The Hidden Bailout Of $1.4 Trillion In Fannie / Freddie Credit-Default Swaps by Daniel Amerman
September 10, 2008
The Hidden Bailout Of $1.4 Trillion In Fannie / Freddie Credit-Default Swaps
by Daniel Amerman
Overview
Something extraordinary happened on Monday, September the 8th, 2008. The government takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac triggered the pending settlement of $1.4 trillion in credit-default swaps. This single event could have led to a cascading series of failures that might have bankrupted Wall Street – and much of the rest of the financial world – by the end of the week. That isn’t happening, and indeed, the media is treating this as something close to a non-event. However, a very real $1.4 trillion event happened – whose resolution effectively constitutes one of the largest government bailouts in history. Nobody noticed, for even though this is occurring in “plain sight”, the simple fact is that few people outside of the financial industry understand the $600 trillion derivative securities market. In this article, written the day after the event, we will briefly explain why this hidden, massive bailout – not of Fannie and Freddie but of the financial derivatives industry – is hugely significant, with potentially profound – and arbitragable – implications for the dollar, the markets and your personal financial future.
What Did NOT Happen
(These first several paragraphs in italics do not describe what did happen, but rather what could have happened in an alternate universe in which we actually had a free market that functioned without massive government interventions.)
The financial news of the day was that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were both unable to make debt payments and had defaulted on $5 trillion in bonds and mortgage-backed securities. With the US real estate market having fallen $4 trillion in the previous two years (non inflation-adjusted), it should have been no surprise that these two highly leveraged companies were not able to absorb the staggering losses. As this became clear to the markets, Fannie and Freddie lost the ability to borrow – which their survival was based upon – and actual default followed soon after. This default immediately triggered settlements on $1.4 trillion in credit-default swaps (credit derivatives), which had been entered into by major financial firms who had promised – in exchange for lucrative fee income – that if Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac were to default, these guarantor firms would make good on the defaulted bonds.
As the value of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac debt plunged to 30 cents on the dollar, this meant that there was a 70% loss on the bonds (if one could find a buyer at all). This then triggered a call for settlement on the $1.4 trillion in credit-default swaps outstanding. Because the debt of the two former titans of the financial world was trading at a 70% discount compared to par value, this meant that total credit losses were $1 trillion ($1.4 trillion X 70% = $1 trillion). This meant $1 trillion worth of payments was due from the companies that had guaranteed the value of this debt, through their entering into credit-default swaps.
Settlement was triggered, but as the credit-default swap beneficiaries soon found out, collecting their settlements was an entirely different matter. The financial institutions around the world who had guaranteed Fannie and Freddie in exchange for lucrative corporate fee income (and multi-million dollar individual bonuses) were all highly leveraged themselves (indeed, weaker than the companies they were guaranteeing), and absolutely reliant on the day to day availability of large lines of credit and general borrowing capacity. As the creditors of these financial giants realized that a trillion dollar hit was barreling straight at them, they pulled their financing. Having to repay or replace these loans, without being able to sell massive portfolios of illiquid assets in a market suddenly devoid of buyers, left nearly every major investment bank and commercial bank in the United States and Europe unable to meet their obligations – even before settlement of their trillion dollar credit-default swap losses.
The failure of the major financial firms triggered another massive round of credit-default swap events, with amounts well over $10 trillion by Thursday, and over $20 trillion by Friday. By that time, however, no one was naïve enough to expect actual payment on those swaps, as Wall Street and the rest of the world’s financial hubs had all been insolvent since Wednesday. When the markets eventually opened for business again more than two months later, the official drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average was over 10,000 points, meaning the index was trading at a level in the 1,000 – 1,500 range.
What Did Happen
“They say there are no atheists in a foxhole. Well, there are no libertarians in a financial crisis, either.”
Jeffrey Frankel, Harvard economist
The above scenario is what might have happened if we took the naïve perspective that markets actually function on their own without government intervention, and that corporations take the consequences for their own bad decisions, in exchange for the profits that come from their good decisions. That is of course a hypothetical world that has little to do with current global financial markets.
If you want a glimpse of the real world future, and what is happening as the same flawed business model that destroyed the $1.2 trillion subprime mortgage derivative securities market now threatens the over $60 trillion credit derivatives market, then we need to look no further than what actually happened with the $1.4 trillion worth of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac credit default swaps. The companies were taken into conservatorship on September 6th. They have effectively failed even if legally there are some different ways of phrasing it. As reported by Bloomberg on September 8th, that led to a unanimous agreement by 13 Wall Street firms on Monday, September 7, 2008, that settlement of $1.4 trillion in credit default swaps had been triggered.
If Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had actually failed to make payments on their debt – the consequences would have quite likely destroyed Wall Street right there. As illustrated in the scenario above, there simply isn’t a big enough capital base on Wall Street to absorb a trillion dollars in losses in a week, particularly once your creditors catch on to what is happening. Much smaller losses from subprime mortgage derivatives incrementally dribbling out over the course of the year, still might have taken down Wall Street, had it not been for the ability to hide losses in Tier Three assets (with the full complicity of the government), as well as the reassurances that the Federal Reserve provided by so swiftly bailing out Bear Stearns via JP Morgan, when a creditor driven bankruptcy (as described above) threatened to take down a major player.
Of course, the hypothetical collapse did not happen. The meltdown was averted because the federal government proactively and aggressively intervened to keep a financial disaster from taking down Wall Street (just as it did with Bear Stearns, and Long Term Capital Management the decade before). When the situation started to get bad, the federal government stepped in and – even if they still are hedging a bit legally – effectively guaranteed the debt of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Which means that they also – and this is crucial – bailed out the firms who had guaranteed the $1.4 trillion in credit derivatives. There may very well be losses, perhaps significant losses, but there would be no catastrophic loss there, that would threaten the viability of the financial system. Because what has really happened is that you have replaced a credit default swap on a quasi-governmental agency, that being Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, with a credit default swap on the full faith and credit of the United States government. If the US guarantee had not been substituted then it would be a catastrophic failure. But because the US guarantee was substituted, it’s seemingly not a big deal, though much remains to be worked out.
In other words, the biggest beneficiaries of the $1.4 trillion Fannie and Freddie bailout were not Fannie or Freddie at all, but the Wall Street firms whose senior officers just happen to be major political contributors to both political parties – with some of those senior officers also running the Treasury Department on a revolving door basis.
How the ending valuation of the credit default swaps for settlement purposes will work out is a fascinating question. Arguably you could say that the value of Fannie and Freddie debt just rose, not only in comparison to prices during the recent financial turmoil, but also compared to par value. After all, we have just gone from quasi-governmental debt to something that is much closer to being explicitly a full faith and credit obligation of the United States Government, which means we should be losing part of the small spread that Fannie and Freddie traded at as quasi-governmental debt over direct governmental debt yields. From this perspective, one could say that the United States stepping in and taking over actually improves credit quality and the value of the bonds, so there is no loss at all – but a gain.
However there still remains a level of uncertainty, as the debt has not explicitly been made full faith and credit of the United States government. There’s a taint involved, and there could be liquidity issues – as investors typically are not too fond of even small uncertainties. So there’s a good chance the ending value will end up somewhere in the 90s – perhaps very close to par or perhaps a little bit further away. Wherever the ultimate settlement prices, however, it will not be a massive loss, because what has really happened is that a swap has indeed taken place, and the United States government bailed Wall Street out of self-inflicted credit swap-driven destruction, through preemptively swapping its guarantee for the guarantees by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
The real implication of this then is that there is no danger from credit default swaps directly taking down Wall Street, so long as the federal government is willing to aggressively intervene every time there is a potential failure. I think we can see a clear path to the future here.
Where Did That Trillion Come From?
Before going any further, let’s stop and ask a simple question.
Where did the money for the bailout come from?
How did a strapped federal government come up with the trillions (if need be) to make good on all of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s obligations?
How did a government that is already running over a $400 billion deficit so smoothly and easily come up with an extra trillion dollars or two, if needed? (With the $400 billion being based upon government accounting standards whose usage would get an individual or private firm thrown in prison. The deficit is far, far higher when unfunded retirement obligations are taken into account.)
And, for that matter, now that we’re on the subject – where did the government come up with the money for the $170 billion “tax rebate”?
How about that $59 trillion number for unfunded retirement related government obligations that keeps being bandied around? (The real number is a good bit higher as I cover in my article “The $2 Million Opportunity.”)
Where does the government come up with all that money, anyway?
The answer is simple – there is an unlimited supply of dollars. When you issue your own currency, and you are sufficiently determined, then there is an infinite supply of money available. Which could be a very good thing(?), for the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac credit-default swaps are only one small part of a much larger market – and much larger risk. As we will discuss later in the article, however, while the supply of money is infinite, the value of that money is a different matter.
Taking Full Advantage Of Implicit Government Guarantees
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Once you understand that the supplyof money is effectively infinite for a sufficiently grave emergency, then you are ready for the next step in understanding some recent events which might otherwise seem indecipherable. From some perspectives, this near catastrophe which could have so easily taken down all of Wall Street (had the federal government not intervened), was not a catastrophe at all. It was instead a highly successful experiment. For the many firms which purportedly took on the risk in creating $1.4 trillion of credit-default swaps for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac did not do so for the fun of it or out of the goodness of their hearts. They did so because they got paid enormous sums of money for purportedly taking on all those risks. With much of that money quite directly passing through to the already wealthy individuals involved.
If Fannie and Freddie had not run into problems then the guarantor financial firms would have just pocketed all of their fees, ultimately as pure profit. Instead of that, a worst case scenario occurred that arguably should have destroyed every one of the firms involved in this business – and would have likely done so if there had genuinely been a free market involved.
What the experiment proved was that as long as the risk that you take is big enough, then the federal government and your former coworkers down at the Treasury Department can be absolutely relied upon to bail you out. Now, Wall Street felt this was likely already the case. It was kind of a shame to lose a firm like Bear Stearns, but the good part about it was it proved that a major derivatives market failure wouldn’t be allowed to occur, as was remarked upon in the article from last month quoted below:
“Government intervention has saved the $62 trillion credit derivatives market from facing the nightmare of counterparty failure during the credit crisis of the past year…
After the government backed rescue of Bear Stearns, the market views other major derivative counterparties as also “too big to fail”, and this implicit support… means the credit derivatives market will likely be spared the ultimate test.”
Reuters (Karen Brettell), August 7, 2008
With the takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the markets have been shown to be correct, and the reliability of the government bailout occurring has now been proven on a much larger scale. If the dollar amount is great enough, then no individual firm has to go down. Instead the United States Treasury and/or Federal Reserve will preemptively step in, and effectively make every one whole (or close thereto), perhaps without even affecting Wall Street bonuses.
The principle is very simple. Take huge risks that you know cannot possibly pay out if you lose. In fact – that’s the key to the whole transaction. The risks have to be so large that you cannot afford to lose, and the economy and markets cannot afford for you to lose. Then one of two things happens. Either the risk event does not come about and you make an extraordinary amount of money as an individual and as a firm for having taken on this huge amount of risk. Or the risk happens and you have to pay out. Except you really don’t, because you can’t afford to pay out and you have effectively blackmailed the rest of the population through being too big to fail. Then the government steps in and bails you out. Except it’s not really the government, because the government can’t truly do that, it is the rest of the population which bails you out.
Situations like this are sometimes referred to as “moral hazard” – a weak and theoretical sounding term for an insider’s game of global economic blackmail that is growing at a rate much faster than the overall global economy. The cozy relationship between Wall Street and regulators is crucial, and much of the massive, hidden derivatives bailout that just occurred can be explained by looking at just who the chief “cop” is. US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson built his half billion dollar personal fortune as the former head of Goldman Sachs, meaning he was chief executive of one of the world’s leading derivatives players.
Making Sense Of The Irrational
It is only when you understand the game that is being played, that the actions of Wall Street and much of the rest of the financial world after the subprime mortgage crisis becomes clear.
The subprime mortgage derivates experiment failed spectacularly. The firms that were creating these derivative securities and the rating firms who were rating them were making numerous and obvious mistakes. Yet once the fundamentally flawed business model was disproven – the world did not move away from derivative securities. Oh, they stopped creating new subprime mortgage derivatives, but when we look at the arguably much riskier credit derivatives market (this greater risk is explored in my article “Credit Derivatives Dangers In 2008 & Beyond – A Primer”), the market grew from $35 trillion in outstanding credit derivatives in July 2007 — the same time it was becoming clear that something was going very badly wrong in the subprime mortgage derivatives market — to a current level of about $62 trillion. In other words the market reacted to the real world proof that these things don’t actually work, by almost doubling the amount in existence in one year. Indeed, the amount of credit derivatives outstanding grew at an annual rate that was about twice the size of the entire United States economy.
Now if you are an academic modeling a hypothetical world of free markets and rational behavior by sophisticated investors keeping the markets safe and fairly valued for all involved, this would make no sense whatsoever. Rational investment firms ought to be fleeing markets like credit derivatives – not doubling up on an already failed experiment.
The reason? It’s the best game in town. Take a huge amount of risk, be paid exceedingly well for it and if you screw up — you have absolute proof that the government will come in and bail you out at the expense of the rest of the population (who did not share in your profits in the first place).
Investing For The Bailout, Not The Crisis
Once we recognize that what is happening here is not a massive credit default, but a monetization by the US government of those losses on a potentially multi-trillion dollar scale, then our investment strategy changes dramatically. We are no longer investing for the crisis – but for the bailout. The combination of this bailout and the Federal Reserves unprecedented actions in forcing interest rates so far below the rate of inflation creates a “target-rich environment” for the execution of arbitrage strategies by both corporate and individual investors.
The federal government is not going to let the financial system fail. It will create however much money needs to be created to bail out the institutions and attempt to bailout the economy, as it has already shown in real world test after test, from the so-called “tax rebate”, to Bear Stearns, to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Which means that the government is prepared to destroy the dollar, and is not just prepared to, but is currently actively destroying the value of the dollar rather than let those firms fail. So the way you invest for the failure of an out of control derivatives market is to invest for the destruction of the dollar. Which means taking on new tools for a new time.
Four Steps To Creating Wealth From Catastrophe
The first step in creating wealth in an unfair world – is to avoid getting cheated. If you are investing money at short term rates of 1%, 2% or even 5%, while the value of your money is eroding at 9% a year, then you are being deliberately played for a sucker, and cheated out of the value of your money by the Federal Reserve.
