Global Oil Scam: There Is No Shortage!

Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000

We may never know for sure the combination of circumstances that brought on energy crisis of 2008. But one factor was almost certainly the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which allowed unprecedented levels of speculation in oil futures by investment banks and pension funds, bringing the familiar boom-bust cycle home to the gas pump. [Drill Now? Try Regulate Now, Wall Street Journal, April 7, 2010]

To lower international food prices and protect our social interests, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission must use its authority to curb excessive speculation in commodities futures and re-establish strict position limits on speculators (which were successful until removed by the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000). We must regulate and bring transparency to all trading. We can also removing damaging speculative influence on commodities prices by prohibiting participation in commodities markets by those who do not produce, manufacture, or take physical delivery of the commodities. We must create a solidarity economy that puts compassion and care for one another ahead of short-term profits, in the United States and around the world. [The world food crisis: what is behind it and what we can do, WorldHunger.org, October 23, 2008]

The surge in world food prices can be attributed to the “financialisation” of commodities due to the Commodities Futures Modernization Act of 2000. The game changed for commodities the minute the legislation passed -- ten years ago. That doesn't explain the surge this year but it does explain the increased volatility of the last decade. [Don't Blame Bernanke: Here's Who's REALLY To Blame For Surging Food Prices, Business Insider, October 12, 2010]

And what caused the huge spike in oil prices? Take a wild guess. Obviously Goldman had help — there were other players in the physical-commodities market — but the root cause had almost everything to do with the behavior of a few powerful actors determined to turn the once-solid market into a speculative casino. Goldman did it by persuading pension funds and other large institutional investors to invest in oil futures — agreeing to buy oil at a certain price on a fixed date. The push transformed oil from a physical commodity, rigidly subject to supply and demand, into something to bet on, like a stock. Between 2003 and 2008, the amount of speculative money in commodities grew from $13 billion to $317 billion, an increase of 2,300 percent. By 2008, a barrel of oil was traded 27 times, on average, before it was actually delivered and consumed. [Matt Taibbi, The Great American Bubble Machine, Rolling Stone, July 2, 2009]

The price of crude oil today is not made according to any traditional relation of supply to demand. It’s controlled by an elaborate financial market system as well as by the four major Anglo-American oil companies. As much as 60% of today’s crude oil price is pure speculation driven by large trader banks and hedge funds. It has nothing to do with the convenient myths of Peak Oil. It has to do with control of oil and its price. [F. William Engdahl, ‘Perhaps 60% of today’s oil price is pure speculation’, Global Research, May 2, 2008]

People of Earth: Prepare for Economic Disaster (Excerpt)

The Economic Collapse
March 5, 2011

It is not just the United States that is headed for an economic collapse. The truth is that the entire world is heading for a massive economic meltdown, and the people of earth need to be warned about the coming economic disaster that is going to sweep the globe.

The current world financial system is based on debt, and there are alarming signs that the gigantic global debt bubble is getting ready to burst.

In addition, global prices for the key resources that the major economies of the planet depend on are rising very rapidly. Despite all of our advanced technology, the truth is that human civilization simply cannot function without oil and food. But now the price of oil and the price of food are both increasing dramatically.

So how is the current global economy supposed to keep functioning properly if it soon costs much more to ship products between continents? How are the billions of people that are just barely surviving today supposed to feed themselves if the price of food goes up another 30 or 40 percent?

For decades, most of the major economies around the globe have been able to take for granted that massive amounts of cheap oil and massive amounts of cheap food will always be there. So what happens when that paradigm changes?

At last check, the price of U.S. crude was over 104 dollars a barrel and the price of Brent crude was over 115 dollars a barrel. Many analysts fear that if the crisis in Libya escalates or if the chaos in the Middle East spreads that we could see the all-time record of 147 dollars a barrel broken by the end of the year. That would be absolutely disastrous for the global economy.

But it isn't just the chaos in the Middle East that is driving oil prices. The truth is that oil prices have been moving upwards for months. The recent revolutions in the Middle East have only accelerated the trend.

Let's just hope that the "day of rage" being called for in Saudi Arabia later this month does not turn into a full-blown revolution like we have seen in other Middle Eastern countries. The Saudis keep a pretty tight grip on their people, but at this point anything is possible. A true revolution in Saudi Arabia would send oil prices into unprecedented territory very quickly.

But even without all of the trouble in the Middle East the world was already heading for an oil crunch. The global demand for oil is rising at a very vigorous pace. For example, last year Chinese demand for oil increased by almost 1 million barrels per day. That is absolutely staggering. The Chinese are now buying more new cars every year than Americans are, and so Chinese demand for oil is only going to continue to increase.

Much could be done to increase the global supply of oil, but so far our politicians and the major oil company executives are sitting on their hands. They seem to like the increasing oil prices. [According to Energy Analyst Peter Beutel: Every penny increase at the pump takes $4 million per day from the American consumer. So a 10-cent increase is $40 million a day.]

So for now it looks like oil prices will continue to rise, and this is going to result in much higher prices at the gas pump. Already, ABC News is reporting that regular unleaded gasoline is going for $5.29 a gallon at one gas station in Orlando, Florida. [A $10 increase in oil prices translates into roughly a 25 cent increase in retail gasoline prices.]

The U.S. economy in particular is vulnerable to rising oil prices because our entire economic system is designed around cheap gasoline. If the price of gas goes up to 5 or 6 dollars a gallon, and it stays there, it is going to have a catastrophic effect on the U.S. economy. Just remember what happened back in 2008. The price of oil hit an all-time high of $147 a barrel and then a few months later the entire financial system had a major meltdown. Well, as the price of oil rises it is going to create a whole lot of imbalances in the global financial system once again.

This is definitely a situation that we should all be watching.

But it is not just the price of oil that could cause a global economic disaster.

The global price of food could potentially be even more concerning. As you read this, there are about 3 billion people around the globe that live on the equivalent of 2 dollars a day or less. Those people cannot afford for food prices to go up much. [Editor's Note: 3 billion people is about 1/4 of the world's population; this coincidentally, or not, is the amount of people that will die by war, scarcity, famine, social injustice, plagues, etc. at the opening of the first four seals (Revelation chapter 6).]

But global food prices are rising. According to the United Nations, the global price of food has risen for 8 consecutive months. Last month, the global price of food set a brand new all-time record high. Many are starting to fear that we could actually be in the early stages of a major global food crisis.

The price of just about every major agricultural commodity has been absolutely soaring during the past year...

• The price of corn has doubled over the last six months.
• The price of wheat has more than doubled over the past year.
• The price of soybeans is up about 50% since last June.
• The price of cotton has more than doubled over the past year.
• The commodity price of orange juice has doubled since 2009.
• The price of sugar is the highest it has been in 30 years.

Unfortunately, the production of food in most countries around the world is very highly dependent on oil, so as oil goes up in price this is going to make the food crisis even worse.

Hold on to your hats folks.

Also, as I have written about previously, the world is facing some very serious problems when it comes to water. Due to the greed of the global elite, there is not nearly enough fresh water to go around. The following are some very disturbing facts about the global water situation....

• Worldwide demand for fresh water tripled during the last century, and is now doubling every 21 years.


• According to USAID, one-third of all humans will face severe or chronic water shortages by the year 2025.


• Of the 60 million people added to the world’s cities every year, the vast majority of them live in impoverished slums and shanty-towns with no sanitation facilities whatsoever.


• It is estimated that 75 percent of India's surface water is now contaminated by human and agricultural waste.


• Not only that, but according to a UN study on sanitation, far more people in India have access to a mobile phone than to a toilet.


• In northern China, the water table is dropping one meter per year due to overpumping.

These days, one of the trendy things to do is to call water "the oil of the 21st century", but unfortunately that is not a completely inaccurate statement. Fresh, clean water is something that we all need, but right now world supplies are getting tight.

Our politicians and the global elite could be doing something about this if they really wanted to, but right now they seem perfectly fine with what is happening...

Top Five Things Obama Has Done to Raise Gasoline Prices

If past statements from Obama and his administration are any indication, the U.S. could be stuck with prohibitively high gasoline prices: Then-Senator Obama said on the campaign trail in 2008 that he doesn’t object to high oil prices as long as they come about gradually, and Secretary of Energy Steven Chu once famously said he hoped the U.S. would “boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe,” where prices are currently about $7 per gallon.

American Solutions
January 3, 2011

With gasoline currently above $3 per gallon nationwide and economists expecting that price to rise even further in 2011, America should be getting serious about producing more of its own resources. But instead of focusing on how to bring more relief to American motorists, President Obama has imposed massive new regulations, restrictions, and even threatened higher taxes on American energy, all of which negatively impact domestic production.

What follows is a list of the five most egregious actions on the part of the Obama administration that have contributed to higher gasoline prices and greater dependence on foreign dictators for our energy:

Cancelling existing permits

Immediately after taking office in 2009, President Obama’s handpicked Secretary of the Department of Interior, Ken Salazar, canceled 77 leases for oil and gas drilling in Utah. The fact that this was one of the administration’s first regulatory decisions meant that American energy companies were immediately concerned about their ability to produce oil and gas in the future, injecting a level of uncertainty into the market that moves the country away from job creation and economic recovery. One year later, the administration canceled 61 more leases, this time in Montana, as part of President Obama’s war on global warming.

Needlessly delaying offshore leasing

Not long after Ken Salazar canceled the Utah leases, he decided to extend for another six months the public comment period for new offshore drilling. As allowed by law, the public had already been given 45 days to comment on the federal government’s pending lease sale to offshore energy producers, after which time the administration would begin developing plans for new leasing. But the Obama administration was so opposed to oil and gas drilling that it wanted to drag the process out further, which meant offshore producers would have to wait even longer before they could start drilling. This was in addition to the 25 years that no drilling was allowed for most of the Outer Continental Shelf due to a congressional moratorium that ended in 2008. Adding insult to injury is that the additional public comments for which the White House asked actually supported expanding offshore drilling by a two-to-one margin, a fact that the administration deliberately kept hidden from the American people. Put simply, the Obama administration did not want any additional offshore drilling, and the fact that the public overwhelmingly opposed them wasn’t going to stop them from pursuing their ideological goal.

Pushing for more taxes on American energy

When the Pelosi-led House of Representatives passed its massive cap and trade energy tax, the Obama administration celebrated. After all, it was then-candidate Barack Obama who happily declared that under his plan of cap and trade, energy prices would “necessarily skyrocket.” Although his target was primarily the coal industry (which suffered badly in 2010 under President Obama’s watch), imposing a tax on carbon dioxide would also heavily impact oil and natural gas production. In fact, there was a new gasoline tax in the most recent cap and trade bill in the Senate, legislation President Obama helped negotiate and would have happily signed had both chambers of Congress passed it. A study from Harvard University found that a carbon cap that was less stringent than what Congress was considering could send gasoline prices soaring to $7 per gallon. When all efforts to pass cap and trade legislatively failed miserably, Obama ignored the message — that Americans strongly oppose new energy taxes — and moved instead to impose a carbon cap administratively through the EPA. Such regulation targets all sectors of the economy, including transportation and oil production and refining, which ultimately means higher gasoline prices at the pump.

Imposing a moratorium on oil and gas drilling

Immediately after the Gulf oil spill began in April 2010, the White House began soliciting input from drilling experts in the National Academy of Engineering as to what the proper response should be. The Obama administration then imposed a six-month moratorium on offshore drilling, claiming that the experts they consulted had advised them to take such an action. Except they hadn’t. The experts stated publicly that they never supported such a moratorium, and that the White House had manipulated their opinions and expertise solely to advance a political agenda. Because the administration had no basis for its ban, two federal courts stated on three separate occasions that the moratorium was unjust. The Obama administration ignored the experts and the courts and kept the ban in place; Salazar said that lifting the moratorium would make him “uncomfortable.” Such a decision ultimately led drillers to relocate their rigs (and hundreds or even thousands of good paying jobs) to other parts of the world, and the long-term impact on domestic production will no doubt be devastating for consumers.

Issuing a new offshore drilling ban

Within weeks of announcing that the moratorium had come to an end, the White House announced a new executive ban on offshore drilling, a ban that is almost identical to what was in place until 2008 when gasoline prices began their climb past $4 per gallon. Amid mounting grassroots opposition to that ban — led by American Solutions’ 1.5 million-member “Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less” effort — then-President Bush lifted the executive ban in July 2008, and Congress ended its own quarter-century long legislative ban a few months later, after which gasoline prices plummeted. But President Obama completely ignored that lesson (and the pain consumers felt) and has set the stage for a repeat of the 2008 gasoline crisis by trying his hand at imposing his own ban. Meanwhile, in the few areas where the White House approves drilling, the administration has completely halted new permitting, a de facto moratorium in and of itself. All told, the Energy Information Administration projects that offshore oil production will decline in 2011 by about 220,000 barrels per day (before the Obama administration’s bans, the EIA had actually predicted an increase in production for 2011.)

Why has President Obama led the charge to restrict American energy? The answer is elusive, and it’s anyone’s guess what his administration will do (if anything) to fight for lower gasoline prices. But if past statements from him and his administration are any indication, the U.S. could be stuck (absent major legislative and regulatory changes) with prohibitively high gasoline prices: Then-Senator Obama said on the campaign trail in 2008 that he doesn’t object to high oil prices as long as they come about gradually, and Secretary of Energy Steven Chu once famously said he hoped the U.S. would “boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe,” where prices are currently about $7 per gallon.

Flashback: Gas Prices May Reach $7 Per Gallon

The New American
March 8, 2010

President Obama's fiscal year 2010 EPA budget calls for carbon reductions that would require raising the cost of gasoline to $7 per gallon within the next 10 years. A report released this month by Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs explained that for Obama to reach his goal, he would need to employ a one-two punch approach, hitting both utility and transportation sectors with strong emissions-reducing taxes.

The Belfer Center report, Reducing the U.S. Transportation Sector's Oil Consumption and Greenhouse Gas Emissions, criticizes Obama's current plan as short-sighted.

"Reducing oil consumption and carbon emissions from transportation is a much greater challenge than conventional wisdom assumes," warns the report.

It also says subsidies for alternatives such as electric and hybrid vehicles are "extremely expensive and ... ineffective" in the short term.

But don't let their criticisms fool you. The authors of the report call for aggressive climate change policies and illogically conclude,

"Even under high-fuels-tax, high-carbon price scenarios, losses in annual GDP, relative to business-as-usual, are less than 1 percent, and the economy is still projected to grow at 2.1 – 3.7 percent per year assuming a portion of revenues collected are recycled to taxpayers."

