A Tiny Elite Owns 80% of the World's Wealth

Eighty-three of the nation's 100 largest corporations, including Citigroup, Bank of America and News Corp., had subsidiaries in offshore tax havens in 2007, and some of the companies received federal bailout funding. The Government Accountability Office released a report that said Bank of America Inc., Citigroup Inc. and Morgan Stanley all had more than 100 units in countries that maintain low or no taxes. The three financial institutions were included in the $700 billion financial bailout approved by Congress. Insurance giant American International Group Inc., which has received about $150 billion in bailout money, had 18 subsidiaries. JPMorgan Chase & Co. had 50 units and Wells Fargo & Co. had 18; both financial institutions received government bailout money. Estimated abusive tax havens and offshore accounts cost the U.S. government at least $100 billion a year in lost taxes. The GAO said 63 of the 100 largest federal contractors maintain subsidiaries in 50 tax havens. - Over 8 in 10 Corporations have Tax Havens, The Associated Press, January 17, 2009

Revealed – the Capitalist Network That Runs the World

Researcher breaks the globalist matrix code, find that 147 companies form a ‘super entity’, controlling 40 per cent of wealth

New Scientist
October 19, 2011

As protests against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters' worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.

The study's assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.

The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York's Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world's transnational corporations (TNCs).

"Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it's conspiracy theories or free-market," says James Glattfelder. "Our analysis is reality-based."

Previous studies have found that a few TNCs own large chunks of the world's economy, but they included only a limited number of companies and omitted indirect ownerships, so could not say how this affected the global economy -- whether it made it more or less stable, for instance.

The Zurich team can. From Orbis 2007, a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, they pulled out all 43,060 TNCs and the share ownerships linking them. Then they constructed a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company's operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power.

The work, to be published in PloS One, revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships. Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What's more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world's large blue chip and manufacturing firms -- the "real" economy -- representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.

When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a "super-entity" of 147 even more tightly knit companies -- all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity -- that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. "

In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network," says Glattfelder.

Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.

John Driffill of the University of London, a macroeconomics expert, says the value of the analysis is not just to see if a small number of people controls the global economy, but rather its insights into economic stability.

Concentration of power is not good or bad in itself, says the Zurich team, but the core's tight interconnections could be. As the world learned in 2008, such networks are unstable.

"If one [company] suffers distress," says Glattfelder, "this propagates."

"It's disconcerting to see how connected things really are," agrees George Sugihara of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, a complex systems expert who has advised Deutsche Bank.

Yaneer Bar-Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), warns that the analysis assumes ownership equates to control, which is not always true. Most company shares are held by fund managers who may or may not control what the companies they part-own actually do. The impact of this on the system's behaviour, he says, requires more analysis.

Crucially, by identifying the architecture of global economic power, the analysis could help make it more stable. By finding the vulnerable aspects of the system, economists can suggest measures to prevent future collapses spreading through the entire economy. Glattfelder says we may need global anti-trust rules, which now exist only at national level, to limit over-connection among TNCs. Bar-Yam says the analysis suggests one possible solution: firms should be taxed for excess interconnectivity to discourage this risk.

One thing won't chime with some of the protesters' claims: the super-entity is unlikely to be the intentional result of a conspiracy to rule the world.

"Such structures are common in nature," says Sugihara.

Newcomers to any network connect preferentially to highly connected members. TNCs buy shares in each other for business reasons, not for world domination. If connectedness clusters, so does wealth, says Dan Braha of NECSI: in similar models, money flows towards the most highly connected members.

The Zurich study, says Sugihara, "is strong evidence that simple rules governing TNCs give rise spontaneously to highly connected groups".

Or as Braha puts it:

"The Occupy Wall Street claim that 1 per cent of people have most of the wealth reflects a logical phase of the self-organising economy."

So, the super-entity may not result from conspiracy. The real question, says the Zurich team, is whether it can exert concerted political power. Driffill feels 147 is too many to sustain collusion. Braha suspects they will compete in the market but act together on common interests. Resisting changes to the network structure may be one such common interest.

The top 50 of the 147 superconnected companies

1. Barclays plc
2. Capital Group Companies Inc
3. FMR Corporation
4. AXA
5. State Street Corporation
6. JP Morgan Chase & Co
7. Legal & General Group plc
8. Vanguard Group Inc
9. UBS AG
10. Merrill Lynch & Co Inc
11. Wellington Management Co LLP
12. Deutsche Bank AG
13. Franklin Resources Inc
14. Credit Suisse Group
15. Walton Enterprises LLC
16. Bank of New York Mellon Corp
17. Natixis
18. Goldman Sachs Group Inc
19. T Rowe Price Group Inc
20. Legg Mason Inc
21. Morgan Stanley
22. Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc
23. Northern Trust Corporation
24. Société Générale
25. Bank of America Corporation
26. Lloyds TSB Group plc
27. Invesco plc
28. Allianz SE 29. TIAA
30. Old Mutual Public Limited Company
31. Aviva plc
32. Schroders plc
33. Dodge & Cox
34. Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc*
35. Sun Life Financial Inc
36. Standard Life plc
37. CNCE
38. Nomura Holdings Inc
39. The Depository Trust Company
40. Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance
41. ING Groep NV
42. Brandes Investment Partners LP
43. Unicredito Italiano SPA
44. Deposit Insurance Corporation of Japan
45. Vereniging Aegon
46. BNP Paribas
47. Affiliated Managers Group Inc
48. Resona Holdings Inc
49. Capital Group International Inc
50. China Petrochemical Group Company

* Lehman still existed in the 2007 dataset used

Graphic: The 1318 transnational corporations that form the core of the economy

(Data: PLoS One)

Financial Tyranny: Defeating the Greatest Cover-Up of All Time (Excerpt)

The Federal Reserve appears to be at the epicenter of a vast “interlocking directorate” of companies that may earn up to 80 percent of all the world’s wealth.

Divine Cosmos
January 13, 2012

Ever since Benoit Mandelbrot discovered “fractals” in the 1970s, the fascinating new science of Chaos Theory has become a part of our collective knowledge base. Mandelbrot discovered a remarkable “geometry of nature” – in which highly complex systems can be reduced down to a few very simple ingredients.

What if we use this same science to “hack” the world’s economy with super-computers – and see how many corporations actually control it?

Three scientists from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, led by James Glattfelder, recently did this – and their results were published in New Scientist, a respected science magazine. Glattfelder’s team unleashed this armada of supercomputers on Orbis 2007 -- a very elaborate database of the top 37 million corporations and individual investors worldwide.

The results were absolutely stunning.

A CORE OF 1,318 COMPANIES EARN 80 PERCENT OF THE WORLD’S WEALTH

The Swiss scientists quickly found a total of 43,060 trans-national corporations in the Orbis 2007 database. From this group, Glattfelder’s team revealed that a ‘core’ of 1,318 companies directly controlled 20 percent of the world’s wealth. However, these corporations also appeared to own and control the stock in a majority of the world’s largest companies -- whose profits added up to an additional 60 percent of global revenues:

www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228354.500-revealed--the-capitalist-network-that-runs-the-world.html

Although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 [corporations] appeared to collectively own, through their shares, the majority of the world's large blue chip and manufacturing firms -- the "real" economy -- representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues….

[This] core of 1318 companies [had] interlocking ownerships. Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20 [other corporations].

A “SUPER-ENTITY” OF 147 CORPORATIONS CONTROL 40 PERCENT OF THE WEALTH

If that isn’t surprising enough for you, then how about this?

Glattfelder’s team then crunched the numbers even harder – and found a very deeply hidden “super-entity” of only 147 corporations – and “much of it” was connected to the 1,318-company ‘core’. These 147 companies were all interconnected with each other in an “even more tightly knit” pattern than the 1,318 corporations in the ‘core’. To put it simply, they all owned each other’s companies.

[Specifically, each company within the “super-entity” owned shares in all 146 others.]