Not that secret meetings are being held and an explicit agreement is being made to “get the little guys”. It’s just that sacrifices have to be made for the greater good to try to avert a catastrophic market meltdown, and that means that trusting individual investors get paid a negative interest rate on their money (after adjusting for inflation), while paying taxes on (economically) non-existent income for the privilege. Keep in mind as well that one of the purposes in destroying the value of your money is to keep the prices on financial assets propped above where they would otherwise be, if genuine market forces were setting short term interest rates. Which means that you are systematically overpaying for financial assets compared to actual fundamental values, and are getting played for a sucker there as well, to the extent that you are not being subsidized with below (real) market rates like the banks, investment banks and hedge funds. (See my article “Fed Manipulations Subsidize Wall Street & Cheat Investors” for more on this.)
The second step to turning financial catastrophe into personal wealth requires understanding one simple thing – which most investors do not. Inflation does not destroy real wealth, at least not directly. Inflation redistributes real wealth. Indeed, inflation can be used by individuals to quite directly take real wealth from both financial institutions and other individuals, as I illustrate in my (slightly twisted) morality tale “Inflation Pickpocket”. (To add insult to injury, those doing the pocket picking can often do so tax-free, even while their victims pay real taxes on illusory income.)
The third step is to understand that wealth redistribution on a massive scale creates personal opportunity on a massive scale. John Paulson (no relation to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson) saw the crisis that was coming in subprime mortgages, researched and educated himself on this area (which had not been his field of expertise), and he turned the crisis into a $3-$4 billion personal payday in 2007. If you’re not a hedge fund manager like John Paulson, you may not have the tools that he used to turn a market crisis into personal billions. That’s OK, because Paulson didn’t start with the tools either. He started with educating himself and learning about a new area, until he came up with a novel way to profit from disaster. A method that wasn’t in the financial textbooks, and that he didn’t find by reading a financial columnist in the paper.
Next you need to understand that you personally may have more tools than you may think, some of which may surprise you. Tools which can give you the opportunity to turn financial disaster into personal net worth. There are ways you can use those tools to turn the destruction of the currency into perhaps the greatest real wealth-building opportunity of your life, on a long-term and tax-advantaged basis. But, if you want this to happen –you will need to start with learning. That is the irreplaceable fourth step. You are going to have to educate yourself, and work to not just understand, but to master some of the financial forces and methods in play here. You will have to learn how to turn the destruction of paper wealth into real wealth. With Turning Inflation Into Wealth being the key to this next step. My best wishes to you for turning this challenge into an extraordinary personal opportunity.
Where are the insider admissions about gold Manipulation? Right here
Where are the insider admissions about gold Manipulation? Right here
By : Chris Powell
Secretary / Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee
www.GATA.org
Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:
People like Mike Shedlock of Sitka Pacific Capital Management in Edmonds, Washington, who writes Mish’s Global Economic Trend Analysis letter, will never debate a GATA representative about manipulation of the gold market even as they aggressively misrepresent GATA’s work, as Shedlock did again this week in his essay, “Conspiracy Theory Psychology”:..
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2008/08/conspiracy-theory-psychology.html
Shedlock wrote, as if it is GATA’s position: “Theory 1: The U.S. government, foreign governments, central banks, various broker-dealers, and a consortium of 10 large U.S. banks are all acting together in some massive conspiracy to suppress the price of precious metals for 15 years running, and not a single insider has stepped up to expose the fraud even though housing fraud stories from insiders are being disclosed at a rapid pace, and government, CIA, and other intelligence leaks have been running rampant throughout that entire timeframe.”..
Actually, of course, GATA’s position is that quite a few insiders have testified to the gold price suppression scheme. Though Shedlock purports not to notice it, GATA has been publicizing their admissions for years. It would be decent of Shedlock and those who share his views to familiarize themselves with and respond to these admissions, particularly:..
January 1995: The Federal Reserve’s general counsel, J. Virgil Mattingly, told the Federal Open Market Committee, according to the committee’s minutes, that the U.S. Treasury Department’s Exchange Stabilization Fund had undertaken “gold swaps.” Central banks have only one purpose for “gold swaps”: market intervention. The January 1995 FOMC minutes with Mattingly’s statement are posted at the Fed’s Internet site here:..
http://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/files/FOMC19950201meeting.pdf
July 1998: Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan told Congress, “Central banks stand ready to lease gold in increasing quantities should the price rise.” That is, Greenspan himself contradicted the usual central bank explanation for leasing gold — supposedly to earn a little interest on a dead asset — and admitted that gold leasing was all about suppressing the price. Greenspan’s admission about the gold price suppression scheme is posted at the Fed’s Internet site here:..
http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/testimony/1998/19980724.htm
September 1999: The Washington Agreement on Gold, made by the European central banks in 1999, was a proclamation that Western central banks were working together to control the gold price. The central banks in the Washington Agreement claimed that, by restricting their gold sales and leasing, they meant to prevent the gold price from falling too hard. But even if you believed that explanation, it was still collusive intervention in the gold market. The Washington Agreement can be found at the World Gold Council’s Internet site here:..
http://www.reserveasset.gold.org/central_bank_agreements/cbga1/
February 2003: Barrick Gold confessed to the gold price suppression scheme in U.S. District Court in New Orleans when it filed a motion to dismiss Blanchard & Co.’s anti-trust lawsuit against Barrick and its bullion banker, JPMorganChase, for rigging the gold market. Barrick’s motion said that in borrowing gold from central banks and selling it, the company had become the agent of the central banks in the gold market, and, as the agent of the central banks, Barrick should share their sovereign immunity and be exempt from suit. Barrick’s confession can be found here:..
http://www.lemetropolecafe.com/img2003/memoformotiontodis.pdf
September 2003: The Reserve Bank of Australia confessed to the gold price suppression scheme in its annual report for 2003. “Foreign currency reserve assets and gold,” the RBA’s report said, “are held primarily to support intervention in the foreign exchange market.” The RBA’s report is posted at the central bank’s site here:..
http://www.rba.gov.au/PublicationsAndResearch/RBAAnnualReports/2003/Pdf/operations_financial_markets.pdf
June 2005: Maybe the most brazen admission of the Western central bank scheme to suppress the gold price was made by the head of the monetary and economic department of the Bank for International Settlements, William S. White, in a speech to a BIS conference in Basel, Switzerland. There are five main purposes of central bank cooperation, White announced, and one of them is “the provision of international credits and joint efforts to influence asset prices (especially gold and foreign exchange) in circumstances where this might be thought useful.” White’s speech is posted at GATA’s Internet site here:..
http://www.gata.org/node/4279
Further, government manipulation of the gold price is only the unanimously accepted history of the world prior to the period about which GATA is complaining. That’s what the gold standard was about, fixing the price of gold to certain amounts of government currencies. That’s what the London Gold Pool was about, the effort of the U.S. and British governments, abandoned in 1968 amid extraordinary demand for the metal, to hold the gold price at $35 per ounce..
Shedlock does acknowledge government’s propensity for market manipulation. He writes:..
“Of course there are conspiracies and manipulations. I have listed many of them..
“Blatant manipulations:..
“– Term Auction Facility..
“– Primary Dealer Credit Facility..
“– Term Securities Lending Facility..
“– SEC rule changes options expiration week..
“– Selective enforcement of naked shorting rules..
“– Discount window changes in options expiration week..
“– Shotgun marriages arranged by the Fed.
“– The bailout of JPMorgan/Bear Stearns.”..
So Shedlock’s position seems to be that government is trying to rig almost every market except the one government used to rig openly. What strange and sublime faith he must have!
Despite the misrepresentation of GATA’s work by Shedlock and others, we’re actually in fairly respectable company in maintaining that the gold market is manipulated. Some big investment houses have said the same thing..
Sprott Asset Management:..
http://www.sprott.com/pdf/pressrelease/press_release_not_free_not_fair.pdf
The Cheuvreux brokerage house of the French bank Credit Agricole:
http://www.gata.org/files/CheuvreuxGoldReport.pd
And Citigroup:
http://www.gata.org/files/CitigroupGoldReport092107.pdf
There’s a lot of admission and documentation above, which, it seems, is why Shedlock, Kitco’s Jon Nadler, the World Gold Council, and others who disparage complaints of manipulation of the gold market refuse to debate the issue, where they might be compelled to address the evidence specifically. But GATA remains ready, any time these folks or others on their side work up the honesty and courage.
Join GATA here:
Hard Assets Investment Conference
Tuesday-Wednesday, September 9-10, 2008
Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, Las Vegas, Nevada
http://www.iiconf.com/
Silver Summit
Thursday-Friday, September 18-19, 2008
Best Western Coeur d’Alene Inn
Coeur d’Alene, Idaho
http://thesilversummit.com
Toronto Resource Investment Conference
Saturday-Sunday, October 4-5
Metro Toronto Convention Centre, Toronto, Canada
http://goldshow.ca/ch_tor2008.html
New Orleans Investment Conference
Thursday-Monday, November 13-18, 2008
New Orleans Marriott Hotel
http://www.NewOrleansConference.com
Chris Powell
Secretary / Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee
www.GATA.org
GATA is a civil rights and educational organization based in the United States and tax-exempt under the U.S. Internal Revenue Code. Its e-mail dispatches are free, and you can subscribe at www.GATA.org. GATA is grateful for financial contributions, which are federally tax-deductible in the United States.
Has the Government Looted the Gold at Fort Knox?
Has the Government Looted the Gold at Fort Knox?
George Washington’s Blog
Saturday, June 7, 2008
http://www.gata.org/about
A group called the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee claims that the U.S. government has defrauded the American people out of the nation’s wealth. Specifically, the group claims that the U.S. has secretly sold, leased or otherwise frittered away half of its entire gold reserves to pay for past military adventures abroad and other ill-conceived actions. Furthermore, the group claims that the government has intentionally covered up this loss of gold reserves through accounting fraud.
Are they right?
Well, as described by Darryl Robert Schoon in his book “How to Survive the Crisis and Prosper in the Process”:
Frank Veneroso is the author of the Gold Book Annual, probably the most comprehensive study and analysis of gold markets available today. One of the world’s foremost financial analysts, Veneroso’s clients have included the World Bank, the Organization of American States, sovereign nations and global money managers.
Frank Veneroso is also chief investment strategist for RCM Global Investors, the equity investment arm of Allianz Dresdner, the giant German insurance conglomerate which also owns the PIMCO bond funds, the bailiwick of Bill Gross.
It was in compiling the statistics on gold markets that Veneroso discovered that the Central Banks were hiding the vast majority of their gold loans from public view. Veneroso estimated that by the late 1990s, the highly lucrative and still hidden gold-carry trade amounted to 10,000 to 15,000 tonnes of gold.
The Central Banks pointed to their books which showed receipts showing large amounts of gold on deposit. What Veneroso suspected and found to be true, however, was that the gold wasn’t there. Ten to fifteen thousand tonnes of gold, an amount far larger than the Central Banks would admit, had been loaned to the investment banks in order to suppress the price of gold and now, in Veneroso’s opinion, were never coming back.
Veneroso noted that the amount of physical gold lent, 10,000-15,000 tonnes, is far too large for investment banks to repurchase without causing the price of gold to explosively rise, the very result the Central Banks had set out to prevent.
The success of the gold-carry trade had led to its failure. Now, at the cost of almost half of their gold reserves, the Central Banks are left only with promissory notes from investment banks instead of the tons of physical gold they had once possessed.
Whereas someone you know, perhaps even yourself, may in the very near future be forced out of their foreclosed home by bank order, rest assured that the investment banks will suffer no consequence for not repaying the gold they borrowed from Central Banks, gold that belonged to the nations that lent it, not its Central Bankers. In matters of finance, especially, the “even hand of justice” is reserved primarily for those that cannot afford it. It is estimated that in the past, Central Banks’ holdings of gold totaled 32,000 tonnes; and Veneroso’s figures show that perhaps 50 % of that is gone. This newly-discovered charade of Central Bank bookkeeping is as fraudulent as Enron’s; and as with Enron, the bookkeepers were complicit in the deception.
See also this.
Are Veneroso and GATA right? I don’t know.
But given that the wealth and stability of our nation is at stake, we should support their attempts to find out. The group has launched a campaign and filed a freedom of information act request to uncover the truth.
If you don’t have any background in the history of gold, here is a very brief history:
* The world’s leading currencies (or “reserve currencies”) have traditionally been backed by gold, at least since the days that shells were the preferred trading standard
* At the end of World War II, it was agreed by the wealthiest nations through the Bretton Woods agreement that the U.S. would be the world’s reserve currency, but that the U.S. dollar would be backed by physical gold (the “gold standard”)
* Because of huge over-spending on foreign military adventures, the U.S. had a gold deficit and was on the verge of economic disaster, and so in 1971 Richard Nixon suspended the gold standard (i.e. he de-linked the dollar from its gold backing)
* GATA and others allege that the U.S. and other wealthy nations have since intentionally suppressed the price of gold so as to make their non-gold backed currencies seem more valuable, and to hide the true level of inflation effecting paper money
* Part of this suppression has allegedly included dumping gold from Fort Knox and foreign gold repositories onto the gold market whenever the price of gold has drifted upward too much for their liking
The Shell Game
THE SHELL GAME
http://www.lemetropolecafe.com/dospassos.cfm?pid=6922
Modern economics is not rocket science. In fact, it’s not science at all. It’s a game, a confidence game. Once paper passed for money, economics became an elaborate shell game designed to hide the fact paper had been substituted for silver and gold. Debt ratings are an attempt to quantify confidence in paper assets and are an essential part of the game. The shell game is called “Where’s The Money?” The answer is simple, it’s not there.
The question “where did the money go during the Great Depression?” has now been answered to my satisfaction. During the Great Depression, money essentially disappeared and, as a consequence, consumer and business demand collapsed as did prices, beginning a downward coreolis-like spiral that was to suck the global economy into an economic black hole.
My study of the Great Depression began in the 1990s and the subsequent collapse of the dot.com bubble provided a real-time corroboration of assumptions about the connection between loose credit, excessive speculation, and financial bubbles; and, now, in 2008, one of my most troubling questions about the depression has been answered—where did the money go during the Great Depression?