Ignoring recent revelations that EPA's greenhouse-gas "endangerment finding" is based on fraudulent data, the report proposes several scenarios which the authors claim will reduce so-called emissions from the transportation sector without significant harm to the economy. The scenarios involve an economy-wide carbon dioxide tax set at $30 per ton in 2010 and escalating to $60 per ton in 2030. The Belfer Center says it would be "a surrogate for a cap-and-trade system like that proposed in the pending American Clean Energy and Security Act." The reference is to H.R. 2454, passed by the House last June and now before the Senate in the form of S. 1733. Many Democrats have suffered in the polls because of their support of these bills, leading Obama to begrudgingly admit final passage is unlikely.

Harvard's solution (in characteristic socialist fashion) is adding to a cap-and-trade tax one or more of the following:

1. Income tax reductions to offset the burden of a carbon tax on consumers. The authors note there is no such provision in the American Clean Energy and Security Act, but claim including it would significantly reduce economic impacts.
2. A "strong" gasoline and diesel tax of $0.50 per gallon this year, increasing by 10 percent per year to reach a $3.36 per gallon tax in 2030.
3. Improvements in Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards to 43.7 miles per gallon by 2030.

The authors argue an economy-wide carbon tax alone would provide little incentive to the transportation sector to curb emissions. Electric utilities would be more adversely affected since they rely more heavily on coal. Therefore, the suggested "additions" listed above are necessary because taxing consumers is the only way to reduce oil consumption and its accompanying greenhouse gas emissions.

The report advises if Obama wants to reduce both emissions and petroleum imports, "consumers cannot continue to drive more and more each year." That is why, according to the authors, electric and hybrid vehicles don't measure up — they only encourage more driving. The report argues,

"The most effective policy for reducing CO2 emissions and oil imports from transportation is to spur the development and sale of more efficient vehicles with strict efficiency standards while increasing the cost of driving with strong fuel taxes."

It ends with the ominous warning that greenhouse gas emissions will continue to grow if the report's suggestions go unheeded.

2003 to 2008 World Oil Market Chronology

Back in 2004 the government’s worst case scenarios had oil reaching $26 per barrel by 2025. This afternoon oil reached $125.98, the fifth day this week we had a record high price for oil. And we are not even halfway through 2008 yet. Goldman Sachs recently pronounced that oil may soon reach $200 per barrel. - The sooner oil hits $200 per barrel, the better!, GreenMonk, May 9, 2008

Wikipedia - From the mid-1980s to September 2003, the inflation adjusted price of a barrel of crude oil on NYMEX was generally under $25/barrel. Then, during 2004, the price rose above $40, and then $50.

A series of events led the price to exceed $60 by August 11, 2005, and then briefly exceed $75 in the middle of 2006. Prices then dropped back to $60/barrel by the early part of 2007 before rising steeply again to $92/barrel by October 2007, and $99.29/barrel for December futures in New York on November 21, 2007.

Throughout the first half of 2008, oil regularly reached record high prices. On February 29, 2008, oil prices peaked at $103.05 per barrel, and reached $110.20 on March 12, 2008, the sixth record in seven trading days.

Prices on June 27, 2008, touched $141.71/barrel, for August delivery in the New York Mercantile Exchange (after the recent $140.56/barrel), amid Libya's threat to cut output, and OPEC's president predicted prices may reach $170 by the Northern summer.

The most recent price per barrel maximum of $147.02 was reached on July 11, 2008. After falling below $100 in the late summer of 2008, prices rose again in late September. On September 22, oil rose over $25 to $130 before settling again to $120.92, marking a record one-day gain of $16.37.

Electronic crude oil trading was temporarily halted by NYMEX when the daily price rise limit of $10 was reached, but the limit was reset seconds later and trading resumed. By October 16, prices had fallen again to below $70, and on November 6 oil closed below $60.

As the price of producing petroleum did not rise significantly, the price increases have coincided with a period of record profits for the oil industry. Between 2004 and 2007, the profits of the six supermajors -- ExxonMobil, Total, Shell, BP, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips -- totaled $494.8 billion.

People of Earth: Prepare for Economic Disaster (Excerpt)

The Economic Collapse
March 5, 2011

...It isn't just the chaos in the Middle East that is driving oil prices. The truth is that oil prices have been moving upwards for months. The recent revolutions in the Middle East have only accelerated the trend.

Let's just hope that the "day of rage" being called for in Saudi Arabia later this month does not turn into a full-blown revolution like we have seen in other Middle Eastern countries. The Saudis keep a pretty tight grip on their people, but at this point anything is possible. A true revolution in Saudi Arabia would send oil prices into unprecedented territory very quickly.

But even without all of the trouble in the Middle East the world was already heading for an oil crunch. The global demand for oil is rising at a very vigorous pace. For example, last year Chinese demand for oil increased by almost 1 million barrels per day. That is absolutely staggering. The Chinese are now buying more new cars every year than Americans are, and so Chinese demand for oil is only going to continue to increase.

Much could be done to increase the global supply of oil, but so far our politicians and the major oil company executives are sitting on their hands. They seem to like the increasing oil prices. [According to Energy Analyst Peter Beutel: Every penny increase at the pump takes $4 million per day from the American consumer. So a 10-cent increase is $40 million a day.]

So for now it looks like oil prices will continue to rise, and this is going to result in much higher prices at the gas pump. Already, ABC News is reporting that regular unleaded gasoline is going for $5.29 a gallon at one gas station in Orlando, Florida. [A $10 increase in oil prices translates into roughly a 25 cent increase in retail gasoline prices.]

The U.S. economy in particular is vulnerable to rising oil prices because our entire economic system is designed around cheap gasoline. If the price of gas goes up to 5 or 6 dollars a gallon, and it stays there, it is going to have a catastrophic effect on the U.S. economy. Just remember what happened back in 2008. The price of oil hit an all-time high of $147 a barrel and then a few months later the entire financial system had a major meltdown. Well, as the price of oil rises it is going to create a whole lot of imbalances in the global financial system once again.

This is definitely a situation that we should all be watching.

But it is not just the price of oil that could cause a global economic disaster.

The global price of food could potentially be even more concerning. As you read this, there are about 3 billion people around the globe that live on the equivalent of 2 dollars a day or less. Those people cannot afford for food prices to go up much. [Editor's Note: 3 billion people is about 1/4 of the world's population; this coincidentally, or not, is the amount of people that will die by war, scarcity, famine, social injustice, plagues, etc. at the opening of the first four seals (Revelation chapter 6).]

But global food prices are rising. According to the United Nations, the global price of food has risen for 8 consecutive months. Last month, the global price of food set a brand new all-time record high. Many are starting to fear that we could actually be in the early stages of a major global food crisis.

The price of just about every major agricultural commodity has been absolutely soaring during the past year...

• The price of corn has doubled over the last six months.
• The price of wheat has more than doubled over the past year.
• The price of soybeans is up about 50% since last June.
• The price of cotton has more than doubled over the past year.
• The commodity price of orange juice has doubled since 2009.
• The price of sugar is the highest it has been in 30 years.

Unfortunately, the production of food in most countries around the world is very highly dependent on oil, so as oil goes up in price this is going to make the food crisis even worse...

Goldman's Global Oil Scam Passes the 50 Madoff Mark

Phil’s Stock World
November 12, 2009

$2.5 Trillion – That’s the size of of the global oil scam.

It’s a number so large that, to put it in perspective, we will now begin measuring the damage done to the global economy in “Madoff Units” ($50Bn rip-offs). That’s right—$2.5Tn is 50 TIMES the amount of money that Bernie Madoff scammed from investors in his lifetime, yet it is also LESS than the MONTHLY EXCESS price the global population is being manipulated into paying for a barrel of oil.

Where is the outrage? Where are the investigations?

Goldman Sachs (GS), Morgan Stanley (MS), BP (BP), Deutsche Bank (DB), Royal Dutch Shell (RDS.A), Societe General (GLE), and Total (TOT) founded the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) in 2000. ICE is an online commodities and futures marketplace.

• It is outside the US and operates free from the constraints of US laws.


• The exchange was set up to facilitate “dark pool” trading in the commodities markets.


• Billions of dollars are being placed on oil futures contracts at the ICE; and the beauty of this scam is that they NEVER take delivery, per se.


• They just ratchet up the price with leveraged speculation using your TARP money.
  
• This year alone they ratcheted up the global cost of oil from $40 to $80 per barrel.

A Congressional investigation into energy trading in 2003 discovered that ICE was being used to facilitate “round-trip” trades. Round-trip” trades occur when one firm sells energy to another and then the second firm simultaneously sells the same amount of energy back to the first company at exactly the same price. No commodity ever changes hands. But when done on an exchange, these transactions send a price signal to the market and they artificially boost revenue for the company. This is nothing more than massive fraud, pure and simple.

“Traders of the the ICE core membership (GS, MS, BP, DB, RDS.A, GLE & TOT) wouldn’t really have to put much money at risk by their standards in order to move or support the global market price via the BFOE market. Indeed the evolution of the Brent market has been a response to declining production and the fact that traders could not resist manipulating the market by buying up contracts and “squeezing” those who had sold oil they did not have. The fewer cargoes produced, the easier the underlying market is to manipulate.” – Chris Cook, Former Director of the International Petroleum Exchange, which was bought by ICE.

How widespread are “round-trip’‘ trades? The Congressional Research Service looked at trading patterns in the energy sector, and this is what they reported: This pattern of trading suggests a market environment in which a significant volume of fictitious trading could have taken place. Yet since most of the trading is unregulated by the Government, we have only a slim idea of the illusion being perpetrated in the energy sector.

DMS Energy, when investigated by Congress, admitted that 80 percent of its trades in 2001 were “round-trip” trades. That means 80 percent of all of their trades that year were bogus trades where no commodity changed hands, and yet the balance sheets reflect added revenue. Remember, these trades are sham deals where nothing was exchanged.

Duke Energy disclosed that $1.1 billion worth of trades were “round-trip” since 1999. Roughly two-thirds of these were done on the Intercontinental Exchange; that is, the online, nonregulated, nonaudited, nonoversight for manipulation and fraud entity run by banks in this country. That means thousands of subscribers would see false pricing. Under investigation, a lawyer for J.P. Morgan Chase admitted the bank engineered a series of “round-trip” trades with Enron.

You can chart the damage done by Goldman Sachs and their gang of thieves by looking at commodity pricing pre- and post-ICE. Before ICE, commodities followed a more or less normal growth path that matched global GDP and was always limited in price appreciation by the fact that, ultimately, someone had to take delivery of a physical commodity at a set price.

ICE threw that concept out the window and turned commodity trading into a speculative casino game where pricing was notional and contracts could be sold by people who never produced a thing, to people who didn’t need the things that were not produced. And in just five years after commencing operations, Goldman Sachs and their partners managed to TRIPLE the price of commodities.

Goldman Sachs Commodity Index funds accounted for $60Bn out of $100Bn of all formula-managed funds in 2007, and investors in the GSCI lost 15% in 2006 while Goldman had a record year. John Dizard of the Financial Times calls this process “date rape” by Goldman Sachs as the funds index rolls cost investors 150 basis points of return annually ($9Bn on the Goldman funds); but GS, under the prospectus, is able to “manage our corresponding position,” which means that it has to deliver a price at the end of the roll period. If Goldman can cover that obligation at a better price, they will, and GS pockets the difference. This is why we see such wild moves in the day’s before rollover—there are billions riding on GS hitting their target every month…

It is not surprising that a commodity scam would be the cornerstone of Goldman Sach’s strategy. CEO Lloyd Blankfein, rose to the top through Goldman’s commodity trading arm J Aron, starting his career at J Aron before Goldman Sachs bought them over 25 years ago. With his colleague Gary Cohn, Blankfein oversaw the key energy trading portfolio. According to Cook:

“It appears clear that BP and Goldman Sachs have been working collaboratively—at least at a strategic level—for maybe 15 years now. Their trading strategy has evolved over time as the global market has developed and become ever more financialised. Moreover, they have been well placed to steer the development of the key global energy market trading platform, and the legal and regulatory framework within which it operates.”

“It appears to me that what has been occurring in the oil market may have been that—through the intermediation of the likes of J Aron in the Brent complex—long term funds have been lending money to producers—effectively interest-free—and in return the producers have been lending oil to the funds. This works well for as long as funds flow into the market, or do not withdraw in quantity, but once funds withdraw money from the market, there is a sudden collapse in price.”

“A combination of market hype, the opacity of the Brent Complex, and the relatively small scale of trading of the benchmark BFOE crude oil contract enabled the long run up in prices, and several observers believe that the dramatic spike to $147.00 per barrel was the specific outcome of the collapse of SemGroup, which that company’s management subsequently blamed mainly on Goldman Sachs.”

Mike Riess issued a study of “Modern Market Manipulation” in which he describes how GS, MS, DB et al have systematically created an environment that rewards those who manipulate the system, robbing the poor to send the money up they company ladder in exchange for record bonus payouts, which (by design) are the majority of their traders’ salaries:

Before the ‘80’s, there were just us traders. “Rogue” traders arrived on the scene with the large institutional participants, both private and public. Today’s companies and government marketing boards are large enough for senior management to distance itself from controversy, including market manipulation.

In a competitive, amoral environment, middle managers in these mega-organizations have the authority to hijack an institution’s reputation and the financial clout to manipulate the market—and they do. As long as they succeed, they enjoy promotions and perks and, sometimes, the fruits of embezzlement. If the manipulation unravels, the company denies any knowledge and hangs the rogue out to dry. We’ve seen this over and over again, most recently with D’Avila and Codelco, Hamanaka and Sumitomo, Leeson and Barings and Tsuda and Daiwa Bank.

The CFTC’s definition of manipulation is:

• A planned operation that causes or maintains an artificial price.


• Unusually large purchases or sales in a short period of time in order to distort prices.


• Putting out false information in order to distort prices.

In mid-2008 it was estimated that some $260 billion was invested in the Brent energy markets on the ICE while the value of the oil actually coming out of the North Sea each month, at maybe $4 to $5 billion at most. NYMEX trading follows a similar path with 258,000, 1,000-barrel contracts open for December delivery (258M barrels), which were traded 327,000 times yesterday alone yet, at the end of the period, less than 40M barrels of oil will actually be delivered as that is the total capacity at Cushing, OK—where NYMEX contract deliveries are settled. Every single one of those traders know it is not even possible for 80% of the contracts they are trading to be fulfilled—its a joke, but the joke is on YOU!