Together, this super-elite, good-old-boys-club of 147 companies directly earns a whopping 40 percent of all the wealth in the world:

www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228354.500-revealed--the-capitalist-network-that-runs-the-world.html

When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a "super-entity" of 147 even more tightly knit companies -- all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity -- that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network.

Without the advanced technology of supercomputers and chaos theory, no one would have been able to discover this. History has caught up to the Powers that Were.

THE SAME PEOPLE RUN THE FEDERAL RESERVE

Next question: What kind of companies do you think these top 147 corporations are? Remember – they control a staggering 40 percent of the world’s wealth.

As it says on page 6 of the paper, 75 percent of the corporations within the “super-entity” were financial institutions. The top 20 financial institutions within the “super-entity” should sound pretty familiar to you by now. They include Barclays Bank, JP Morgan Chase & Co., Merrill Lynch, UBS, Bank of New York, Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs.

What QE3 Will Look Like (Excerpt)

Robert Bonomo, Activist Post
August 12, 2011

The modern division of labor consists of:

1. A ruling class (top 1%) that control about 40% of all financial assets,
2. A managerial class ( the top 2%-10%) who control about 35% of all assets, with
3. The other 90% of the working masses dividing up the 25% that’s left.

The pyramid is organized by a complex and highly specialized division of labor, state-run education, massive corporations, government bureaucracy, the judiciary, intelligence organizations, mediatic propaganda machines and mainstream religion.

Those rare few that actually wake up and see the zombie world are quickly diagnosed by the DSM-5 and given anti-depressants.

There are two things everyone wants all the time, and one of them is money. Control of the money is the magic wand that rules the world. All the other religious, patriotic and historical paraphernalia are directly related to allowing the 1% to control the creation of money. Take that away, and they are nothing but media hacks.

The current era which began with the creation of the Federal Reserve and the involvement of the United States in WWI is coming to an end. The great mistake most “awake” people make is believing redemption is at hand while underestimating the ruling class.

The masters of propaganda and finance and are much more in control then they will ever reveal through their own channels. Their imaginations are immense and their capacity to orchestrate drama has no limits. They are the voice of reason while the dissenters are “diagnosed” with a collection of ailments that quickly marginalize them.

Study Shows Powerful Corporations Really Do Control the World's Finances

ScienceNews.or
August 19, 2011

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.

To zero in on the significant controlling corporations, the team started with a list of 43,060 TNCs taken from a sample of 30 million economic “actors” in the Orbis database. They then applied a recursive algorithm designed to find and point out all of the ownership pathways between them all. The resulting TNC network produced a graph with 600,508 nodes and 1,006,987 ownership connections. The team then graphed the results in several different ways to show the different ways that corporate ownership is held; the main theme in each, showing that just a very few corporations through direct and indirect ownership (via stocks, bonds, etc.) exert tremendous influence over the actions of those corporations, which in turn exert a huge impact on the rest of us.

The authors conclude their report by asking, perhaps rhetorically, what are the implications of having so few exert so much influence, and perhaps more importantly, in an economic sense, what the implications are of such a structure on market competitiveness.

More information: The network of global corporate control, Stefania Vitali, James B. Glattfelder, Stefano Battiston, arXiv:1107.5728v1 [q-fin.GN] http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.5728

Abstract

The structure of the control network of transnational corporations affects global market competition and financial stability. So far, only small national samples were studied and there was no appropriate methodology to assess control globally. We present the first investigation of the architecture of the international ownership network, along with the computation of the control held by each global player. We find that transnational corporations form a giant bow-tie structure and that a large portion of control flows to a small tightly-knit core of financial institutions. This core can be seen as an economic "super-entity" that raises new important issues both for researchers and policy makers.

Catherine Austin Fitts: The Looting of America

Infowars.com
November 2, 2010

Former Assistant Secretary of Housing under George H.W. Bush Catherine Austin Fitts blows the whistle on how the financial terrorists have deliberately imploded the US economy and transferred gargantuan amounts of wealth offshore as a means of sacrificing the American middle class. Fitts documents how trillions of dollars went missing from government coffers in the 90’s and how she was personally targeted for exposing the fraud.

Fitts explains how every dollar of debt issued to service every war, building project, and government program since the American Revolution up to around 2 years ago — around $12 trillion — has been doubled again in just the last 18 months alone with the bank bailouts.

“We’re literally witnessing the leveraged buyout of a country and that’s why I call it a financial coup d’état, and that’s what the bailout is for,” states Fitts.

Massive amounts of financial capital have been sucked out the United States and moved abroad, explains Fitts, ensuring that corporations have become more powerful than governments, changing the very structure of governance on the planet and ensuring we are ruled by private corporations. Pension and social security funds have also been stolen and moved offshore, leading to the end of fiscal responsibility and sovereignty as we know it.

Fitts explained how, when she was in government, she tried to encourage the creation of small businesses, new jobs and new skills to compete in a globalized world, otherwise the American middle class was toast, only to be forced out by the feds using dirty tricks. The elite instead wanted Americans to take on more credit card, mortgage and auto debt which corporations and insurers knew they couldn’t afford, while quietly moving their jobs abroad in the meantime.

This is a key interview in understanding precisely how the financial collapse was deliberately planned from the outset as a means of eviscerating the American middle class, and we encourage all our subscribers to watch it now at Prison Planet.tv by visiting the “video reports” section. Not a member? Please click here to subscribe and get instant access to this interview, along with thousands of hours of material, including daily access to the live video stream and video archives of The Alex Jones Show.

Ron Paul: President Obama Is Not a Socialist, He Is a Corporatist

TalkingPointsMemo
April 10, 2010

Near the end of the third day of this year's Southern Republican Leadership Conference, it was time for Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) to take the stage. Paul, fresh off his victory in the CPAC straw poll, gave a characteristically fired-up speech that took on the views of the Republican party establishment.

"The question has been raised about whether or not our president is a socialist," Paul said. "I am sure there are some people here who believe it. But in the technical sense, in the economic definition of a what a socialist is, no, he's not a socialist."

"He's a corporatist," Paul continued. "And unfortunately we have corporatists inside the Republican party and that means you take care of corporations and corporations take over and run the country."

Paul said examples of President Obama's "corporatism" were evident in the heath care reform bill he signed into law last month. He said the mandate in the bill put the power over health care in the hands of corporations rather than private citizens. But he said the bill wasn't the only place where corporatism is creeping into Washington.

"We see it in the financial institutions, we see it in the military-industrial complex," he said. "And now we see it in the medical-industrial complex."

Despite his opposition to the bill, and despite Republican calls to repeal it, Paul said that when it comes to the landmark health care bill, "throwing it all out is probably not going to happen."

He said the only hope Republicans have is to change the bill for the better. Paul said he will introduce his own legislative fix when the Congress returns from recess next week.

"There's one piece of legislation that I'm going to introduce, it's going to be one page long," he said. "It will be to remove the mandate so you don't have to participate if you don't want to."

His speech, which touched on his oft-repeated calls to close down American military bases overseas and shift toward libertarian-style social policy, drew cheers from the Paul fans in the crowd and what sounded like boos from others in the room.

Brian Basham: Beware Corporate Psychopaths – They are Still Occupying Positions of Power

In an unregulated world, the least-principled people rise to the top

The Independent
December 29, 2011

Over the years I've met my fair share of monsters – rogue individuals, for the most part. But as regulation in the UK and the US has loosened its restraints, the monsters have proliferated.

In a paper recently published in the Journal of Business Ethics entitled "The Corporate Psychopaths: Theory of the Global Financial Crisis", Clive R Boddy identifies these people as psychopaths.

"They are," he says, "simply the 1 per cent of people who have no conscience or empathy." And he argues: "Psychopaths, rising to key senior positions within modern financial corporations, where they are able to influence the moral climate of the whole organisation and yield considerable power, have largely caused the [banking] crisis'.

And Mr Boddy is not alone. In Jon Ronson's widely acclaimed book The Psychopath Test, Professor Robert Hare told the author:

"I should have spent some time inside the Stock Exchange as well. Serial killer psychopaths ruin families. Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies."