Plunge In US Commercial Property, an article by Daniel Pimlott posted on FT.com (Financial Times) May 21, 2008 provided a critical clue:
Commercial property prices in the US in February saw their sharpest decline since records began nearly 15 years ago as sources of finance for deals has dried up, according to data from Standard & Poor’s out yesterday.
The value of commercial buildings fell 1.03 percent between January and February, the largest monthly decline since at least 1993, when the industry was just emerging from a deep slump.
The fall in national property prices comes as banks have retrenched on lending due to credit crisis and the slowing economy, causing the volume of deals to slow sharply. The market for commercial mortgage-backed securities, which until last August was a major route to cheaper borrowing, has largely ground to a halt.
Sales of commercial properties were down 71 per cent in the first quarter compared with a year earlier, according to data from Real Capital Analytics.
The fact that sales of US commercial real estate fell an astounding 71 % from 1st quarter 2007 to 1st quarter 2008 is shocking and the implications are quite serious. The cause of the slowdown, however, provided the very clue I was seeking.
Commercial property prices in the US…saw their sharpest decline…as sources of finance for deals has dried up… as banks have retrenched on lending due to credit crisis…
DURING THE GREAT DEPRESSION
MONEY DID NOT DISAPPEAR
CREDIT DID
The answer to: Where did the money go in the Great Depression? is found in the metaphor of the shell game. It is now clear that money didn’t disappear during the Great Depression, credit disappeared.
The money was never there in the first place. Money had been replaced by credit in the shell game introduced by the Federal Reserve in 1913 when the Federal Reserve began issuing credit-based Federal Reserve notes in place of the savings-based money from the US Treasury.
For details on how the shell game is run, Professor Antal E. Fekete’s description of the check kiting scheme between the US Treasury and Federal Reserve provides crucial information for those perhaps wishing themselves to live off the earnings of others.
It is epitomized by an elaborate check-kiting conspiracy between the U.S: Treasury and the Federal Reserve. Treasury bonds, contrary to appearances, are no more redeemable than Federal Reserve notes. It’s all very neat: the notes are backed by the bonds, and the bonds are redeemable by the notes. Therefore each is valued in terms of itself, rather than by an independent outside asset. Each is an irredeemable liability of the U.S: government. The whole scheme boils down to a farce. It is check-kiting at the highest level. At maturity the bonds are replaced by another with a more distant maturity date, or they are ostensibly paid in the form of irredeemable currency. The issuer of either type of debt is usurping a privilege without accepting the countervailing duty. They issue obligations without taking any further responsibility for their fate or for the effect they have on the economy. Moreover, a double standard of justice is involved. Check-kiting is a crime under the Criminal Code. That is, provided that it is perpetrated by private individuals. Practiced at the highest level, check-kiting is the corner-stone of the monetary system.
GOTTERDÄMMERUNG The Twilight of Irredeemable Debt, Antal E. Fekete, April 28, 2008
http://www.professorfekete.com/articles%5CAEFGotterdammerung.pdf
THE STUDY OF MODERN ECONOMICS IS SIMILAR
TO THE STUDY OF RELIGION IN A TIME OF IDOLATRY
In the shell game of modern economics, credit replaces money and when credit gives rise to speculative bubbles, the collapse of those bubbles leads to the defaulting of debt which causes credit to disappear and the economy to collapse.
The credit based shell game, however, is nearing its end. The historic credit contraction that began in August 2007 is still in progress. Despite the efforts of central bankers, credit is still disappearing and, just as in the Great Depression, the credit contraction is continuing to spread causing more and more debt to default.
Credit, the fertilizer of human debt, when no longer available effectively spells the end of the legalized shell game masquerading as modern economics; but the kreditmeisters, their global confidence game now damaged by an unexpected lack of confidence on the part of the marks, sic investors, however, will not give up their scam easily.
THE CONUNDRUM OF THE KREDITMEISTERS
Those running the shell game, the central bankers and their codependent brethren, investment bankers, are terrified of losing their day jobs, They have lived well for three hundred years (since the establishment of the Bank of England in 1694) leveraging the productivity of others and we can be assured they will do everything in their considerable power to keep their lifestyle intact..
At this time the central bankers are collectively engaged in financial triage as they attempt to replace the credit that is rapidly being withdrawn in the face of ever increasing amounts of defaulting debt.
Following the same play book they used in the aftermath of the dot.com collapse, the Fed has quickly cut rates from 5.25 % to 2 % but this time they will not ignite a housing bubble as they did the last time. This time, they will do worse. This time, they will burn down the house.
BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE
In the long run, there is no short run
In retrospect it will all be clear, the mistakes, the reasons, the excuses, the results. Now, however, in the beginning of the collapse, events appear more problematic, the outcome still unknown. Nonetheless, even in the fog of unexpected events, certain things can be known and safely predicted; and, one of them is that we are now on the road to hyperinflation.
Appointing “Helicopter Ben” Bernanke to head the Federal Reserve now is akin to sending Sammy the Bull, the mafia hit-man, to negotiate with the Palestinians and Israelis; and when the news comes back that Sammy the Bull shot and killed the Palestinians and Israelis at the negotiating table, we should not be surprised—just as we should not be surprised that Ben “the printing press” Bernanke is erring on the side of excess in the current economic crisis by providing even more credit, by shoving even more debt based paper into now a burning house.
WHEN A HOUSE OF PAPER MONEY BURNS
Hyperinflation is to inflation like pneumonia is to a cold. Though similar, the former is much more consequential; and whereas pneumonia can sometimes kill, hyperinflation is a veritable death sentence. Hyperinflation always ends in the total destruction of paper money. In hyperinflation, the value of paper money reverts to its mean—ZERO.
The past is indeed prologue when it comes to humanity, printing presses, and the recurrent desire of governments to turn paper into gold; which through the alchemy of central banking is possible—though only for a limited time.
While central bankers and governments do not intend to cause hyperinflation anymore than drunk drivers intend to crash, they are nonetheless responsible for the decisions that lead to hyperinflation and deflationary depressions.
The United States has experienced high rates of inflation in the past and appears to be running the same type of fiscal policies that engendered hyperinflations in 20 countries over the past century.
Professor Laurance Kotlikoff, Federal Reserve Bank Review St Louis July/Aug 2006
The US is the largest economy in the world and the US dollar is the world’s reserve currency. Its central bank, the Federal Reserve, is the most influential, and Ben “the printing press” Bernanke is its chairman. We should not be surprised at what is now going to happen to the US, the US dollar and the world economy.
As the Fed is busy bailing out international investment banks with America’s money, we should be more concerned with what is going to happen to us; because when the US dollar goes up in smoke, the US economy will go down in flames and the world economy will stumble badly, if not collapse completely.
Hyperinflation will destroy both the US dollar and the US economy and the world will not be unaffected. Professor Kotlikoff’s warning about a US hyperinflation was published in 2006; and, now in 2008, US printing presses under Fed chairman Ben Bernanke are running faster than they’ve ever been run before.
HYPERINFLATION IS LIKE STEPPING OFF A CLIFF.
YOU ONLY EXPERIENCE IT AFTER YOU’VE GONE TOO FAR
Friedrich Kessler, a law professor at Harvard and at Boalt Hall UC Berkeley described the onset of hyperinflation during the Weimar Republic in Germany.
It was horrible. Horrible! Like lightening it struck. No one was prepared. You cannot imagine the rapidity with which the whole thing happened. The shelves in the grocery stores were empty. You could buy nothing with your paper money.
From Fiat Paper Money, The History And Evolution of Our Currency $28.50 by Ralph T. Foster, tfdf@pacbell.net (510) 845-3015 This book, a primer on the end game, is everything you wanted to know about fiat paper money and were too afraid to ask.
At Session III of Professor Fekete’s Gold Standard University Live in February, I discussed the possibility of a sequential or simultaneous hyperinflationary deflationary depression, the economic equivalent of having both a severe heart condition and a possibly fatal cancer at the same time. Such is not impossible; in fact, it is increasingly likely.
I highly recommend the thorough and studied analysis of hyperinflation and concurrent possibilities in John Williams’ Hyperinflation Special Report, Shadow Government Statistics, Series Issue No. 41, April 8, 2008, http://www.shadowstats.com/article/292. John Williams also references and recommends Ralph T. Foster’s Fiat Paper Money, The History And Evolution of Our Currency noted above.
The critical question should now be asked: What can we do?
THE PARACHUTE OF GOLD AND SILVER
JUMPING OUT OF UNCLE BEN’S SPUTTERING HELIPCOPTER
The following is from The Nightmare German Inflation, Scientific Market Analysis, 1970, which describes the extreme hyperinflationary conditions during the Weimar Republic in the 1920s:
The ones who fared best were the small minority who had the foresight to exchange marks into foreign money or gold very early, before new laws made this difficult and before the mark lost too much value.
The difference between 1920s Germany and today is that there are no longer any currencies convertible to precious metals. In the 1920s, when hyperinflation destroyed the German mark, other currencies were still tied to gold. Today, this is no longer the case. Today, only gold and silver will offer guaranteed monetary refuge during the coming crisis.
A hyperinflation is a monetary phenomena caused by the rapid printing of money not convertible to gold or silver. The inflation of the paper money supply happens gradually, but hyperinflation is itself a sudden-onset phenomena. Suddenly and unexpectedly, inflation becomes hyperinflation and unless you are already prepared, it is already too late.
Today, we are moving closer to the end game, the resolution of past monetary sins when the banker’s shell game is exposed for what it is—a monetary abomination, a parasite on the economic body that over time kills the host on which it feeds.
Be aware. Be careful. Be safe.
Have faith.
Note I: I now have a blog, Moving Through The Maelstom with Darryl Robert Schoon. My first blog discusses the underlying reasons for our increasing series of crises.
see http://www.posdev.net/pdn/index.php?option=com_myblog&blogger=drs&Itemid=106
Note II: I will be speaking at Professor Antal E. Fekete’s Session IV of Gold Standard University Live (GSUL) July 3-6, 2008 in Szombathely , Hungary. If you are interested in monetary matters and gold, the opportunity to hear Professor Fekete should not be missed. A perusal of Professor Fekete’s topics may convince you to attend (see http://www.professorfekete.com/gsul.asp ). Professor Fekete, in my opinion, is a giant in a time of small men.
Darryl Robert Schoon
www.survivethecrisis.com
www.drschoon.com
blog www.posdev.net/pdn/index.php?option=com_myblog&blogger=drs&Itemid=81
Autism Risk Linked To Distance From Power Plants, Other Mercury-releasing Sources
Autism Risk Linked To Distance From Power Plants, Other Mercury-releasing Sources
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080424120953.htm
Is the risk of autism greater for children who live closer to the pollution source? (Credit: iStockphoto/Marcin Pawinski)
ScienceDaily (Apr. 25, 2008) — How do mercury emissions affect pregnant mothers, the unborn and toddlers? Do the level of emissions impact autism rates? Does it matter whether a mercury-emitting source is 10 miles away from families versus 20 miles? Is the risk of autism greater for children who live closer to the pollution source?
A newly published study of Texas school district data and industrial mercury-release data, conducted by researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, indeed shows a statistically significant link between pounds of industrial release of mercury and increased autism rates. It also shows—for the first time in scientific literature—a statistically significant association between autism risk and distance from the mercury source.
“This is not a definitive study, but just one more that furthers the association between environmental mercury and autism,” said lead author Raymond F. Palmer, Ph.D., associate professor of family and community medicine at the UT Health Science Center San Antonio. The article is in the journal Health & Place.
Dr. Palmer, Stephen Blanchard, Ph.D., of Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio and Robert Wood of the UT Health Science Center found that community autism prevalence is reduced by 1 percent to 2 percent with each 10 miles of distance from the pollution source.
“This study was not designed to understand which individuals in the population are at risk due to mercury exposure,” Dr. Palmer said. “However, it does suggest generally that there is greater autism risk closer to the polluting source.”
The study should encourage further investigations designed to determine the multiple routes of mercury exposure. “The effects of persistent, low-dose exposure to mercury pollution, in addition to fish consumption, deserve attention,” Dr. Palmer said. “Ultimately, we will want to know who in the general population is at greatest risk based on genetic susceptibilities such as subtle deficits in the ability to detoxify heavy metals.”
The new study findings are consistent with a host of other studies that confirm higher amounts of mercury in plants, animals and humans the closer they are to the pollution source. The price on children may be the highest.
“We suspect low-dose exposures to various environmental toxicants, including mercury, that occur during critical windows of neural development among genetically susceptible children may increase the risk for developmental disorders such as autism,” the authors wrote.
Study highlights
* Mercury-release data examined were from 39 coal-fired power plants and 56 industrial facilities in Texas.
* Autism rates examined were from 1,040 Texas school districts.
* For every 1,000 pounds of mercury released by all industrial sources in Texas into the environment in 1998, there was a corresponding 2.6 percent increase in autism rates in the Texas school districts in 2002.
* For every 1,000 pounds of mercury released by Texas power plants in 1998, there was a corresponding 3.7 percent increase in autism rates in Texas school districts in 2002.
* Autism prevalence diminished 1 percent to 2 percent for every 10 miles from the source.
* Mercury exposure through fish consumption is well documented, but very little is known about exposure routes through air and ground water.
* There is evidence that children and other developing organisms are more susceptible to neurobiological effects of mercury.
Implications
“We need to be concerned about global mercury emissions since a substantial proportion of mercury releases are spread around the world by long-range air and ocean currents,” Dr. Palmer said. “Steps for controlling and eliminating mercury pollution on a worldwide basis may be advantageous. This entails greener, non-mercury-polluting technologies.”
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimated environmental mercury releases at 158 million tons annually nationwide in the late 1990s, the time period studied by the Texas team. Most exposures were said to come from coal-fired utility plants (33 percent of exposures), municipal/medical waste incinerators (29 percent) and commercial/industrial boilers (18 percent). Cement plants also release mercury.
With the enactment of clean air legislation and other measures, mercury deposition into the environment is decreasing slightly.
Limitations
Dr. Palmer and his colleagues pointed out the study did not reflect the true community prevalence rates of autism because children younger than school age are not counted in the Texas Education Agency data system. The 1:500 autism rates in the study are lower than the 1:150 autism rates in recent reports of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Furthermore, the authors note that distance was not calculated from individual homes to the pollution source but from central points in school districts that varied widely in area.
Data sources
Data for environmentally released mercury were from the United States Environmental Protection Agency Toxics Release Inventory. Data for releases by coal-fired power plants came from the same inventory and from the Texas Commission for Environmental Quality. Data for school district autism came from the Texas Education Agency.