Over the course of an average month at the NYMEX, 5 BILLION barrels of oil will be traded, with a fee being collected on every single transaction which is ultimately passed down to US consumers, yet less than 40 million barrels will actually be delivered. That is just 8 tenths of 1 percent of actual demand for the product that is being traded—99.2% of the oil transaction fees being paid by the American people do nothing more than create fees for the traders and record profits and bonuses for the trading firms!

Index Speculators have now stockpiled, via the futures market, the equivalent of 1.1 billion barrels of petroleum, effectively adding eight times as much oil to their own stockpile as the United States has added to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve over the last five years.

Today, in many commodities futures markets, they are the single largest force. The huge growth in their demand has gone virtually undetected by classically-trained economists who almost never analyze demand in futures markets.

As money pours into the markets, two things happen concurrently: the markets expand and prices rise. One particularly troubling aspect of Index Speculator demand is that it actually increases the more prices increase. This explains the accelerating rate at which commodity futures prices (and actual commodity prices) are increasing.

Before ICE, the average American family spent 7% of their income on food and fuel. Last year, that number topped 20%. That’s 13% of the incomes of every man, woman and child in the United States of America, over $1 TRILLION EVERY SINGLE YEAR stolen through market manipulation. On a global scale, that number is over $4Tn per year—80 Madoffs!

Why is there no outrage; why are there no investigations? Well the answer is the same—$4Tn per year buys you a lot of political clout, it pays to have politicians all over the world look the other way while GS and their merry men rob from the poor and give to the rich on such a vast scale that it’s hard to grasp the damage they have done and continue to do to the global economy.

CIBC Chief Economist, Jeff Rubin, issued a report last year that blames the current recession on high oil prices, saying defaulting mortgages are only a symptom. According to Rubin, these higher oil prices caused Japan and the Eurozone to enter into a recession even before the most recent financial problems hit. Higher oil prices started four of the last five world recessions; we shouldn’t be too surprised if they started this one also:

Oil shocks create global recessions by transferring billions of dollars of income from economies where consumers spend every cent they have, and then some, to economies that sport the highest savings rates in the world. While those petro-dollars may get recycled back to Wall Street by sovereign wealth fund investments, they don’t all get recycled back into world demand. The leakage, as income is transferred to countries with savings rates as high as 50%, is what makes this income transfer far from demand neutral.

There is NO shortage of oil. OPEC alone has 6-7 Million barrels a day of spare capacity, more than the total disruption of any single country and any two countries other than Saudi Arabia could offset. Additionaly ICE partners Total and JPM are part of the cartel that is totally skewing the global demand picture by storing 125M barrels of oil in offshore tankers. That’s 15 days of US imports that have been “ordered” but never delivered so they show up as an extra 1Mbd of global demand, even though nobody actually wants them.

Land-based storage is also bursting at the seems, with global supplies up to 61 days of total consumption (84Mbd) up from 52 days last year. That’s 5 BILLION barrels of oil already out of the ground, in barrels and ready to go AND THEY KEEP MAKING 86M MORE EVERY DAY!!!

Where is the shortage? Mainly, it is media hype pushed by “analysts” at the very firms that profit the most from high oil prices. Goldman Sachs issues bullish opinions on oil and builds large positions in oil, while it is the cartel’s job to hide oil in off shore tankers, and then sell forward all the oil, with futures contracts, locking in the high price. Of course they have their media hounds as well, most notably the Drudge Report. As noted by Goldmansachsrules:

Type in the word “OIL” inside the “Drudge Report” search engine. It returns 1,965 headlines with the word “OIL.” Over the last couple years, the Drudge Report has ran 1,965 headlines with the word “OIL.” Most of these articles were hosted by the worthless organizations of Yahoo, Breibart, APNews, and Reuters. The Drudge Report just creates the headline, and links it the article hosted by who ever is doing the “hyping.”

Search on the word “credit crisis” and you only get 12 archived headlines. The word “bailout” yields only 268. The word “bank” returns only 568. So you have the Drudge Report hyping the oil market, because they bring it up almost 2,000 times. Unlike the “credit crisis” or “Wall Street Bailout” that actual did happen, the oil market and what did/didn’t happen between Israel/Iran is plugged 10 times more!

Of all the 1,965 articles that the Drudge Report ran with the word “OIL” in the title, most were hyping the oil market. The most notorious cases, a few times a week, were hosted by Yahoo, Breibart, and AP News. Most of these articles were plugged with the same paragraph that stated if “Israel were to attack Iran, Iran would retaliate by taking over the straits of Hormuz, the largest pathway for oil and we all know what that would do to the price of oil.

It truly takes a global village of manipulators and their lackeys to pull off a con on the scale of oil, but it’s also the most profitable scam ever perpetrated on the people of this planet as they take control of a vital resource and then create artificial shortages and drive speculative demand in order to charge you an extra dollar per gallon of gas. You don’t complain because it’s “only” $15-$20 every time you fill up your tank, but that’s what they count on and that’s where you’re wrong—it’s $20 from you and $20 from EVERY SINGLE ONE of your customers once or twice a week and $20 more dollars that your employees need just to get to work. It’s money that could be going into your business instead of a new gold bathtub for a Saudi Prince or a Goldman trader.

Global drivers consume 1.7Bn gallons of gas every single day—that $1 is $50Bn a month, a Madoff per month that is being taken away from YOU and YOUR business and the non-energy/financial businesses you invest in. Of course we can give up and invest in those sectors (we do) but that doesn’t do much for the global economy. And, even as you sit here now, not doing anything, those oil and profits have been plowed into the copper and gold markets.

And now the same Goldman energy cartel is bidding to take over your clean air (through Carbon Credit trading) and your clean water. Maybe when they are charging you $80 a gallon for water and 10 cents a breath you’ll want to do something about it.

I think I’ll start right now and you can too! Here are the e-mail addresses and fax numbers for all of yor Senators, Congresspeople and Governors. Send this article to them and let them know you’d like to see an investigation. Take a few minutes of your time to save a few bucks on your next gallon of water!

Speculators Blamed for Oil Price Spikes

By Kevin G. Hall, McClatchy Newspapers
July 28, 2009

The chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission signaled Tuesday that his agency is likely to limit financial speculators' ability to drive up prices for oil and other fuels.

Excessive speculation, suggested CFTC chief Gary Gensler, drove the price of oil to a record $147 a barrel a year ago, making it unnecessarily more expensive for Americans to heat their homes and fuel their cars.

"I believe we must seriously consider setting strict position limits in the energy markets," Gensler said at the start of a public hearing to consider limiting the number of contracts that an oil trader can hold.

Gensler's comments mark a stark shift from the Bush administration's view. When a Republican headed the CFTC last year, the agency concluded that market forces of supply and demand, not financial speculators, drove record increases in energy prices. However, Gensler and at least one other commissioner, Bart Chilton, think that speculation, at a minimum, drove the price of oil higher than it would've gotten otherwise.

Investors, many of them big pension funds working with Wall Street investment banks, poured speculative money into futures, or contracts for future delivery. This inflow, as much as $300 billion, appears to have pushed prices to record levels, and helped them rebound again during the past six months from their winter lows.

Testifying Tuesday before the CFTC, representatives from utilities, the airline industry and petroleum marketers all called on the agency to restrict Wall Street speculators to prevent a return to last year's price volatility.

Allowing such a return would have "serious impact on the national air transportation system and the economy," including airline bankruptcies or mergers, warned Ben Hirst, general counsel for Delta Airlines, testifying on behalf of the Air Transport Association.

Gensler signaled that the question of limits on speculative investment isn't a matter of if but when.

"As we move forward in considering position limits, I believe that we should apply consistent, across-the-board regulations to all futures market participants," Gensler said, noting that the agency, and not individual exchanges, should set the new limits. "With competing exchanges, regulations must be applied equally to similar contracts in different markets. The CFTC is in the best position to apply limits across different exchanges, and we are most able to strike a balance between competing interests and the responsibility to protect the American public."

The CFTC is also weighing whether to take back exceptions granted over decades to big Wall Street powers such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley that allow their investments in energy contracts to be regulated as if they were airlines or refineries, free from limits on the number they can buy.

Commercial fuel users are exempt from position limits because they actually take delivery of the product. Wall Street firms, which don't take delivery, received the same exemptions, first from the CFTC and later from commodity exchanges, on the grounds that they needed to hedge against risks that they've taken through private bets on the price of oil.

These private bets are called swaps. The swaps market dwarfs the regulated futures markets. Lack of transparency in these markets, and uncertainty about who actually owes what to whom, has amplified the global financial crisis.

"It became more apparent to me today than it ever has before that the agency should be the one to grant hedge exemptions," Chilton said in an interview. He noted that exchanges have incentives to grant exemptions to big players who bring more trading volume, and thus profits, to the exchanges. "Our job is to protect consumers and ensure these markets are working effectively and efficiently."

Executives from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are slated to testify Wednesday before the CFTC. They've denied that the flood of investment they helped direct into commodities drove up oil prices, arguing that global concerns about inadequate oil supplies explain the run-up.

Why High Oil Prices Are Likely Here to Stay

U.S. Global Investors
April 11, 2011

A number of forces continued to push oil prices higher last week, reaching their highest levels in the U.S. since September 2008.

One factor fueling the run has been the continued decline of the U.S. dollar. You can see from the chart that oil and the dollar historically are negatively correlated. This means that a rise in oil prices generally coincides with a decline in the dollar, and vice versa. The U.S. dollar has seen a dramatic decline since the beginning of the year as oil prices have moved some 30 percent higher. This could be due to fact that roughly two-thirds of the U.S. trade deficit is related to oil imports.

Despite the run up, oil’s upward rate of change is still within its normal trading pattern over the past 60 trading days. Accordingly, this may imply that it isn’t a spike and we haven’t crossed into the extreme territory like we experienced in 2008 and 2009.

Conversely, oil prices are positively correlated with gold prices, which also saw a bounce this week. Looking back over the past one- and 10-year periods, oil and gold have roughly a 75 percent correlation. This means that three out of four times, when prices for one go up, prices for the other increase as well.

Another factor pushing prices higher is the seasonal strength that oil prices historically experience leading into the summer driving season. This chart shows the five-, 15- and 28-year patterns for oil prices. You can see that prices historically bottom in February before rising through the end of the summer.

We discussed in detail how these seasonal factors affect oil prices a few weeks ago. Click here to read “Oil’s March Madness a Boost for Refiners.”

Rising oil prices are also a result of what the Financial Times calls the “new geopolitics of oil.” The FT says three elements creating this new environment are becoming clear:

1. Young populations with high unemployment rates and a skewed distribution of income are a volatile combination for the people in power.
2. To placate these groups, oil-producing countries are increasing public expenditures.
3. Governments are also to extend energy subsidies to shelter the country’s consumers from rising energy prices.

A Deutsche Bank chart plots the share of population under the age of 30 for selected North African and Middle Eastern countries against the unemployment rate of this group. You can see that large oil producers such as Saudi Arabia have a high level of unemployment among youth populations.

This is why King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has announced a total of $125 billion worth (27 percent of the country’s GDP) on social programs for the public. For King Abdullah, this is the cost of keeping peace but has driven up the breakeven price for Saudi oil production to $88 per barrel, according to the FT.

Keeping these young populations happy and working is not only domestically important for these governments but for global oil markets as well. You can see from this chart that a significant portion of the world’s oil production comes from the Middle East.

With the unrest in Libya—a top-20 oil producer—essentially knocking out the country’s entire production, any further unrest in another country could threaten global supply. Upcoming elections in Nigeria have the potential to disrupt production for the world’s fifteenth-largest producer.

But it’s not just geopolitics that is threatening production. Natural decline rates from mature fields such as Mexico’s Cantarell oil field are starting to make a dent in global production. Reuters reported this morning that Norway, the world’s eleventh-largest oil producer, is experiencing a significant slowdown in production from the Oseberg oil field in the North Sea. Production is expected to be cut by 26 percent in May to only 118,000 barrels per day.

Meanwhile, oil demand has been picking up significantly in both emerging and developed markets. Oil demand in China and the U.S. has been rising since mid-2009, well before the uprisings began in the Middle East.

In China, a big driver has been growth in the Chinese automobile market. Auto sales increased 2.6 percent in February, and March data released by the Chinese Auto Association over the weekend shows auto sales grew 5.36 percent on a year-over-year basis in March.

The G7 economies have been in an up cycle since last year. In the U.S., employment rates and consumer spending have been steadily improving. Oil prices rising too fast remains a threat to this recovery but BCA Research estimates that oil prices need to rise above $120 per barrel before “significantly undermining consumer and business confidence.”

Exxon Mobil Now Supports Carbon Tax, But Is It All That Surprising?

By Daniel Taylor, Old-Thinker News
January 10, 2009

The media is hailing Exxon Mobil's announcement in favor of carbon tax proposals as a shocking, unbelievable move. But is it really that surprising? Could well meaning environmentalists be in for a shock to find that a seemingly "grass roots" movement has from the beginning been initiated from the top down?

As the Calgary Herald reports:

"Exxonmobil Corp., the world's largest crude oil refiner, supports taxing carbon dioxide as the most efficient way of curbing greenhouse gas emissions, its chief executive said."

The announcement came from Rex Tillerson, CEO of Exxon Mobil, speaking at the Woodrow Wilson international center for scholars in Washington, which has served as a platform for discussing various globalist initiatives for many years. That Tillerson would make this announcement is interesting, due to the fact that the Rockefeller family, who built Standard Oil [Standard Oil of New York later became Mobil, a predecessor to Exxon/Mobil], recently identified him as "resistant" to "take the threat of global warming more seriously." Are we to accept this story? Was there any real resistance in the first place?

A May 2008 article from the International Herald Tribune painted a glowing picture of the Rockefeller family in their quest to "press for change at Exxon." As reported:

"David Rockefeller, retired chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank and patriarch of the family, issued a statement saying, "I support my family's efforts to sharpen Exxon Mobil's focus on the environmental crisis facing all of us."

The Rockefeller family has held a very special interest in environmental matters for decades. Population control and reduction is a central directive of many Rockefeller initiatives. The recent focus on global warming is no different. Steven Rockefeller's Earth Charter is an example.

There are countless real environmental issues such as genetically engineered organisms being released into the environment causing unknown mutations, consuming potentially dangerous cloned animal products, mass honey-bee die offs, etc. However, global warming was identified by the Club of Rome's 1991 report The First Global Revolution as a unifier to funnel the energy of citizens and businesses alike into supporting globalist initiatives. The report states:

"In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill... All these dangers are caused by human intervention... The real enemy, then, is humanity itself."