Cut to a pleasantly warm evening in Bahrain. My companion, a senior UK investment banker and I, are discussing the most successful banking types we know and what makes them tick. I argue that they often conform to the characteristics displayed by social psychopaths. To my surprise, my friend agrees.

He then makes an astonishing confession:

"At one major investment bank for which I worked, we used psychometric testing to recruit social psychopaths because their characteristics exactly suited them to senior corporate finance roles."

Here was one of the biggest investment banks in the world seeking psychopaths as recruits.

Mr Ronson spoke to scores of psychologists about their understanding of the damage that psychopaths could do to society. None of those psychologists could have imagined, I'm sure, the existence of a bank that used the science of spotting them as a recruiting mechanism.

I've never met Dick Fuld, the former CEO of Lehman Brothers and the architect of its downfall, but I've seen him on video and it's terrifying. He snarled to Lehman staff that he wanted to "rip out their [his competitors] hearts and eat them before they died". So how did someone like Mr Fuld get to the top of Lehman? You don't need to see the video to conclude he was weird; you could take a little more time and read a 2,200-page report by Anton Valukas, the Chicago-based lawyer hired by a US court to investigate Lehman's failure. Mr Valukas revealed systemic chicanery within the bank; he described management failures and a destructive, internal culture of reckless risk-taking worthy of any psychopath.

So why wasn't Mr Fuld spotted and stopped? I've concluded it's the good old question of nature and nurture but with a new interpretation. As I see it, in its search for never-ending growth, the financial services sector has actively sought out monsters with natures like Mr Fuld and nurtured them with bonuses and praise.

We all understand that sometimes businesses have to be cut back to ensure their survival, and where those cuts should fall is as relevant to a company as it is, today, to the UK economy; should it bear down upon the rich or the poor?

Making those cuts doesn't make psychopaths of the cutters, but the financial sector's lack of remorse for the pain it encourages people to inflict is purely psychopathic. Surely the action of cutting should be a matter for sorrow and regret? People's lives are damaged, even destroyed. However, that's not how the financial sector sees it.

Take Sir Fred Goodwin of RBS, for example. Before he racked up a corporate loss of £24.1bn, the highest in UK history, he was idolised by the City. In recognition of his work in ruthlessly cutting costs at Clydesdale Bank he got the nickname "Fred the Shred", and he played that for all it was worth. He was later described as "a corporate Attila", a title of which any psychopath would be proud.

Mr Ronson reports:

"Justice departments and parole boards all over the world have accepted Hare's contention that psychopaths are quite simply incurable and everyone should concentrate their energies instead on learning how to root them out."

But, far from being rooted out, they are still in place and often in positions of even greater power.

As Mr Boddy warns:

"The very same corporate psychopaths, who probably caused the crisis by their self-seeking greed and avarice, are now advising governments on how to get out of the crisis. Further, if the corporate psychopaths theory of the global financial crisis is correct, then we are now far from the end of the crisis. Indeed, it is only the end of the beginning."

I became familiar with psychopaths early in life. They were the hard men who terrorised south-east London when I was growing up. People like "Mad" Frankie Fraser and the Richardson brothers. They were what we used to call "red haze" men, and they were frightening because they attacked with neither fear, mercy nor remorse.

Regarding Messrs Hare, Ronson, Boddy and others, I've realised that some psychopaths "forge careers in corporations. The group is called Corporate Psychopaths". They are polished and plausible, but that doesn't make them any less dangerous.

In attempting to understand the complexities of what went wrong in the years leading to 2008, I've developed a rule:

"In an unregulated world, the least-principled people rise to the top."

And there are none who are less principled than corporate psychopaths.

The Establishment (Those Corporate Psychopaths) Does Not Want Ron Paul on the Presidential Ticket

When asked recently by Wolf Blitzer whom he would vote for in a race between Paul and Obama, Gingrich replied: “I think you’d have a very hard choice.” When asked recently by Chris Wallace about Ron Paul, Huckabee replied that his views on foreign policy “are so much an anathema to Republicans and Democrats and what I call middle of the road people. He has a core of fanatical believers, and they don’t represent mainstream Americans. It is not okay for Iran to have a nuclear weapon.” But of Obama Huckabee said: “I think he’s a decent, patriotic American. He loves America different than me, but I don’t doubt he loves America.” Is there any doubt that the Republican Party is first and foremost the war party? Statists in the GOP might be able to tolerate some of Ron Paul’s economic and limited-government views, but never his views on foreign policy. They are incorrigible, bloodthirsty warmongers.' - Laurence Vance, Do Gingrich and Huckabee Prefer President Obama to Ron Paul?, LRC Blog, December 28, 2011

Over the years I've met my fair share of monsters – rogue individuals, for the most part. But as regulation in the UK and the US has loosened its restraints, the monsters have proliferated. In a paper recently published in the Journal of Business Ethics entitled "The Corporate Psychopaths: Theory of the Global Financial Crisis", Clive R Boddy identifies these people as psychopaths. "They are," he says, "simply the 1 per cent of people who have no conscience or empathy." And he argues: "Psychopaths, rising to key senior positions within modern financial corporations, where they are able to influence the moral climate of the whole organisation and yield considerable power, have largely caused the [banking] crisis'. And Mr Boddy is not alone. In Jon Ronson's widely acclaimed book "The Psychopath Test", Professor Robert Hare told the author: "I should have spent some time inside the Stock Exchange as well. Serial killer psychopaths ruin families. Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies." - Brian Basham, Independent, Beware Corporate Psychopaths – They are Still Occupying Positions of Power, December 29, 2011

Paul Builds Campaign on Doomsday Scenarios

Reuters
December 27, 2011

The man who might win the Republican Party's first presidential nominating contest fears that the United Nations may take control of the U.S. money supply.

Campaigning for the January 3 Iowa caucuses, Ron Paul warns of eroding civil liberties, a Soviet Union-style economic collapse and violence in the streets.

The Texas congressman, author of "End the Fed," also wants to eliminate the central banking system that underpins the world's largest economy.

"Not only would we audit the Federal Reserve, we may well curtail the Federal Reserve," Paul told a cheering crowd of more than 100 in this small Iowa city last week.

Paul, 76, is facing questions for racist writings that appeared under his name two decades ago, which he has disavowed as the work of "ghost writers."

But Paul's dark-horse presidential bid ultimately could founder, analysts and others say, because of increasing questions about how his unorthodox vision of government would work in the real world.

Republican rivals criticize his anti-war, isolationist approach to foreign policy as dangerously naive, and object to his plans to slash the Pentagon's budget and pull back U.S. troops from overseas.

Non-partisan analysts say his economic proposals - drastic spending cuts, elimination of the Federal Reserve and a return to the gold standard - would plunge the country back into recession.

"Paul appeals to people whose knowledge of major issues is superficial (and) he sees conspiracies where there are none," said Greg Valliere, chief political strategist at Potomac Research Group, an analysis firm. "If he does well in Iowa, which is likely, it will be an enormous embarrassment to the Republicans."

However, Paul's calls for a dramatically limited government and a hands-off foreign policy are resonating among voters who have grown deeply alienated from Washington after a decade of war and nearly five years of economic malaise.

"Obama got into office and I can't tell the difference between him and Bush," said Deanna Pitman, a homemaker from Bloomfield, Iowa, citing President Barack Obama's support for policies such as the Wall Street bailout and the war in Afghanistan that began under George W. Bush.

Polls show Paul jockeying for the lead in the Iowa caucuses, and political observers say his organization in the state is unmatched. His campaign stops draw hundreds of enthusiastic supporters, along with undecided voters who are giving him a look.

On the campaign trail, he reaches out to Tea Party supporters on the right and Occupy Wall Street supporters on the left.

Some potential supporters from the left have been put off by Paul's uncompromising support for the free market.

At a campaign stop in this small city of about 7,000, Paul told breast cancer survivor Danielle Lin that insurance companies should not be required to offer coverage to people who are already sick.