Journal reference: Palmer, R.F., et al., Proximity to point sources of environmental mercury release as a predictor of autism prevalence. Health & Place (2008), doi:10.1016/j.healthplace.2008.02.001.
Adapted from materials provided by University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio.
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University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (2008, April 25). Autism Risk Linked To Distance From Power Plants, Other Mercury-releasing Sources. ScienceDaily. Retrieved April 26, 2008, from http://www.sciencedaily.com /releases/2008/04/080424120953.htm
Bush has a sneering contempt for the law.
Bush has a sneering contempt for the law.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19783.htm
He says that on his say so alone he can identify anyone in the United States as creating a “significant risk of undermining reconstruction program in Iraq, or political reform by creating a risk that an act of violence might be committed.” And when he identifies you, he doesn’t inform you. But you are instantly subjected to a financial death penalty. All your assets are frozen; no one then can do any business with you.
A Must Watch – Video Discussion -
Chairman of the American freedom agenda Bruce Fein and former United States Congressman Bob Barr
GUN CONTROL DOES NOT MEAN LESS CRIME-JUST THE OPPOSITE
The scientific value of a study can only be determined by examining how it was conducted, not by parroting its “conclusions.” This section is intended to make available the actual study rather than what people are saying about it.
The Failed Experiment: Gun Control and Public Safety in Canada, Australia, England and Wales
Authored by Gary Mauser, professor at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada, this study examines crime trends in Commonwealth countries that have recently introduced firearm regulations: i.e., Great Britain, Australia, and Canada. The widely ignored key to evaluating firearm regulations is to examine trends in total violent crime, not just firearms crime. The United States provides a valuable point of comparison for assessing crime rates because its criminal justice system differs so drastically from those in Europe and the Commonwealth. Perhaps the most striking difference is that qualified citizens in the United States can carry concealed handguns for self-defense. The upshot is that violent crime rates, and homicide rates in particular, have been falling in the United States. The drop in the American crime rate is even more impressive when compared with the rest of the world. The study can be downloaded as a 304K pdf file.
International Crime Victim Surveys
From, of all places, the United Nations, comes this look at crime rates and victim attitudes for 17 major industrialized countries. What is of interest to gun owners is the not-so-surprising revelation that England now has the worst crime rate of all major countries. Following a near-total ban on civilian ownership of firearms, crime in England began to skyrocket. In the UN study, researchers found that nearly 55 crimes are committed per 100 people in England and Wales compared with an average of 35 per 100 in other industrialized countries. England and Wales also have the worst record for “very serious” offenses, recording 18 such crimes for every 100 inhabitants, followed by Australia with 16 (yet another country that has all but banned legitimate self-defense, thus creating a lucrative hunting ground for criminals). In typical UN layered-bureaucracy fashion, the ICVS is funded out of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, but the link is to the Dutch WODC (Research and Documentation Centre). Study data are available for download in English as Acrobat pdf files.
Northern Ireland Affairs — Fourth Report
More United Kingdom data. Found here is an interesting and comprehensive dichotomy involving the differing approaches to fireams ownership in Northern Ireland and England itself. Of particular interest is the “Minutes of Evidence” section, whereby Members of the House of Commons respond to questions about just how trustworthy folks are with these pesky guns.
Safe Storage Gun Laws: Accidental Deaths, Suicides, and Crime
Dr. John R. Lott of More Guns, Less Crime fame teamed with John E. Whitley of the University of Adelaide on this study of more than twenty years worth of “Lock Up Your Safety” madatory gun storage laws. They found no support at all for the usual gun banner claims that such laws will reduce juvenile accidental gun deaths and suicides. On the contrary, the data suggest that these laws appear to impair the ability of citizens to properly use their guns in self-defense. During the first five full years after the passage of the safe storage laws, the group of fifteen states that adopted these laws faced an annual average increase of over 300 more murders, 3,860 more rapes, 24,650 more robberies, and over 25,000 more aggravated assaults. On average, the annual costs borne by victims averaged over $2.6 billion as a result of lost productivity, out-of-pocket expenses, medical bills, and property losses. The link is to the abstract; the actual study available for download is a 238K Acrobat pdf file.
The Impact of Gun Laws on Police Deaths
This groundbreaking study, published in The Journal of Law and Economics, has discovered that states implementing concealed carry laws benefit the safety of police. The author, David B. Mustard of the University of Georgia’s Department of Economics, found that allowing law-abiding citizens to carry concealed weapons “does not endanger the lives of officers, and may help reduce their risk of being killed.” This is an Acrobat pdf file.
Urban Delinquency and Substance Abuse
From the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention within the U.S. Department of Justice comes this study focusing on crime, gang activity, and drug use among youths in cities. Of particular interest is page 18. The study showed that those youths who owned illegal guns are involved in street crime at a whopping 71% rate. By contrast, the government researchers admit that youths owning legal guns have a crime rate lower than those who own no guns at all! The link between the socialization of the family and instruction by fathers to legal gun ownership and low crime rates is mentioned. The thugs, of course, are getting their socialization “on the street.” This is an Acrobat pdf file.
Guns in America: National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms
A federal grant from the Clinton Justice Department went to two anti-gun scholars to fund this research project. Result: findings which support the work on defensive uses of firearms done by Dr. Gary Kleck of FSU. Kleck’s research has been unfairly vilified in the media, but now even anti-gun researchers are admitting to more than a million defensive uses per year. The above link is to a text version; the 20-page report is also available as an Adobe Acrobat file.
Crime, Deterrence, and Right-to-Carry Concealed Handguns
This is the famous 1996 Lott and Mustard multi-year study which proves the link between concealed carry and the lowering of the crime rate. Several download options available.
Crime and Justice in the United States and England and Wales
This Clinton Department of Justice study looks at crime in the U.S. vs. the U.K. from 1981-1996. Gun control in England is nearly total, with yet another major ban passing in 1997. England’s attempts to control its society-wide crime problem with ever-more restrictive gun control have proven to be a dismal failure.
Uniform Crime Reports
The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports. Most files available as .pdf (Adobe Acrobat) only.
Shall Issue: The New Wave of Concealed Handgun Permit Laws
One of the oldest studies, from October of 1994, relying heavily upon early Florida and Washington data.
Florida Concealed Weapons Statistical Report
From the Florida Department of State, updated monthly.
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Bilderberg 2007 – Towards a One World Empire?
Bilderberg 2007 – Towards a One World Empire?
Discussions at the 2007 Bilderberg Group meetings covered concerns over the World Bank presidency, Russia’s muscle-flexing on energy issues and the failure of US-led NATO forces in Afghanistan.
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by Daniel Estulin © 2007
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The Sun has set on Bilderberg 2007 in Istanbul, Turkey. After a sumptuous lunch on this warm and sunny 3rd June, most Bilderbergers returned to their countries of choice, freshly armed with precise instructions from the Steering Committee on how to proceed in covertly expanding the powers of One World Government. Amongst this year’s luminaries in attendance were: Henry Kissinger; Henry Kravis of KKR; Marie-Josée Kravis of Hudson Institute; Vernon Jordan; Etienne Davignon, Bilderberg Group President; Her Majesty Queen Beatrix of The Netherlands, daughter of one of the founders, Prince Bernhard; and the King and Queen of Spain.
As a rhetorical question, can someone please explain to me how it is that progressive liberals such as John Edwards and Hillary Clinton as well as do-gooder humanitarians with multiple social projects on the go, such as David Rockefeller and every Royal House in Europe, can perennially attend Bilderberg meetings knowing that the final objective of this despicable group of hoodlums is a fascist One World Empire? How could it be orchestrated?
The idea is to give to each country a political constitution and an appropriate national economic structure, organised for the following purposes: (1) to place political power into the hands of chosen people and eliminate all intermediaries; (2) to establish a maximum concentration of industries and suppress all unwarranted competition; (3) to establish absolute control of prices of all goods and raw materials (Bilderbergers make it possible through their iron-grip control of The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization); and (4) to create judicial and social institutions that would prevent all extremes of action.
NOT PRIVATE, BUT SECRET
Although participants emphatically attest that they attend the Club’s annual meeting as private citizens and not in their official government capacity, that affirmation is dubious-particularly when you compare the Chatham House Rule with the Logan Act in the United States, where it is absolutely illegal for elected officials to meet in private with influential business executives to debate and design public policy.
Bilderberg meetings follow a traditional protocol founded in 1919, in the wake of the Paris Peace Conference held at Versailles, by the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA) based at Chatham House in London. While the name Chatham House is commonly used to refer to the Institute itself, the Royal Institute of International Affairs is the foreign policy executive arm of the British monarchy.
According to RIIA procedures: “When a meeting, or part thereof, is held under the Chatham House Rule, participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed; nor may it be mentioned that the information was received at a meeting of the Institute.”
The Logan Act was intended to prohibit United States citizens without authority from interfering in relations between the United States and foreign governments. However, there have been a number of judicial references to the Act, and it is not uncommon for it to be used as a political weapon.
Those who have attended Bilderberg Group meetings over the years and flouted the Logan Act include: Allen Dulles (CIA); Senator William J. Fulbright (from Arkansas, a Rhodes Scholar); Dean Acheson (Secretary of State under President Truman); Nelson Rockefeller and Laurance Rockefeller; former President Gerald Ford; Henry J. Heinz II (former CEO, H. J. Heinz Co.); Thomas L. Hughes (former President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace); Robert S. McNamara (President Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense and former President of the World Bank); William P. Bundy (former President of the Ford Foundation, and former editor of the Council on Foreign Relations’ Foreign Affairs journal); John J. McCloy (former President of Chase Manhattan Bank); George F. Kennan (former US Ambassador to the Soviet Union); Paul H. Nitze (former representative of Schroeder Bank; Nitze played a very prominent role in matters of arms control agreements, which have always been under the direction of the RIIA); Robert O. Anderson (former Chairman, Atlantic Richfield Co., and Chairman, Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies); John D. Rockefeller IV (former Governor of West Virginia, now US Senator); Cyrus Vance (Secretary of State under President Carter); Eugene Black (former President of the World Bank); Joseph Johnson (former President, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace); Gen. Andrew J. Goodpaster (former Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, and later Superintendent of West Point Academy); Zbigniew Brzezinski (National Security Adviser to President Carter, co-founder of the Trilateral Commission); General Alexander Haig (once European NATO Commander, former assistant to Henry Kissinger, and later Secretary of State under President Reagan); James S. Rockefeller (former President and Chairman, First National City Bank, now Citibank).
BILDERBERG 2007 CONCLUSIONS
Thanks to our inside sources at the conference, we have compiled what we believe to be an accurate and a credible model of the Bilderberg 2007 conclusions. Following is a summary of some key points with some additional commentary added. Other subjects discussed were climate change and global warming, Turkey’s role in the new European Union, World Bank reforms, Middle East geopolitics, the conflict in Iraq, Iran’s potential nuclear threat, and the future of democracy and populism.
Robert Zoellick and The World Bank
The United States delegation is standing unanimously behind Robert Zoellick’s candidacy as the next President of The World Bank. Zoellick is a 53-year-old Wall Street executive, a former official in two Bush administrations and a free-market fundamentalist. During the meeting, he pledged “to work to restore confidence in the bank”. “We need to put our differences aside and focus on the future together. I believe that the World Bank’s best days are still to come,” Zoellick said. The chances of Zoellick not being approved for the presidency are slim to none. The final decision is to be made in late June by the bank’s 24-member board of directors.
The United States and Europe have a tacit agreement between them that the World Bank’s President should always be a US national, while its sister institution, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), should always be headed by a European. Nevertheless, according to our sources at the conference, European Bilderbergers are not at all pleased with continuing the status quo, in which the US nominates a single candidate after informal consultations with World Bank members.Ê
The Zoellick nomination also appears to short-circuit burgeoning calls for reform of this selection process at the World Bank, one of the cornerstones of the global financial architecture as designed by the victors of World War II. One Belgian Bilderberger proposed “a merit-based selection process, without regard to nationality”, something which will obviously be discarded by the inept Bush administration. What is quite remarkable is that on several occasions European Bilderbergers openly rejected the current model, saying “the nomination reeks of double standards”, especially because both the USA and the World Bank preach accountability and transparency to developing countries-the main clients of the bank.
But with the IMF under the control of a Spaniard, Rodrigo Rato, and the European Central Bank headed by a Frenchman, Jean-Claude Trichet, it was difficult to imagine that the USA would give up control of the World Bank. Only the US Federal Reserve would remain in the hands of the Americans.
“Replacing one Bush appointee with another will not resolve the fundamental governance problems of the World Bank,” said one Scandinavian. “Member governments should reject a back-door deal that leaves the bank’s governance structure intact, and should press for an open, merit-based selection process,” he said.
Zoellick’s name also raised eyebrows among development groups for his close ties to the US establishment and corporate interests.
One of the attendees (I have not been able to confirm this individual’s identity) asked Zoellick how he was planning to patch up relationships with Third and Fourth World nations when he is best remembered during his tenure as US Trade Representative for arm-twisting poor nations’ governments to adhere to US-imposed intellectual-property laws that make medicines, for example, unaffordable in the developing world. Zoellick has been a close friend to the brand-name pharmaceutical industry, and the bilateral trade agreements he has negotiated effectively block access to generic medications for millions of people.
However, what has really riled both the American and European delegates is the fact that the World Bank’s dirty linen is being washed in public, thanks in great part to Paul Wolfowitz and his ineptness, which incidentally he has blamed on the press.
[Postscript: On 25 June, Robert Zoellick was unanimously elected President of The World Bank for a five-year term, taking over from Paul Wolfowitz on 1 July. In a statement posted at www.worldbank.org, he said: "Once I start at the World Bank, I will be eager to meet the people who drive the agenda of overcoming poverty in all regions, with particular attention to Africa, advancing social and economic development, investing in growth, and encouraging hope, opportunity and dignity."]
Relations with Russia
Another issue of great concern to both American and European Bilderbergers is Russia’s current muscle-flexing on the issue of energy. The controversy over the TNK-BP licence, BP’s Russian venture, is just one of many circumstances causing anger amongst the globalist elite.
One American Bilderberger said that after years of economic stagnation, “Russia is acting against unipolarity’s accommodating ideologies and politics, against its recently resurgent manifestations and machinations, and against the instruments of its perpetuation, such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation [NATO]“.
