IMF Tax Tribunals Coming to America Soon?

From Infowars
By KurtNimmo 


– In Greece, the bankster loan sharking operation popularly known as the International Monetary Fund has proposed creating special courts and tribunals to prosecute tax evaders. Greek’s finance minister, George Papaconstantinou, a socialist Bilderberg member and a graduate of the London School of Economics, has “suggested the effective management of whistle-blowing” to protect people who rat out tax scofflaws.

	Once upon a time, federal officials were tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail in response to confiscatory taxation.Illustration: Western Pennsylvanians protest a tax on whiskey in 1794.

“The idea of tax courts concerns either the setting up of special tribunals that would deal with tax cases without having to go through normal courts or the appointment of an adequate number of specialized judges to the existing structure of administrative courts who would deal exclusively with tax cases,” reports Kathimerini, a supplement to the International Herald Tribune in Greece.
The IMF also calls for “exhaustive checks regarding the payment of value-added tax.” Bankers and their cronies in government love the VAT because it legalizes theft at every stage of product manufacture and distribution. It disproportionately raises taxes on middle- and low-income earners. It is a sledgehammer used to wreck societies.
It will get ugly in Greece because the banksters will not get blood out of a stone. Austerity of the sort now imposed on Greece erodes tax revenues. But then the plan is not to raise tax revenue. It is to destroy nations and usher in world government.
Greece went crawling to the globalist loan sharking operation after its economy was imploded through a “monetarist” debt policy. In other words, after Greece joined the eurozone bankers manipulated the country’s money supply and then destroyed the supports with hedge funds and other bankster speculation schemes designed to level national economies.
In April, Greek’s socialist government begged the EU and the IMF for high interest loans. The following month the IMF made demands for “austerity measures” — slash and then freeze public-sector wages, raise taxes, increase value-added taxes, impose new taxes on businesses, cut pension payments and raise retirement ages — in order to pay back the loans issued at high interest and thus impoverish the average Greek.
Soon thereafter, the planned IMF riots occurred in Greece with predictable result, including death.
Monetary and fiscal austerity are designed to implement privatization and so-called “liberalization,” a nice word for removing restrictions on the inflow and outflow of international capital as well as restrictions on what transnational corporations and banks are allowed to buy, own, and operate in foreign countries. Banksters accomplish this by stacking up debt and then demanding “structural readjustment” that results in fire sales and the selling off of national treasures and assets to the bankster vulture class. In June, the Greek government put some of its 6,000 islands on the market.
“Debt is an efficient tool. It ensures access to other peoples’ raw materials and infrastructure on the cheapest possible terms,” writes Susan George in A Fate Worse Than Debt.
“The huge multinational banks and corporations in particular love the IMF,” writes Ron Paul. “Big corporations obtain lucrative contracts for a wide variety of construction projects funded with IMF loans. It’s a familiar game in Washington, where corporate welfare is disguised as compassion for the poor.” Most “recipient nations face huge debts they cannot service, which only adds to their poverty and instability,” Paul adds.
Now the IMF has set its sights on the Big Kahuna, the United States, and its analysts have “estimated a series of probabilities regarding the amount of increased debt a country might be able to sustain without hitting its projected point of no return,” the Washington Post reported in September. “In the case of the U.S., the fund said the odds were roughly three out of four that the country could increase its total debt to some degree without being penalized by investors.”
According to the IMF’s calculations, the United States finished 2009 with a debt-to-GDP ratio of 85%. “The current trend projects the United States to finish 2010 at 94% and 2011 at 98%. The 90% level has become the IMF’s make-or-break point for countries hoping to grow their way out of debt. If the government debt load climbs above 90% of GDP, economic growth slows so much that growth is no longer a viable solution for reducing that debt, and the IMF insists on austerity measures,” notes Activist Post.
It looks like austerity measures and new tax schemes are in the works for America. Glenn Beck and the RINO intelligentsia are all for squeezing more money out of the workers to pay off a never-ending bankster debt. Beck is in agreement with the former Fed mob boss Paul Volcker and Obama’s Goldman Sachs dominated Economic Recovery Advisory Board. It is our duty to pay the bankers.
It looks like, as well, the U.S. will ultimately get the same sort of tax courts and tribunals the IMF proposes for Greece since there is no shortage of tax scofflaws in America and no shortage of state-worshiping bureaucrats eager to fill the prisons and coming-soon slave labor penal workhouses with a fresh crop of victims.
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Related:

Greece Just Had Its Patriot Act Moment -- Proposing Special Police Units To Hunt Down Tax Evaders

Greek Leftist Guerrilla Group Targets Sarkozy With Bomb Attempt

Who Were the Witches? - Patriarchal Terror and the Creation of Capitalism

Must read of the year: a *STELLAR* book review (both the book and the review) from Sott:

Alex Knight
The End of Capitalism

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This Halloween season, there is no book I could recommend more highly than Silvia Federici's brilliant Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (Autonomedia 2004), which tells the dark saga of the Witch Hunt that consumed Europe for more than 200 years. In uncovering this forgotten history, Federici exposes the origins of capitalism in the heightened oppression of workers (represented by Shakespeare's character Caliban), and most strikingly, in the brutal subjugation of women. She also brings to light the enormous and colorful European peasant movements that fought against the injustices of their time, connecting their defeat to the imposition of a new patriarchal order that divided male from female workers. Today, as more and more people question the usefulness of a capitalist system that has thrown the world into crisis, Caliban and the Witch stands out as essential reading for unmasking the shocking violence and inequality that capitalism has relied upon from its very creation. 

Who Were the Witches?