"It's sort of like me living on the Gulf Coast, not buying insurance until I see the hurricane," said Paul, whose Galveston-based district was devastated by a hurricane in 2008. "Insurance is supposed to measure risk."

The response left Lin in tears. While her insurance covered her treatment, she said, several of her friends were not so fortunate.

"I watched three friends die because they didn't have insurance," said Lin, a registered Democrat who is looking for a Republican candidate to support this time.

"Nobody can afford private insurance, nobody can. And they're dead."

APOCALYPTIC SCENARIOS

Paul can wax apocalyptic as he warns of the dangers of a diluted currency and a deeply indebted government. His doomsday scenarios often are incomplete, leaving listeners room to fill in the blanks.

He draws parallels between the current situation in the United States and that of the former Soviet Union, whose economy collapsed amid the union's breakup and civil unrest in 1991.

Paul acknowledges that his proposal to avoid that outcome - an immediate $1 trillion spending cut that would slash the federal budget by more than one-third and eliminate the departments of Education, Energy, Commerce, Interior, and Housing and Urban Development - could have some unpleasant side effects.

"I'm afraid of violence coming," he told a crowd of more than 600 in Bettendorf, Iowa. "When you see what the government is preparing for, and the arrests and military law, and the demonstrations in the streets, some people aren't going to be convinced so easily that you don't owe them a living."

At the earlier stop in Washington, he said the Federal Reserve was poised to "bail out" the Euro zone, a move that he said ultimately would cause the United States to surrender control of its own currency to the United Nations.

"This monetary crisis is well known by the international bankers. They want the U.N. to come in and solve this problem," he said. "The dollar will probably eventually disintegrate and be taken over. But I don't want the U.N. issuing that currency."

Economists note that Paul's long-standing proposal to return the dollar to a gold standard would force the United States to relinquish control of its currency.

"We would still have monetary policy - it would be set by gold miners in South Africa and Uzbekistan, rather than bureaucrats in Washington," said Michael Feroli, chief U.S. economist with JPMorgan Chase.

"If you like what OPEC means for oil prices, you'd love what the gold standard would do to financial markets."

Why Neo-Cons Hate Ron Paul’s Honest Foreign Policy

This article, originally titled “Ron Paul: Propagandist Or Prophet?”, was written by Jeremy R. Hammond and published at Foreign Policy Journal

Alt-Market
December 27, 2011

Ron Paul is “the best-known American propagandist for our enemies”, writes Dorothy Rabinowitz in a recent Wall Street Journal hit piece. To support the charge, she writes that Dr. Paul “assures audiences” that the terrorist attacks of 9/11 “took place only because of U.S. aggression and military actions”. It’s “True,” she writes, that “we’ve heard the assertions before”, but only “rarely have we heard in any American political figure such exclusive concern for, and appreciation of, the motives of those who attacked us”—and, she adds, he doesn’t care about the victims of the attacks.

The vindictive rhetoric aside, what is it, exactly, that Ron Paul is guilty of here? It is completely uncontroversial that the 9/11 attacks were a consequence of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. The 9/11 Commission Report, for instance, points out that Osama bin Laden “stresses grievances against the United States widely shared in the Muslim world. He inveighed against the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, the home of Islam’s holiest sites. He spoke of the suffering of the Iraqi people as a result of sanctions imposed after the Gulf War, and he protested U.S. support of Israel.”

Notice that Rabinowitz doesn’t actually deny that the 9/11 attacks were motivated by such U.S. policies as these. Rather, Ron Paul’s sin is that he actually acknowledges this truth. The fact that other political figures choose to ignore or deny this fact hardly reflects poorly on Dr. Paul. Refusing to bury one’s head deeply up one’s arse, as Rabinowitz is so obviously willing to do, is hardly a character trait to be faulted.

From this position of willful ignorance, Rabinowitz then implores her readers that “a President Paul” would “be making decisions about the nation’s defense, national security, domestic policy and much else.” The conclusion one is supposed to draw is that anyone who could actually acknowledge the ugly truth that 9/11 was a consequence of U.S. foreign policy isn’t fit for office; only someone who is willing to delude him or herself that the U.S. was attacked because “they hate our freedoms” is worthy of the presidency. Anyone who wishes to change U.S. foreign policy is unfit; only a person who is willing to continue the status quo should be allowed a seat in the Oval Office.

Rabinowitz warns that “The world may not be ready for another American president traversing half the globe to apologize for the misdeeds of the nation he had just been elected to lead.” It’s not clear who she has in mind with the “another”, but it’s by now a familiar refrain. “I’ll never apologize for the United States of America. Ever. I don’t care what the facts are,” President George H. W. Bush declared to the world after a U.S. warship had shot down an Iranian civilian airliner in Iranian airspace, killing all 290 passengers aboard, including 65 children. Surely, any president willing to apologize for the murder of innocent children must not lead the nation. The horror of the thought!

And then there is Dr. Paul’s position with respect to Iran. He recently urged his host in an interview “to understand that Iran’s leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, had never mentioned any intention of wiping Israel off the map.” Here, again, it’s notable that Rabinowitz doesn’t actually dispute this. Dr. Paul is, of course, correct. The claim that Iran has threatened to acquire nuclear weapons to “wipe Israel off the map” is a complete fabrication of Western media propaganda, and mainstream corporate news agencies know it is a fabrication, but repeat it obligatorily anyway.

Rabinowitz presumably does, as well, so instead of challenging Dr. Paul on the facts, she quotes him saying “They’re just defending themselves” and writing, “Presumably he was referring to Iran’s wishes for a bomb.” In the interview referred to, Dr. Paul had said,

“I don’t want them to get the nuclear weapon”, but pointed out that Israel’s defense minister, “Ehud Barak said that they’re acting logically, and they’re acting in their self-interest, and if he was an Iranian, he would probably think the same way” (Dr. Paul is correct on this, also; it’s true that Barak has “quipped that if he were an Iranian, he would take part in the development of nuclear weapons”).

Rabinowitz also disinclines herself to point out what Dr. Paul said next:

“But there is a gross distortion to this debate that they are on the verge of a nuclear weapon. There is no evidence that they are on the verge of a nuclear weapon, and we shouldn’t be ready to start another war” (Dr. Paul is correct on this, too, and has rightly drawn parallels to the current propaganda about Iran and the lies that preceded the war on Iraq).

So, once again, we see that Ron Paul’s true sin is his failure to jump on board with the war propaganda. A further sin is that he said after 9/11 that “there was ‘glee in the administration because now we can invade Iraq.” But is the contention that those policymakers responsible for the war on Iraq were not happy that they now had the opportunity to do so sustainable?

Is Rabinowitz unaware that in 1996, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David Wurmser coauthored a document prepared for the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, which made the case for overthrowing Saddam Hussein’s regime? Or that the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), whose membership was a virtual who’s who of so-called “neoconservatives” calling for war on Iraq, had a manifesto calling for regime change and stating that the “process of transformation” of the U.S. military into a force to “preserve American military preeminence” around the globe “is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor”? That PNAC director Robert Kagan acknowledged that the 9/11 attacks were the “Pearl Harbor” he and his ilk were looking for, writing in the Washington Post that 9/11 must be used to “to launch a new era of American internationalism. Let’s not squander this opportunity”?

Yet again, it becomes evident that Ron Paul’s sin is that he is too willing to be honest with the American people and speak the truth about U.S. foreign policy. Just as Dr. Paul predicted and warned about the housing bubble and financial crisis of 2008, so did he predict and warn prior to 9/11 that U.S. foreign policy would result in what the intelligence community terms “blowback”. Ron Paul has a long record of speaking truth to power and making predictions that have come to pass.

Rabinowitz concludes, “It seemed improbable that the best-known of American propagandists for our enemies could be near the top of the pack in the Iowa contest, but there it is.” That Ron Paul has emerged in Iowa as a frontrunner is a hopeful sign that Americans are waking up to the realities of U.S. foreign policy and are tired of crude propagandists for U.S. wars and empire insulting their intelligence, as Rabinowitz—who is a member of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board—does so well in her column.