Bilderberg 2007 served as a consensus-building exercise to decide on a common policy and strategy to deal with Russia’s resurgence. In particular, Bilderberg is not at all happy with Russia’s current strategy of actively dismantling what remains of “the atmosphere of acquiescence to America’s will”, in the words of one Bilderberger, which arose in the post-Soviet period and was absolutely crucial to the thriving of US-led unipolarity.
That was in the beginning of the 1990s, the early stages of the Yeltsin reign. With the wholesale looting of Russia in the 1990s through shock therapy and the loans-for-shares scheme, engineered by the socialist theoreticians at Harvard such as Jeffrey Sachs, Andrei Schliefer, David Lipton and Jonathan Hay, the country was brought into the dawn of the 21st century capitalist economy. As a result, Russia eventually toppled into anarchy, its population rendered desperate; its ability to support a world-class military establishment was smashed, which then made it inevitable that colonial behaviour would occur. That is exactly what George Ball was proposing during the Bilderberg 1968 meeting in Canada. I’ll get back to Ball later in this section.
Incidentally, the term “shock therapy” refers to the sudden release of price and currency controls combined with the withdrawal of state subsidies and immediate trade liberalisation within a country-all the necessary ingredients for impoverishment of the society…in this case, Russia.
In Zbigniew Brzezinski’s 1997 book The Grand Chessboard,1 “Russia” and “vital energy reserves”, as it turns out, are mentioned more frequently than any other country and subject in the book. Brzezinski is President Carter’s former National Security Advisor, a co-founder of the Trilateral Commission, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Bilderberg Club and a close associate of David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger. He is the proverbial insider’s insider. According to Brzezinski, global US and thus Bilderberg hegemony depended on having complete control of Russia’s vital energy reserves in Central Asia. As long as Russia remained strong, it remained a threat-a potential block to the complete imposition of Bilderberg-led economic and military will.
Bilderberg energy imperatives and geopolitical control are once again coming to play a key role in the lives of hundreds of millions of unsuspecting people.
Brzezinski spelled out in The Grand Chessboard the compelling energy issue driving American policy: “A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world’s three most advanced and economically productive regions. A mere glance at the map also suggests that control over Eurasia would almost automatically entail Africa’s subordination, rendering the Western Hemisphere and Oceania geopolitically peripheral to the world’s central continent. About 75 percent of the world’s people live in Eurasia, and most of the world’s physical wealth is there as well, both in its enterprise and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for 60 percent of the world’s GNP and about three-fourths of the world’s known energy resources.”
The history of mankind has always shown that controlling the heart of Eurasia was the key to controlling the entire known world. Azerbaijan, containing the riches of the Caspian Sea Basin and Central Asia, is a case in point. From the US perspective, the independence of the Central Asian states will be rendered nearly meaningless if Azerbaijan becomes fully subordinated to Moscow’s control. To the Bilderbergers, energy imperatives are the end game.
The energy theme appears again later in Brzezinski’s book, written four years before 9/11: “The world’s energy consumption is bound to vastly increase over the next two or three decades. Estimates by the US Department of Energy anticipate that world demand will rise by more than 50 percent between 1993 and 2015, with the most significant increase in consumption occurring in the Far East. The momentum of Asia’s economic development is already generating massive pressures for the exploration and exploitation of new sources of energy.”
Clearly, to the Bilderbergers, Russia was the beginning of the end game.
During a presentation titled “Internationalisation of Business” to the 26-28 April 1968 Bilderberg meeting at Mont Tremblant, Canada, George Ball provided a far more truthful and insightful glimpse into the group’s economic orientation. Ball, who was Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs under JFK and Lyndon Johnson, a Steering Committee member of the Bilderberg Group as well as a Senior Managing Director for Lehman Brothers and Kuhn Loeb Inc., defined the Bilderberg’s new policy of globalisation and how it would shape the New World Order.
As Pierre Beaudry noted in Synarchy Movement of Empire,2 “…Ball presented an outline of the advantages of a new-colonial world economic order based on the concept of a ‘world company’, and described some of the obstacles that needed to be eliminated for its success. According to Ball, the first and most important thing that had to be eliminated was ‘the archaic political structure of the nation state’.”
In other words, Ball was calling for a return to the old colonialism system, but this time built on the concept of a “world company”.
“Ball wrote: ‘To be productive, we must begin our inquiry by explicitly recognizing the lack of phasing between development of the world company-a concept responding to modern needs-and the continued existence of an archaic political structure of nation states, mostly small or of only medium size, which is evolving only at glacier pace in response to new world requirements of scope and scale.’”
Beaudry concluded: “It was clear for Ball that the very structure of the nation state, and the idea of the commonwealth, or of a general welfare of a people, represented the main obstacle against any attempt of freely looting the planet, especially the weak and poor nations of the world, and represented the most important impediment to the creation of a neo-colonial world empire. The priority of the world company is obviously based on international free trade without restraint, that is, trade measured by the British standard of profit of buying cheap and selling dear. The problem is that national governments have priorities, which are different than and contrary to those of a looting company…”
On page 39 of a Bilderberg transcript from the 1968 meeting at Mont Tremblant, Ball self-assuredly stated the following: “Where does one find a legitimate base for the power of corporate managements to make decisions that can profoundly affect the economic life of nations to whose governments they have only limited responsibility?”
In other words, Messrs Rockefeller and Davignon, what Mr Ball would like to know is: how does one establish a Halliburton type of world company, which would greatly surpass in authority any government on the planet? Isn’t that what “world company”, run by the ruling class, stands for?
Not according to Bilderberg President and Belgian multimillionaire Etienne Davignon. During his 2005 BBC interview, Mr Davignon said: “I don’t think a global ruling class exists. Business influences society, and politics influences society-that’s purely common sense. It’s not that business contests the right of democratically elected leaders to lead.”
Is that so, Mr Davignon? Current parliamentary democracy works on the basis of an “elected” head of state and a parliament, which can be dumped any time you decide to orchestrate a crisis and put a third branch of government in charge of its financial system, called an “independent central banking system”.
In the United States, this “independent” banking system is known as the Federal Reserve, a privately owned bank interlocked with the Bilderberg Group. In Europe, the independent banking system is run through the European Central Bank, whose monetary policies are put together by the leading members of the Bilderberger elite, such as Jean-Claude Trichet. In Britain, this independent system is run by the Bank of England, whose members are also full-time members of the Bilderberg Group’s inner circle. The independent central banking system controls the emission of currency, controls national credit and interest rates, and, any time the government displeases it, uses its power to orchestrate the overthrow of the government. The British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was overthrown because she opposed the wilful handover of British sovereignty to the global world company superstate designed by the Bilderbergers. This is what Kuhn, Loeb and Lehman Brothers have been building worldwide, by way of mergers and acquisitions, from the 1960s until today. In the past decades, the entire deregulation policy of US industries and banking was precisely set up in response to this blueprint scenario for creating giant corporations for a new empire whose intention is nothing short of perpetual war.
Could the eventual dismemberment and weakening of Russia-to the point that it could not oppose US military operations that have now successfully secured control of the oil and gas reserves in Central Asia-been part of a multi-decade plan for global domination? Most credible senior analysts definitely believe so.
At a 1997 symposium held in Bonn, Germany, Dr Sergei Glazyev, Chairman of the Economic Policy Committee of the State Duma of the Russian Federation, explained: “This colonisation, masked as reforms, destroyed the basic institutions of Russian society along the following basic lines: (1) destruction of the financial system of the state by means of an endless build-up of the state debt pyramid, shrinking of the tax base, deepening of the non-payments crisis, and disorganisation of the monetary system; (2) destruction of the scientific and technological potential of the country, achieved by means of a many-fold reduction in state financing of science, the collapse of technological cooperation and scientific production integration in the course of mass privatisation, and the refusal of the government to have any scientific and technical, industrial or structural policy at all; (3) sale of controlling blocs of shares in the leading and most valuable Russian firms, in industry, electric power and telecommunications, to foreign companies; (4) Transfer of the right to exploit the most valuable Russian raw materials deposits to transnational corporations; (5) establishment of foreign control over the Russian stock exchange; (6) establishment of direct foreign control over the shaping of Russian domestic and foreign economic policy.”3
The Bilderberg conclusions are striking in their candidness: “The US can no longer ride roughshod over, nor bully, nor simply ignore resurgent Russia, rising China or the globe’s regimes that supply the vital oil that fuels the US economy. Something must be done, and urgently, in order to cut deeply into Russia’s mounting global energy leverage. The US-Russia strategically deteriorating relations are one victim of this geopolitical struggle for energy supremacy.”
One Finnish delegate’s opinion that “no US-Russia military confrontation is likely, no matter how tense things should get” is increasingly an unsafe one as a more desperate US pushes back against a much more aggressive Russia. Dr Henry Kissinger added that “aggressive, unilateralist US foreign policy has forced ‘axis of evil’ states to accelerate their pursuit of nuclear weapons to immunise themselves against US military strikes”.
Richard Perle pointed out that in response to aggressive US tactics across the globe, Russia has undertaken asymmetric steps to undermine the ability of the US to project its military power effectively into their neighbourhoods and into those of their partners and allies. When one American Bilderberger tried to object, European delegates brought up China’s recent response to US intentions to weaponise space: a simple and relatively inexpensive demonstration of destruction of its satellite. The example produced snickering in the room, much to the chagrin of the Americans.
Afghanistan and the price of treason
Another subject under discussion dealt with Afghanistan. It was commonly agreed by the attendees that the US-led NATO alliance/mission is in a state of quagmire and that “the situation in the country is getting worse”. The problem can be defined, in the words of one British Bilderberger, as “one of the unreal expectations”. He went on to explain that clamouring for democratic reform while simultaneously propping up Pashtun warlords without delivering serious progress “has managed to discredit a lot of our basic notions in the eyes of the Afghans”.
Bilderbergers, however, aren’t the only ones left scratching their heads as to how Western governments and their carefully chosen Afghan partners have managed to spend billions of dollars in development assistance with little to show for it.
Catastrophe is good for business; always has been. Without suffering, there would be no humanitarian assistance. And without humanitarian assistance, there would be no room for undercover intelligence network operations as part of Western imperatives for geopolitical control.
The worse it looks, the better it sells. While the American people were getting their daily diet of ubiquitous images of repression, suffering and burka-clad Afghani women beamed into every living room in America, a propaganda campaign was surreptitiously launched in the pages of newspapers and glossy magazines. The New York Times and the New Yorker were greasing the gears of the misery machine by urging the US government, the United Nations and anyone who would listen to “do something”-amid the jewellery advertisements. Terror and horror, like expensive jewellery, became commodities.
Today, Afghanistan and its African cousins of Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Congo and Rwanda and the rest of the nations blessed with Western humanitarian help are all basket cases. Bilderbergers seem to be asking: how is it possible that humanitarian missions of such scale and magnitude could have failed so miserably? Is it a case of good-intentioned exercises going bad due to corruption, greed and lack of oversight? Or is it the merciless dismemberment of yet more foreign lands and cultures exercised stealthily through humanitarian aid agencies tied to the larger apparatus of government?
Furthermore, the US government’s support for known Afghani drug warlords adds another vital clue to the puzzle. The amount of profit generated annually by the drug trade, according to the United Nations, is somewhere around $700 billion in tax-free cash flow per year. Seven hundred billion dollars a year is too much money to hide in a sock. You need a lot of experience and expertise to move those kinds of funds stealthily. Does anyone doubt that Afghanistan is about drugs? Does anyone doubt that the CIA is involved?
For example, the CIA financed the Muslim Brotherhood in 1977 and trained the mujahedin in preparation for the campaign of collusion between Washington and right-wing Islam: the Afghan War. The roots to the Afghan conflict can be traced to Al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo, the centre of the Muslim Brotherhood’s activity. Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, alleged airline hijacker Mohammed Atta was identified as a Muslim Brother in several Western publications such as the Washington Post (22 September 2001), the Observer (23 September 2001) and Newsweek (31 December 2001). Other Muslim Brothers involved were Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Ramzi Yousef, who masterminded the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Osama bin Laden’s right-hand man, an Egyptian by the name of Ayman al-Zawahiri, is also a lifelong member of the Brotherhood.
Robert Dreyfuss, in his extremely important book Devil’s Game,4 explained it thus: “They returned to Afghanistan and formed a branch of the Brothers, the Islamic Society. Later, these same ‘professors’, as they were known, would form the backbone of the Afghan mujahedin who waged a US-backed, decade-long war against the Soviet occupation. The three leading ‘professors’ were Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, Burhanuddin Rabbani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.” Sayyaf and Hekmatyar, two big-time Pashtun drug traffickers and CIA assets, were backed by Pakistani Intelligence as well as Pakistan’s own “branch” of the Brotherhood and funded by Saudi money.
There is yet another link between the Brotherhood and the super-secret Bilderberg Group. In the early 1980s, Bilderberger Michael Ledeen of the ultraconservative American Enterprise Institute and Bilderberger Richard Perle used Hekmatyar as a poster boy of anti-Soviet resistance at the time when Hekmatyar was actively working with Hezb-i-Islami terrorists to undermine America’s influence in Afghanistan. Does anyone reading this doubt that this is hardly a coincidence?
First came the “humanitarian relief” through non-government organisations. In short order, this was followed by the US military which came to the rescue out of the goodness of its heart for “purely humanitarian objectives”. Once on the ground, it became an exercise in “nation-building”. In the end, it morphed into the hunt for a terrorist dictator.
During an animated discussion at Bilderberg 2007 in Istanbul, one Italian asked if the US-led NATO forces have “the will to stay the course”. In the wake of the US military siege of Tora Bora, Afghanistan, in December 2001, the commanding general, Tommy Franks, reportedly said it was not his intention to “get embroiled in a Soviet-style long-term engagement as in the 1980s”.5 Now, however, American Bilderbergers are pressuring NATO allies to provide larger troop contributions to the cause.
Dr Kissinger insisted that “the will” is lacking and so “we must now begin to acknowledge our limits”. “The choices facing us are very difficult,” reflected one European Royal, wholeheartedly agreeing with Kissinger’s assessment on the lack of commitment and will. A NATO representative categorically stated that the West has neither the political intelligence nor the understanding to fight a protracted, decade-long counter-insurgency campaign in Afghanistan.
A MEANS TO AN END?