Parents putting a pointed hat on their young son or daughter before Trick-or-Treating might never pause to wonder this question, seeing witches as just another cartoonish Halloween icon like Frankenstein's monster or Dracula. But deep within our ritual lies a hidden history that can tell us important truths about our world, as the legacy of past events continues to affect us 500 years later. In this book, Silvia Federici takes us back in time to show how the mysterious figure of the witch is key to understanding the creation of capitalism, the profit-motivated economic system that now reigns over the entire planet.

During the 15th - 17th centuries the fear of witches was ever-present in Europe and Colonial America, so much so that if a woman was accused of witchcraft she could face the cruellest of torture until confession was given, or even be executed based on suspicion alone. There was often no evidence whatsoever. The author recounts, "for more than two centuries, in several European countries, hundreds of thousands of women were tried, tortured, burned alive or hanged, accused of having sold body and soul to the devil and, by magical means, murdered scores of children, sucked their blood, made potions with their flesh, caused the death of their neighbors, destroyed cattle and crops, raised storms, and performed many other abominations" (169).

In other words, just about anything bad that might or might not have happened was blamed on witches during that time. So where did this tidal wave of hysteria come from that took the lives so many poor women, most of whom had almost certainly never flown on broomsticks or stirred eye-of-newt into large black cauldrons?

Caliban underscores that the persecution of witches was not just some error of ignorant peasants, but in fact the deliberate policy of Church and State, the very ruling class of society. To put this in perspective, today witchcraft would be a far-fetched cause for alarm, but the fear of hidden terrorists who could strike at any moment because they "hate our freedom" is widespread. Not surprising, since politicians and the media have been drilling this frightening message into people's heads for years, even though terrorism is a much less likely cause of death than, say, lack of health care.1 And just as the panic over terrorism has enabled today's powers-that-be to attempt to remake the Middle East, this book makes the case that the powers-that-were of Medieval Europe exploited or invented the fear of witches to remake European society towards a social paradigm that met their interests.

Interestingly, a major component of both of these crusades was the use of so-called "shock and awe" tactics to astound the population with "spectacular displays of force," which helped to soften up resistance to drastic or unpopular reforms.2 In the case of the Witch Hunt, shock therapy was applied through the witch burnings - spectacles of such stupefying violence that they paralyzed whole villages and regions into accepting fundamental restructuring of medieval society.3 Federici describes a typical witch burning as, "an important public event, which all the members of the community had to attend, including the children of the witches, especially their daughters who, in some cases, would be whipped in front of the stake on which they could see their mother burning alive" (186).

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The witch burning was the medieval version of "Shock and Awe"

The book argues that these gruesome executions not only punished "witches" but graphically demonstrated the repercussions for any kind of disobedience to the clergy or nobility. In particular, the witch burnings were meant to terrify women into accepting "a new patriarchal order where women's bodies, their labor, their sexual and reproductive powers were placed under the control of the state and transformed into economic resources" (170).

Federici puts forward that up until the 16th century, though living in a sexist society, European women retained significant economic independence from men that they typically do not under capitalism, where gender roles are more distinguished. "If we also take into account that in medieval society collective relations prevailed over familial ones, and most of the tasks that female serfs performed (washing, spinning, harvesting, and tending to animals on the commons) were done in cooperation with other women, we then realize... [this] was a source of power and protection for women. It was the basis for an intense female sociality and solidarity that enabled women to stand up to men."

The Witch Hunt initiated a period where women were forced to become what she calls "servants of the male work force" (115) - excluded from receiving a wage, they were confined to the unpaid labor of raising children, caring for the elderly and sick, nurturing their husbands or partners, and maintaining the home. In Federici's words, this was the "housewifization of women," the reduction to a second-class status where women became totally dependent on the income of men (27).

The author goes on to show how female sexuality, which was seen as a source of women's potential power over men, became an object of suspicion and came under sharp attack by the authorities. This assault manifested in new laws that took away women's control over the reproductive process, such as the banning of birth control measures, the replacement of midwives with male doctors, and the outlawing of abortion and infanticide.4 Federici calls it an attempt to turn the female body into "a machine for the reproduction of labor," such that women's only purpose in life was supposedly to produce children (144).

But we also learn that this was just one component of a broader move by Church and State to ban all forms of sexuality that were considered "non-productive." For example, "homosexuality, sex between young and old, sex between people of different classes, anal coitus, coitus from behind, nudity, and dances. Also proscribed was the public, collective sexuality that had prevailed in the Middle Ages, as in the Spring festivals of pagan origins that, in the 16th-century, were still celebrated all over Europe" (194). To this end, the Witch Hunt targeted not only female sexuality but homosexuality and gender non-conformity as well, helping to craft the patriarchal sexual boundaries that define our society to this day.

Capitalism - Born in Flames

What separates Caliban from other works exploring the "witch" phenomenon is that this book puts the persecution of witches into the context of the development of capitalism. For Silvia Federici, it's no accident that "the witch-hunt occurred simultaneously with the colonization and extermination of the populations of the New World, the English enclosures, [or] the beginning of the slave trade" (164). She instructs that all of these seemingly unrelated tragedies were initiated by the same European ruling elite at the very moment that capitalism was in formation, the late 15th through 17th centuries. Contrary to "laissez-faire" orthodoxy which holds that capitalism functions best without state intervention, Federici posits that it was precisely the state violence of these campaigns that laid the foundation for capitalist economics.

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A new era was forged in the flames of the Witch Hunt

Thankfully for the reader, who may not be very familiar with the history of this era, Federici outlines these events in clear and accessible language. She focuses on the Land Enclosures in particular because their significance has been largely lost in time.