Ron Paul is the Biggest Threat to the New World Order Because He Is Not Their Puppet

Vote for anybody but Dr. Ron Paul and you might as well get in your cars and drive to your nearest FEMA Camp and turn yourselves in!!! This old world has seen enough and Satan is ready to make his appearance. Get your lives in order cause it's all coming down the turnpike at breakneck speed.

By Wondering Woman, The Patriot Update
January 24, 2012

It is not only the Democrats – it is the majority of both Democrats and Republicans and it is not communism – IT is the new world order whose ultimate goal is reducing our population worldwide by 90%. If the majority of our long term career congressional members were not new world order puppets, they would have taken action against the treason/fraud.

Obama is not the first puppet in our federal government. Both the Bushes and the Clintons, and who knows how many presidents before those, were NWO puppets. John McCain was obviously another one who was the designated loser in the 2008. Newt Gingrich is another. Herman Cain was such an excellent choice, but look where he was told to throw his support to when the sexual harassment issues came forth. Most likely he was another NWO puppet.

As much as I abhor their AGENDA 21 plans, one has to admire their cunning. They have to have some of the brightest minds working on their plans; and most of these poor misguided souls working to bring about the genocide of 90% or our population are just brainwashed idiots (remember the old saying that there is only a hairline of difference between insanity and brilliance) who have bought into the tales of global warming and saving the planet from destructive overpopulation.

If you go to YouTube and type in the Obama Deception video and click on the full length one, you will see both Obama and Hilary Clinton attending the Bilderberg conference. Our government is so infiltrated with them, and all our major departments like the FDA, CDC, USDA, education department are full of them.

Think not? – ask yourself why they are trying to make home schooling illegal throughout Planet Earth – why has the FDA totally ignored all the toxins in our processed food chain – why did they remove one neurotoxin from our vaccines (thimerosal is still in flu vaccines) and replace it with another excitotoxin – why is the FDA and the USDA both pushing all Monsanto’s GMO seeds – despite evidence of severe problems with the produce grown from these seeds, they are still pushing to keep anyone from using heritage seeds – they didn’t stop with our fruits and vegetables, now Monsanto is releasing a GMO grass seeds – WHY?

I think the answer lies in why India banned Monsanto’s seeds after doing their own study. Their four-legged creatures fed the produce grown from those seeds displayed loss of activity (energy) and loss of interest in sexual activity just a coupe of weeks into the study. They had fewer litters and those fewer litters consisted of fewer members and lower birth weights than before GMO produce. It only took three generations for no litters at all, which means no more descendents, which means extinction of the species or study subjects.

After reading of this study, my thought went to the dying out of our friendly little pollinators – the honeybees. We have no definite explanation for this to date. My logical conclusion is that if the produce grown from these Monsanto GMO seeds are so toxic to ingest, then the pollen that the honey bees collect from those GMO plants must also be toxic and that would explain why all the honey bees are dying out.

A scientist, at the beginning of the dying off of our honey bees, remarked that if all our friendly little pollinators died off, mankind would probably not survive them more than four years after their demise.

Welcome to the new world order!

This is why we must be very careful in who we vote for – getting Obama OUT does nothing if we put another one of their puppets in.

We must quit being as shallow as Newt Gingrich is, if he was quoted correctly by someone in saying that “his second wife was not young enough or pretty enough to be the president’s wife.” Voters with that mentality is what got us into this mess.

We must learn to look for wisdom, humane values, keeping their promises or upholding their sworn duties, character and the courage to stand up for what they believe in whether it is politically correct at the moment or not. We only have one candidate who has a long record of all the qualities we need so badly at this time.

Ron Paul’s biggest threat to his life is not his age or his feebleness – but the new world order that does not want him in there because he is not their puppet and not likely to sell out to them. That is why I hope he’ll pick a younger and huskier veep, such as Jesse Ventura – plus Jesse Ventura has been busy since leaving politics after being a mayor and then a governor, ferreting out the corruption in the federal government. To see Jesse in action on this, just type in HAARP in your search window.

Some of you might also enjoy visiting Project Camelot and type Benjamin Fulford in their search window. Reading those interviews should bring you up to date on the new world order quickly.

One blogger admitted that most of his ideas and plans were good but he “muttered and appeared too old and feeble.” I’ll concede that he looks frail (however, another blogger said he runs 6 miles every morning) and that we probably look old to young whippersnappers (he could tell me to go ahead because age comes before beauty) but to this date, not a mutter one – “Sputters” yes – but who wouldn’t sputter when those darned biased moderators at the debates asks them a question and then tries to shut them up before giving them a chance to answer the question. This is just more evidence that Dr. Ron Paul must not be allowed to win the Republican nominee position.

He is too electable and they know it.

U.S. Drifting from Financial Crisis to Social Crisis

The inevitable consequence of the looting of the American people is upon us. The ruling class controls the wealth while the impoverished masses scrounge for sustenance. Expect more outbursts, more security clampdowns, more abuse of citizens by agents of the state, and more restrictions of speech.

The Telegraph
January 10, 2011

The US is drifting from a financial crisis to a deeper and more insidious social crisis. Self-congratulation by the US authorities that they have this time avoided a repeat of the 1930s is premature.

There is a telling detail in the US retail chain store data for December. Stephen Lewis from Monument Securities points out that luxury outlets saw an 8.1 percent rise from a year ago, but discount stores catering to America’s poorer half rose just 1.2 percent.

Tiffany’s, Nordstrom, and Saks Fifth Avenue are booming. Sales of Cadillac cars have jumped 35 percent, while Porsche’s US sales are up 29 percent.

Cartier and Louis Vuitton have helped boost the luxury goods stock index by almost 50pc since October.

Yet Best Buy, Target, and Walmart have languished.

Such is the blighted fruit of Federal Reserve policy. The Fed no longer even denies that the purpose of its latest blast of bond purchases, or QE2, is to drive up Wall Street, perhaps because it has so signally failed to achieve its other purpose of driving down borrowing costs.

Yet surely Ben Bernanke’s 'trickle down' strategy risks corroding America’s ethic of solidarity long before it does much to help America’s poor.

The retail data can be quirky but it fits in with everything else we know. The numbers of people on food stamps have reached 43.2 million, an all time-high of 14 percent of the population. Recipients receive debit cards — not stamps — currently worth about $140 a month under President Obama’s stimulus package.

The US Conference of Mayors said visits to soup kitchens are up 24 percent this year. There are 643,000 people needing shelter each night.

Jobs data released on Friday was again shocking. The only the reason that headline unemployment fell to 9.4 percent was that so many people dropped out of the system altogether.

The actual number of jobs contracted by 260,000 to 153,690,000. The “labour participation rate” for working-age men over 20 dropped to 73.6 percent, the lowest the since the data series began in 1948. My guess is that this figure exceeds the average for the Great Depression (minus the cruellest year of 1932).

“Corporate America is in a V-shaped recovery,” said Robert Reich, a former labour secretary. “That’s great news for investors whose savings are mainly in stocks and bonds, and for executives and Wall Street traders. But most American workers are trapped in an L-shaped recovery.”

It is no surprise that America’s armed dissident movement has resurfaced. For a glimpse into this sub-culture, read Time Magazine’s “Locked and Loaded: The Secret World of Extreme Militias”.

Time’s reporters went underground with the 300-strong 'Ohio Defence Force', an eclectic posse of citizens who spend weekends with M16 assault rifles and an M60 machine gun training to defend their constitutional rights by guerrilla warfare.

As it happens, I spent some time with militia groups across the US at the tail end of the recession in the early 1990s. While the rallying cry then was gun control and encroachments on freedom, the movement was at root a primordial scream by blue-collar Americans left behind in the new global dispensation. That grievance is surely worse today.

The long-term unemployed (more than six months) have reached 42 percent of the total, twice the peak of the early 1990s. Nothing like this has been seen since the World War Two.

