28 November 2011
Posted in News - Economy

(NaturalNews) We live in interesting times. Even as our own civilization hangs on the precipice of financial solvency, the priorities of the uninformed masses as so distorted that many will actually camp out in front of a Best Buy store in order to be the first in line to save $100 on a big-screen TV. In a time when the very problems of society are rooted in over-consumption and too much television, the everyday pleebs place such high importance on expanding the size of their mainstream media hypnosis devices that they will physically fight each other to get one of these TVs at a slightly lower price.

Meanwhile, the federal debt has plunged past $15 trillion, the freedoms and liberties upon which America built its economic strength are fast eroding, and the U.S. has practically entered a fighting war with Pakistan (http://www.reuters.com/article/2011…).

Pay no mind to any of that, friends. Wal-Mart has teflon-coated waffle makers on sale for two bucks off!

Sleight-of-mind distractions

Meanwhile, the 2012 presidential election races are under way, and the mainstream media seems determined to catapult anyone into the White House as long as his name isn’t Ron Paul. The last thing the globalist controllers really want is someone who dares to tell the People the truth about topics that matter — the Federal Reserve, national debt, foreign wars, the Bill of Rights and more. Presidents are supposed to beentertainersanddistracters, didn’t you know? When a nation’s collision with financial reality is all but inescapable, that nation inevitably turns to bread and circuses.

And so sleight-of-mind distractions invite the masses to invest their attention in dancing with the stars, lusting after the latest electronics gadgets, and tuning in to staged news footage from the front lines of the fabricated “war on terror” where U.S. troops are now openly engaged in the planting, harvesting and protecting of the opium trade in Afghanistan. You can talk about anything you want in America, it seems, as long as it’s not the Bill of Rights, or buying something with cash, or exercising your Free Speech rights — because all of those things are now considered signs of being a suspectedterrorist.

Layers of deceit

The most astonishing thing about it all is how many layers of wool have been pulled over the eyes of the American people, most of whom suffer under the illusion that they still live in a “free” country. Where to begin in educating people about this? First, there’s the engineered “war on terror” which was entirely invented, carried out and sold to the American people as a way to justify more war spending and the stripping away of fundamental human rights.

Then there’s the economic quackery taking place right under our noses as the Federal Reserve — a private corporation that answers to no one — has been quietly and deliberately stealing America’s wealth for nearly a hundred years. Following the money is simply too difficult for mainstream Americans, who are unable to grasp how purchasing power is deliberately stolen from them through the dilution of the money supply. You’re neversupposedto get ahead, don’t you know? A common wage earner can no more save money and make it into the ranks of the ultra wealthy than a frog can transform into a magical unicorn. That’s because a small percentage of your wealth — everything you’ve worked for — is stolen from you year after year, much like the way in which rain erodes a pile of sand that you might have stacked and shoveled into a mound.

The economic deceit is designed to keep you enslaved; to keep youworkingfor the globalist corporations that pocket the profits of your labors — and usually tax-free! Two examples: Bank of America pays NO taxes (http://www.thestreet.com/story/1105…), and General Motors also runs a sweet offshore tax shelter structure that makes it virtually immune to paying taxes at all:http://money.cnn.com/2011/02/23/new…

Meanwhile, YOU are taxed when you earn (payroll taxes, paid by your employer), taxed when you save (capital gains taxes) and taxed when you spend (sales taxes). You’re even taxed when you just sit on a pile of money and do nothing (monetary devaluation / price inflation). And remarkably, some of the more ignorant members of society have been out protesting, calling for more taxes on the People as a “solution” to all this!

No, my friends. We do not need more taxes on the People. In fact, let me explain something to you that will absolutely astonish you once you grasp the simple truth of it:

The U.S. government needs NO TAX MONEY whatsoever to operate!