Many of us will not remember that during Europe's Middle Ages, before the Enclosures, even the lowliest of serfs had their own plot of land with which they could use for just about any purpose. Federici adds, "With the use of land also came the use of the 'commons' - meadows, forests, lakes, wild pastures - that provided crucial resources for the peasant economy (wood for fuel, timber for building, fishponds, grazing grounds for animals) and fostered community cohesion and cooperation" (24). This access to land acted as a buffer, providing security for peasants who otherwise were mostly subject to the whim of their "Lord." Not only could they grow their own food, or hunt in the relatively plentiful forests which were still standing in that era, but connection to the commons also gave peasants territory with which to organize resistance movements and alternative economies outside the control of their masters.

The Enclosures were a process by which this land was taken away - closed off by the State and typically handed over to entrepreneurs to pursue a profit in sheep or cow herding, or large-scale agriculture. Instead of being used for subsistence as it had been, the land's bounty was sold away to fledgling national and international markets. A new class of profit-motivated landowners emerged, known as "gentry," but the underside of this development was the trauma experienced by the evicted peasants. In the author's words, "As soon as they lost access to land, all workers were plunged into a dependence unknown in medieval times, as their landless condition gave employers the power to cut their pay and lengthen the working-day" (72).

For Federici, then, the chief creation of the Enclosures was a property-less, landless working class, a "proletariat" who were left with little option but to work for a wage in order to survive; wage labor being one of the defining features of capitalism.

Cut off from their traditional soil, many communities scattered across the countryside to find new homesteads. But the State countered with the so-called "Bloody Laws", which made it legal to capture wandering "vagabonds" and force them to work for a wage, or put them to death. Federici reveals the result: "What followed was the absolute impoverishment of the European working class... Evidence is the change that occurred in the workers' diets. Meat disappeared from their tables, except for a few scraps of lard, and so did beer and wine, salt and olive oil" (77). Although European workers typically labored for longer hours under their new capitalist employers, living standards were reduced sharply throughout the 16th century, and it wasn't until the middle of the 19th century that earnings returned to the level they had been before the Enclosures.5

According to Federici, the witch hunts played a key role in facilitating this process of impoverishment by driving a sexist wedge into the working class that "undermined class solidarity," making it more difficult for communities to resist displacement from their land (48). While women were faced with the threat of horrific torture and death if they did not conform to new submissive gender roles, men were in effect bribed with the promise of obedient wives and new access to women's bodies. The author cites that "Another aspect of the divisive sexual politics to diffuse workers' protest was the institutionalization of prostitution, implemented through the opening of municipal brothels soon proliferating throughout Europe" (49). And in addition to prostitution, a legalization of sexual violence provided further sanction for the exploitation of women's bodies. She explains, "In France, the municipal authorities practically decriminalized rape, provided the victims were women of the lower class" (47). This initiated what Federici calls a "virtual rape movement," making it unsafe for women to even leave their homes.

The witch trials were the final assault, which all but obliterated the integrity of peasant communities by fostering mutual suspicion and fear. Amidst deteriorating conditions, neighbors were encouraged to turn against one another, so that any insult or annoyance became grounds for an accusation of witchcraft. As the terror spread, a new era was forged in the flames of the witch burnings. Surveying the damage, Silvia Federici concludes that "the persecution of the witches, in Europe as in the New World, was as important as colonization and the expropriation of the European peasantry from its land were for the development of capitalism" (12).

A Forgotten Revolution

Federici maintains that it didn't have to turn out this way. "Capitalism was not the only possible response to the crisis of feudal power. Throughout Europe, vast communalistic social movements and rebellions against feudalism had offered the promise of a new egalitarian society built on social equality and cooperation" (61).

Caliban's most inspiring chapters make visible an enormous continent-wide series of poor people's movements that nearly toppled Church and State at the end of the Middle Ages. These peasant movements of the 13th - 16th centuries were often labelled "heretical" for challenging the religious power of the Vatican, but as the book details they aimed for a much broader transformation of feudal society. The so-called "heretics" often "denounced social hierarchies, private property and the accumulation of wealth, and disseminated among the people a new, revolutionary conception of society that, for the first time in the Middle Ages, redefined every aspect of daily life (work, property, sexual reproduction, and the position of women), posing the question of emancipation in truly universal terms" (33).

Silvia Federici shows us how the heretical movements took many forms, from the vegetarian and anti-war Cathars of southern France to the communistic and anti-nobility Taborites of Bohemia, but were united in the call for the elimination of social inequality. Many put forth the argument that it was anti-Christian for the clergy and nobility to live in opulence while so many suffered from lack of adequate food, housing or medical attention.

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The vegetarian and anti-war Cathars were rounded up by the Crusaders.

Another common thread weaving the European peasant movements together was the leadership of women. Federici describes that, "[Heretical women] had the same rights as men, and could enjoy a social life and mobility that nowhere else was available to them in the Middle Ages... Not surprisingly, women are present in the history of heresy as in no other aspect of medieval life." (38). Some heretical sects, like the Cathars, discouraged marriage and emphasized birth control - advocating a sexual liberation which directly challenged the Church's moral authority.

The gender politics of peasant movements proved to be a strength, and they attracted a wide following that undercut the power of a feudal system which was already in crisis. Federici explains how the movements became increasingly revolutionary as they grew in size. "In the course of this process, the political horizon and the organizational dimensions of the peasant and artisan struggle broadened. Entire regions revolted, forming assemblies and recruiting armies. At times, the peasants organized in bands, attacking the castles of the lords, and destroying the archives where the written marks of their servitude were kept" (45).

What started as a religious movement became increasingly revolutionary. For example, in the 1420s and 30s, the Taborites fought to liberate all of Bohemia, beating back several Crusades of 100,000+ men organized by the Vatican (54-55). The uprisings became contagious all across Europe, so much so that in the crucial period of 1350-1500, unprecedented concessions were made including the doubling of wages, reduction in prices and rents, and a shorter working day. In the words of Silvia Federici, "the feudal economy was doomed" (62).