The Bilderberg Group is not the end but the means to a future One World Government. This organisation has grown beyond its secretive beginnings to become a virtual shadow government which decides in total secrecy at annual meetings how its plans are to be carried out. The ultimate goal of this nightmare future is to transform Earth into a prison planet by bringing about a single globalised marketplace, controlled by a One World Government, policed by a United World Army, financially regulated by a World Bank, and populated by a microchipped population whose life’s needs have been stripped down to materialism and survival-work, buy, procreate, sleep-all connected to a global computer that monitors our every move.
And it is becoming easier because the development of telecommunications technology together with profound advances in present-day knowledge and new methods of behaviour engineering to manipulate individual conduct are converting what, in other epochs of history, were only evil intentions into a disturbing new reality. Each new measure, viewed on its own, may seem an aberration, but a whole host of changes, as part of an ongoing continuum, constitutes a shift towards total enslavement.
But there is hope. In almost every corner of the planet, stress points are beginning to fracture and people are starting to take sides. There is a general awakening taking place as people hold mirrors up to the irrationality that’s being imposed upon them. This awakening is beginning to empower our collective learning and understanding. You see, the powers-that-be have told us that world events are too difficult for the layperson to understand. They lied! We have been told that national secrets must be zealously protected. Indeed, they must! No government wants its citizens to discover that its best and brightest participate in massive collusion, conspiracy and pillaging of the planet.
Now, as the year 2007 unfolds, we find ourselves at the crossroads. The road we take from here will determine the very future of humanity and whether we will become an electronic global police state or remain free human beings. We must always remember that it is not up to God to bring us back from the “New Dark Age” planned for us. It is up to us. Forewarned is forearmed. We will never find the right answers if we don’t ask the right questions.
Endnotes
1. Brzezinski, Zbigniew, The Grand Chessboard: American primacy and its geostrategic imperatives, Basic Books, New York, 1997
2. Beaudry, Pierre, Synarchy Movement of Empire, Leesburg, Virginia, USA, 2005, Book IV, chapter 4, pp. 104-05, at http://www.pehi.eu/organisations/SME/Synarchy_Movement_of_Empire_book_04.pdf
3. Glazyev, Sergei, “From a Five-Year Plan of Destruction to a Five-Year Plan of Colonisation”, EIR Bonn Symposium, 1997
4. Dreyfuss, Robert, Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, Henry Holt & Co., New York, 2005
5. Smucker, Philip, “Missions impossible: NATO’s Afghan dilemma”, Asia Times Online, 1 June 2007, http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/IF01Df01.html
About the Author:
Based in Spain, Daniel Estulin is an award-winning investigative journalist who has been researching the Bilderberg Group for over 15 years. He is the author of La Verdadera Historia del Club Bilderberg (2005), a bestseller in Spain and now in its 13th printing; it has been translated into 24 languages and sold to over 42 countries. The English-language edition, The True Story of the Bilderberg Group, is to be published by Trine Day, USA in September 2007 (available through Amazon.com). The sequel, Los Secretos del Club Bilderberg (2006), is already in its second printing in Spanish; bidding for international rights is scheduled for (northern) autumn 2007.
Estulin’s previous contribution to NEXUS was in 2005 with “Breaking the Silence: Bilderberg Exposed” (vol. 12, no. 5). The original text of this 2007 article is at the web page http://www.danielestulin.com/?op=noticias¬icias= ver&id=345&idioma=en.
Daniel Estulin can be contacted by email at daniel@danielestulin.com. For more information, visit his website at http://www.danielestulin.com.
DELEGATES AT BILDERBERG 2007
Istanbul, Turkey, 31 May – 3 June 2007
This year’s delegation included many of the most important politicians, businessmen, central bankers, European commissioners and executives of the Western corporate press. They were joined at the table by leading representatives of European royalty.
According to the Bilderberg Steering Committee list which this author has had access to, the following names have now been confirmed as attendees at the Bilderberg 2007 conference (uncharacteristically, David Rockefeller was not present).
Graham Allison, Douglas Dillon Professor of Government, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University (USA); George Alogoskoufis, Minister for Economy and Finance (Greece);
Ali Babacan, Minister for Economic Affairs (Turkey); Francisco Pinto Balsemo, Chairman and CEO, IMPRESA SGPS, former Prime Minister (Portugal); Michel Barnier, Vice President, Merieux Alliance; former Minister for Foreign Affairs (France); Michael Barone, Senior Writer, US News & World Report (USA); Martin Bartenstein, Federal Minister of Economics and Labour (Austria); Nicolas Baverez, Partner, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP (France); Her Majesty Queen Beatrix, Queen of The Netherlands (The Netherlands); Leonor Beleza, President, Champalimaud Foundation (Portugal); Franco Bernabe, Vice Chairman, Rothschild Europe (Italy); Rosina M. Bierbaum, Professor and Dean, School of Natural Resources and Environment, University of Michigan (USA); Carl Bildt, Minister for Foreign Affairs, former Prime Minister (Sweden); Mehmet A. Birand, Columnist (Turkey); Lloyd C. Blankfein, Chairman and CEO, Goldman Sachs & Co. (USA); Anders Borg, Minister for Finance (Sweden); Charles G. Boyd, President and CEO, Business Executives for National Security (USA); Umit N. Boyner, Member, Executive Board, Boyner Holding (Turkey); Vendeline A. H. von Bredow, Business Correspondent, The Economist; Rapporteur (Germany); Ian Bremmer, President, Eurasia Group (USA); Oscar Bronner, Publisher and Editor, Der Standard (Austria); Hubert Burda, Publisher and CEO, Hubert Burda Media Holding (Belgium); Gerald Butts, Principal Secretary, Office of the Prime Minister of Ontario (Canada);
Cengiz Candar, Journalist, Referans (Turkey); Henri de Castries, Chairman of Management Board and CEO, AXA (France); Juan Luis Cebrian, CEO, Grupo PRISA media group (Spain); Hikmet Cetin, Former Minister for Foreign Affairs and former NATO Senior Civilian Representative in Afghanistan (Turkey); Kenneth Clarke, Member of Parliament (UK); Timothy C. Collins, Senior Managing Director and CEO, Ripplewood Holding, LLC (USA);
Frans van Daele, Permanent Representative of Belgium to NATO (Belgium); George A. David, Chairman, Coca-Cola HBC SA (Greece); Etienne Davignon, Vice-Chairman, Suez-Tractebel, Honorary Chairman, Bilderberg Meetings (Belgium); Richard Dearlove, Master, Pembroke College, Cambridge (UK); Kemal Dervis, Administrator, UNDP (Turkey); Anna Diamantopoulou, Member of Parliament (Greece); Thomas E. Donilon, Partner, O’Melveny & Myers LLP (USA); Mathias Dopfner, Chairman and CEO, Axel Springer AG (Germany); Cem Duna, Former Ambassador to the European Union (Turkey); Esther Dyson, Chairman, EDventure Holdings, Inc. (USA);
Anders Eldrup, President, DONG AS (Denmark); John Elkann, Vice Chairman, Fiat SpA (Italy);
Ulrik Federspiel, Permanent Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs (Denmark); Martin S. Feldstein, President and CEO, National Bureau of Economic Research (USA);
Timothy F. Geithner, President and CEO, Federal Reserve Bank of New York (USA); Paul A. Gigot, Editorial Page Editor, The Wall Street Journal (USA); Eival Gilady, CEO, The Portland Trust, Israel (Israel); Dermot Gleeson, Chairman, AIB Group (Ireland); Emre Gonensay, Professor of Economics, Isik University, and former Minister for Foreign Affairs (Turkey); Marc Grossman, Vice Chairman, The Cohen Group (USA); Alfred Gusenbauer, Federal Chancellor (Austria);
Richard N. Haass, President, Council on Foreign Relations (USA); Victor Halberstadt, Professor of Economics, Leiden University, former Honorary Secretary-General of Bilderberg Meetings (The Netherlands); Peter D. Hart, Chairman, Peter D. Hart Research Associates (USA); Frank Heemskerk, Minister for Foreign Trade (The Netherlands); Paul Hermelin, CEO, Cap Gemini SA (France); Richard C. Holbrooke, Vice Chairman, Perseus, LLC (USA); Jan H. M. Hommen, Chairman, Reed Elsevier NV (The Netherlands); Jaap G. de Hoop Scheffer,* Secretary-General, NATO (The Netherlands/International);
Atte Jaaskelainen, Director of News, Sports and Regional Programmes, YLE (Finland); Kenneth Jacobs, Deputy Chairman, Head of Lazard USA, Lazard Freres & Co. LLC (USA); James A. Johnson, Vice Chairman, Perseus LLC (USA); Vernon E. Jordan, Jr, Senior Managing Director, Lazard Frres & Co. LLC (USA); His Majesty, King Juan Carlos I,* King of Spain (Spain);
Jyrki Katainen, Minister of Finance (Finland); Jason Kenney, Member of Parliament (Canada); Muhtar Kent, President and Chief Operating Officer, The Coca-Cola Company (USA); John Kerr (Lord Kerr of Kinlochard), Member, House of Lords, Deputy Chairman, Royal Dutch Shell PLC (UK); Henry A. Kissinger, Chairman, Kissinger Associates (USA); Eckart von Klaeden, Foreign Policy Spokesman, CDU/CSU (Germany); Klaus Kleinfeld, President and CEO, Siemens AG (Germany); Mustafa V. Koc, Chairman, Ko Holding AS (Turkey); Bruce Kovner, Chairman, Caxto Associates LLC (USA); Henry R. Kravis, Founding Partner, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. (USA); Marie-Josée Kravis, Senior Fellow, Hudson Institute, Inc. (USA); Idar Kreutzer, CEO, Storebrand ASA (The Netherlands); Neelie Kroes, Commissioner, European Commission (The Netherlands/ International);
Bernardino Leon Gross, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs (Spain); Mogens Lykketoft, Member of Parliament (Denmark); William J. Luti, Special Assistant to the President for Defense Policy and Strategy, National Security Council (USA);
Jessica T. Mathews, President, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (USA); Michael McDowell, Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform (Ireland); John R. Micklethwait, Editor, The Economist (UK); Mario Monti, President, University Commerciale Luigi Bocconi (Italy); Craig J. Mundie, Chief Research and Strategy Officer, Microsoft Corporation (USA); Egil Myklebust, Chairman, SAS and Norsk Hydro ASA (Norway);
Matthias Nass, Deputy Editor, Die Zeit (Germany); Ewald Nowotny, CEO, BAWAG PSK (Austria);
Christine Ockrent, Editor-in-Chief, France Television (France); Jorma Ollila, Chairman, Royal Dutch Shell PLC, Chairman and CEO, Nokia Corporation (Finland); George Osborne, MP, Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer (UK);
Laurence Parisot, President, MEDEF (Mouvement des Entreprises de France) (France); Christopher Patten, Member, House of Lords (UK); Richard N. Perle, Resident Fellow, American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (USA); Rick Perry, Governor of Texas (USA); Volker Perthes, Director, Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (Germany); HRH Prince Philippe of Belgium (Belgium);
Rodrigo de Rato y Figaredo, Managing Director, IMF (International); Olli Rehn, Commissioner, European Commission (International); Heather Reisman, Chair and CEO, Indigo Books & Music Inc. (Canada); Mat’as Rodriguez Inciarte, Executive Vice Chairman, Grupo Santander, Ciudad Grupo (Spain); Olivier Roy, Senior Researcher, CNRS (France);
Paolo Scaroni, CEO, Eni SpA (Italy); Eric Schmidt, Chairman of the Executive Committee and CEO, Google (USA); Rudolf Scholten, Member of the Board of Executive Directors, Oesterreichische Kontrollbank AG (Austria); Jorgen E. Schrempp, former Chairman of the Board of Management, DaimlerChrysler AG (Germany); Klaus Schwab, Executive Chairman, World Economic Forum (Switzerland); Robert W. Scully, Co-President, Morgan Stanley (USA); Kathleen Sebelius, Governor of Kansas (USA); Josette Sheeran, Executive Director, UN World Food Programme (USA); Kristen Silverberg, Assistant Secretary of State, Bureau of Interational Organization Affairs (USA); Domenico Siniscalco, Managing Director and Vice Chairman, Morgan Stanley (Italy); Javier Solana,* High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy, Secretary-General of the Council of the European Union and the Western European Union (International); Her Majesty Queen Sophia, Queen of Spain (Spain); Ayse Soysal, Rector, Bosphorus University (Turkey); Lawrence H. Summers, Charles W. Eliot University Professor, Harvard University (USA); Peter D. Sutherland, Chairman, BP PLC, and Chairman, Goldman Sachs International (Ireland); Carl-Henric Svanberg, President and CEO, Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson (Sweden);
Paul A. Taggart, Professor of Politics, University of Sussex (UK); Sidney Taurel, Chairman and CEO, Eli Lilly and Company (USA); J. Martin Taylor, Chairman, Syngenta International AG (UK); Peter A. Thiel, President, Clarium Capital Management, LLC (USA); Teija Tiilikainen, State Secretary, Ministry for Foreign Affairs (Finland); Michel Tilmant, Chairman, ING NV (The Netherlands); Jean-Claude Trichet, Governor, European Central Bank (France/International);
Jens Ulltveit-Moe, CEO, Umoe AS (Norway);
Daniel L. Vasella, Chairman and CEO, Novartis AG (Switzerland); Jeroen van der Veer, Chief Executive, Royal Dutch Shell PLC (The Netherlands);
Jacob Wallenberg, Chairman, Investor AB (Sweden); Vin (J.V.) Weber, Partner, Clark & Weinstock (USA); Guido Westerwelle, Chairman, Free Democratic Party (Germany); Ross Wilson, Ambassador to Turkey (USA); James D. Wolfensohn, Chairman, Wolfensohn & Company, LLC (USA); Paul Wolfowitz, President, The World Bank (International); Joseph R. Wood, Deputy Assistant to the Vice President, National Security Affairs (USA); Adrian D. Wooldridge, Foreign Correspondent, The Economist; Rapporteur (UK);
Arzuhan Dogan Yalindag, President, TUSIAD (Turkey); Erkut Yucaoglu, Chairman of the Board, MAP, former President, TUSIAD (Turkey);
Philip D. Zelikow, White Burkett Miller Professor of History, University of Virginia (USA); Robert B. Zoellick,* former US Trade Representative, former Deputy Secretary of State, Managing Director, Goldman Sachs (USA).