The myth of government needing tax money

How’s that? You’ve all been told the government needs a few trillion dollars a year in tax revenues to build bombs, make roads, pay social security benefits and the like, right? It is the Great Lie of our time. Allow me to explain…

The idea that the U.S. government needs usto send itour money is rooted in the false assumption that the government cannot simplycreatethe money it wants to spend. And yet, we all now know that to be false. For example, in October 2008 during the first investment banker crisis, the U.S. government (via the Federal Reserve) simply created nearly $1 trillion and handed that money over to the richest, filthiest banksters on the planet. Here’s a partial list of who received the money (and this list isn’t even up to date)http://projects.propublica.org/bail…

Where did this money come from? Think about it. Did you send in some cash to help with this bailout? Of course not. The money was created out of thin air by the U.S. Treasury working in conspiracy with the Federal Reserve.

And that wasn’t even the end of it: Between 2008 and 2011, the U.S. government conspired with the Federal Reserve tocreatetrillions more — in what can only be called “counterfeit” money — and then hand it over to the world’s wealthiest corporations, banks and institutions. According to the New York Times, the U.S. government has now committed $12.2 trillion to these institutions:http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/…

Okay, so where is all this money coming from? Did the U.S. government ask every taxpayer to send in a check to cover this $12 trillion? Nope, because that would have required each American man, woman and child to pay $40,000 just to cover it. That obviously didn’t happen, so where did this money come from?

The government just CREATED the moneyout of thin air.

There is technically no need for federal income taxes

Here’s the kicker in all this: The government could be creating money right now to end the entire federal tax system so that no American citizen would ever need to pay tax again. The tax code, after all, was originally created only to tax corporations, not the People. Yet today it’s the wealthiest corporations that are paying no tax while the People are being bankrupted by it.

So the government, you see, could simplycreatethe few trillion dollars it needs each year to pay for defense spending (bombs and bullets), interest on the debt, social security, Medicare, etc. And that means the government technically doesn’t need YOUR tax dollars at all!

Now, of course, it would be financial suicide for the government to keepcreatingtrillions of dollars each year, thereby eroding the purchasing power of the dollar and resulting in price inflation across the nation — butit’s doing that anyway!In other words, the government is already CREATING trillions of dollars in new money, year after year, solely for the benefit of the wealthy banksters and global corporate giants. So if the government is already headed into total financial insolvency (runaway debt increases combined with an upcoming currency collapse) — why not use this suicidal process to help the People for a while instead of just bailing out the wealthy corporations?

Imagine this: The IRS announces a cancellation of the personal income tax. You no longer have to file on April 15th. You can keep all the money you’ve earned, other than state income taxes.

Can you imagine the economic boom that would result? People who earn more will spend more, thereby unleashing a domino effect of new job creation across the economy. People would be happier, stress would be lowered, and we would probably see a reduction in heart attacks and suicides, too. The federal government, meanwhile, would simply create a couple of trillion dollars each year to fund its own budgetary needs, and we could all ride this insane financial monster into the ground together while at least avoiding the hassle of filling out a stack of income tax paperwork every April.

There’s no question, you see, that the U.S. government is headed into total financial insolvency. I’m just saying that as long as we’re headed that way, we should be bailing out the People instead of bailing out the rich banksters and wealthy corporations. Why not cancel the income tax next April 15th and announce an income tax bailout for the working people?

Don’t you see that the bankster bailouts are the most obscene example of crony capitalism? The money goes to the insider pals while the debt burden is heaped upon the working poor. That’s the real problem with America — notcapitalism, butcriminality!

The real purpose of the income tax – it’s not what you think

So if the tax code is not needed to generate money for the government, what is its purpose, you ask?

The purpose of the federal tax code is to keep you down, to keep your face buried in the dirt so that you can never rise up and “get ahead.” The purpose isnotto fund the federal government itself, as you’ve been told. The government has already proven it can create trillions of dollarswhen it really wants to.

So remember that as you’re out spending your after-tax dollars this holiday season. Most of what you have been told by conventional, mainstream sources is pure fabrication: The War on Terror, the “danger” of marijuana, the “right” of the government to reach down your pants at the airport, and of course the “need” for you to “contribute” to the government to pay for roads and schools. It’s all so hilariously fictional that we should all be rolling on the floor laughing about it if we weren’t already writhing from the pain of writing all those checks to the government.