The Gini Coefficient used to measure income inequality has risen from the mid-30s to 46.8 over the last quarter century, touching the same extremes reached in the Roaring Twenties just before the Slump. It has also been ratcheting up in Britain and Europe.

Raghuram Rajan, the IMF’s former chief economist, argues that the subprime debt build-up was an attempt — “whether carefully planned or the path of least resistance” — to disguise stagnating incomes and to buy off the poor.

“The inevitable bill could be postponed into the future. Cynical as it might seem, easy credit has been used throughout history as a palliative by governments that are unable to address the deeper anxieties of the middle class directly,” he said.

Bank failures in the Depression were in part caused by expansion of credit to struggling farmers in response to the US Populist movement.

Extreme inequalities are toxic for societies, but there is also a body of scholarship suggesting that they cause depressions as well by upsetting the economic balance. They create a bias towards asset bubbles and over-investment, while holding down consumption, until the system becomes top-heavy and tips over, as happened in the 1930s.

The switch from brawn to brain in the internet age has obviously pushed up the Gini count, but so has globalization. Multinationals are exploiting “labour arbitrage” by moving plant to low-wage countries, playing off workers in China and the West against each other. The profit share of corporations is at record highs across in America and Europe.

More subtly, Asia’s mercantilist powers have flooded the world with excess capacity, holding down their currencies to lock in trade surpluses. The effect is to create a black hole in the global system.

Yes, we can still hope that this is a passing phase until rising wages in Asia restore balance to East and West, but what it if it proves to be permanent, a structural incompatibility of the Confucian model with our own Ricardian trade doctrine?

There is no easy solution to creeping depression in America and swathes of the Old World. A Keynesian 'New Deal' of borrowing on the bond markets to build roads, bridges, solar farms, or nuclear power stations to soak up the army of unemployed is not a credible option in our new age of sovereign debt jitters. The fiscal card is played out.

So we limp on, with very large numbers of people in the West trapped on the wrong side of globalization, and nobody doing much about it. Would Franklin Roosevelt have tolerated such a lamentable state of affairs, or would he have ripped up and reshaped the global system until it answered the needs of his citizens?

U.S. Taxpayers Still Owed $132.9 Billion from Transnational Companies That Haven't Repaid the Public Funds Given to Them in the Financial Bailout

The Associated Press
January 26, 2012

A government watchdog says U.S. taxpayers are still owed $132.9 billion that companies haven't repaid from the financial bailout, and some of that will never be recovered.

The bailout launched at the height of the financial crisis in September 2008 will continue to exist for years, says a report issued Thursday by Christy Romero, the acting special inspector general for the $700 billion bailout. Some bailout programs, such as the effort to help homeowners avoid foreclosure by reducing mortgage payments, will last as late as 2017, costing the government an additional $51 billion or so.

The gyrating stock market has slowed the Treasury Department's efforts to sell off its stakes in 458 bailed-out companies, the report says. They include insurer American International Group Inc., General Motors Co. and Ally Financial Inc.

If Treasury plans to sell its stock in the three companies at or above the price where taxpayers would break even on their investment — $28.73 a share for AIG, $53.98 for GM — it may take a long time for the market to rebound to that level, the report says. AIG's shares closed Wednesday at $25.31, while GM ended at $24.92. Ally isn't publicly traded.

It will also be challenging for the government to get out of the 458 companies as the market remains volatile and banks struggle keep afloat in the tough economy, it says.

Congress authorized $700 billion for the bailout of financial companies and automakers, and $413.4 billion was paid out. So far the government has recovered about $318 billion. The bailout is called the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP.

"TARP is not over," Romero said in a statement. She said her office will maintain its commitment to protect taxpayers for the duration of the program.

Treasury spokesman Matt Anderson said the department "has made substantial progress winding down TARP and has already recovered more than 77 percent of the funds disbursed for the program, through repayments and other income."

"We'll continue to balance the important goals of exiting our investments as soon as practicable and maximizing value for taxpayers," Anderson said.

The government has unwound its investments in four of the companies that received the most aid: Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., Chrysler Group LLC and Chrysler Financial, the automaker's old lending arm.

On Wednesday, Treasury announced that it had sold the final batch of securities under its $368 million Small Business Administration loan program under TARP.

In Romero's quarterly report to Congress, she said her office has uncovered and prevented fraud related to TARP. Investigations by her office resulted in criminal charges against 10 people and three convictions in the quarter ended Dec. 31, the report notes. Altogether, the investigations have resulted in criminal charges against 61 people, including 45 senior company executives, according to the report. Thirty-one of the 61 individuals have been convicted. Civil charges have been filed against 38 people.

World Government (the 'Beast' That Was, and Is Not, and Yet Is) Predictions for 2012

Each and every day, people around the world are realizing that the one-world government is based upon a hybrid Socialism-Communism economics system — a system of corporate governance and ownership of natural resources, land, water, and complete control of human beings. It is a system based upon the marriage of corporations, science and politics. It is a system that is funded by us, the world’s people. But what do knowing people do? We can’t fight manufactured super viruses, HAARP and psychotronic weapons; and we certainly cannot fight global nuclear arsenals. But we can, however, refuse to think and participate in the global economics systems, which were set up to literally enslave humankind. - Nancy Levant, Get Off the Globalization Grid, Part 1, NewsWithViews.com, August 23, 2005

We have a world government, but it is mostly private, and the private institutions running the world government are not geared or focused on the common good. So what we have nowadays is private power. And private power is the power running the world government. They issue documents. They publish books. They have logos. They make reports. It’s all out there. All you need to do is, like a jigsaw puzzle, put the pieces together. - Adrian Salbuchi, Will It Be World Government?

By Adrian Salbuchi
December 26, 2011

The Private Global Power Elite embedded in major governments is dead set on imposing World Government on us sooner rather than later. Let’s look at 12 mega-processes – veritable “Triggers” – that we infer they are using to achieve their goals.

­All roads lead to World Government. This should come as no surprise. London’s Financial Times openly articulated this view in an article by their chief foreign affairs commentator, Gideon Rachman, published on 8 December 2009, whose title said it all: “And Now for a World Government.” These goals are echoed by the Trilateral Commission, CFR and Bilderberg insiders – even by the Vatican.

Macro-managing planet Earth is no easy matter. It requires strategic and tactical planning by a vast think-tank network allied to major elite universities whereby armies of academics, operators, lobbyists, media players and government officers interface, all abundantly financed by the global corporate and banking superstructure.

They do this holistically, knowing that they operate on different stages moving at very different speeds:

• Financial Triggers move at lightning speed thanks to electronic information technology that can make or break markets, currencies and entire countries in just hours or days;
• Economic Triggers move slower: manufacturing cars, aircraft, food, clothes, building plants and houses takes months;
• Political Triggers tied to the “democratic system” put politicians in power for several years;
  
• Cultural Triggers require entire generations to implement; this is where PsyWar has reached unprecedented “heights”.

Risk-managing this whole process takes into account the many pitfalls and surprises in store. So each plan in every field counts, with “Plan B’s” – even Plans “C” and “D” – which can be implemented if needed.

­Twelve Triggers for World Government

Today, the Global Power Elite are wrapping up globalization and ushering in World Government. Paraphrasing the tightrope walker in German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Thus Spake Zarathustra,” this implies “….a dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting…"

These 12 Triggers are interlinked and interlocked in a highly complex, holistic matrix, very flexible in its tactics but rigidly unbending in its strategic objectives. When read as a whole, the picture that unfolds shows that whole being far more than the sum of its parts.