The author documents that the initial reaction by elites was to institute the "Holy Inquisition," a brutal campaign of state repression that included torturing and even burning heretics to death. But as time went on, ruling class strategy shifted from targeting heretics in general to specifically targeting female community leaders. The Inquisition morphed into the Witch Hunt.

Soon, simple meetings of peasant women were stigmatized as possible "Sabbats," where women were supposedly seduced by the devil to become witches, but as Federici clarifies, it was the rebellious politics and non-conforming gender relations of such gatherings which were demonized (177). Strong, defiant women were murdered by the tens of thousands, and along with them the Witch Hunt also destroyed "a whole world of female practices, collective relations, and systems of knowledge that had been the foundation of women's power in pre-capitalist Europe, and the condition for their resistance in the struggle against feudalism" (103).

For elite European nobles and clergy, the Witch Hunt succeeded in stifling a working class revolution that had increasingly threatened their rule. Even more, Silvia Federici puts forward that the Witch Hunt facilitated the rise of a new, capitalist social paradigm - based on large-scale economic production for profit and the displacement of peasants from their lands into the burgeoning urban workforce. In time, this capitalist system would dominate all of Europe and be dispersed through conquistadors' "guns, germs and steel" to every corner of the globe, destroying countless ancient civilizations and cultures in the process.6 Federici's analysis is that, "Capitalism was the counter-revolution that destroyed the possibilities that had emerged from the anti-feudal struggle - possibilities which, if realized, might have spared us the immense destruction of lives and the environment that has marked the advance of capitalist relations worldwide" (22). How might things be different if the forgotten revolution had won?

Conclusion - Rediscovering the Magic of Truth-Telling

"Day by day, it's worse for my people, especially for the women. And that's why, because of all of these main reasons, we say this is the mockery of democracy and mockery of War on Terror." - Malalai Joya, Afghan democracy activist, 2009

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Malalai Joya speaking at a girls school in Farah province, Afghanistan

Caliban and the Witch is a book that challenges many important myths about the world we live in. First and foremost among these is the widely-held belief that capitalism, though perhaps flawed in its current form, started out as a "progressive" development that liberated workers and improved the conditions of women, people of color and other oppressed groups. Silvia Federici has done impressive work to take us back to the very foundations of the capitalist system in late-medieval Europe to uncover a secret history of land dispossession and impoverishment, gender and sexual terror, and brutal colonization of non-Europeans. This terrible legacy leads her to the profound conclusion that the system is "necessarily committed to racism and sexism" (17).

Most strongly, she writes, "It is impossible to associate capitalism with any form of liberation or attribute the longevity of the system to its capacity to satisfy human needs. If capitalism has been able to reproduce itself it is only because of the web of inequalities that it has built into the body of the world proletariat, and because of its capacity to globalize exploitation. This process is still unfolding under our eyes, as it has for the last 500 years" (17).

It's been said that we can measure a society by how it treats its women. This book provides compelling documentation to suggest that capitalism is and has always been a male dominated system, which reduces opportunities and security for women as well as marginalizing those who don't fit within narrow gender boundaries. In particular, Silvia Federici uses the story of the Witch Hunt to illuminate the inner workings of capitalism to show the restraining, silencing, and demonizing of female sexual power built into it.7 Responding to our question that started this essay, she writes, "The witch was not only the midwife, the woman who avoided maternity, or the beggar who eked out a living by stealing some wood or butter from her neighbors. She was also the loose, promiscuous woman - the prostitute or adulteress, and generally, the woman who exercised her sexuality outside the bonds of marriage and procreation... The witch was also the rebel woman who talked back, argued, swore, and did not cry under torture" (184).

In other words, the witches were those women who in one way or another resisted the establishment of an unjust social order - the mechanical exploitation of capitalism. The witches represented a whole world that Europe's new masters were anxious to destroy: a world with strong female leadership, a world rooted in local communities and knowledge, a world alive with magical possibilities, a world in revolt.

We need not despair for the world that has been lost. Indeed, it is still with us today in the struggles of people everywhere organizing for justice. Today from Afghanistan we can hear the clarion voice of Malalai Joya, a courageous woman who was expelled from the Afghan parliament in 2007 for speaking out against the U.S.-installed warlords who now rule her country. She appeared recently on Democracy Now! saying, "Now my people are sandwiched between two powerful enemies: from the sky, occupation forces bombing and killing innocent civilians... [and] on the ground, Taliban and these warlords together continue to deliver fascism against our people."8

Joya risks her life to make these comments, but her words carry the sparkling truth that is so necessary to end the insanity of war and occupation in the Middle East. Those who are summoned to action by her call do so in the immortal spirit of the "heretics" and "witches" who resisted capitalism and feudalism before it, carrying forward a movement that is wide as the Earth and old as time.

Notes

1 - Harvard University researchers released a study on Sept. 17, 2009 showing that approximately 45,000 Americans die unnecessarily from lack of medical coverage every year, unfortunately many times more than the number killed in the September 11 terrorist attacks. See this article for more on the Harvard study.

2 - "Shock and Awe", Wikipedia. Online at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shock_and_awe. Accessed Nov. 2, 2009.

3 - This "shock therapy" strategy is examined with detailed case studies by Naomi Klein in the excellent The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Metropolitan Books 2007. For example she offers that the US-led devastation of Iraq's social infrastructure, including destruction of hospitals, schools, and food and water systems traumatized the Iraqi people such that they could not mobilize to prevent the highly unpopular privatization of the country's oil wealth.

4 - for more on the Witch Hunt's effect on the male domination of reproduction and medicine, see Barbara Ehrenreich'sWitches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers, The Feminist Press at CUNY 1972, pamphlet.