* Known to have attended Bilderberg 2007, although not included on the official list of attendees distributed by the Bilderberg Meetings office.
Indonesia accuses US of bird flu plot
Indonesia accuses US of bird flu plot
Mark Forbes Herald Correspondent in Jakarta
February 20, 2008
THE Indonesian Health Minister has said the United States and the World Health Organisation are part of a global conspiracy to profit from the spread of bird flu and the US may use samples to produce biological weapons.
The views of Dr Siti Fadilah Supari, outlined in her new book, threaten to undermine efforts to control the spread of avian influenza. With 104 deaths, nearly half the world total, Indonesia is the new hotspot for the virus.
Despite claims by the minister that she has agreed to share virus samples and allow all nations access to resulting vaccines, Indonesia is still blocking sharing samples from human victims.
Applications to send more than 200 samples from chickens to an Australian laboratory had also been refused, inquiries by the Herald have revealed.
In the book, Dr Supari writes that WHO laboratories forwarded influenza viruses to Western companies so they could profit by selling vaccines back to developing countries: “The system of world health management has been very exploitative. It has been controlled by inhumanly desires, based on the greediness to raise capital and to control the world.”
Some Indonesian samples had been sent to a US Defence Department laboratory, Dr Supari says, adding that “some of our seed viruses had been in a laboratory known as a facility developing biological weapons in a superpower country”.
Privately, officials said Dr Supari’s belief that she was engaged on a God-driven crusade against an evil and “neo-colonialist” world health system – on the book’s cover she describes herself as the “divine hand behind avian influenza” – had caused her to lose touch with reality.
The President, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, appears to have endorsed the book, having written its introduction.
Dr Yudhoyono supports Dr Supari’s claim that the virus is under control in Indonesia, stating the “occurrence rate and the number of affected areas are decreasing”.
The WHO declined to comment and no US officials were available.
This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2008/02/19/1203190823829.html
FINAL WARNING: A HISTORY OF THE NEW WORLD ORDER
FINAL WARNING: A HISTORY OF THE NEW WORLD ORDER
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Since the Persian Gulf War, the term “New World Order” has become well known. However, there has never really been an explanation as to what the term meant, only that it represented a new spirit of cooperation among the nations of the world in order to further the cause of peace. And peace is good, so therefore the New World Order is good and should be accepted. Not so fast. Like the old saying, you can’t tell a book by its cover, there is more here than meets the eye.
The term “New World Order” was actually first used many years ago. Adolf Hitler said: “National Socialism will use its own revolution for the establishing of a new world order.” The Associated Press reported that on July 26, 1968, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller said in a speech to the International Platform Association at the Sheraton Park Hotel in New York, that “as President he would work toward international creation of a New World Order.”
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
The German Union and The French Revolution
The Illuminati Spreads to America
Secret Societies: Phi-Beta Kappa and Skull and Bones
The Masons Separate Themselves from the Illuminati
The Illuminati in the United States
The Illuminati Leadership Changes
FINANCIAL BACKGROUND
The Beginning of Monetary Control
How Our Gold Reserves Have Been Manipulated and US Economy Destroyed
FOUNDATIONS ARE THE TAX SHELTERS FOR THE SUPER RICH
The Carnegie Endowment and The Ford Foundation
The Stock Market Crash and Depression
BRINGING THE WORLD TOGETHER
World War I and League of Nations
DOMESTIC TAMPERING
The Illuminati Creates Racial Tension
COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS
The Council on Foreign Relations
SETTING THE STAGE FOR WORLD WAR II
The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion
World War II and the Rise of Hitler
THE COMMUNIST AGENDA
The Communists Fight Among Themselves
The Ultimate Goal of Communism
THE ILLUMINATI INFLUENCE ON INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
The Committee for Economic Development
READY TO SPRING THE TRAP
Independent Commission on International Issues
SYMBOL OF THE ILLUMINATI
When Weishaupt founded the Order of the Illuminati, he adopted the All-Seeing Eye symbol of Masonry, to be the symbol of the organization. It is the Great Pyramid of Cheops, with the capstone missing, and replaced with an eye. The All-Seeing Eye can be traced back to Chaldea as the Solar Eye, the Eye of Jupiter or Apollo, or the Eye of Providence. Hieroglyphics in ancient Egypt identified the name of the chief Sun God Osiris with a human eye.
On July 4, 1776, Thomas Jefferson (a Mason and Illuminist), John Adams (a Mason), and Ben Franklin (a Mason and Rosicrucian), were appointed by a Committee of the Continental Congress to prepare the Great Seal of the United States to signify that the 13 states had united in an act of independence. After some preliminary work by another, William Barton submitted an Eagle on the pinnacle of a Doric column, the All-Seeing Eye, and the stars (representing a new constellation, or new empire). Barton’s second design pushed the All-Seeing Eye to the reverse side, and moved the eagle up to the crest, and placed a phoenix (a mythical bird that would be consumed with fire of its own volition, then be resurrected out of its own ashes, which was the Egyptian symbol of regeneration used by the Rosicrucians) rising from the flames at the column’s summit, which was to indicate the revival of the new (America) out of the old (England).
This design was accepted on May 9, 1782 and referred to Charles Thompson (a Mason), the Secretary of Congress on June 13th. The final version, approved and adopted by an act of Congress on June 20, 1782, was the result of a series of committee meetings which combined ideas from Barton, Thompson and Jefferson, who placed a triangle around the eye, added the year ‘1776,’ ‘E Pluribus Unum,’ the olive branch on the front, stars above the eagle, and other things. Within weeks, a brass plate of the face of the Great Seal was produced, but not the reverse side.
Although the design of the seal was not to deviate from the one approved, when the original wore out, and a second engraving in 1841 was ordered by Secretary of State Daniel Webster. The design by French artist R. P. Lamplier and cut by John V. N. Throop had many subtle differences, such as six, rather than thirteen arrows, and the phoenix clearly became an eagle. Referred to as the Websterian Great Seal, it was used until 1885.
The third engraving was prepared in 1885 under Secretary of State F. T. Frelinghuysen and cut by Tiffany and Co.; and the fourth engraving, under Secretary of State John Hay, engraved by Max Zeiler, and cut by Baily, Banks & Biddle; were both consistent with the design passed by law in 1782.
A committee appointed by Frelinghuysen, consisting of Theodore F. Dwight (Chief of the Bureau of Rolls and Library of the State Department), Justin Winsor (historian), Charles Eliot Norton (Harvard professor), William H. Whitmore (genealogist), John Denison Chaplin, Jr. (associate editor of American Cyclopedia) and James Horton Whitehouse (designer for Tiffany and Co. in New York City) decided that a die for the reverse side of the seal would not be produced and used as an official seal. Norton called it a “dull emblem of a Masonic fraternity.” However, a 1957 pamphlet by the U.S. Government Printing Office, called The Seal of the United States, indicated that in 1885 “a die may have been cut,” but never used.
Celestia Root Lang (editor and publisher of Divine Life magazine from the Independent Theosophical Society of America) wrote in 1917: “The reverse side must have been designed by a mystic, one versed in symbolism … The time will come … when the white stone (pyramid capstone) will become the headstone of the corner of our government … in proclaiming a new religion in which all spiritual currents flowing from every religion shall meet in the perfection of the white stone … having neither dogma nor doctrine … We see in Mr. Barton only the facade of the instrument; that if he himself was not a mystic or seer, then, a Master (thought to have been Thomas Paine) stood behind him.”
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. wrote in his book The Coming of the New Deal, that Vice President Henry A. Wallace (a Mason) was “fascinated” by the occult, and was impressed enough with the significance of the reverse side of the Great Seal to lobby Treasury Secretary Morganthau to have it put on the back of the one dollar bill in 1935. Wallace later ran for President as a Socialist. What this gesture meant, was that the Illuminati had finally reached the point where they could set into motion their plans for the New World Order by initiating the destruction of our Constitution.
The front side of the Great Seal, or the Eagle, is well known. It is used to seal all governmental documents. The reverse side displays a pyramid, with an eye in the capstone and a Latin inscription around it. This seems to be a continuation of the Masonic symbolism found on the front. The number thirteen is displayed prominently, and was thought to have referred to the thirteen colonies. However, the number thirteen was a mystical number to the Egyptians and Babylonians, and also the Masons.
There are:
13 stars in the crest
13 stripes and bars in the shield
13 olive leaves
13 olives
13 arrows in the right claw
13 feathers in the arrows
13 letters in “Annuit Coeptis”
13 letters in “E Pluribus Unum”
13 courses of stone in the pyramid
13 X 9 dots in the divisions around the crest
It has been said that the cluster of 13 five-pointed stars above the head of the eagle is actually a representation of a hexagram, which is the most evil of all occult symbols, and is used to invoke Satan.
This is not to be confused with the Star of David, Mogen David, or Seal of Solomon, which consists of two interlaced equilateral triangles, which symbolize the union of God and man.
There are 32 long feathers on the right wing which represent the 32 degrees in Scottish Rite Masonry, and there are 33 feathers on the left, which represent the 33 degrees of York Rite Freemasonry. The pyramid has thirteen levels, said to represent the 13 bloodlines; and within the capstone is an eye. It is not the eye of God, as we have been taught to believe. It stems from Masonic tradition, where it is known as the ‘Eye of Horus’ (the Sun God), or the ‘All-Seeing Eye,’ which refers to the protection of Providence, “whose eye never slumbers nor sleeps,” alluding to the ‘Big Brother’ system of constant surveillance. To the Illuminati, it represents the eye of Satan, who its members worship.
The pyramid represents the organizational structure of the Illuminati, and the capstone containing the eye, represents the House of Rothschild, who control the group, and have perpetuated the goal of one-world government. Some sources claim that on the top level, the 1st block represents the Council of 13 (the 13 most powerful witches), the 2nd block represents the Council of 33 (33 highest ranking Masons in the world), and the 3rd block is the Council of 500 (500 richest people and corporations in the world).
According to the original Treasury Department press release of August 15, 1935, which gave details of the symbol being put on the back of the one dollar bill, said the following: “The eye and triangular glory symbolize an all-seeing Deity. The pyramid is the symbol of strength and its unfinished condition denoted the belief of the designers of the Great Seal that there was still work to be done.” Notice they said “Deity,” and not “God.”
The news release indicated that the Latin phrase “Annuit Coeptis” is translated as “he (God) favored our undertakings,” and comes from Virgil’s ‘audacibus annue coeptis’ or “favor my daring undertaking,” which refers to the ‘golden’ age during which the ‘Saturnian’ (Saturn was the father of Osiris) kingdom shall return. “Novus Ordo Seclorum” is translated as ‘a new order of the ages,’ which is taken from Virgil’s ‘magnus ab integro seclorum nascitur ordo’ or “the great series of ages begins anew.” To the Illuminati, the combination of these two Latin phrases is translated as: “Announcing the Birth of a New Secular Order.”
The date 1776, found at the base of the pyramid in Roman numerals, doesn’t refer to July 4th, the date of the country’s independence; but May 1st, when the Illuminati was founded. May 1st is also an international holiday for all workers, known as May Day, which was established in 1889 at the International Socialist Congress.
Now, take a pen, and on the seal on the left side of the bill, find the word “Annuit” and draw a circle around the first letter ‘A.’ Find the word “Coeptis” and draw a circle around the last letter ‘S.’ Find the word “Novus” and draw a circle around the first letter ‘N.’ Find the word “Ordo” and draw a circle around the last letter ‘O.’ Find the word ‘Seclorum’ and draw a circle around the last letter ‘M.’ Now, take your pen, and starting from ‘N’ to the top of the capstone, back down to ‘M’ and back over to ‘N’ (utilizing the entire pyramid as one triangle). Then draw a line from ‘A’ to ‘S’ then down to ‘O’ and then back up to ‘A’ which is the second triangle. Not only will you will see a representation of the six-pointed star, but you will also an anagram that spells the word M-A-S-O-N.
The reverse side of the Great Seal, which can be found in the Meditation Room of the United Nations, has never been used to seal one document in this country’s history, and it never will, because it is the seal of the Illuminati
This is a crazy world. What can be done? Amazingly, we have been mislead. We have been taught that we can control government by voting. The founder of the Rothschild dynasty, Mayer Amschel Bauer, told the secret of controlling the government of a nation over 200 years ago. He said, “Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation and I care not who makes its laws.” Get the picture? Your freedom hinges first on the nation’s banks and money system. Freedom is connected with Debt Elimination for each individual. Not only does this end personal debt, it places the people first in line as creditors to the National Debt ahead of the banks. They don’t wish for you to know this. It has to do with recognizing WHO you really are in A New Beginning: A Practical Course in Miracles. You CAN take back your power and stop volunteering to pay taxes to the collection agency for the BEAST. You can take back that which is yours, always has been yours and use it to pay off your debts. And you can send others to these pages to discover what you are discovering.