Many of the "green" proposals to fight global warming will have a direct impact on your standard of living. Obama has admitted that sending "price signals" to change behavior is an option. Obama stated during a 2007 PBS interview:

"We're gonna have to cap the emission of greenhouse gasses. That means the power plants are gonna have to adjust how they generate power. They will pass on those costs to consumers."

Investment Banks are Big Players in Energy Markets

Reuters
June 19, 2008

Investment banks are big players in the energy markets, where an oil price boom has increased demand from a whole range of companies for products that can offset the risks of volatile prices.

The banks also can trade on their own account, so-called proprietary trading, where they bet their own cash in the oil futures and over-the-counter markets.

Some also make investments in energy-related infrastructure assets, such as pipelines, transportation and storage facilities.

The top three players are Goldman Sachs (GS.N), Morgan Stanley (MS.N) and Barclays Capital (BARC.L), the investment bank arm of UK bank Barclays Plc.

Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, once know as the "Wall Street refiners", have been active for two decades, Barclays Capital has built its business over the past 10 years.

Banks are increasingly active in the physical oil markets, where they say they need a presence to satisfy client needs and to gain access to information.

Both Morgan Stanley and Barclays Capital, for example, trade physical crude oil.

The futures markets where oil is traded include the New York Mercantile Exchange NMX.N, the world's biggest energy futures market, and ICE Futures Europe, owned by Atlanta-based Intercontinental Exchange Inc (ICE.N).

Oil and other energy derivatives are also traded over-the-counter. These markets are estimated to be between 10-15 times bigger than the ICE and NYMEX.

Other banks have expanded in energy and commodities, but fallout from the credit crunch has forced some of the newer participants to cut back or pull out.

Lehman Brothers LEH.N has been expanding as well as Citi (C.N) and Deutsche Bank. French banks BNP Paribas (BNPP.PA) and Societe Generale (SOGN.PA) have also have a presence.

Some of the banks' recent moves in energy and commodities are listed below.

* BANK OF AMERICA CORP (BAC.N) early this year shut its commodities and energy trading desk in London, becoming one of the first big investment banks to trim operations.

The U.S. bank said it would close its London commodities and trading desk and centralize operations in New York.

* BARCLAYS CAPITAL (BARC.L) - The investment bank arm of the UK banking group plans around a 30 percent increase in staff in its commodities business in the next two years.

The bank currently has around 250 staff in energy and other commodities, spanning oil and refined products, metals, power and gas, coal, agriculturals, emissions and investment products.

It has entered into a 5-year partnership with China Development Bank CHDB.UL to develop a commodities business in the country.

The firm recently started trading physical crude oil and has also entered the physical gasoline barge market in Europe and is also active in diesel trading.

* CITIGROUP (C.N) - The U.S. bank has been building up commodities in Europe over the past couple of years.

Its emphasis has been on newer markets such as freight, power and gas, carbon emissions and coal, but the firm also trades oil, precious and base metals and agricultural markets.

* CREDIT SUISSE (CSGN.VX) - The Swiss bank started expanding in commodities in a partnership with physical commodity trading group Glencore that was set up in early 2006.

In March, the bank hired 8 new staff, including 4 for its oil trading business, based in London ID:nL10814702

* DEUTSCHE BANK (DBKGn.DE) - The German bank began expanding its commodities business in late 2006 and has been adding staff and entering more markets, including carbon emissions, gas storage and transportation.

David Silbert, who was previously with Merrill Lynch MER.N, is global head of the business, which recently opened a new office in Houston in the United States.

* JP MORGAN CHASE & CO (JPM.N) - The U.S. investment bank will begin trading physical oil by the year-end, as part of plans to expand commodities and energy trading.

The U.S. bank added 50 people to its commodities and energy trading and investment team last year and aims to hire a similar number this year, giving it a team of 450 globally.

JP Morgan is taking on staff from the energy business of Bear Stearns, the rival investment bank it is in the process of taking over.

* MERRILL LYNCH MER.N - The U.S. investment bank began trading physical oil on a limited basis last year and has around 70 people globally specializing in oil and oil product trading.

The firm trimmed some energy traders and back-office staff in April in the United States and Europe.

* UBS - The Swiss bank (UBSN.VX) began a build up in energy and commodities but has now scaled back some expansion plans.

It had expanded its crude oil trading operation into Europe, after trading crude in North America since 2005 and subsequently launched power and gas in Europe.

But in January of this year, the bank announced that the European power and gas business would focus on northwest Europe and the UK and that it would place more emphasis on client business, reducing its proprietary trading activities in European power and gas.

Big Oil Companies Nearly Doubled Their Profits in 2010 Compared to 2009; the Top Five Oil Refiners Control More Than Half of the Domestic Refining Capacity in the U.S.

Oil Prices and Profits Rise While Big Oil Defends Its Tax Loopholes

American Progress
January 31, 2011

Oil prices are high and rising at an alarming pace. After hitting a low of $38 per barrel in January 2009, the price of oil doubled to $76 per barrel just a year later. By January 2011, prices rose another 14 percent, and the average barrel now costs around $87. And there is little reason to believe this will change anytime soon, as political instability in the Middle East may cause prices to rise even further.

As oil prices rise, so do Big Oil company profits. But even with their cash registers overflowing with dollars from struggling families, Big Oil is mobilizing to defeat President Obama's proposal to invest $4 billion annually in clean energy programs by ending unnecessary tax loopholes for this highly profitable industry.

The big five oil companies—BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil [Rockefeller-owned], and Shell—made a total profit of nearly $1 trillion over the past decade. The three oil companies that have reported their 2010 profits nearly doubled their profits compared to 2009. (see chart)

Their profits closely follow the rise in oil prices from 2005 to 2008, when the average price rose from $55 to $95 per barrel. Profits for the major oil producers rose from $13 to $21 per barrel. ExxonMobil did much better than its competitors, with profits rising from $16 to $25 per barrel.

These profits are likely to grow as oil prices continue to rise. CNN reported on January 31 that,

"Exxon Mobil posted quarterly earnings Monday that topped Wall Street expectations, thanks to rising oil prices and increased production."

Its 2010 profit of $31 billion is nearly two-thirds higher than its 2009 profit.

And we can expect oil prices and profits to rise even more as a result of instability in the Middle East. AP reported that,

"Growing political unrest in Egypt drove oil prices higher over the weekend, pushing benchmark crude up $3.70 to $89.34 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange."

This provides nearly a $4 per barrel windfall to oil companies because the oil is worth more though the cost of producing oil remains stable and relatively low. The Energy Information Administration estimates that production costs:

... can range from as little as $2 per barrel in the Middle East to more than $15 per barrel in some fields in the United States, including capital recovery. ... technological advances in finding and producing oil have made it possible to bring once-expensive deepwater Gulf of Mexico oil into production for less than $10 per barrel.

ExxonMobil, for instance, will make nearly $9 million more every day that the oil price includes Friday's spike. Prices will rise further if this instability spreads to other oil-producing nations such as Iran, Libya, or Algeria—all of which produce much more oil than Egypt.

Rising oil prices aren't the only factor driving bigger profits. Big Oil companies have invested a huge percentage of their profits into buying back shares of their own stock over the last few years, which helps drive up the price of the remaining shares. ExxonMobil, for instance, spent $35 billon—the equivalent of nearly 80 percent of its 2008 profits—on common stock purchases that year. It spent $700 million more on common stock purchases in 2009 than its profits of $19.2 billion. Meanwhile, ExxonMobil invested less than 1 percent in clean energy technologies the year of its record 2008 profit of $45 billion.

While Big Oil is busy raking in profits, American families are struggling with the worst economy in 80 years. One way to spur more job growth is to invest in energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies. President Obama proposed during his State of the Union address that Congress eliminate unnecessary tax breaks for Big Oil companies to pay for these investments.

"To help pay for [clean energy investments], I'm asking Congress to eliminate the billions in taxpayer dollars we currently give to oil companies. ... I don't know if you've noticed, but they're doing just fine on their own. So instead of subsidizing yesterday's energy, let's invest in tomorrow's."

The administration estimates closing these Big Oil tax loopholes would save "approximately $4 billion per year in tax subsidies to oil, gas, and other fossil fuel producers." These tax giveaways include the "domestic manufacturing tax deduction" that creates an incentive to keep manufacturing plants in the United States. Former CAP Senior Policy Analyst Sima Gandhi described the absurdity of extending this special tax break to Big Oil and gas companies since they cannot move an onshore or offshore oil field to another nation.

"Companies that manufacture, produce, or extract oil and gas or any primary derivative receive a manufacturing subsidy provided that the product was made in the United States. But since removing this subsidy does not affect the production of oil [in the U.S.], the subsidy does not significantly affect business decisions."

The Congressional Joint Economic Committee determined that excluding Big Oil companies from this provision "will not increase consumer energy prices." Oil prices rose from $42 to $90 per barrel since this tax break was created in 2004, so it did nothing to keep prices down.

The oil and gas industry argues its tax breaks are essential to its ability to create jobs, but the evidence indicates that clean energy investments are a more cost-effective job creator. A University of Massachusetts study found that investment in clean energy creates anywhere from two to four times more direct and indirect jobs compared to the same investment in oil and gas production. Investing $1 million to retrofit buildings to make them more energy efficient creates three times more jobs than a $1 million investment in oil and gas. An investment in wind energy creates two and a half times more jobs compared to the same investment in oil and gas. At a time when the federal government must reduce its spending while creating more jobs, it makes much more sense to invest tax dollars in the most cost-effective programs to increase employment.

Taxpayer handouts for oil companies have proven to be ineffective. Domestic oil production has continued to decline since the early 1970s in spite of multiple, generous tax subsidies. Gandhi reports that "the Treasury Department estimates that ending subsidies will affect domestic production by less than one half of 1 percent."

President George W. Bush, a former oil man, noted in 2005 that high oil prices have eliminated any remaining reason for tax breaks.

"With $55 oil we don't need incentives to the oil and gas companies to explore. There are plenty of incentives."

Oil and gas production can be a risky, dangerous business that provides an essential fuel for the American economy. The Big Oil companies deserve to make a profit. But it makes little economic sense for these same companies to receive billions of dollars in tax breaks while they benefit from rising oil prices that take a huge bite from families' wallets.

President Obama noted in his State of the Union that "the first step in winning the future is encouraging American innovation." Some special interests such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce believe that America cannot meet this challenge, saying the "administration has [an] unrealistic approach on energy."

We believe that we can innovate, compete, and grow if we make investments in the clean energy technologies of the future. Eliminating tax loopholes for enormously profitable oil companies to provide incentives and seed capital for investors in this $2 trillion industry is essential to our economic recovery and competitiveness.

Oil and Gasoline Inventories Moving in the Opposite Direction

Bespoke Investment Group
March 30, 2011

This week's release of energy inventories for the last week reinforces a trend that has been in place for the last several weeks. While oil inventories have been rising and coming in ahead of expectations, gasoline inventories have been declining and falling at a faster than expected rate. At this rate, it is only a matter of weeks before gasoline inventories will fall below average. For oil, May is when inventories typically begin their seasonal period of decline, so that will be a key time to watch and see how things trend this year versus historically.

What Causes High Gas Prices? (Excerpt)

WeatherImagery.com
May 24, 2007

...In the past, gasoline prices pretty much mirrored the price per barrel of oil. If oil was in short supply and the price increased, gasoline prices would also increase. However, in the early part of this decade, we saw a new anomaly with gasoline prices: they started to spike.

It would appear something other than the price of oil has a much greater affect on the the price of gasoline. While oil prices do have some affect on gasoline prices, it’s apparently not that much. After all, when oil was half the price it is now, gasoline wasn’t half its price. Something else is at work.

When the oil companies get their oil, they transport it to refining facilities across the country, most of which are in Texas. The refining facilities are responsible for taking the crude oil and converting it into usable products.

Consolidation in the refining industry has limited our refining capabilities. The three biggest American oil companies ExxonMobile [Rockefeller-owned], ConocoPhillips, and ChevronTexaco used to be six individual companies. There was a time when the oil industry wasn’t making a profit (hard to believe, but it wasn’t that long ago). When they combined, they also bought out some of the smaller refiners.

The top five refiners now control more than half of the domestic refining capacity in the United States. Unfortunately, this has allowed the big refiners to tightly control gasoline reserves thus greatly affecting availability and prices. Is this bad? It depends. If they are deliberately reducing refining capabilities to reduce the amount of gasoline they produce, thus increasing their profit margins, then yeah … it is.

Without a competitive market, the consumer will continue to suffer because there is no incentive for Big Oil to increase refining capacity when there is a shortage. Spending millions to construct new refineries to produce gasoline faster will only lower their profit margins. They like the prices high because it costs them the same amount of money to make the gasoline regardless of its price...

OPEC Could Reap $1 Trillion This Year

National Journal
March 30, 2011

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is set to make a record-breaking $1 trillion in export revenues this year if crude oil prices remain above $100 a barrel, an the International Energy Agency official told the Financial Times.

"It would be the first time in the history of OPEC that oil revenues have reached a trillion dollars," Chief IAEA Economist Fatih Birol told the Financial Times. "It's mainly because of higher prices and higher production."

The possibility of a record-breaking year comes as continued unrest in the Middle East and North Africa, engagement in Libya, and signs of an economic recovery renew debate among policymakers over how to deal with rising global oil prices and their ties to national security.

President Obama will weigh in on the issue today when he speaks about his new four-part “Plan for America’s Energy Security” at Georgetown University. And Republicans and oil state Democrats have argued for expanded offshore oil and gas drilling in light of rising prices and foreign oil dependence.

On Tuesday, House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Doc Hastings, R-Wash., introduced legislation that expands drilling and the Interior Department said in a report this month that the oil industry isn’t using a large portion of their drilling leases.

The report, along with other energy security concerns, will likely be discussed at Hastings’ Natural Resources Committee hearing this morning, where Bureau of Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE) director Michael Bromwich is scheduled to testify on his FY 2012 budget.

Morgan Stanley Cancels All Libya Oil Trade

Reuters
March 7, 2011

Wall Street bank Morgan Stanley (MS.N) has stopped trading oil with Libya, a trade source said on Monday, in an early indication that sanctions could hit exports from the north African producer.

The firm canceled all crude oil and refined products in the past week "due to the OFAC," the source familiar with the firm's transactions said, referring to the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control, which controls trade sanctions.

President Barack Obama signed an executive order on February 25 freezing the assets of Libya's President Muammar Gaddafi, his family and top officials, as well as the Libyan government and the country's central bank.