5 - "The high point of wages was immediately preceding the 'long' sixteenth century [roughly 1450], and the low point was at its end [roughly 1650]. The drop during the sixteenth century was immense." Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World-System. Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Academic Press, 1974. pg. 80.

6 - see Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, W.W. Norton Press 2005. Jared Diamond's study of the rise of Europe focuses more on ecology than patriarchy, but is nonetheless useful for exposing the carnage of the colonization process.

7 - for a brilliant collection of insights into the many ways female sexuality is still under attack, see Friedman, Jaclyn & Jessica Valenti. Yes Means Yes! Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape. Seal Press 2008. My review of this book can also be found here.

8 - Democracy Now! October 28, 2009 broadcast. "A Woman Among Warlords: Afghan Democracy Activist Malalai Joya Defies Threats to Challenge US Occupation, Local Warlords."

Comment: Read also the two related SOTT Focus pieces:

Control of Uppity Women Behind Witchcraft Accusations?

Wars, Pestilence and Witches  

GORDON DUFF: BOMBS, TERRORISM AND MANURE

From VeteransToday, October 31, 2010 

by Gordon Duff 

“IS THAT A BOMB IN YOUR PANTS OR ARE YOU JUST GLAD TO SEE ME?”

By Gordon Duff STAFF WRITER/Senior Editor

“Worse still, the “terrorists” father, described by the press as a “Muslim banker” turned out to be a partner in an Israeli managed defense company and a close friend of the CIA.”

Last week, we were told courier services were carrying powerful and undetectable bombs, sent from Yemen, mailed to “Chicago synagogues” to strike out at America’s Jewish population just before the elections.  This would seem like a credible terrorist act if it were not for a few things:

Recent “debunked” terror threats, Adam “Perlman” Gadahn, the actor playing “American Taliban” and the long dead Osama bin Laden had both issued terror alerts that had, as usual, made no reference to Israel or Palestinians.  This time, the press noticed and Israel became suspect number one as to the real origin of these threats.

Wikileaks has also been “outed” as a source unique in its protection of Israel and its interests.  Reports have been proven to be, not only altered or falsified, but carefully filtered using PROMISsoftware, proving high level government complicity in filtering and fabricating data.  Today, Israel announced that Wikileaks proves they were singled out by the UN for investigation for atrocities in Gaza as proven by the Goldstone Report.  They now ask for a similar investigation of the United States, a nation they used to consider an ally, the nation that underwrites their economy with massive economic aid.

Newspaper reports, so often horribly unreliable, have universally misrepresented the nature of the explosive used, PETN, its detectability and function.  This is not a minor thing, not at all.  Literally hundreds of reporters were fed information easily disproven in Wikipedia.

We have seen it all before.  Last Christmas, the “Crotch Bomber” was another “PETN/Yemen” terror fiasco.  Press stories blamed Al Qaeda and were ready to build this into a new 9/11 except that reliable witnesses, Detroit area attorneys, saw the terrorist, no passport, no visa, escorted onto the plane.  Before that, newspapers said the bomber had a diplomatic passport, a visa and had “evaded” security.

“Security” put him on the plane, security employed by a company whose management and employees are largely IDF and Mossad and whose owners are Israeli.

Worse still, the “terrorists” father, described by the press as a “Muslim banker” turned out to be a partner in an Israeli managed defense company and a close friend of the CIA.

Now we have the arrest, today, of a young woman in Yemen, one with no ties to extremist organizations orterrorism.  When this story is “peeled away,” beneath the “spin,” where will it go?  The problem is, every story is “spin” and has to be discarded.  What does this tell us?

(VIDEO) EXPLOSIVES:  OBAMA SAYS YES, BBC SAYS NO…HERE WE GO AGAIN

YouTube - Veterans Today -

BOMB DETECTION MYTHOLOGY

Every newspaper in the country has reported that PETN,  Pentaerythritol tetranitrate, is “undetectable.”  Look at the word.  See the part that says “nitrate?”  Most common explosives are nitrates and there is nothing the least bit difficult about finding them.  The game is simple.  We now have to put a useless $5 million dollar “Michael Chertoff” package scanner in every post office in America to find explosives easily detected by 1970s technology.  This is the heart of mythology and the racketeers that run, not only “counter-terrorism” but may well in fact run “terrorism” as well.

30 years ago, I was talking with my good friend Leo Crampsey about portable explosive detectors.  Those of you who know Leo, know him as the “last man” up the ladder in 1975, last American to leave the embassy in Saigon as South

LEO CRAMPSEY (LEFT) WITH FIDEL CASTRO

Vietnam fell to the communists.

“In a role symbolic of its mission (the Diplomatic Security Service), one of the last people in the final helicopter to evacuate the U.S. Embassy during the fall of Saigon in 1975 was Leo Crampsey, Diplomatic Security’s regional security officer, according to the State Department.”

CRAMPSEY WITH GERMAN CHANCELLOR ADENAUER AND SECRETARY OF STATE JOHN FOSTER DULLES

We had gotten a new British model, one extremely effective at detecting nitrate based explosives like PETN.  It was very portable, rechargeable battery, and a good application for use by the Bureau of Diplomatic Security.  Letter bombs had become a big issue and inspecting mail received by the president while traveling became the first application.

This much can probably be said, considering the years that have passed.  Suffice it to say, I have been around these technologies and “counter-terrorism” for awhile and recognize the smell of “manure” in today’s press stories.

“Counter-terrorism” was a science long before 9/11 and the people of the United States had been looked after quite effectively for some time, before terrorism became an industry onto itself.