1. Financial Meltdown. Since 2008, the Global Financial System continues on life-support. Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner and the US economic hit team – Robert Rubin, Larry Summers and Goldman Sachs, CitiGroup, JPMorganChase mega-bankers working with the Bank of England and the European Central Bank – have not and will not take any measures to help the populace and ailing economies. They just funnel trillions to the banking elite, imposing the media myth that certain banks are “too big to fail” (Orwellian Newspeak for “too damn powerful to fail”). Why? Because it’s not governments overseeing, supervising and controlling Goldman Sachs, CitiCorp, HSBC, Deutsche Bank, JPMorganChase, but exactly the other way around…
2. Economic Crises. Today, “Destructive Extreme Capitalism” is collapsing national and regional economies, reformatting them into international slave-labour Gulag-like entities that Joseph Stalin would envy. Our woes lie not with the world’s real economy (mostly intact), but with the fake world of finance, banks, and speculation;
3. Social Upheavals. Meltdowns in Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Iceland and – soon to come – Italy, Spain and others, trigger violent social uprisings, even in the US and UK;
4. Pandemics. Get ready for more “flu surprises” leading to mandatory vaccinations: a discreet opportunity to slip RFID chips into our bodies and test “intelligent viruses” targeting specific DNA strains. Racially and ethnically selective viruses as part of mass depopulation campaigns?
5. Global Warming. As the global economy sinks into zero growth mode, economic drivers shift from growth expansion to consumption contraction. Will coming “carbon credits” open the path to full societal control?
6. Terrorist “False Flag” Mega-Attacks. The Elite have this wildcard up their sleeve to jump-start new “crises” as short-cuts towards world government. Will new “attacks” dwarfing 9/11 justify further global wars, invasions and genocide? A nuclear weapon over a major city to be blamed on the Elite’s “enemies”?
7. Generalized War in the Middle East. As we speak, naval forces, bombers, entire armies are poised to attack and invade Syria, Iran…
8. Ecological/Environmental “Accidents”. The 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident sparked the beginning of the end of the former USSR by showing the world and the Soviets themselves that their State could no longer manage their own nuclear facilities. April 2010 saw the BP “Deepwater Horizon” oil rig eco-catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico; since March 2011, Japan and the world have been grappling with a much larger nuclear accident in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex. Was foul play involved?
9. Assassination of a major political or religious figure to be blamed on an Elite enemy. Mossad, CIA, MI6 are really good at playing this type of dirty trick;
10. Attacks on “Rogue States” – Iraq, Libya… Who’s next? Iran? Syria? Venezuela? North Korea?
11. Staged “Religious” Event. The growing need of the masses for meaning in their lives makes them easy victims of a Hollywood-staged, 3D virtual reality hologram show, orchestrating a “second coming”. An electronically engineered “messianic figure” acting in sync with Elite global objectives? Who would dare go against God himself?
12. Staged “Alien Contact.” This too may be in the works. For decades, large sectors of world population have been programmed to believe in aliens. Here too, hologram technology could stage a “space vehicle landing” – on the White House lawn, of course – highlighting the “need” for Mankind to have “unified representation” in the face of extraterrestrials. Further justification for world government?

What do such interlocking “crises” have in common? Global warming, pandemics, “international terrorism”, financial collapse, economic depression, even alien contacts? They all serve to show that they cannot be addressed by any single nation state, thus “justifying” the need for World Government.

2012: We must stay especially alert, understanding things the way they really are and not the way the global TV Masters want us to believe they are.

Adrian Salbuchi is a political analyst, author, speaker and radio/TV commentator in Argentina. www.asalbuchi.com.ar

U.S. Big Business Sides with Iran

Weekly Standard
December 5, 2011

Earlier this week, on Monday, the advocacy group USA*Engage sent a letter to each of the 100 Senate offices. The organization’s intention was clear: to prevent the U.S. from imposing economic sanctions on Iran.

USA*Engage’s efforts, however, failed last night when every office to receive such a letter did the exact opposite. The sanctions amendment offered by Senator Bob Menendez (D, New Jersey) and Senator Mark Kirk (R, Illinois), which passed by a 100-0 vote in the Senate.

According to Kirk’s Senate office,

“The sanctions would prohibit financial institutions that do business with the bank of Iran from opening or maintaining correspondent banking accounts in the United States.”

The goal?

“The amendment seeks to deny Iran the resources for its nuclear weapons program.”

So why would USA*Engage actively seek to block a measure that would hopefully prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon?

In the letter, USA*Engage director Richard Sawaya states:

“Given that the reported announced intent of the sanctions amendments is to target Iran’s crude sales into the world oil market, the adverse effects on the world economy, and on vital U.S. interests, could be considerable. Such hasty, draconian, unilateral legislation would be ill advised at best.”

“If any Iran sanctions amendments do reach the floor, we urge you to vote no.”

In other words, USA*Engage is concerned that sanctioning Iran will hurt the economy—not at all about allowing a rogue regime to acquire nuclear weapons.

But who is USA*Engage anyway?

It’s a coalition of corporations, companies, and organizations, a subsidiary of the National Foreign Trade Council. Although USA*Engage does not reveal who their members are, here is the list of those who make up the National Foreign Trade Council’s board of directors:

• ABB Incorporated
• American International Group, Incorporated
• Applied Materials
• Baxter International, Incorporated
• Boeing Company
• Caterpillar Incorporated
• Chevron
• Chrysler, LLP
• CIGNA International
• Citigroup Inc.
• Deloitte & Touche, LLP
• Dewey & LeBoeuf LLP
• DHL North America
• E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company
• Eastman Kodak Company
• Ernst & Young LLP
• ExxonMobil Corporation
• Fluor Corporation
• Ford Motor Company
• General Electric Company
• General Motors Corporation
• Google Inc.
• Halliburton Company
• Hanesbrands Inc.
• Hercules, USA
• Hewlett-Packard Company
• Ingersoll-Rand Company
• Johnson & Johnson
• JPMorganChase & Co
• KPMG, LLP
• Mars Incorporated
• Microsoft Corporation
• National Foreign Trade Council
• Occidental Petroleum Corporation
• Oracle Corporation
• PepsiCo, Inc.
• Pernod Ricard USA
• Pfizer Inc.
• PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP
• Procter & Gamble Company
• Prudential Insurance Company
• Ridgewood Group International
• Rockwell International Corporation
• Siemens Corporation
• Sullivan & Worcester LLP
• TE Connectivity
• Tyco Electronics
• United Technologies Corporation
• Wal-Mart Stores, Incorporated

U.S. Corporations Rake in Massive Profits, and the Same Corporations Are Still Lobbying for More Tax Breaks

The Lookout
July 6, 2011

It is, you might say, the best of times, and the worst of times.

Call it a tale of two economies. Across a range of measures, the current "recovery" is among the weakest since the government began keeping records. Meanwhile, American corporations, which already have been raking in massive profits, are poised to report strong second quarter profits. And despite that imbalance, one economic commentator notes that those same corporations are still lobbying for more tax breaks--concerns over the deficit be damned.

The Great Recession officially ended in June 2009, but the recovery has been lackluster in the extreme. It's not just the 9.1 percent unemployment rate, the nearly 14 million jobless, or the anemic 1.8 percent GDP growth in the first quarter--numbers we're all familiar with at this point.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, banks are lending less money now--both through credit card lines and home loans--than when the recovery began, according to numbers from the New York Fed.

And although household debt is lower than it was at the height of the boom, it's still high enough to exert a severe drag on the economy. In 2007, the average household had borrowed 127 percent of its annual income to fund purchases. That's now down to 112 percent--in part because banks have written off some debt as uncollectable. But it could take years before it descends the average level for the 1990s, 84 percent, which experts say is a healthier mark.

So, things are bleak--but not for American companies and shareholders. The Journal reports separately that according to an analysis by Brown Brothers Harriman, second-quarter earnings for companies in the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index are expected to rise by 13.6 percent compared to a year ago, when they're announced later this month.

That news comes after U.S. companies reported record profits last year. And rather than using that cash to hire workers, they sat on more of it than ever before.

Given all this, you might expect that corporations would at least be doing what they can to help solve the deficit problem that many experts say imperils the long-term stability of the economy. But as David Leonhardt of the New York Times observes today, the opposite is the case.