Traders said Morgan Stanley has regularly sourced oil from the North African country to feed the UK Grangemouth and the French Lavera refineries but did not know how much the bank was buying from Libya.

The bank also traded gasoline with Libya, sources said.

Morgan Stanley declined to comment.

Most estimates suggest around half of the country's 1.6 million barrels per day (bpd) of oil production capacity has been suspended due to clashes between government forces and rebels.

Some trade sources expect other oil companies to follow the bank's lead and halt oil trade with Libya, effectively halting exports to the international market.

"Players won't be able to buy Libyan crude even if it's there. It won't matter if they are producing or not," said a crude oil trader.

Austrian energy group OMV (OMVV.VI) said on Monday it was still getting oil from Libya despite severe output disruptions.

U.S. Could Tap Oil Reserves as Gasoline Price Surges

Reuters
March 7, 2011

The U.S. government reiterated that it could tap its strategic oil reserves in order to safeguard economic growth as surging gasoline prices increase pressure for action.

While longstanding U.S. policy is to release reserves only in the event of a significant and immediate supply shortage, some analysts say the Obama administration may feel compelled to try to tamp down prices that are being fueled both by outages in Libya and concern unrest could spread in the Middle East.

Reflecting market worries over unrest, crude futures prices were trading in Asia on Monday around their highest levels in more than two years.

Echoing comments made by a number of Obama officials over the past week, White House Chief of Staff William Daley told NBC television's "Meet the Press" on Sunday:

"We are looking at the options. The issue of the reserves is one we are considering."

"It is something that only is done -- has been done -- in very rare occasions. There's a bunch of factors that have to be looked at and it is just not the price," he added. "All matters have to be on the table when you go through -- when you see the difficulty coming out of this economic crisis we're in and the fragility of it."

He spoke just before a survey showed the second-largest two-week rise in gasoline pump prices ever. The national average for a gallon of self-serve, regular gas was $3.50 on March 4, according to the influential Lundberg Survey of about 2,500 gas stations, up 32.7 cents from the February 18.

Congress has pressured the Obama administration to look to the emergency oil supplies as an option to ease consumers' fears over rising U.S. gasoline prices, which are nearing the all-time high of $4.1124 per gallon hit on July 11, 2008, according to the Lundberg Survey.

Higher oil prices could undermine the fragile U.S. economic recovery and damage President Barack Obama politically as he moves toward a 2012 re-election bid.

NOT 2008

The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve holds 727 million barrels of oil, or about 38 days of consumption, and has only been tapped a handful of times since it was created in the mid-1970s after the Arab oil embargo. It was last used in 2005 following Hurricane Katrina.

Thus far the International Energy Agency (IEA) -- which coordinates reserves policy among the world's major energy consuming countries -- has made clear it will rely first on OPEC to fill the void left by the violence in Libya, which has cut off an estimated 1 million barrels per day (bpd) of output.

IEA members South Korea and Japan, among the world's top 5 crude oil importers, have no immediate plans to tap into strategic reserves, sources said.

"There is no concern at all over supply shortages," said an official with Japan's Trade Ministry, which is in charge of the country's strategic oil reserves.

The official declined to be identified because he is not authorized to be quoted by the media.

OPEC powerhouse Saudi Arabia has stepped up production significantly, but oil prices remain high. The risk for markets is that the wave of North African and Middle East protests could spread to major Gulf oil producers, cutting off supplies that would be impossible to make up from other producers.

Despite longstanding U.S. policy on the SPR, there are reasons to believe the reserves could be used more liberally now.

Unlike in 2008, when oil prices shot to nearly $150 a barrel in a demand-led rally, the rise this year is driven by a loss of supply -- a distinction that could give Obama more latitude to tap the reserves, even though Libya ships only a fraction of its oil to the United States.

In addition, the global economy is in a more precarious state than was generally believed at the start of 2008, prior to the financial crisis.

"Sovereign debt issues need time and growth to resolve. High oil prices threaten that outcome. No leader will want to preside over a recession that they had the tools to avert," said Lawrence Eagles, head of oil research at JP Morgan.

His outlook calls for a possible SPR release if Brent crude pushes materially above $120 a barrel.

It traded above $117 a barrel on Monday, up more than 14 percent in the last two weeks. [A $10 increase in oil prices translates into roughly a 25 cent increase in retail gasoline prices.] Last week, the price hit its highest level since 2008. U.S. crude futures rose to more than $106 a barrel on Monday, also their highest level since 2008.

U.S. federal law allows the government to tap the reserve during a national energy supply shortage that raises petroleum prices and could damage the economy. The president has the authority to determine such an emergency.

While the reserves could help make up for lost supplies, it is unclear how effective they would be in tempering fears that unrest could spread to other, bigger producers including Saudi Arabia, where security forces have detained at least 22 minority Shi'ites following protests last week.

GROWING SUPPORT AMONG DEMOCRATS

U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner last week played down risks to oil supply, but also reminded lawmakers of the emergency stockpile.

"If necessary, those reserves could be mobilized to help mitigate the effect of a severe, sustained supply disruption," Geithner told the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

But there has been growing support among Senate Democrats for tapping America's emergency oil supply.

U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu on Wednesday had ruled out releasing oil from the reserve, saying ramped-up oil production in Saudi Arabia should lower the crude price.

"We're hoping market forces will take care of this," he added.

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ExxonMobil-led consortium nets ’supergiant’ Iraq oil field
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Are Wall Street speculators driving up gasoline prices?
Feds take new steps to stop overseas natural gas speculation
Regulators aim to curb speculators' influence on oil prices
How Obama's regulation plan aims to fix what went wrong
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Gensler: statement on futures markets
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Shell calls for global cap-and-trade system
Big Oil Behind Copenhagen Climate Scam
Oil Rallies for Ninth Day on Icy Weather; Stocks, U.S. Futures Fluctuate
Oil below $83 after 10-day rise on US stock build
Trading Commission Proposes Curbing Speculation in Oil Prices
Oil Isn't 'Expensive', the Dollar Is Cheap
Aware of the historical relationship between gold and oil, Reagan deduced that oil was due for a correction based on a 20% drop in the price of an ounce of gold since his election. Sure enough, by December of 1981 the price of a barrel of oil was nearly 20% lower than it had been one year before. Looked at over a longer timeframe, from 1970 to 1981 the price of gold rose 1,219 percent, versus a rise in the price of oil 1,291 percent. This wasn't coincidental. With gold and oil both priced in dollars, and with gold serving as the best proxy for the latter's value, a jump in the gold price neatly foretold the oil "shocks" of the 1970s that were merely dollar shocks ... Oil hasn't become expensive this decade; rather the dollar has become very cheap. Strengthen the dollar, and worries over nosebleed gasoline prices will quickly become a thing of the past. Absent that, to hope that something will become inexpensive when the unit of account in which it's priced continues to fall is to indulge in fantasy.

Updated 4/25/11 (Newest Additions at End of List)

The Hidden Agenda for World Government

The Democrats Are Privatizing Wealth Redistribution

By Tom Mullen, Campaign for Liberty
November 9, 2009

George W. Bush redistributed more wealth during his presidency than any president had since Lyndon Johnson. Republicans really have never had any problem with redistributing wealth as long as the proceeds go to the right people.

Since Medicare benefits senior citizens, a constituency that no election can be won without in the baby boomer retirement era, Republicans had no problem using the force of government to take money from one individual and use it to buy "healthcare" for another -- as they did with their Medicare prescription drug benefit. Neither do they hesitate to redistribute to bankers, under the cover of "saving the financial system." God help us if there is ever a constituency of senior citizen bankers.

In fact, if one looks at the federal budget as it existed before the massive bailouts started -- pre-TARP -- at least 80% of the almost $3 trillion budget amounted to wealth redistribution.

Always there was some rationalization for why this or that group must receive federal funds "for the good of all."

• The farmers must be subsidized because there is absolutely no way to sustain farming in a market economy.


• If large farming corporations weren't subsidized, we would all starve.


• Medical research must be subsidized because we will eventually all die of cancer, AIDS, and other horrific diseases if the government doesn't subsidize medical research.


• Corporations in general must be subsidized because if one were to go out of business, everyone would be unemployed.

The Democrats typically attempt to characterize the Republicans as racist or elitist because the Republicans have traditionally resisted wealth redistribution for the poor or minorities. However, the reality is that Republicans do this for the same reasons that Democrats resist redistribution to bankers and corporations (or at least they used to). The poor and minorities don't vote Republican. That is the only reason that Republicans attempt to leave them out.

No one in America seems to know any American history. Following the American Civil War, when black voters universally supported the Republicans due to their perception that the "party of Lincoln" had set them free, it was the Republicans who promised "40 acres and a mule" to blacks, and it was the Democrats who proclaimed themselves "the party of white men."

Enslaved by their former ruling class and now used as pawns in a political power game by the new one, the freed black voters of post-Civil War America serve as a perfect metaphor for the supposed "beneficiaries" of all government redistribution schemes.

Whether it is elderly people trying to scrape by on a Social Security Check, poor people trying not to starve on public welfare, or Iraqi citizens enjoying their newly provided "freedom," the so-called beneficiaries of government wealth redistribution are never the winners. It takes an alarming lack of skepticism not to ask who the real winners are.

As this new century has "progressed" (pun intended), even the blurry lines separating the two parties have begun to melt away.

Remember that George Bush's redistribution schemes also included stimulus "tax refunds" to everyone, whether they actually paid taxes in the first place or not. "Compassionate conservatism" was nothing more than a euphemism for attempting to blend traditional Republican rhetoric about "free markets" and "limited government" with thinly-veiled redistribution schemes. By doing so, Bush's Republicans hoped to hold onto their own base while chipping away at the Democratic voting blocks by promising them other people's money, just as the Democrats do.

Throughout the 20th century, the two parties employed this strategy of "borrowing a page from the other's playbook" over and over, always hoping to win voters away from the opposition while retaining the loyalty of their own traditional supporters. It was this that caused many liberals to criticize Bill Clinton for being "too much like a Republican." Why George Bush has managed to hold on to his image as an "extreme conservative" defies explanation.

Until now, there has always been at least one thing to say in favor of the Democrats: they have been honest about their intentions. They have come right out and said that their intention was to redistribute wealth in order to achieve "equality" or "social justice" or some other utopian goal. Certainly, no lucid American can deny that the Democratic platform has been a socialist one for at least the last century.

It has been the Republicans who have deceived their followers to a much greater extent by promising them liberty and property rights and then redistributing almost as egregiously as the Democrats.

One hallmark redistribution strategy used by the Republicans was "privatization." Somehow, they managed to successfully characterize forcibly extracting money in taxes from their citizens and redistributing it to private corporations as "free enterprise," as if "private" and "free" were synonymous. Alexander Hamilton must have smiled in his grave.

However, the Democrats have truly broken new ground during this presidential administration. Not only have they managed to outspend the voracious Bush administration in just ten short months, but they have taken a page from the Republican playbook and actually privatized wealth redistribution.

Formerly, however transparent the scheme, the money at least made it into the federal treasury for a moment before being paid out to the special interest that had bought it with votes.

However, H.R. 3962, the so-called "Affordable Health Care for America Act," dispenses with this formality. Now, using the coercive power of government, private citizens will be forced to pay their money directly to government-supported health insurers whether they wish to or not. The veneer that this is "public money" being spent for the "public good" has been completely stripped away. There is now simply a government pointing a gun at its citizens and forcing them to pay directly to the special interest that has successfully lobbied for their money. Even the King John of the Robin Hood tales did not extort for his friends this overtly.

A more perverse merger of left and right political corruption is unimaginable. Using the government's numbers, this will provided coverage for 36 million uninsured Americans at a minimum of $15,000 per covered life. Assuming these numbers to be at least "in the ball park," President Obama and his so-called liberals have just handed over a half a trillion dollars a year to corporate America (the health insurance companies). What true progressive could possibly support this?

The price of this corporate welfare, of course, is that any remaining vestiges of voluntary contracts between insurer and insured which health insurance still retained has been eliminated. Insurers are no longer allowed to determine rates demographically and based upon a real risk model. They are no longer allowed to offer diverse coverage packages to compete with one another for different customer groups. They now must offer low rates and uniform benefits to everyone as entitlements. Like individual welfare recipients, they have surrendered all of their liberty and property rights in return for other people's money. They are now just one more arm of the state bureaucracy.

The worst aspect of this great fraud is the implications it has for the liberty of every American.

The closest parallel to this heretofore has been automobile insurance. Americans have been forced to buy auto insurance directly from an auto insurer in order to exercise the "privilege" of driving on the government's roads. This was of course enacted for the public good, to ensure that poor drivers could not bankrupt the innocent by demolishing their cars or saddling them with exorbitant hospital bills. However, as hostile to liberty as these laws are, they still leave the driver a choice. He can choose not to drive, however impractical or unrealistic that choice might be.

However, with this new bill, even that smattering of liberty is ripped away. Americans are now forced to purchase insurance from a government-protected and subsidized health insurance company merely because they are alive. Worse yet, they are not merely forced to make a single payment of tribute to satisfy their "individual responsibility." They must go on paying, year in and year out, for as long as they live. They cannot decline. They cannot conscientiously object. There is no escape from this tyranny save one: death. For those individuals that can demonstrate that they are completely incapable of paying, someone else will be forced to pay for them. No matter what, the government's corporation will be paid. Even life is no longer a right, but a privilege that the government extends to its subjects for a fee.

From 2001-2006, the Republicans controlled all branches of government. It was an horrific period of utter destruction of American liberty. The Democrats have now been given their chance, and in ten short months they have far outdone the Bush Republicans for this dubious distinction. Make no mistake. If the Republicans regain power, they will be worse still.

Americans should understand that they will affect no "change" in their government by electing either of these two parties. The federal government is a monster that has taken on a life of its own. Both parties are now its minions and are now indistinguishable from one another.

Our Declaration of Independence says that:

"Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."