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I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. (attributed to Voltaire), but certainly embodies what the 1st amendment of the constitution refers to as the freedom of speech
Bill of Rights
Amendment 1
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
The Plot to Dissolve the United States and Establish a North American Union
Texe Marrs
http://www.texemarrs.com/082006/murder_of_america.htm The evidence is overwhelming. There is absolutely a wicked and devastating plot and conspiracy to overthrow America. The traitors are now confident they will soon wash over 225 years of American tradition and history down a sinkhole. If their foul plan suceeds, the vision we as patriots once had of a strong, prosperous nation of liberty, freedom and prosperity will soon vanish beneath a cavernous cesspool of forgotten dreams. Over the years I have personally withstood a torrent of abuse and ridicule over my assertion that a small clique of traitorously evil men and women were plotting to bring down the walls of history. Still, I soldiered on, enduring the cruel arrows of ignorant and malicious critics. I refused to play along and keep quiet, and I have done my best to expose their heinous plot to shutdown the fabled American experiment in freedom and self-government. Among the evil culprits I fingered over the years were such anti-American globalist groups as the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons and the Bilderbergs. All play important roles in the on-going conspiracy. But behind them all is the satanic influence and power of Zionists. Zionists, in fact, are the real, but, so often, unheralded authors of the globalist plot. Stepping Out Of the ShadowsNow, finally, this traitorous clique of elitists has stepped out of the shadows into the light. No longer need they fear public
disapproval. So effective has been their psychological brainwashing campaign and their dumbing down of the citizenry, the arrogant plotters believe they can finally come out and defiantly show themselves. Evidently, they think that no one is able to stop or even delay their bold plot to murder—yes, murder—America. The CFR has even published its despicable plan in a book, entitled Building A North American Community. Authored by three elite members of the New York-based organization, the book calls for the ending of American sovereignty and the overthrow of the American Constitution and government. The CFR’s membership of 4,275 conspirators, backed by the organization’s predominantly Zionist Jew leadership, demands that, by the year 2010, America as we once knew it will no longer exist. By that date, the Illuminati intends that the following be achieved:
This is Nothing Short of Treason! As shocking as the CFR plot is, equally upsetting is that President George Bush, Mexican President Vicente Fox, and Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin met in Waco, Texas, March 23, 2005, and signed a secret pact called the Security and Prosperity Partnership. That pact, prepared by CFR and Bilderberg administrators, sets forth step-by-step what each nation must do to insure the new, merged slave “nation,” the North American Union, is fully operational by the year 2010. Forget about the fact that the U.S. Consitution requires the President to submit treaties such as this to the Senate for a vote. Imperial dictator Bush knows that no U.S. Senator dare utter one word of protest against the CFR Plot. That would be the kiss of death for his or her senatorial career. Having disposed of American sovereignty, the “New World Order” forged by Bush and Gorbachev in the 80s and cemented
by traitorous Clinton-Bush, Democrat-Republican alliances will finally become a reality. The fly in the ointment, of course, will be the small contingent of true American patriots that remain. This is why the Bush Administration recently gave Halliburton a $385 million contract to build new detention camps. It is also why NSA computers have all our names tagged in its “dissident” database list. If necessary, they will get rid of us—permanently. American military forces will enforce the New World Order. Mexican and other foreign officers will no doubt be given high military commands to guard against mutiny by angry U.S. soldiers. A few rogue nations—Venezuela, Cuba, etc.—must be dealt with. The hapless Islamic masses will not be a major problem. They are to be enslaved and/or killed off, just as is happening now in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their oil resources will be expropriated. The Zionist Connection: The CFR is Dominated by JewsThe Zionist Connection is the sinewy thread that ties this entire, vast, traitorous enterprise together. The Bush Administration is only a puppet operation. The Council on Foreign Relations has among its leading members such Zionist fanatics and servants as Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condi Rice, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. In all, over seventy percent of the membership of the CFR is Jewish! Also on the CFR’s rolls: Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve; Robert Rubin, Clinton’s former Secretary of the Treasury; and Madleine Albright, Clinton’s former Secretary of State. Every one of these persons is a Jew and a Zionist Agent. Their first allegiance is to the Jewish World Authority. Here are some other top Jewish names that dominate the CFR. Indeed, the CFR is nothing more than America’s premier Zionist Secret Society, a traitorous front for global Jewish interests and headquarters for the furtherance of the Zionist plot for a global Jewish Utopia: Carla Hills, Henry Bienen, Kenneth Duberstein, Martin Feldman, Richard Salomon, Bart Friedman, Maurice Greenberg, Morton Janklow, Ira Lipman, Seymour Sternberg, Frank Wisner, Michael Moscow, Roger Altman, Jessica Einhorn, David Greenberg, Louis Perlmutter, Joshua Steiner, Anita Wien, Douglas Schoen, Malcolm Weiner, Charles Schumer, Nancy Soderberg, Peter Tannoff, Abraham Lowenthal, Marc Thiessen, Daniel Yergin, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, Carl Gershman, Peter Rosenblatt, Joseph Lieberman, Mortimer Zuckerman. All of those listed are CFR Jews. All are globalists. As CFR conspirators and associates, all, in my opinion, are deceitful traitors, guilty of treason, enemies of the Constitution of the United States of America. They deserve to be arrested, indicted, and, if found guilty by a jury of 12 honest American Patriots, sent to prison or executed.
The Trap Has Been SetDear friends, the trap has been set. The media are not on our side. Neither are the leaders of the Christian religious establishment. They are owned by Jewish Wall Street corporation interests. Neither can we count on either of the two major political parties to rescue us. The Congress and the State Capital delegations are packed with CFR traitors who have already sold out the American Republic for a pot of porridge. Today in America, we have the best politicians and clergy that money can buy! Please, I encourage you: Call today and order the audiotape/CD special report I have just released revealing the facts you need to know to understand and survive the horrible crisis now facing us all: The Murder of America-The Council on Foreign Relations Plot to Dissolve the United States and Establish a North American Union (Available in 2-Audiotape Set or 2-CD Set). Be aware of the facts, and remember, though the storm clouds gather and the twilight hour is at hand, there is One who is able to lift us up and bring the Adversary to heel. We can cast out fear and face the future with zest and confidence. Jesus, you may recall, said it simply and powerfully: “Only believe.”
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Ecklonia Cava Extract – Super Antioxidant & Beyond
Ecklonia Cava Extract – Super Antioxidant & Beyond
Ecklonia Cava Extract: Polyphenol / Phlorotannin Derived from Brown Algae
Disclaimer: For educational purposes only This information has not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This information is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease
Ecklonia Cava Extract (ECE) is a standardized natural complex of unique marine molecules that originate from a specific species of brown algae (Ecklonia cava). ECE represents a unique category of polyphenols often called phlorotannins. Their unique polyphenolic structure endows them with biological activities that are not found in land-based plants.
ECE naturally occurs as high-molecular weight tannin (Mw> 2,000 Dalton) and low-molecular weight tannin (Mw=400-1000 Dalton). ECE can be classified into four types depending on the ratio of high molecular weight and low molecular weight tannins. Various physiological activities of ECE have been evaluated in vitro, in vivo and clinically as individual compounds (ECE1-ECE14) and complex forms (ECE, Type I-IV).
Millions on Research
Dr. Haengwoo Lee and his team of M.D.’s and Ph.D.’s have spent over thirty million dollars on research, from in vitro to animal and human studies. Much of the work was done in Korea, and some at the University of Washington. ECE has been found to be an impressive therapeutic agent in a wide array of clinical applications.
SUPER ANTIOXIDANT
The power of an antioxidant is determined by its structure, which is made up of rings. These rings capture stray electrons from free radicals. Most flavonoids generally have three interconnected rings. ECE has up to eight interconnected rings, making its free-radical scavenging ability 10-100 times more powerful than other polyphenols. It is substantially more powerful than green tea catechins, which only have four rings.
Multiple Antioxidant Profiles of ECE
ECE’s antioxidant activities against various reactive oxygen species have been confirmed to be highly potent in physiologically relevant concentrations. The effective dose of ECE for free radical scavenging is in the 10-20 µg/mL range which belongs to most potent families of natural antioxidants. ECE itself and its individual compounds have demonstrated potent reducing power and radical scavenging activities against DPPH radical, oxidized LDL and peroxynitrite.*
Much Longer Half-Life
ECE is a unique polyphenol in that it has a very long half-life in the body. This is because ECE is a marine-based polyphenol which is 40% fat-soluble. Virtually all other polyphenols are derived from land-based plants and are water-soluble. The half-life of ECE is up to 12 hours, compared to 30 minutes for water-soluble, land-based polyphenols. ECE has the ability to cross the blood-brain barrier.
The Research of Martin Pall, Ph.D.
Peroxynitrite is the most notorious of the free radicals incriminated by Martin Pall, Ph.D.’s groundbreaking research on multiple chemical sensitivity, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, post traumatic stress disorder, Gulf War syndrome, and fourteen other conditions. Peroxynitrite plays a main role in Dr. Pall’s mechanism, along with NF-kappaB and other inflammatory mediators. ECE also reduces tissue specific NF-kappaB.
*Peroxynitrate is a central reactive oxidant, which appears to play a major role in many disease processes.
FIBROMYALGIA
ECE: Phase I Clinical Trial Results (Preliminary)
In an 8-week, double-blinded, placebo-controlled study of established fibromyalgia patients, ECE was used as an adjunct therapy to the patients’ current standard of physician care. The results established the general safety of ECE. ECE cut the time it took the participants to fall asleep by 47 minutes; it increased total nighttime sleep by 1.6 hours; it improved soundness of sleep by 80%; it boosted their energy levels by 71%; it gave them 2 1/4 more good days per week; it helped reduce their pain by 31%; and their general condition improved by 39%. Interestingly, these improvements were achieved at all doses. Patients given the placebo had no improvement during the study.
ECE & FIBROMYALGIA
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BRAIN FUNCTION: MEMORY, RELAXATION, ALERTNESS
Acetylcholine & Memory
Memory is dependent on the neurotransmitter acetylcholine (ACh). In an animal study, ECE increased rodent ACh by 140% in brain regions responsible for learning and memory in seven days. Memory enhancement increased by 100-200% at an oral dose as low as 0.2-1mg/kg.
With regard to mechanism, it is thought that the mild acetylcholinesterase inhibitory activity of two phlorotannin compounds found in ECE, dieckol (DE) and phlorofurofucoeckol (PFF), may be involved in the up-regulation of acetylcholine.
Increased Blood Flow
ECE crosses the blood-brain barrier and significantly improves blood flow, which is likely another way ECE improves memory. More specifically, Dr. Lee’s group found that ECE can increase the velocity of blood flow in the carotid artery from an average of 36.68 cm/sec. to 40.09 cm/sec., while the placebo showed no improvement.
Relaxation & Alpha-Waves
An EEG study on brain waves of healthy middle age volunteers found that ECE compounds increase alpha-waves. Alpha-waves are an indicator of relaxation.
Alertness
Yet another study found that ECE compounds prevented sleepiness in bus drivers and in high school students during daytime activities. This is likely due to increased blood flow and oxygen delivery.
Neuroprotective Effects
ECE demonstrated powerful neuroprotective effects owing to several features of its components. ECE compounds are both powerful antioxidants and anti-inflammatory agents capable of scavenging free radicals and suppressing excessive inflammatory reactions. Fucoidan in ECE has recently been found to protect neuronal cells from ischemia-induced inflammatory reactions which often occur in the aged and highly stressed brain. ECE compounds also neutralize the neurotoxic free-radical peroxynitrite.
Enhancement of Acetylcholine Levels in Mice
After 7 days oral administration of two ECE compounds (DE 10mg/kg and PFF 2mg/kg), mice under ethanol-induced cognitive impairment showed substantial enhancement of acetylcholine in three brain regions related to memory formation, as compared with non-treated mice. Especially, 140% enhancement was observed in the frontal cortex that is crucial in long-term memory and associative thinking.
Resistance of Stress-Induced Learning Deficit in Mice
In a 5-day study, ECE treated mice showed significant resistance to electric shock treatment-induced learning deficiency, as compared to non-treated mice whose learning process was significantly retarded during the test period.
Memory Enhancement in Mice
The beneficial effects of ECE compounds on memory enhancement were further demonstrated by measuring the latency time avoiding the previously experienced electric shock treatment in mice as passive-avoidance memory testing. After 7 days oral administration of two ECE compounds DE and PFF (as low as 1 and 0.2mg/kg), mice under ethanol-induced cognitive impairment showed 130-140% improvement, especially in the PFF group.
Beta-Amyloid Deposition Inhibition in Rats
Researchers at the National Institute of Health’s aging research labs in Baltimore studied ECE in rats, and found it to inhibit beta-amyloid deposition in the brain. Beta-amyloid is the same substance that accumulates in Alzheimer’s disease. The rats also learned maze challenges faster, which demonstrated improvement in short-term memory.
ARTHRITIS, INFLAMMATION, NEURALGIA
Dr. Lee and colleagues found ECE to naturally suppress inflammatory responses and neutralize inflammatory damage caused by reactive oxygen species. The optimal combination of ECE’s natural anti-inflammatory and tissue-protective properties appears to enable dramatic improvement in both arthritis and neuralgia. In a human trial, ECE significantly reduced pain in a group of knee arthritis patients compared with placebo.
Comparable to Celebrex®
ECE’s ability to treat arthritis was found to be comparable to Celebrex®, the prescription drug that reduces inflammatory cox enzymes.
The influence of ECE in lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-induced generation of prostaglandin E2 (PGE2) using RAW 246.7 cells was studied. While PGE2 was barely detectable in non-stimulated cells, more than one hundred times the amount of PGE2 was detected in the stimulated cells. ECE, celecoxib (Celebrex®) and aspirin all showed significant inhibition of PGE2 generation in the concentration range tested. ECE showed inhibition of 61%, 85%, 92% and 99% at concentrations of 10, 30, 60 and 100 µg/mL, showing similar activity to celecoxib which showed 65%, 79%, 85% and 96%.
Cartilage Protecting Activities
As demonstrated above, ECE compared almost identically to celecoxib in the ability to reduce PGE2 by slowing down the lipoxygenase (LOX) system. ECE compounds have more than double the ability of resveratrol to inhibit LOX. These results were demonstrated in a study on rabbit cartilage cells. Those cells treated with ECE had up to an 80% reduction in degeneration.
Rabbit Model
In an animal study, rabbit articular cartilage explant culture was treated with recombinant human interleukin 1 (rhIL-1) to induce proteoglycan degradation. The amount of glycosaminoglycan released into the medium was measured as an index of proteoglycan degradation. When the rabbit cartilage explants were treated with rhIL-1 for 60 hours, the amount of released glycosaminoglycan into the culture medium increased significantly compared to the vehicle group (1.44 ± 0.06µg/mg vs. 0.30 ± 0.01µg/mg). Diclofenac, which is known as a selective COX-2 inhibitor was used as a positive control at a dose of 10µM (3.2µg/mL). ECE significantly interfered with the rhIL-1-mediated degradation of proteoglycan in all concentrations tested (p <0.001). It showed 53%, 79%, 81% and 70% of inhibition at 1, 3, 10 and 30 µg/mL concentration.
Neuropathy: 4-Week Clinical Trial
Researchers recently studied ECE on 40 patients with neuropathy. ECE reduced nerve pain by 40% in four weeks. Overall, 80% of the patients responded favorably.
Speculation about Neuropathy Mechanism
The strong lipid and cholesterol reducing potential of ECE supports reduced vascular inflammation. Increasingly, the scientific literature supports the notion that many forms of nerve pain or neuropathy are caused by nerve pressure, as exerted by swollen, inflamed blood vessels adjacent to the nerves.
ALLERGIES / ASTHMA
Overall, ECE appears to significantly relieve allergic reactions without drowsiness, dizziness and othe