alternative medicine practitioner in the USA. Email thomascmountain at yahoo.com.

Eurointelligence Daily Briefing - 27 April 2010: Contagion risks on the rise for the PIIGS

Is Merkel about to push the eurozone over the brink?

• Angela Merkel attempts to delay any decision about Greece beyond the May 9 state elections in North-Rhine Westphalia;
• giving financial markets more reason to expect a Greek default and the failure of a final deal;
• Greek two year bond yields rose 300bp, now the highest in the world;
• Solution could be hammered out only in the very last moment shortly before €8.5bn are due on May 19;
• European leaders press on Germany to speed up decision;
• Dominique Strauss Kahn and Jean Claude Trichet were asked to brief members of the German parliament;
• In Greece another wave of transportation strikes against pay cuts sets off;
• Contagion risks are on the rise as yields for Portugal, Ireland and Spain increased significantly;
• Both German and Greek commentators deplore the poor quality of public debate and populist stunts in their respective country;
• The Belgian prime minister, meanwhile, had resigned over the impossibility to get the two linguistic communities to agree a split of a bilingual constituency at the outskirts of Brussels %

_____________________________________________________________________

This is the Daily Briefing from www.eurointelligence.com.   

Meet the Agro-Industry Lobby's Natural Food Prohibition Act of 2010

This will be likely the worst news of this week:

By Steve Green - Foodforfreedom
April 24, 2010

S 510, the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2010,  may be the most dangerous bill in the history of the US.  It is to our food what the bailout was to our economy, only we can live without money.

“If accepted [S 510] would preclude the public’s right to grow, own, trade, transport, share, feed and eat each and every food that nature makes.  It will become the most offensive authority against the cultivation, trade and consumption of food and agricultural products of one’s choice. It will be unconstitutional and contrary to natural law or, if you like, the will of God.”  ~Dr. Shiv Chopra, Canada Health whistleblower
It is similar to what India faced with imposition of the salt tax during British rule, only S 510 extends control over all food in the US, violating the fundamental human right to food.

Monsanto says it has no interest in the bill and would not benefit from it, but Monsanto’s Michael Taylor who gave us rBGH and unregulated genetically modified (GM) organisms, appears to have designed it and is waiting as an appointed Food Czar to the FDA (a position unapproved by Congress) to administer the agency it would create — without judicial review — if it passes.  S 510 would give Monsanto unlimited power over all US seed, food supplements, food and farming.

History

In the 1990s, Bill Clinton introduced HACCP (Hazardous Analysis Critical Control Points) purportedly to deal with contamination in the meat industry.  Clinton’s HACCP delighted the offending corporate (World Trade Organization “WTO”) meat packers since it allowed them to inspect themselves, eliminated thousands of local food processors (with no history of contamination), and centralized meat into their control.  Monsanto promoted HACCP.

In 2008, Hillary Clinton, urged a powerful centralized food safety agency as part of her campaign for president.  Her advisor was Mark Penn, CEO of Burson Marsteller*, a giant PR firm representing Monsanto.  Clinton lost, but Clinton friends such as Rosa DeLauro, whose husband’s firm lists Monsanto as a progressive client and globalization as an area of expertise, introduced early versions of S 510.

S 510 fails on moral, social, economic, political, constitutional, and human survival grounds.

1.  It puts all US food and all US farms under Homeland Security and the Department of Defense, in the event of contamination or an ill-defined emergency.  It resembles the Kissinger Plan.

2.  It would end US sovereignty over its own food supply by insisting on compliance with the WTO, thus threatening national security.  It would end the Uruguay Round Agreement Act of 1994, which put US sovereignty and US law under perfect protection.  Instead, S 510 says:

COMPLIANCE WITH INTERNATIONAL AGREEMENTS.

Nothing in this Act (or an amendment made by this Act) shall be construed in a manner inconsistent with the agreement establishing the World Trade Organization or any other treaty or international agreement to which the United States is a party.

3.  It would allow the government, under Maritime Law, to define the introduction of any food into commerce (even direct sales between individuals) as smuggling into “the United States.”  Since under that law, the US is a corporate entity and not a location, “entry of food into the US” covers food produced anywhere within the land mass of this country and “entering into” it by virtue of being produced.


4.  It imposes Codex Alimentarius on the US, a global system of control over food.  It allows the United Nations (UN), World Health Organization (WHO), UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and the WTO to take control of every food on earth and remove access to natural food supplements.  Its bizarre history and its expected impact in limiting access to adequate nutrition (while mandating GM food, GM animals, pesticides, hormones, irradiation of food, etc.) threatens all safe and organic food and health itself, since the world knows now it needs vitamins to survive, not just to treat illnesses.


5.  It would remove the right to clean, store and thus own seed in the US, putting control of seeds in the hands of Monsanto and other multinationals, threatening US security. See Seeds – How to criminalize them, for more details.


6.  It includes NAIS, an animal traceability program that threatens all small farmers and ranchers raising animals.  The UN is participating through the WHO, FAO, WTO, and World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) in allowing mass slaughter of even heritage breeds of animals and without proof of disease.  Biodiversity in farm animals is being wiped out to substitute genetically engineered animals on which corporations hold patents.  Animal diseases can be falsely declared.  S 510 includes the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), despite its corrupt involvement in the H1N1 scandal, which is now said to have been concocted by the corporations.


7.  It extends a failed and destructive HACCP to all food, thus threatening to do to all local food production and farming what HACCP did to meat production – put it in corporate hands and worsen food safety. 


8.  It deconstructs what is left of the American economy.  It takes agriculture and food, which are the cornerstone of all economies, out of the hands of the citizenry, and puts them under the total control of multinational corporations influencing the UN, WHO, FAO and WTO, with HHS, and CDC, acting as agents, with Homeland Security as the enforcer.  The chance to rebuild the economy based on farming, ranching, gardens, food production, natural health, and all the jobs, tools and connected occupations would be eliminated.


9.  It would allow the government to mandate antibiotics, hormones, slaughterhouse waste, pesticides and GMOs.  This would industrialize every farm in the US, eliminate local organic farming, greatly increase global warming from increased use of oil-based products and long-distance delivery of foods, and make food even more unsafe.  The five items listed — the Five Pillars of Food Safety — are precisely the items in the food supply which are the primary source of its danger.


10. It uses food crimes as the entry into police state power and control.  The bill postpones defining all the regulations to be imposed; postpones defining crimes to be punished, postpones defining penalties to be applied.  It removes fundamental constitutional protections from all citizens in the country, making them subject to a corporate tribunal with unlimited power and penalties, and without judicial review.  It is (similar to C-6 in Canada) the end of Rule of Law in the US.

For further information, watch these videos:
Food Laws – Forcing people to globalize
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ia-P4rL2IWc
State Imposed Violence … to snatch resources of ordinary people
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onw_PkVvpts&feature=related
Corporate Rule
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PwqUQ_HIlg&feature=related
Reclaiming Economies
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXoJHG-er7A&feature=related
Oak snake image at Alfred B. Maclay Gardens State Park, Florida
http://snipurl.com/vrg6p