The Ruling Elite Believe in Reincarnation and the Convergence of Man and Machine

"There exists in the world today, and has existed for thousands of years, a body of enlightened humans united in what might be termed, an Order of the Quest. It is composed of those whose intellectual and spiritual perceptions have revealed to them that civilization has secret destiny. The outcome of this 'secret destiny' is a World Order ruled by a king with supernatural powers. This king was descended of a divine race; that is, he belonged to the Order of the Illumined for those who come to a state of wisdom then belong to a family of heroes―perfected human beings." - Manly P. Hall, 33° Mason, "The Lost Keys of Freemasonry"

"Satanists believe that they will reenter the 'reincarnation cycle' in the future, at which time they will be able to enjoy the fruits of their labors from centuries before. These occultists even believe that they will come back as future leaders, at least as high as they were, based upon the occult Law of Karma. Therefore, they are patient to the extreme, but always alert to any change of the prevailing attitudes and belief structure of the people that might herald the time when the New World Order could be established." - David Bay, A Christian's View on Conspiracy in World Affairs, March 13, 1998

"Skull and Bones members, like all secret societies before them, are said to seek the 'tree of life' by which to restore man's lost immortality. This knowledge is widely believed by Bonesmen to be held in the secrets of DNA and by way of cloning so as to avoid death and judgment. In this sense Bonesmen share a common belief with cultists like the Raelians, who believe man is the product of 'alien scientists,' and who wish to overthrow traditional Christian religion with a one world religion based on 'aliens as god' with Lucifer as their chief 'god.' One of the symbols used to represent this philosophy of 'rebirth from death' is the phoenix, and it is a favorite symbol of these cultists." - BC Revolution, Secret Societies

The financial elite believe they can attain the fountain of youth and "restore man's lost immortality" by merging with technology; their goal is to evolve [through technology, science, bionics, robotics] into superhumans that will live forever. - Alex Jones, Endgame: Blueprint for Global Enslavement

"Man is a god in the making. And as the mystic myths of Egypt, on the potter's wheel, he is being molded. When his light shines out to lift and preserve all things, he receives the triple crown of godhood." ― Manly P. Hall, 33° Mason, "The Lost Keys of Freemasonry"



The super-rich believe that they will live forever by evolving into a separate species via science and technology (they also believe that their ancestors will be reincarnated to enjoy eternal life on this earth with them). They worship the creation ('Mother Earth') rather than the Creator (our Almighty God, who will destroy this earth and create a new heaven and new earth when Christ returns), so they have an urgent need to drastically reduce the world's population (the 'useless eaters') to preserve what's left of the earth's resources for themselves (or, as they put it, 'to alleviate pressure on natural resources by slowing population growth.') Perhaps they'll allow their Sierra Club minions to live along with them in this great society of 'the enlightened' since they'll need people to run the machines and do the paperwork.

Super-Rich ‘May Evolve into Separate Species’

The rich could all be cyborgs in the future.

By Amy Willis, Telegraph
October 25, 2009

The super-rich may evolve into a separate species entirely in the future due to enhancements in biotechnology and robotic engineering, American futurologist Paul Saffo has said.

“Gradually, by selective breeding, the congenital differences between rulers and ruled will increase until they become almost different species. A revolt of the plebs would become as unthinkable as an organized insurrection of sheep against the practice of eating mutton.” - Bertrand Russell, “The Impact of Science on Society,” 1953

Mr. Saffo, from San Francisco, says in the future people will be able to grow their own replacement organs, take specially tailored drugs, and use genetic research tools to alert them from any possible hereditary health dangers.

He adds that tomorrow’s world will be a fusion of biology and technology, where robots do the chores, cars drive themselves and artificial limbs are better than real ones.

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Mr. Saffo’s comments reflect claims by American scientist Ray Kurzweil who only a few months ago said immortality was only 20 years away due to the speed of advancements in nanotechnology.

But Mr. Saffo says these improvements would only be affordable to the super-rich. And because of this, he says, advancements may lead to a divide between the classes and eventually could lead to the super-rich evolving into a different species entirely, leaving his not-so-rich counterpart behind.

“In the 1980s it was the personal computer – came out of the garage, changed the world. In the 1990s it was the web. The next big device to wander into our lives is robots,” he told the Sunday Times.

“We may find we are absolutely dependent upon these electronic insects and that we don’t even know we are dependent upon them until something breaks.

“I sometimes wonder if the very rich can live, on average, 20 years longer than the poor. That’s 20 more years of earning and saving. Think about wealth and power and the advantages that you pass on to your children.”

Two Hundred and Fifty Pills to Immortality

By Courtney Boyd Myers, Forbes
May 5, 2009

Book Review: Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman's "Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever."

So you want to live forever? Ray Kurzweil will tell you how.

The life and work of the futurist and inventor was the subject of a film at this year's Tribeca Film Festival, Barry Ptolemy's Transcendent Man. When he was in his early 20s, Kurzweil watched his father lose a battle with heart disease. The experience spurred his deeply rooted desire to conquer death.

He's received White House honors from three presidents, including the National Medal of Technology, and is known for his innovations in print-to-speech text translation for the blind.

Suffering from heart disease himself at age 61, Kurzweil takes between 180 and 250 pills a day to help him live long enough to reach what he calls "Singularity," a point after which, because of tremendous advancements in technology, he believes he will be able to live forever.

In his most recent book, Transcend, he and co-author Terry Grossman offer detailed support for the "living long enough to live forever" concept, which was introduced in their previous book, Fantastic Voyage.

Many academics liken Kurzweil to a prophet; others call him a crackpot. Either way, he has reached celebrity status for his bold theories about Singularity, when man and machine will converge, creating super-intelligent, immortal beings.

According to Kurzweil, within this century we will have blood-cell-sized robots, or "nanobots," swimming through our bloodstreams to keep us healthy by zapping cancer, correcting DNA errors, removing toxins, extending our memories and eating up brownies before they hit our thighs... 

Each chapter of Transcend ends with futuristic conversations between "Ray, Terry2034 and Reader," which provide a glimpse into Kurzweil's visions for the future of health care. He sees a world equipped with technological advances and far fewer negative biological consequences.

The 400-plus-page book is easily summed up: don't smoke, eat well, get frequent check-ups, manage stress and exercise—and, of course, buy Kurzweil and Grossman's longevity supplements. But what sets this self-help book aside from the rest is its overall goal—to literally live forever.

Many believe that what Kurzweil preaches is science fiction. What's certain, however, is that his vision—that we will reach Singularity by 2045—make him a brazen optimist. Kevin Kelly, the founder of Wired magazine, doubts Kurzweil will be able to live forever, writing on his blog, "The Singularity is an illusion that will be constantly retreating—always 'near' but never arriving." 

But whether Kurzweil's controversial ideas provoke academics or challenge religious zealots, it's impossible not to recognize him as a man who, in his quest for immorality, has so blurred the boundary between man, machine and medicine.

Calling All Transhumanists

By Courtney Boyd Myers, Forbes
October 2, 2009

Technology futurists love to talk about the Singularity as the point in time when technology starts to progress so rapidly that machine intelligence melds with and surpasses human intelligence. It is to futurists what the Rapture is to fundamentalist Christians.

Those who welcome or fear this eventuality are gathering this weekend in New York City for the fourth annual Singularity Summit. Speaking at the summit are some of the better-known tech soothsayers, including author and programmer Ray Kurzweil; Steve Wolfram, the founder of the novel search engine Alpha; and Aubrey de Grey, an expert on anti-aging science. Also giving talks are Australian philosopher David Chalmers, whose idea inspired the Matrix film series, and Pay-Pal co-founder Peter Thiel, who has donated in the six figures to the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, the organization putting on the event. Last year, the summit drew 1,000 curious academics and entrepreneurs in San Jose, Calif. (See our story on the 2007 Summit here.)

Michael Vassar, the president of the institute, gives the Singularity just under a 25% chance of happening by 2040 and a 70% chance by 2060. When we do cross that line, Vassar says nothing will be the same.

“Humans living in the post-Singularity world will be as powerless as jellyfish are in today’s world,” he says.

His odds don’t take into account the chances of the world plunging into rapid technological decline due to a nuclear war or a worldwide collapse into barbarism.

Vassar’s six staffers at the Singularity Institute, including Kurzweil, publish papers with titles such as, “Uncertain Future Project,” “Global Catastrophic Risk Project” and “Economics and Machine Intelligence,” and have developed software that supposedly predicts technology’s trajectories and generates odds on the occurrences of global catastrophes like nuclear war and global warming.

Singularists fall into optimist and pessimist camps:

Optimists, such as Kurzweil, look forward to living in an age in which human intelligence is enhanced by brain implants that extend our memories, enhance our senses and allow us to solve problems faster and with greater accuracy.

The pessimists, and Vassar is one of them, see threats to humanity from the rise of an unfriendly machine intelligence that will want to enslave humans (think The Matrix) and use our brain matter for endless computation, much as we’ve used computers in the past 60 years.

Vassar says he and his colleagues at the Singularity Institute are working on seeing that a Matrix-like future never happens. Institute research fellow Eliezer Yudkowsky coined the term “Friendly AI” to describe an AI that could be built to have a moral conscience. One of the institute’s chief goals is to encourage other scientists to create this Friendly AI. (Read "Vassar's Machine Minds" in the AI Report.)

Many computer scientists and engineers remain very skeptical of the Singularity and the cargo-cult enthusiasm that surrounds it. They don’t believe in humanity’s ability to reach a point at which technology will be so complex as to render us inconsequential. It’s also likely that for economic reasons, technical progress and computer hardware performance will never accelerate at the speed required to reach the Singularity.

Will Wright, the creator of The Sims videogame series, has gone on record saying that machines will never achieve the kind of intelligence and creativity of which humans are capable. But he does believe that machines will one day be able to make themselves more intelligent, effectively reprogramming themselves until the first real AI achieves its own sort of sentience, one that is very alien to our own human cognizance.

Ariel Rabkin, a third year Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkley’s Computer Science program, doubts that many technical people take the Singularity seriously.

“Human-comparable AI is really hard,” he says, “And we’re nowhere close to achieving it.” He adds, “I can tell you that nobody I work with at Berkeley or elsewhere has ever mentioned it. And just to be clear, I don’t just mean, ‘We don’t talk about it in courses.’ I mean, nobody mentions it, at all, ever. We don’t think about it.”

But the Singularity continues to pique the curiosity of the layman. Over the next 12 months, Hollywood will release several movies with trans-humanist themes, such as Jonathan Mostow’s Surrogates, James Cameron’s Avatar, Barry Ptolemy’s Transcendent Man and The Singularity is Near, with a script by Ray Kurzweil. 

In a time when the publishing industry is struggling, Better Humans LLC has just launched a new magazine called H+ covering the trans-humanism scene for fans of radical technological change.

It’s possible that because the Singularity is a relatively new idea, it’s embraced mostly by the youth and dismissed as a counter-cultural trend by an older generation of professors and scientists.

“I’m the older side of the Singularists,” says Vassar, who is 30 years old.

The Singularity probably won’t destroy humanity in our lifetime, but it’s productive to keep asking the question of whether technology is serving us or if things are the other way around.

Microchip Implant: Mark of the Beast or the Coming 'Singularity'?

By Jim Edwards, Bnet
October 9, 2009

The news that Novartis wants a deal with Proteus Biomedical to produce a microchip implant called “Raisin” that will text your mobile phone when it’s time to take another pill, and VeriChip’s efforts to link microchip implants to online health records, has caused two separate controversies that seem bound to collide: some Christians believe the devices are eerily similar to the “mark of the beast” as described in the book of Revelation; while “singularity” buffs — those who look forward to the merger of humans and intelligent technology — regard it as a bold step forward in improving health.



The Christians make the obvious argument. On the subject of “the beast,” Revelation 13:16-18 states:

And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: 

And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. 

Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.

The suggestion is that if the government starts requiring chip implants, then this will be a sign that the antichrist is in charge and we’re at the end of days. (Of course, the beast in question will have “two horns like a lamb, and he spake as a dragon,” which should be easy to spot in a presidential candidate.)

On the other hand, the singularity buffs see nothing but good news. There’s an obvious advantage on the club scene, as VeriChip could replace both photo ID and cash:

Beautiful club-goers have a problem: If you’re going to wear a halter top and micro-skirt, there’s not much of anywhere to put a wallet. And who wants to carry a purse when you’re there to dance? Luckily, a company called VeriChip this year unveiled a solution based on radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology.

More importantly, the chip that increases your compliance with your prescription — so you don’t stop taking them before the full course of pills is up — will only improve public health, the singularitarians believe:

Raisin, or any system that helps us discipline our health habits is bound to help us live longer and happier. That’s the promise of Body 2.0 and I hope that the partnership between Proteus and Novartis means that promise is gaining ground in the global marketplace.

And finally: Proteus CEO Andrew Thompson believes his company’s market opportunity could be $100 billion. This is delusional. The serious debate here is over privacy and tracking concerns, and whether anyone might be required to have an implant. The vast majority of patients and consumers simply won’t want one.

The Psychedelic Transhumanists

By Michael Garfield, H+ Magazine
September 29, 2009

...Transhumanism in a fortune cookie: the familiar human world is just one point along a continuum of evolution, and we have an unprecedented capacity to participate in that process...
The common vision of “psychedelic transhumanists” shares much with the rest of the transhuman community, including an embrace of technology and science as both potent and inevitable; an evolutionary model of the universe and humanity; a sense of the human organism as something that can be tinkered with and expanded; a recognition of drugs as a technology that can dramatically reinvent identity, and a playful challenging of fixed boundaries....

McKenna: Everything is about to get very much more complicated, much larger, the number of choices are about to exponentially explode. In a sense, these technologies point us toward, if not literal godhood, then a kind of fictional godhood. We are all going to become the masters of the narrative in which we are embedded. Our separate stories are going to take on dimensions so multifarious that for all practical purposes we will each move into a cosmos of our own creation and control.

Pearce: ...Given an imperfect knowledge of the future, we have to be careful that transhumanism does not lapse into merely commodifying the unknowable, playing to people’s drive for immortality and pleasure as a meme in competition with the satisfaction of more immediate concerns. If transhumanism is understood as faith in our transcendental potential, then wisdom is a technology and real transhumanism starts now.

Davis: ...If one thing makes itself apparent from the psychedelic experience, it’s that the more you know the more you don’t know, and admitting this is a form of death. The acceleration of intelligence and extension of the individual lifespan means that life itself will increasingly come to resemble a constant re-imagining of self — not the indefinite perpetuation that many of us desire, but an ongoing process of death and rebirth. And by its very nature, death is across the event horizon, an impenetrable unknown...

Leary: A renaissance preaches a basic religion of humanism. The aim of individual life is to know yourself and treat each other as human beings...

McKenna: ...So this is an enterprise of integrity and millennial implication, and what lies as the goal is true humanness, in sympathetic symbiosis with the planet, and with these strange children that we have brought into the world, our machines. That is the challenge at the end of history. As we approach the event horizon, the only mature response is a humble participation in its unfolding mystery... which involves a deep scrutiny of our assumptions that the future will be the modified present, that the posthuman will be merely “humanity plus”...