PETN

PETN is interesting stuff.  It is actually a heart drug.  There are more than a few ways to detect it, certainly those airport swabs can pick it up, sniffers and the newer scanners.  It doesn’t hold together well so you can’t shape it as with other explosives unless you mix it with something else.  It also requires a trigger of some kind, another explosive device, something that makes it even easier to detect.  Ah, but the press doesn’t care about any of this, they are willing to fabricate stories about the new “magic” undetectable explosive, one that requires that airports, post offices, courier companies, all buy new inspection equipment.

Former head of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, represents many of the companies that make this extremely expensive equipment.  Do we want to say who owns these companies?  This, and a few things about Chertoff leap out at us in a second.  Never was America, its freedoms and security less free and less secure as when Michael Chertoff was watching over us.

The smell we get is “false flag.”

HOW BIG IS THE THREAT OF FALSE FLAG ATTACKS?

“False Flag” means “terror for profit.”  One thing the “9/11 Truth” movement never looks at is the money trail.  Who profited from 9/11?  So often the ideas about terrorism, the ones sold by the media, seem a bit thin.

“You hate America because of what?  You’re kidding!”

Terrorism is 90% industry and 10% “crazy Arab extremists.”  When we are told to believe a “cover story” about a terrorist attack, we are asked to discount the very well established fact that intelligence agencies are all, in reality, the real terrorist organization.  They do the assassinations, the bombings and certainly are the ones who get the crazy and too often childish threats spread across the media.  Terrorism is how they work.  They do two things, they get information and they influence events.

Influence.

This means bribe, this means blackmail but mostly it means murder, terrorism and lots and lots of doing things to blame on someone else.  This, in fact, is the very heart of most intelligence agency activities and always has been.  Then why does our media pretend none of this is what we know it to be when half the TV shows, books and movies we see talk about little else.  Try getting a job with the Mossad or CIA if you can’t speak Arabic or look like a “cardboard cutout” terrorist.

When two idiots in Kansas City want to blow something up, probably because they have seen it done on TV so many times or just got their orders from, yes that long dead Osama bin Laden, orders relayed to them by ABC News, the “help” they get, where do you think it comes from?  Look at Oklahoma City.  Without delving into conspiracy theory, nothing added up there.  Every terror attack since has had some kind of cover-up involved or as Colonel Shaffer calls it, “whitewash.”

WHO PROFITS FROM FALSE FLAG TERROR?

The first thing to come to mind is, of course, scaring the public to stop looking at their own government, its mismanagement, the massive corruption and the foreign influence that many say makes America seem more and more like a “colony.”  The invasion of Iraq had some very interesting aspects to it, too many to count but these are worth looking at:

The phony intelligence created to justify the attack on Iraq was created prior to 9/11 but was written as an answer to 9/11.  Are there really psychics?

The invasion of Iraq, in answer to 9/11 2001, was planned as early as 1999 or before, by people who weren’t even in government yet.  Are there really psychics?

Look at Iraq alone.  Haliburton Corporation, an oil tool company once headed by Dick Cheney began selling food, water, in fact everything imaginable to the US government on “no bid” and “cost-plus” contracts with no oversight whatsoever.  Dirty water, electrocuted troops, unfinished projects, massive overruns and worse were the result, that and endless billions “misplaced.”  Bush political insiders formed companies overnight and were awarded contracts for everything imaginable, in reality, funding political “dirty tricks” and election rigging in the US at the same time, the same way the drug profits from Afghanistan are being laundered back into congressional campaigns for the upcoming 2010 election.

Our ill planned invasion, now termed a “war crime” by almost everyone, turned into an insurgency, then a civil war and finally a total disaster for the United States, leaving Iraq unstable and believed by many under the total control of Iran.

If anyone can find a “war aim” other than stealing money from America and oil from Iraq, please let me know.

THE DANGER OF PRESS COMPLICITY

When Israel attacked the Mavi Marmara in international waters, executing 9 humanitarian activists and then “photoshopped” video for the press, piracy and terrorism by a government have never been as obvious.  When Israel demonstrated its stranglehold on the press, suppressing news stories quite openly, it signaled to the world that we live under a real terror threat that has nothing to do with Islam or extremism.

Abuses like this, the news media totally discredited, only embolden profiteers who would use terror as a daily business practice.  Yes, terrorism is nothing but a way of drumming up business, selling body scanners, bulldozers to knock down homes, drones to bomb weddings and funerals, endless “think tanks” and “consultants” who all do nothing but misdirect, misinform, mislead and, in reality, betray.

Terrorism is organized crime in its purist form, managed from Wall Street and New York, perhaps Washington, London and Tel Aviv also, maybe more so.

With the news, our military, the intelligence agencies, the drug cartels, big oil and defense all inexorably tied together financially, an endless “revolving door,” defended by a totally complicit and equally guilty press, terrorism can be expected to remain the only growth industry in the world.

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Foreign Money, National Security, And The Midterm Elections

(My take about the following is that at this point, letting more and more foreigners to take control of the USA might actually improve its policies, starting with putting a brake on the imperialist wars for jewistan and on the debt bubble. More: it could be the only chance to do it):

From The Baseline Scenario: 

By Simon Johnson
Campaign contributions by non-citizens are a huge issue lurking behind the midterm elections; they will be even more important in 2012.  Think about the economic dynamics:

1. Americans have a long-standing and well-founded aversion to foreign involvement in their politics, and it is well-established that this can happen in part through corporate “commercial” structures.  Thomas Jefferson objected to Alexander Hamilton’s plan for a national bank in part because he feared this would become a stalking horse for the British in some form (see Chapter 2 of 13 Bankers for the context). Dubai Ports World was not allowed to invest in the United States – for reasons of perceived national security.  You may or may not think that case was handled well, but we have the CFIUS process to vet foreign direct investment for good reason.
2. The Supreme Court has determined that corporations can make political contributions virtually without limit, apparently not understanding or not caring that (a) management has a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders, (b) globalization means more foreign shareholders on average (for privately held companies and funds, as well as publicly traded companies), and (c) at the margin, key strategic shareholders – the people who provide extra capital when the chips are down – increasingly tend to be foreign.  Think about the role of Sovereign Wealth Funds in providing funds to our banking system in 2007-08, or the fact that Citigroup goes cap-in-hand to Saudi Arabia every decade or so.
3. During the Reagan years and again, even more, under the Second President Bush, the US ran a large current account deficit – reaching 6 percent of GDP before the 2008 crisis (and still around 3 percent of GDP).  You may think this a technical detail that is largely irrelevant to the political process, but you would be wrong.  We finance our current account deficit with capital inflows from abroad or, to put that more plainly: Foreigners buy and hold financial assets in the United States.  Some of those assets are US government obligations but traditionally and increasingly non-US people have also acquired claims on corporate entities – including common or preferred stock.

There are good economic reasons to allow foreigners to buy financial assets in the United States.  We like to invest around the world and a high degree of reciprocity is only reasonable. 
The US dollar is the “reserve currency” of choice – for the past 50 years this is where countries and careful individuals have chosen to keep their rainy day funds.  This was a core idea behind the international trading system constructed after 1945.  You may not like it, but what alternative exactly would you propose?
And there is nothing wrong per se with running a current account deficit – although it would be much better if we used the inflow of foreign capital to finance investment, rather than (as in the Bush years) tax cuts that just further encourage overconsumption.
Irrespective of how you feel about foreign capital inflows in economic terms, you have to face the political reality.  As foreigners accumulate claims on the United States, they will increasingly diversify into corporate assets (in fact, this is the advice they get from their Wall Street advisers).  Some of these corporate assets explicitly come with voting rights – but those are supposed to be voting rights over the corporation (or investment fund), not voting rights in political elections.
We have effectively enfranchised foreigners in US elections.  This is clearly and absolutely not what the drafters of the Constitutions had in mind.
This dissonance between our claimed political values and the political reality will grow over time – unless you think our current account deficit will swing into surplus at any time in the future, the net inflow of foreign capital will continue.
The only way to deal with this is to require complete disclosure by all corporate entities (and similar “veils” like investment funds of any kind) regarding the contributions they make to any organization or individual involved in political messaging or campaigning.
To be sure, this would be onerous.  Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues would have wanted it no other way.  The US Constitution was not drawn up to protect the rights of foreign citizens.  It defines who is and who can become an American – and the rights and responsibilities of those who would like to rule the United States.
And however you prefer to define our legitimate national security interests, how are they consistent with letting foreign citizens influence or even determine the outcome of our elections?

CHINA’S CREATIVE ACCOUNTING: USING DEBT AS A TOOL FOR ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

Must read of the day:

By Ellen Brown

WebofDebt, October 28th, 2010

China may be as heavily in debt as we are. It just has a different way of keeping its books -- which makes a high-profile political ad sponsored by Citizens Against Government Waste, a fiscally conservative think tank, particularly ironic. Set in a lecture hall in China in 2030, the controversial ad shows a Chinese professor lecturing on the fall of empires: Greece, Rome, Great Britain, the United States . . . .

"They all make the same mistakes," he says. "Turning their backs on the principles that made them great. America tried to spend and tax itself out of a great recession. Enormous so-called stimulus spending, massive changes to health care, government takeover of private industries, and crushing debt."

Of course, he says, because the Chinese owned the debt, they are now masters of the Americans. The students laugh. The ad concludes, "You can change the future. You have to."

James Fallows, writing in the Atlantic, remarks:

“The ad has the Chinese official saying that America collapsed because, in the midst of a recession, it relied on (a) government stimulus spending, (b) big changes in its health care systems, and (c) public intervention in major industries -- all of which of course, have been crucial parts of China's (successful) anti-recession policy.”

That is one anomaly. Another is that China has managed to keep its debt remarkably low despite decades of massive government spending. According to the IMF, China’s cumulative gross debt is only about 22% of 2010 GDP, compared to a U.S. gross debt that is 94% of 2010 GDP.

What is China’s secret? According to financial commentator Jim Jubak, it may just be “creative accounting” -- the sort of accounting for which Wall Street is notorious, in which debts are swept off the books and turned into “assets.” China is able to pull this off because it does not owe its debts to foreign creditors. The banks doing the funding are state-owned, and the state can write off its own debts.

Jubak observes:

“China has a history of taking debt off its books and burying it, which should prompt us to poke and prod its numbers. If we go back to the last time China cooked the national books big time, during the Asian currency crisis of 1997, we can get an idea of where its debt might be hidden now.”

The majority of bank loans, says Jubak, went to state-owned companies -- about 70% of the total. The collapse of China’s export trade following the crisis meant that its banks were suddenly sitting on billions in debts that were clearly never going to be paid. But that was when China’s largest banks were trying to raise capital by selling stock in Hong Kong and New York, and no bank could go public with that much bad debt on its books.

The creative solution? The Beijing government set up special-purpose asset management companies for the four largest state-owned banks, the equivalent of the “special purpose vehicles” designed by Wall Street to funnel real estate loans off U.S. bank books. The Chinese entities ultimately bought $287 billion in bad loans from state-owned banks. To pay for the loans, they issued bonds to the banks, on which they paid interest. The state-owned banks thus got $287 billion in toxic debt off their books and turned the bad loans into an income stream from the bonds.