Taxes, you see, are really just a financial shakedown. They are an exercise of thuggish government power over the common people for no purpose than to remind the People they are slaves to the state. And for that purpose, federal taxes are very, very effective. Much like the fictional War on Terror, the IRS reminds everybody to “be afraid” and comply.

And it works. Even I comply with the federal tax code and dutifully pay what seems to be far too much to the federal government every single year. The difference is that I know it’s all a silly game and has nothing whatsoever to do with actually funding government operations. So I pay, and I chuckle, and I continue to work toward the day when we may see the rise of social justice in America where the money supply is honest, the corporations are stripped of their fictional “rights,” and everyone shares equally in the funding of running asmallergovernment whose main function is to protect and preserve the rights of the People… not to rule over them like tyrants.

Happy Holidays from NaturalNews. Enjoy your Christmas season, but as you spend money this year, I encourage you to look at that money in an enlightened way and realize the deeper truth of where money comes from, how it is created, and how government use money confiscation (and devaluation) to weaken the economic power of the People while concentrating it in the hands of the few.

07 November 2011
Posted in News - Economy

The Economic Collapse

(this article seems to focus on the US, but applies to the whole world)

There is absolutely nothing wrong with working hard and making a lot of money, but there is something wrong with being completely arrogant and smug about it.  Today, many among the elite are savagely mocking the poor, and that is a huge mistake.

You shouldn’t kick people when they are down.  There are tens of millions of Americans that are deeply frustrated about losing their homes, losing their jobs or barely being able to survive in this economy.  These frustrations have been one of the primary reasons for the rise of the Tea Party movement and the rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement.  What these movements have in common is that people in both movements are sick and tired of the status quo and they want something to be done about our broken system.  There are huge numbers of families out there right now that have just about reached the end of their ropes.  Instead of showing compassion, many of the ultra-wealthy have decided that it is funny to mock the poor and those that are suffering.  So how are all of these protesters going to respond to the “let them eat cake” attitude of the Wall Street elite?  The protesters are being told that nothing that they can do will change anything and that they should be grateful for what Wall Street and the ultra-wealthy have done for them.  They are essentially being told that they should just shut up and go home.  So will we see these protest movements become discouraged and die down, or will the patronizing attitudes of so many among the elite just inflame them even further?

Right now, there really are two different “Americas”.  In one America, the stock market is surging, corporate profits are soaring and BMW is operating factories at 110% of capacity just to keep up with demand.

In the other America, unemployment is rampant, millions of families are being kicked out of their homes and more than 45 million Americans are on food stamps.

There is more economic frustration in this country today than there has been at any other time since the Great Depression.  We are watching pressure build to very dangerous levels.

It is important to note that I certainly do not agree at all with the solutions being put forward by the organizers of the Occupy Wall Street protests.  As I have written about previously, collectivism is one of our biggest problems, and more collectivism is not going to solve anything.

But it is definitely understandable that people are incredibly upset about this economy and that they want to protest.  Most Americans realize that something is fundamentally wrong with our economic system.

Unfortunately, most of them do not understand how we have gotten to this point or what it is going to take to fix things.  That is one of the reasons why I write about economic issues so much.  We desperately need to educate America.

But what is undeniable is that there is a growing rage in this country that protest movements such as the Occupy Wall Street are giving a voice to.

Our system is badly broken.  The people out there protesting in the streets may not understand much, but they do understand that something needs to change.

The Wall Street elite should be taking these protests as a signal that they need to get their house in order.  The status quo just is not going to cut it.  But instead of taking leadership and calling for significant change, many among the elite are openly mocking the protesters.

The incredible arrogance displayed by so many on Wall Street and by so many in Washington D.C. is absolutely appalling.

The following are 10 examples of how the elite are openly mocking the poor in America today….

#1 According to an article in The New York Times, poor families that lost their homes to foreclosure were openly mocked during a Halloween party thrown by the law firm of Steven J. Baum.  This particular law firm represents many of the largest mortgage lenders in the United States….