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Globalists to Make a 'Political Deal' on Climate Change

Negotiators Scale Back UN Climate Pact Ambition

By Katy Daigle and Arthur Max, Associated Press
November 5, 2009

Barcelona, Spain – With the U.S. Congress still struggling to agree on sharp cuts in greenhouse gases or how to fund them, European officials said Thursday they were now striving for a political agreement instead of a new treaty to allow the U.S. and other rich nations to make commitments that are not legally binding.

The revised thinking was an implicit admission of defeat: the two-year timetable for crafting a landmark treaty will miss its deadline, and that failure threatens to deepen the distrust between rich countries and poor nations reeling from drought and failing crops caused by persistently warmer weather.

The treaty had been due to be completed in December at a 192-nation conference in Copenhagen, Denmark.

European and U.N. officials are now suggesting a political deal, rather than a legal accord, that would rely on commitments from both wealthy and developing countries. Industrial countries would commit to firm targets for reducing emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide and allocating funds for poor countries, while developing countries would specify their plans for low-carbon growth.

Such a deal would not be legally binding, but would carry the authority of world leaders who would come to Copenhagen to sign off on it. Nations would agree to stick to their promises while they continue negotiating the details of a treaty, taking as long as another year.

The delay is significant. The only instrument for controlling carbon emissions, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, expires in 2012. Unless a new treaty is in place by then, no regulations will exist, threatening chaos among industries relying on predictable rules for their business development.

"People are more and more talking about a framework ... that you clarify further in the following months," said Artur Runge-Metzger, chief delegate from the European Union Commission.

Despite the troubled passage of U.S. legislation, delegates at the U.N. talks in Spain had not given up hope the Obama administration will bring specific pledges to the final round of negotiations in Copenhagen.

Success at Copenhagen "depends very much on President Obama himself, on ... whether he can put numbers on the table or not," Runge-Metzger said.

Legislation working its way through Congress would reduce U.S. emissions by about 4 percent below 1990 levels. The Europeans and developing countries have complained, however, about the Washington's "low ambitions."

Former Vice President Al Gore, who won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize along with the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for highlighting global warming, suggested the U.S. may not need the legislation to pass to help secure a global agreement next month.

Gore said in an interview with The Associated Press that draft U.S. legislation "that reflects consensus support, carrying realistic expectation of 60 votes" needed to pass in the Senate, would make the chances better than 50-50 that 192 nations could reach an agreement.

"That's the threshold that will enable the United States to play the leadership role the rest of the world expects of us," Gore said in Washington.

The downsizing of ambitions for the treaty after two years of difficult global negotiations left developing countries and lobby groups despondent.

"We are completely dismayed by the shuffling of feet and sliding backward of the developed countries," said Raman Mehta, program manager in India for global anti-poverty agency ActionAid.

Following pleas by European leaders in Washington this week, Senate Democrats sidestepped a Republican boycott and pushed a climate bill out of committee. Other committees still must weigh in and the partisan antics cast a pall over the legislation — one of Obama's top priorities.

"This is a very good start," Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pa., said. "It is regrettable that we could not move forward in a more constructive way."

Specter said the vote would send a positive signal to other countries before the Copenhagen conference.

"It is not the best signal, but it is a signal that the Senate is ready to move forward," he said.

But U.S. delays appear to have already jeopardized global commitment toward concluding a legally binding treaty next month.

Yvo De Boer, the U.N. official who is shepherding the talks, has urged negotiators to consider a transition agreement that would be adopted by consensus among the 192 countries. The proposal would delay the politically explosive question of the format the final agreement will take. Developing countries insist an amended Kyoto Protocol be the central document of a new treaty. The United States wants nothing to do with the protocol.

In private consultations, de Boer has proposed drafting an overarching statement of long-term objectives, and a series of supplemental decisions on technology transfers, rewards for halting deforestation and building infrastructure in poor countries to adapt to global warming, delegates said.

These agreements would be appended with annexes listing the emission reduction targets of all industrial countries; details of actions developing countries will take to lower the growth of emissions; a list of financial pledges by wealthy countries; and an outline of a new body for dispersing the funds, over which developing countries have control.

Though lacking grounding in international law, any decision accepted by all countries at Copenhagen would be "morally binding," de Boer said.

Even an interim deal would clear the way to mobilize funds to help poor countries. The EU has said euro5 billion to euro7 billion ($7.4 billion to $10.4 billion) will be needed in the next three years for developing nations to begin planning their first steps toward controlling their emissions and protecting themselves against the effects of climate change.

The EU calculated that $150 billion (euro101 billion) a year will be needed by 2020 to fight climate change in the developing world.

There was no sign that developing nations were backing away from their demands for next month's meeting — including that industrial nations pledge to reduce emissions by at least 40 percent of their 1990 levels by 2020. Scientists say at least a 25-40 percent reduction from those levels is required to avert climate catastrophe.

"What we can't do is keep the whole thing open and wait and see whatever comes out of the U.S., because the only possibility then is that the whole thing gets dragged down," said Antonio Hall of Oxfam International.

Alden Meyer, policy director at the Washington-based Union of Concerned Scientists, played down the political maneuvering and noted that the climate issue was now on the agenda for every major summit over the next month.

On Friday, finance ministers from the Group of 20 industrial and developing nations will discuss climate funding at a summit in St. Andrews, Scotland, and climate will dominate Oct. 18-19 talks in London by the 17 nations in the Major Economies Forum.

Al Gore’s Sequel to "An Inconvenient Truth" Recruits World Religions for a Holy War on Climate Change

By Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian
November 3, 2009

Al’s Gore’s much-anticipated sequel to An Inconvenent Truth is published today, with an admission that facts alone will not persuade Americans to act on global warming and that appealing to their spiritual side is the way forward.

In his latest book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis, the man who won a Nobel prize in 2007 for his touring slideshow on disappearing polar ice and other consequences of climate change, concludes: “Simply laying out the facts won’t work.”

Instead, Gore tells Newsweek magazine in a pre-publication interview, that he has been adapting his fact-based message – now put out by hundreds of volunteers – to appeal to those who believe there is a moral or religious duty to protect the planet.

“I’ve done a Christian [-based] training program; I have a Muslim training program and a Jewish training program coming up, also a Hindu program coming up. I trained 200 Christian ministers and lay leaders here in Nashville in a version of the slide show that is filled with scriptural references. It’s probably my favourite version, but I don’t use it very often because it can come off as proselytising,” Gore tells Newsweek.

Gore’s book arrives at a time of intense international scrutiny of America’s moves on the environment ahead of an international meeting on global warming at Copenhagen, now just more than a month away.

It draws on the scholarly approach Gore developed for Inconvenient Truth. Since 2007, the former vice-president has been calling experts together from fields ranging from agriculture to neuroscience to discuss possible solutions to climate change.

The book draws on 30 such “solutions summits,” as well as Gore’s countless telephone conversations with scientists at America’s best institutions. According to the book’s press release:

“Among the most unique approaches Gore takes in the book is showing readers how our own minds can be an impediment to change.”

New polling last month showed a steep decline in the numbers of Americans who share Gore’s sense of urgency in acting on climate change.

The book aims to reach those Americans by familiarising readers with emerging alternative energy sources, such as geothermal, biomass and wind power, as well as the possibilities of making cleaner coal power plants, and developing a more efficient and responsive “smart” electrical grid.

Gore also explores how deforestation, soil erosion, and the rising world population are multiplying the effects of rising greenhouse gas emissions.

Much of the material was developed through the series of brainstorming sessions organised by Gore. Since 2007, the former vice-president has been calling experts together to discuss possible solutions to climate change. He has also held countless telephone conversations with scientists at America’s best institutions.

“He is one of the only politicians that takes the time to actually talk to scientists who are producing the cutting-edge stuff and he comes in with questions. He doesn’t ask us how our results impinge on a particular policy he actually asks about science,” said Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist at Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who spoke to Gore along with colleagues four or five times for the book. “Nobody that we have dealt with has ever taken as much time to understand the subtlety of the science and all the different complications and what it all means as Al Gore.”

Those conversations led Gore to politically inconvenient conclusions in this new book. In his conversations with Schmidt and other colleagues at the beginning of the year, Gore explored new studies – published only last week – that show methane and black carbon or soot had a far greater impact on global warming than previously thought. Carbon dioxide – while the focus of the politics of climate change – produces around 40% of the actual warming.

Gore acknowledged to Newsweek that the findings could complicate efforts to build a political consensus around the need to limit carbon emissions.

“Over the years I have been among those who focused most of all on CO2, and I think that’s still justified,” he told the magazine. “But a comprehensive plan to solve the climate crisis has to widen the focus to encompass strategies for all” of the greenhouse culprits identified in the Nasa study.

The former vice-president has been working behind the scenes to try to nudge the White House and Congress to move forward on a 920-page proposed law to cut America’s greenhouse gas emissions and encourage its use of clean energy sources like solar and wind power.

On Saturday, he told the German newspaper, Der Spiegel, he was “almost certain” Obama would attend the negotiations. The White House has so far refused to make a commitment.

But Gore has also been confronted with almost daily fresh reminders of the difficulties of prodding Americans to action.

The proposed legislation has set off a ferocious debate about the costs of dealing with climate change – with conservative Democrats and Republicans saying reducing America’s use of oil will deepen unemployment and hurt average American families.

Republicans in the Senate have threatened to boycott a session today that had been called to move forward a draft of a 920-page proposed law to deal with climate change.

Progress on the bill is seen as crucial to getting a binding deal at Copenhagen. Barbara Boxer, the chair of the Senate’s environment and public works committee, said yesterday she was ready to move ahead without any Republican participation.

"Animism, naturalistic pantheism, Gaia theory — there are various belief systems that deify the natural world. But should a fervent belief in the need to fight climate change be given the same legal protection as an actual religion? A London judge said yes, ruling this week that environmentalism should carry the same legal weight as religion under Britain's employment laws." - Eben Harrell, Environmentalism, the British Religion, Time, November 6, 2009

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Obama Anticipates an H1N1 “Hurricane” to Hit

Obama’s H1N1 Swine Flu “National Emergency” Evidences Vaccine Market-Building for Mass Murder

By Leonard Horowitz and Sherri Kane, The Palestine Telegraph
November 2, 2009

President Obama’s declared H1N1 emergency cannot be reconciled by either vaccine shortages or flu cases; only by medical “market-building,” vaccination intoxications, and mass murder for population reduction says common sense and mounting evidence.

Over the weekend, initial reports from Reuters News Service and Fox News stated that the President’s declaration was intended to prepare the country in case of “a rapid increase in illness that may overburden health care resources.” The media quoted an unidentified administration official saying:

“It’s important to note that this is a proactive measure — not a response to a new development.” This action was “similar to disaster declarations issued before hurricanes hit coastal areas,” Reuters reported.

Why would the Obama administration anticipate an H1N1 “hurricane” to hit when Purdue researchers concluded last week the epidemic was expected to peak this week? In fact, too soon for vaccines to be helpful.

Thus, most people getting vaccinated now risk side effects for NOTHING — no benefit what-so-ever!

Furthermore, CBS News determined last week the CDC’s reported H1N1 cases had been overblown up to 97 percent. Only about 1,000 people have died of H1N1 since April’s Mexican outbreak. That is merely 1/18th, or less than 6%, of expected deaths from a normal seasonal flu during the same time period.

It is highly suspicious that David A. Paterson, New York State’s Governor, suddenly suspended “mandatory” H1N1 shots for health professionals citing vaccine shortages, not litigation exposures, as cause for the policy change.

Neglecting notice that more than 60 percent of nurses in New York State refused to take the H1N1 vaccines according to polls, and unions had filed lawsuits against New York and Washington State to gain injunctions against mandated injections, Paterson’s yellow press blamed “limited vaccine supplies” as reason to inject pregnant women and children exclusively. Only two weeks earlier, New York State officials posted their first priority, “as established by the CDC,” to vaccinate health care workers and emergency medical services personnel.

Oddly, all this talk about sudden vaccine shortages being the cause of a federal emergency grossly contradicts what many health officials were saying merely three weeks ago. United Press International (UPI) reported, for instance, Dr. Judy Monroe, Indiana’s state health commissioner, said that an ample supply of the vaccine would be available for everyone by mid-October. Now, suddenly, there is an alleged shortage that compels mixed messages and general confusion.

Revelations of the Swine Flu and Forced Vaccinations

“Shortage Marketing” Disease and Death

“This is called “shortage marketing,” Dr. Leonard Horowitz explains. “It is an increasing trend in the industrial world to get consumers to purchase products that are unappealing, over-inventoried, or scarce.”

For weeks preceding Obama’s declaration of national emergency polls showed the vast majority of Americans, including health care workers, rejecting the seasonal and H1N1 flu vaccines. So with stockpiles high, despite allegations of manufacturing delays, the government’s promotions and policy changes simply reflect “shortage marketing.”

But this is a “superficial concern” according to Dr. Horowitz, who references neurobehavioral and neurocognitive disorders demonstrated in vaccine recipients who were normal before getting vaccinated. He credits the brilliant work of Andrew Moulden, MD, PhD, photographically detailing tremendous physical damage occurring following vaccinations. These previously unknown and unseen subtle changes in nerve function and physical appearance is now demonstrated in pictures by Dr. Moulden that are irrefutable in courts and the scientific world.

Dr. Horowitz, a Harvard-trained expert in behavioral science, media persuasion and public health education, has spent 20 years documenting drug industrialists’ and health officials’ criminal actions.

“The only way to reconcile President Obama’s declaration of emergency, given the increasing risks of vaccine injuries, post-peak diminishing risks of H1N1, and the anticipated public health nightmare caused by live viruses “shedding” from those vaccinated to unvaccinated persons, is to follow the flow of money,” Dr. Horowitz says. “In the process of shedding vaccination H1N1, the highly unstable shed virus is expected to pick up more lethal genes from other circulating viruses, including possibly H5N1 that kills nearly 60 percent of those infected.”

Dr. Horowitz notes that authorities have been mum on the triple recombinant H1N1 produced in labs for use in the “active” vaccine. Experts know this is highly unstable, because it is a man-made laboratory creation that did not evolve naturally over the millennia. This unstable mutant more readily recombines with other circulating viruses when it is shed for up to three weeks, thus exposing non-vaccinated people who are infected with other viruses.

This is the best explanation for Obama’s anticipated “hurricane,” explains Dr. Horowitz, who criticizes the mainstream media for completely neglecting this greatest risk while falsely reporting vaccine “shortages.” Something else is obviously happening behind the scenes that only seasoned investigators can discern, he says.