Sound familiar? Wall Street did the same thing in the 2008 bailout, with the U.S. government underwriting the deal. The difference was that China’s largest banks were owned by the government, so the government rather than a private banking cartel got the benefit of the arrangement. According to British economist Samah El-Shahat, writing in Al Jazeera in August 2009:

“China hasn’t allowed its banking sector to become so powerful, so influential, and so big that it can call the shots or highjack the bailout. In simple terms, the government preferred to answer to its people and put their interests first before that of any vested interest or group. And that is why Chinese banks are lending to the people and their businesses in record numbers.”

In the US and UK, by contrast:

“[B]anks have captured all the money from the taxpayers and the cheap money from quantitative easing from central banks. They are using it to shore up, and clean up their balance sheets rather than lend it to the people. The money has been hijacked by the banks, and our governments are doing absolutely nothing about that. In fact, they have been complicit in allowing this to happen.”

Today, Jubak continues, China's debt problem is the thousands of investment companies set up by local governments to borrow money from banks and lend it to local companies, a policy that has produced thousands of jobs but has left an off-balance-sheet debt overhang. He cites economist Victor Shih, who says local-government investment companies had a total of $1.7 trillion in outstanding debt at the end of 2009, or about 35% of China's GDP. Banks have extended $1.9 trillion in credit lines to local investment companies on top of that. Collectively, the debt plus the credit lines come to $3.8 trillion. That is about 75% of China's GDP, which is proportionately quite a bit smaller than U.S. GDP. None of this is included in the IMF’s calculation of a gross-debt-to-GDP figure of 22%, says Shih. If it were, the number would be closer to 100% of GDP.

Proportionately, then, China may be more heavily in debt than we are. Yet it is still managing to invest heavily in infrastructure, local businesses and local jobs. Its creative accounting scheme seems to be working for the Chinese. It may be sleight of hand, but it was a necessary ploy to harmonize their economic realities with Western banking standards.

For China to join the World Trade Organization in 2001, it had to revise its accounting methods to conform to Western requirements; but before it joined, it did not consider grants to its state-owned enterprises to be “non-performing loans.” They were what the IMF calls “contingent grants.” If they paid off, great; if they didn’t, they were written off. There were no creditors demanding payment from the state-owned banks. The creditor was the state; and the state, at least in theory, was the people. In any case, the state owned the banks. It was lending to itself, and it could write off its loans at will. It was better to sweep the “NPLs” into “SPVs” than to cut back on services and impose heavier taxes on the people. The Chinese government did cut back on services and raise taxes, to the detriment of the struggling masses, but not to the extent that would otherwise have been necessary to balance their books by Western standards.

While the rest of the world suffers from an unrelenting credit crunch, today China’s banks are on a lending binge. The rush to make new loans is a direct response to the government’s economic stimulus policy, which emphasizes infrastructure and internal development. The Chinese government was able to get its banks to open their lending windows when U.S. banks were being tight-fisted with their funds, because the government owns the banks. The Chinese banking system has been partially privatized, but the government is still the controlling shareholder of the Big Four commercial banks, which were split off from the People’s Bank of China in the 1980s.

We might take a lesson from the Chinese and put our own banks to work for the people, rather than making the people work for the banks. We need to get our dollars out of Wall Street and back on Main Street, and we can do that only by breaking up Wall Street’s out-of-control private banking monopoly and returning control over money and credit to the people themselves.

We could also take a lesson from the Chinese and dispose of our debt with a little creative accounting: when the bonds come due, we could pay them with dollars issued by the Treasury, in the same way that the Federal Reserve has issued Federal Reserve Notes to save Wall Street with its “Quantitative Easing” program. The mechanics of that process were revealed in a remarkable segment on National Public Radio on August 26, 2010, describing how a team of Fed employees bought $1.25 trillion in mortgage bonds beginning in late 2008. According to NPR:

"The Fed was able to spend so much money so quickly because it has a unique power: It can create money out of thin air, whenever it decides to do so. So . . . the mortgage team would decide to buy a bond, they'd push a button on the computer – ‘and voila, money is created.’”

If the Fed can do it to save the banks, the Treasury can do it to save the taxpayers. In a paper presented at the American Monetary Institute in September 2010, Prof. Kaoru Yamaguchi showed with sophisticated mathematical models that if done right, paying off the federal debt with debt-free Treasury notes would have a beneficial stimulatory effect on the economy without inflating prices.  

The CAGW ad is correct: we have turned our backs on the principles that made us great. But those principles are not rooted in “fiscal austerity.” The abundance that made the American colonies great stemmed from a monetary system in which the government had the power to issue its own money – unlike today, when the only money the government issues are coins. Dollar bills are issued by the Federal Reserve, a privately owned central bank; and the government has to borrow them like everyone else. But as Thomas Edison famously said:

 “If the Nation can issue a dollar bond it can issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good makes the bill good also. The difference between the bond and the bill is that the bond lets the money broker collect twice the amount of the bond and an additional 20%. . . . It is a terrible situation when the Government, to insure the National Wealth, must go in debt and submit to ruinous interest charges at the hands of men who control the fictitious value of gold."

China’s government can direct its banks to advance credit in the national currency as needed, because it owns the banks. Ironically, the Chinese evidently got that idea from us. Sun Yat-sen was a great admirer of Abraham Lincoln, who avoided a crippling national debt by issuing debt-free Treasury notes during the Civil War; and Lincoln was following the lead of the American colonists, our forebears. We need to reclaim our sovereign right to fund the common wealth without getting entangled in debt to foreign creditors, through the use of our own government-issued currency and publicly-owned banks.   

Ellen Brown is an attorney and the author of eleven books. In Web of Debt: The Shocking Truth About Our Money System and How We Can Break Free, she shows how the Federal Reserve and "the money trust" have usurped the power to create money from the people themselves, and how we the people can get it back. Her websites are webofdebt.com, ellenbrown.com, and public-banking.com.