The firm, which is located near Buffalo, is what is commonly referred to as a “foreclosure mill” firm, meaning it represents banks and mortgage servicers as they attempt to foreclose on homeowners and evict them from their homes. Steven J. Baum is, in fact, the largest such firm in New York; it represents virtually all the giant mortgage lenders, including Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo.

Photos from this Halloween party are posted on The New York Times website.  To say that they are appalling would be a huge understatement.  The following is how The New York Times described one of the photos….

In one, two Baum employees are dressed like homeless people. One is holding a bottle of liquor. The other has a sign around her neck that reads: “3rd party squatter. I lost my home and I was never served.” My source said that “I was never served” is meant to mock “the typical excuse” of the homeowner trying to evade a foreclosure proceeding.

#2 To many on Wall Street, the OWS protests are one big joke.  In fact, Wall Street executives have been spotted sipping champagne while watching the Occupy Wall Street protests from their balconies.

#3 In response to the Occupy Chicago protests, signs were put up in the windows of the building where the Chicago Board of Trade is located that spelled out this sentence: “We Are The 1%“.

#4 Many columnists for major financial publications have had no fear of mocking the Occupy Wall Street protesters.  For example, Doug Hirschhorn recently wrote the following for Forbes….

As your Occupation of Wall Street continues, you may want to grasp a few things. First, it is not going to change anything in the short term and probably not much in the long-term either.

I hate to be the bearer of that news, but money makes the world go round and “Wall Street” is all about money. Second, the top traders, banks and hedge funds are still going to out earn and generate substantial profits from speculating on the disconnects in the prices of things generated from all the moving parts in the global economy and it has nothing to do with why you lost your house or job or can’t find a job. If anything the successful ones are helping you, your pensions funds, retirement savings and the economy in general. If Wall Street stops. The world stops. Period.

#5 Instead of attempting a balanced report on the Occupy Wall Street protests, Erin Burnett of CNN openly made fun of them during a recent broadcast.  After being a stalwart on CNBC for so many years, Burnett has very close ties to Wall Street and apparently she does not like anyone criticizing her friends.  You can see video of Burnett mocking the Occupy Wall Street movement right here.

#6 Barack Obama continues to mock the poor by telling them to cut back on vacations and little luxuries like going out to eat while at the same time sending his own family out on incredibly expensive vacations.  The following is one example I noted in an article earlier this year….

Barack Obama recently made the following statement to American families that are struggling to survive in this economy: “If you’re a family trying to cut back, you might skip going out to dinner, or you might put off a vacation.” A few days after making that statement Obama sent his wife and children off on yet another vacation, this time to a luxury ski hotel in Vail, Colorado.

Later on in that same article I mentioned another outrageously expensive vacation taken by the Obamas that was paid for by our taxes….

Back in August, Michelle Obama took her daughter Sasha and 40 of her friends for a vacation in Spain.

So what was the bill to the taxpayers for that little jaunt across the pond?

It is estimated that vacation alone cost U.S. taxpayers$375,000.

During a time when so many millions of American families are deeply, deeply suffering it is truly appalling that the residents of the White House would be so insensitive.

#7 Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain recently declared that anyone that is unemployed or poor in America should only blame themselves….

“Don’t blame the big banks. If you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself.”

#8 Sometimes our politicians are so insensitive that it is almost hard to believe.  In an interview with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News while she was still the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi stated that we need poor people to have less children because it costs the government so much money to take care of them….

PELOSI: Well, the family planning services reduce cost. They reduce cost. The states are in terrible fiscal budget crises now and part of what we do for children’s health, education and some of those elements are to help the states meet their financial needs. One of those – one of the initiatives you mentioned, the contraception, will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So no apologies for that?

PELOSI: No apologies. No. we have to deal with the consequences of the downturn in our economy.

#9 Warren Buffett has some interesting observations on class warfare.  He is one of the few wealthy Americans that is willing to say what everyone else is thinking.  Back in 2006, Buffett was quoted as saying the following in an article in The New York Times….

“There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

Buffett was not taking pride in the fact that the elite have won, but there are many others among the elite that are very proud of what they have done and they are not afraid to look down on the poor.