Leonhardt uses as an example the Business Roundtable, a trade group that's generally seen as moderate, and talks about the deficit problem in sober, restrained tones. But lately, he writes, its actions are telling a different story:

Rhetoric aside, it consistently lobbies for a higher deficit. The roundtable defends corporate tax loopholes and even argues for new ones. It pushes for a lower corporate tax rate. It favors the permanent extension of the Bush tax cuts. It opposes a reduction in the tax subsidy for health insurance, a reduction that was part of the 2009 health reform bill. Oh, and the roundtable also favors new spending on roads, bridges and other infrastructure.

It's not just the Roundtable. Leonhardt continues:

Today's business groups struggle to come up with any specific deficit plan. Last year, the Business Council—a group of top corporate executives headed by Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase—and the roundtable released a 49-page plan that simultaneously warned that projected deficits would "retard future growth" and called for policies that would add hundreds of billions of dollars a year to the deficit.

So to recap: This recovery is among the weakest since World War Two. But three years after the financial industry caused the economy to tank, corporations are doing better than ever, without using their profits to hire people. Meanwhile, they're lobbying for more tax breaks, which would make the deficit problem worse.

The Goal of the Corporate State Is to Create a Total Control Society

"In the future, whether it's entering your home, opening your car, entering your workspace, getting a pharmacy prescription refilled, or having your medical records pulled up, everything will come off that unique key that is your iris. Every person, place, and thing on this planet will be connected [to the iris system] within the next 10 years." - Jeff Carter, CDO of Global Rainmakers November 16, 2010

By John W. Whitehead, The Rutherford Institute
November 16, 2010

The U.S. government and its corporate allies are looking out for you — literally — with surveillance tools intended to identify you, track your whereabouts, monitor your activities and allow or restrict your access to people, places or things deemed suitable by the government. This is all the more true as another invasive technology, the iris scanner, is about to be unleashed on the American people.

Iris scanning relies on biometrics, which uses physiological (fingerprint, face recognition, DNA, iris recognition, etc.) or behavioral (gait, voice) characteristics to uniquely identify a person. The technology works by reading the unique pattern found on the iris, the colored part of the eyeball. This pattern is unique even among individuals with the exact same DNA. It is read by projecting infra-red light directly into the eye of the individual.

The perceived benefits of iris scan technology, we are told, include a high level of accuracy, protection against identity theft and the ability to quickly search through a database of the digitized iris information. It also provides corporations and the government — that is, the corporate state — with a streamlined, uniform way to track and access all of the information amassed about us, from our financial and merchant records, to our medical history, activities, interests, travels and so on. In this way, iris scans become de facto national ID cards, which can be implemented without our knowledge or consent. In fact, the latest generation of iris scanners can even capture scans on individuals in motion who are six feet away. And as these devices become more sophisticated, they will only become more powerfully invasive.

At the forefront of this effort is the American biometrics firm Global Rainmakers Inc. (GRI), which has partnered with the city of Leon — one of the largest cities in Mexico — to create "the most secure city in the world." GRI plans to achieve this goal by installing iris scanners throughout the city, thus creating a virtual police state in Leon.

The eye scanners, which can scan the irises of 30—50 people per minute, will first be made available to law enforcement facilities, security check-points, police stations, detention areas, jails and prisons, followed by more commercial enterprises such as mass transit, medical centers and banks and other public and private locations. As the business and technology magazine Fast Company reports:

To implement the system, the city is creating a database of irises. Criminals will automatically be enrolled, their irises scanned once convicted. Law-abiding citizens will have the option to opt-in.

However, as Fast Company points out, soon no one will be able to opt out:

When these residents catch a train or bus, or take out money from an ATM, they will scan their irises, rather than swiping a metro or bank card. Police officers will monitor these scans and track the movements of watch-listed individuals.

"Fraud, which is a $50 billion problem, will be completely eradicated," says Carter.

Not even the "dead eyeballs" seen in Minority Report could trick the system, he says.

"If you've been convicted of a crime, in essence, this will act as a digital scarlet letter. If you're a known shoplifter, for example, you won't be able to go into a store without being flagged. For others, boarding a plane will be impossible."

Mark my words: the people of Leon, Mexico, are guinea pigs, and the American people are the intended control subjects.

In fact, iris-scanning technology is already being implemented in the U.S. For example, the Department of Homeland Security ran a two-week test of the iris scanners at a Border Patrol station in McAllen, Texas, in October 2010. That same month, in Boone County, Missouri, the sheriff's office unveiled an Iris Biometric station purchased with funds provided by the U.S. Department of Justice. Unknown by most, the technology is reportedly already being used by law enforcement in 40 states throughout the country.

There's even an iPhone app in the works that will allow police officers to use their iPhones for on-the-spot, on-the-go iris scanning of American citizens. The manufacturer, B12 Technologies, has already equipped police with iPhones armed with facial recognition software linked to a statewide database which, of course, federal agents have access to. (Even Disney World has gotten in on the biometrics action, requiring fingerprint scans for anyone entering its four Orlando theme parks. How long before this mega-corporation makes the switch to iris scans and makes the information available to law enforcement? And for those who have been protesting the whole-body imaging scanners at airports as overly invasive, just wait until they include the iris scans in their security protocol. The technology has already been tested in about 20 U.S. airports as part of a program to identify passengers who could skip to the front of security lines.)

The goal of the corporate state, of course, is to create a total control society — one in which the government is able to track the movements of people in real time and control who does what, when and where. In exchange, the government promises to provide security and convenience, the two highly manipulative, siren-song catchwords of our modern age.

Again, as Fast Company reports:

For such a Big Brother-esque system, why would any law-abiding resident ever volunteer to scan their irises into a public database, and sacrifice their privacy? GRI hopes that the immediate value the system creates will alleviate any concern.

"There's a lot of convenience to this — you'll have nothing to carry except your eyes," says Carter, claiming that consumers will no longer be carded at bars and liquor stores.

And he has a warning for those thinking of opting out:

"When you get masses of people opting-in, opting out does not help. Opting out actually puts more of a flag on you than just being part of the system. We believe everyone will opt-in."

So who's the real culprit here? While we all have a part to play in laying the foundations for this police state — the American people due to our inaction and gullibility; the corporations, who long ago sold us out for the profit they could make on us; the federal government, for using our tax dollars to fund technologies aimed at entrapping us; lobbyists who have greased the wheels of politics in order to ensure that these technologies are adopted by government agencies; the courts, for failing to guard our liberties more vigilantly; the president, for using our stimulus funds to fatten the pockets of technology execs at the expense of our civil liberties — it's Congress that bears the brunt of the blame.

Our so-called elected representatives could and should have provided oversight on these technologies in order to limit their wide-spread use by corporations and government agencies. Yet they have done nothing to protect us from the encroaching police state. In fact, they have facilitated this fast-moving transition into a suspect society.

Ultimately, it comes back to power, money and control — "how it is acquired and maintained, how those who seek it or seek to keep it tend to sacrifice anything and everything in its name" — the same noxious mix that George Orwell warned about in his chilling, futuristic novel 1984. It is a warning we have failed to heed. As veteran journalist Walter Cronkite observed in his preface to a commemorative edition of 1984:

1984 is an anguished lament and a warning that vibrates powerfully when we may not be strong enough nor wise enough nor moral enough to cope with the kind of power we have learned to amass. That warning vibrates powerfully when we allow ourselves to sit still and think carefully about orbiting satellites that can read the license plates in a parking lot and computers that can read into thousands of telephone calls and telex transmissions at once and other computers that can do our banking and purchasing, can watch the house and tell a monitoring station what television program we are watching and how many people there are in a room.

We think of Orwell when we read of scientists who believe they have located in the human brain the seats of behavioral emotions like aggression, or learn more about the vast potential of genetic engineering.

And we hear echoes of that warning chord in the constant demand for greater security and comfort, for less risk in our societies. We recognize, however dimly, that greater efficiency, ease, and security may come at a substantial price in freedom, that "law and order" can be a doublethink version of oppression, that individual liberties surrendered for whatever good reason are freedoms lost.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead [send him mail] is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. He is the author of The Change Manifesto (Sourcebooks).