The level of income inequality that we have in the United States today isabsolutely amazing.  According to data from a few years ago, the average household income for the top 0.01% of all Americans was $27,342,212.  According to that same data, for the bottom 90% of all Americans the average household income was just $31,244.

#10 Every single day, our “representatives” in Washington D.C. are living the high life at our expense.  It is amazing that out of the entire population of the United States, we continue to overwhelming elect rich people to Congress.  As I noted in a recent article, more than half of all the members of Congress are millionaires, and the median wealth of a U.S. Senator in 2009 was 2.38 million dollars.

Without a doubt, the wealthy rule over us all and they intend to maintain control and perpetuate the system which has rewarded them so handsomely.

When necessary, they are not afraid to call in the police to bust some skulls.  Sadly, we are already seeing some brutally violent confrontations between law enforcement authorities and Occupy Wall Street protesters in many areas of the country.  The other day, I wrote about the horrific violence that took place in Oakland recently….

Unfortunately, the authorities are not just going to sit by and watch these protests happen.  In fact, they are already clamping down hard in many areas of the nation.  For example, police in Oakland recently used tear gas and rubber bullets to break up the Occupy protest in that city.  When police opened fire, the streets of Oakland literally became a war zone for a few minutes.  You can see shocking videos of the violence here, here and here.

Power and wealth have become incredibly concentrated in the United States today.  As one scientific study demonstrated recently, the elite control almost the entire global economy.  In fact, the University of Zurich study discovered that there are just 147 gigantic corporations at the core of it all.

It is not a good thing that such a very small group of people completely dominates all the rest of us.

Once again, there is absolutely nothing wrong with working hard, making great contributions to society and becoming very wealthy.

However, what we have today is a fundamentally broken system that funnels most of the wealth and most of the power into the hands of the ultra-wealthy and the gigantic corporations that they own.

It would be great if the American people could come together and work to make some positive changes to our system.

But right now, it appears that strife, discord and hatred are going to continue to rapidly grow in this country.  We have become a very divided nation and we are watching anger and frustration grow to very dangerous levels.

All of this is a recipe for mass chaos.  Our country is marching toward a date with disaster and right now we show no signs of changing course.

Please pray for America.

We definitely need it.

18 September 2011
Posted in News - Economy

Max Hastings
Daily Mail

Three years ago this week, the collapse of the American investment bank Lehman Brothers signalled the onset of the global financial crisis, which has since escalated into a sovereign debt nightmare, boiling around us still.

In response to the financial services industry’s manic greed and incompetence, the British Government last year established the Independent Commission on Banking.

On Monday, the commission published its final report, calling for Britain’s banks to be broken up, ring-fencing their retail arms from the investment ‘gambling’ operations.

So far so good. But then the rocket fizzles out abruptly: reform need not be implemented for eight years. Some of us will be dead, for God’s sake, before anything happens.

Read full article here

27 August 2011
Posted in News - Economy

Bob Yirka

For many years conventional wisdom has said that the whole world is controlled by the monied elite, or more recently by the huge multi-national corporations that seem to sometime control the very air we breathe. Now, new research by a team based in ETH-Zurich, Switzerland, has shown that what we’ve suspected all along, is apparently true. The team has uploaded their results onto the preprint server arXiv.

Using data obtained (circa 2007) from the Orbis database (a global database containing financial information on public and private companies) the team, in what is being heralded as the first of its kind, analyzed data from over 43,000 corporations, looking at both upstream and downstream connections between them all and found that when graphed, the data represented a bowtie of sorts, with the knot, or core representing just 147 entities who control nearly 40 percent of all of monetary value of transnational corporations (TNCs).

In this analysis the focus was on corporations that have ownership in their own assets as well as those of other institutions and who exert influence via ownership in second, third, fourth, etc. tier entities that hold influence over others in the web, as they call it; the interconnecting network of TNCs that together make up the whole of the largest corporations in the world. In analyzing the data they found, and then in building the network maps, the authors of the report sought to uncover the structure and control mechanisms that make up the murky world of corporate finance and ownership.

Read more