He diagnoses the alleged vaccine shortage as a profitable ploy used by those “who have outrageously obvious connections to the Population Council, the preeminent organization directing global depopulation, as encouraged by Obama’s science czar, John Holdren. Dr. Holdren is the co-author of the 1977 book, Ecoscience, which calls for massive global depopulation using sterilizing vaccinations.

Dr. Horowitz points to the fact that Nonoxynol-9, a spermicidal drug causing spontaneous abortions in pregnant women, and birth defects in infants, is one of the many new “adjuvants” banned in the United States, but used by the American-based Baxter Company in their H1N1 flu vaccines stockpiled by European nations.

H1N1 Flu, A Pharmaceutical Hoax

“Just get yer damn vaccine!”

Outrageous Conflicting Interests

Dr. Horowitz also suggests discerning conflicting interests between vaccine makers and the news sources that break the federal government’s announcements, in this case Reuters and FOX news.

Reuters is directed by Thomas H. Glocer, a Merck & Co. director making money from H1N1 vaccine sales through Merck’s subsidiary, CSL, Inc. Merck also sells Pneumovax, a vaccine suggested for use at the time influenza vaccines are given, yet contraindicated in people with active influenza infections.

A “live” H1N1 vaccine infects those vaccinated with “active” viruses. Thus, Merck’s suggested Pneumovax usage is contraindicated according to their own package insert!

If that’s not bad enough, CSL, Inc. did its H1N1 vaccine safety testing on pregnant women, infants, and children at facilities financed by Rupert Murdoch and his family–the Royal Victoria Women’s Hospital directed by Elisabeth Murdoch, and the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute overseen by Rupert’s daughter-in-law Susan Murdoch. So much for FOX News’s impartiality.

The Wall Street Journal that announced “New York Ends Flu Shot Mandate for Health Care Workers” on October 23rd, is disqualified by way of its links to Merck also... WSJ CEO Councilman, David Brennan, directs the AstraZeneca’s Flumist manufacturer, Medimmune, Inc. AstraZeneca drafted Brennan from Merck & Company, and appointed him CEO in 2006.

This pattern of gross conflicting interests, and coordinated multi-media genocidal counterintelligence, expands with reading Thomas Glocer’s article wherein Reuters plugs “an experimental new drug called peramivir, made by Biocryst Pharmaceuticals Inc.”

Peramivir is produced by Jon P. Stonehouse’s BioCryst Pharmaceuticals, Inc. President and Chief Executive Officer, Stonehouse recently served as Senior Vice President of Corporate Development at (surprise, surprise) Merck. At Merck, Stonehouse was responsible for “leading strategic developments . . . [that] significantly changed the company,” according to BioCryst’s website.

The Partnership for New York City and Council for Depopulation

It is obvious that our H1N1 “intelligence” is being gathered and broadcast from the highest levels of the medical-media’s mafia. As previously reported in Dr. Horowitz’s “AFFIDAVIT,” submitted to the FBI earlier this month, and filed last week in a lawsuit against federal officials in Washington State, David Rockefeller, Rupert Murdoch, Thomas Glocer, and other media moguls are partnered in the world’s most powerful drug ring and biotechnology consortium. Its members include the government of New York State as well as the US Federal Government. Proof of these facts are available for inspection online at The Partnership for New York City (PFNYC). The site provides its members list and related pharmaceutical industry activities.

The Founder of PFNYC, David Rockefeller, wields tremendous influence over many of the foundations and institutions that direct the US Federal Government’s policies and practices. American “health care reform” is currently directed, on behalf of the Democratic party, by Sen. Jay Rockefeller.

The Rockefeller Brothers Fund granted millions of dollars to the Population Council of the City of New York during its formative years. Rockefeller family members founded this Population Council, according to The Rockefeller Archive Center. The organization currently advances globally as the world’s premier depopulation advocacy group. The US Federal Government and private institutions fund the Population Council at this time.

Doctor Oz Advises Kids To Get H1N1 Shot But Not His Own

Summary and Conclusion

“Biopreparedness” for the 2009 H1N1 Swine Flu is all about mind manipulation and vaccination for population reduction.

In the past week, the swine flu situation went from near ending to causing a “National Emergency.” People, aware of the dangers of H1N1 vaccinations, opted out and gained precedent-setting federal court prohibitions on mandatory vaccinations. CBS declared the numbers of H1N1 cases fraudulently overstated by the CDC, and additional lawsuits were filed exposing State and Federal officials for genocidal malfeasance.

Rather than admitting disgrace, government spin doctors integrated vaccine “shortage marketing” as a distraction for public consumption. New York State Health Commissioner, Richard F. Daines, who said only a week ago that health workers must be vaccinated for the seasonal flu and the H1N1 virus, or risk discipline, said that scarce vaccines would be given exclusively to pregnant women and children.

Ironically, US Health and Human Services Secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, pledged 10 percent of vaccines would be donated to other countries.

All of this preceded Barack Obama’s declaration of “National Emergency,” thus, exercising Executive power to implement The Model State Emergency Health Powers Act affecting most of the 50 States.

Obviously, none of this makes much sense unless you examine the fundamental and overriding intoxication and depopulation agendas, and what the media moguls know that few commoners learn: the H1N1 vaccines contain “live” viruses that are highly unstable.

As laboratory “reverse engineered” genetically spliced germs, they are expected to recombine with more deadly viruses, possibly H5N1, by January, 2010. These new strains, circulating the globe, are projected to kill nearly 3 billion people. This Lex Lutheresque evil is obviously orchestrated by David Rockefeller’s family and friends that control vaccine manufacturing, “health care reform,” mass media persuasion, and global depopulation industries.

Like it or not, you are advised to prepare for the worst.

The Engineering of “Pandemics” - Vaccine Induced Disease Epidemic Outbreaks

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Goldman Sachs' Low Road to High Profits

How Goldman Secretly Bet On the U.S. Housing Crash

By Greg Gordon, McClatchy Newspapers
November 1, 2009

In 2006 and 2007, Goldman Sachs Group peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting.

Goldman's sales and its clandestine wagers, completed at the brink of the housing market meltdown, enabled the nation's premier investment bank to pass most of its potential losses to others before a flood of mortgage defaults staggered the U.S. and global economies.

Only later did investors discover that what Goldman had promoted as triple-A rated investments were closer to junk.

Now, pension funds, insurance companies, labor unions and foreign financial institutions that bought those dicey mortgage securities are facing large losses, and a five-month McClatchy investigation has found that Goldman's failure to disclose that it made secret, exotic bets on an imminent housing crash may have violated securities laws.

"The Securities and Exchange Commission should be very interested in any financial company that secretly decides a financial product is a loser and then goes out and actively markets that product or very similar products to unsuspecting customers without disclosing its true opinion," said Laurence Kotlikoff, a Boston University economics professor who's proposed a massive overhaul of the nation's banks. "This is fraud and should be prosecuted."

John Coffee, a Columbia University law professor who served on an advisory committee to the New York Stock Exchange, said that investment banks have wide latitude to manage their assets, and so the legality of Goldman's maneuvers depends on what its executives knew at the time.

"It would look much more damaging," Coffee said, "if it appeared that the firm was dumping these investments because it saw them as toxic waste and virtually worthless."

Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman's chairman and chief executive, declined to be interviewed for this article.

A Goldman spokesman, Michael DuVally, said that the firm decided in December 2006 to reduce its mortgage risks and did so by selling off subprime-related securities and making myriad insurance-like bets, called credit-default swaps, to "hedge" against a housing downturn.

DuVally told McClatchy that Goldman "had no obligation to disclose how it was managing its risk, nor would investors have expected us to do so ... other market participants had access to the same information we did."

For the past year, Goldman has been on the defensive over its Washington connections and the billions in federal bailout funds it received. Scant attention has been paid, however, to how it became the only major Wall Street player to extricate itself from the subprime securities market before the housing bubble burst.

Goldman remains, along with Morgan Stanley, one of two venerable Wall Street investment banks still standing. Their grievously wounded peers Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch fell into the arms of retail banks, while another, Lehman Brothers, folded.

To piece together Goldman's role in the subprime meltdown, McClatchy reviewed hundreds of documents, SEC filings, copies of secret investment circulars, lawsuits and interviewed numerous people familiar with the firm's activities.

McClatchy's inquiry found that Goldman Sachs:

• Bought and converted into high-yield bonds tens of thousands of mortgages from subprime lenders that became the subjects of FBI investigations into whether they'd misled borrowers or exaggerated applicants' incomes to justify making hefty loans.
  
• Used offshore tax havens to shuffle its mortgage-backed securities to institutions worldwide, including European and Asian banks, often in secret deals run through the Cayman Islands, a British territory in the Caribbean that companies use to bypass U.S. disclosure requirements.


• Has dispatched lawyers across the country to repossess homes from bankrupt or financially struggling individuals, many of whom lacked sufficient credit or income but got subprime mortgages anyway because Wall Street made it easy for them to qualify.


• Was buoyed last fall by key federal bailout decisions, at least two of which involved then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, a former Goldman chief executive whose staff at Treasury included several other Goldman alumni.

The firm benefited when Paulson elected not to save rival Lehman Brothers from collapse, and when he organized a massive rescue of tottering global insurer American International Group while in constant telephone contact with Goldman chief Blankfein. With the Federal Reserve Board's blessing, AIG later used $12.9 billion in taxpayers' dollars to pay off every penny it owed Goldman.

These decisions preserved billions of dollars in value for Goldman's executives and shareholders. For example, Blankfein held 1.6 million shares in the company in September 2008, and he could have lost more than $150 million if his firm had gone bankrupt.

With the help of more than $23 billion in direct and indirect federal aid, Goldman appears to have emerged intact from the economic implosion, limiting its subprime losses to $1.5 billion. By repaying $10 billion in direct federal bailout money — a 23 percent taxpayer return that exceeded federal officials' demand — the firm has escaped tough federal limits on 2009 bonuses to executives of firms that received bailout money.

Goldman announced record earnings in July, and the firm is on course to surpass $50 billion in revenue in 2009 and to pay its employees more than $20 billion in year-end bonuses.

THE BLUEST OF THE BLUE CHIPS

For decades, Goldman, a bastion of Ivy League graduates that was founded in 1869, has cultivated an elite reputation as home to the best and brightest and a tradition of urging its executives to take turns at public service.

As a result, Goldman has operated a virtual jobs conveyor belt to and from Washington: Paulson, as Treasury secretary, sent tens of billions of taxpayers' dollars to rescue Wall Street in 2008, and former Goldman employees populate some of the most demanding and powerful posts in Washington. Savvy federal regulators have migrated from their Washington jobs to Goldman.

On Oct. 16, a Goldman vice president, Adam Storch, was named managing executive of the SEC's enforcement division.

Goldman's financial panache made its sales pitches irresistible to policymakers and investors alike, and may help explain why so few of them questioned the risky securities that Goldman sold off in a 14-month period that ended in February 2007.

Since the collapse of the economy, however, some of those investors have changed their opinions of Goldman.

Several pension funds, including Mississippi's Public Employees' Retirement System, have filed suits, seeking class-action status, alleging that Goldman and other Wall Street firms negligently made "false and misleading" representations of the bonds' true risks.

Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood, whose state has lost $5 million of the $6 million it invested in Goldman's subprime mortgage-backed bonds in 2006, said the state's funds are likely to lose "hundreds of millions of dollars" on those and similar bonds.

Hood assailed the investment banks "who packaged this junk and sold it to unwary investors."

California's huge public employees' retirement system, known as CALPERS, purchased $64.4 million in subprime mortgage-backed bonds from Goldman on March 1, 2007. While that represented a tiny percentage of the fund's holdings, in July CALPERS listed the bonds' value at $16.6 million, a drop of nearly 75 percent, according to documents obtained through a state public records request.

In May, without admitting wrongdoing, Goldman became the first firm to settle with the Massachusetts attorney general's office as it investigated Wall Street's subprime dealings. The firm agreed to pay $60 million to the state, most of it to reduce mortgage balances for 714 aggrieved homeowners.

Attorney General Martha Coakley, now a candidate to succeed Edward Kennedy in the U.S. Senate, cited the blight from foreclosed homes in Boston and other Massachusetts cities. She said her office focused on investment banks because they provided a market for loans that mortgage lenders "knew or should have known were destined for failure."

New Orleans' public employees' retirement system, an electrical workers union and the New Jersey carpenters union also are suing Goldman and other Wall Street firms over their losses.

The full extent of the losses from Goldman's mortgage securities isn't known, but data obtained by McClatchy show that insurance companies, whose annuities provide income for many retirees, collectively paid $2 billion for Goldman's risky high-yield bonds.

Among the bigger buyers: Ambac Assurance purchased $923 million of Goldman's bonds; the Teachers Insurance and Annuities Association, $141.5 million; New York Life, $96 million; Prudential, $70 million; and Allstate, $40.5 million, according to the data from the National Association of Insurance Commissioners.

In 2007, as early signs of trouble rippled through the housing market, Goldman paid a discounted price of $8.8 million to repurchase subprime mortgage bonds that Prudential had bought for $12 million.

Nearly all the insurers' purchases were made in 2006 and 2007, after mortgage lenders had lifted most traditional lending criteria in favor of loans that required little or no documentation of borrowers' incomes or assets.

While Goldman was far from the biggest player in the risky mortgage securitization business, neither was it small.

From 2001 to 2007, Goldman hawked at least $135 billion in bonds keyed to risky home loans, according to analyses by McClatchy and the industry newsletter Inside Mortgage Finance.

In addition to selling about $39 billion of its own risky mortgage securities in 2006 and 2007, Goldman marketed at least $17 billion more for others.

It also was the lead firm in marketing about $83 billion in complex securities, many of them backed by subprime mortgages, via the Caymans and other offshore sites, according to an analysis of unpublished industry data by Gary Kopff, a securitization expert.

In at least one of these offshore deals, Goldman exaggerated the quality of more than $75 million of risky securities, describing the underlying mortgages as "prime" or "midprime," although in the U.S. they were marketed with lower grades.

Goldman spokesman DuVally said that Moody's, the bond rating firm, gave them higher grades because the borrowers had high credit scores.

Goldman's securities came in two varieties: those tied to subprime mortgages and those backed by a slightly higher grade of loans known as Alt-A's.

Over time, both types of mortgages required homeowners to pay rapidly rising interest rates. Defaults on subprime loans were responsible for last year's housing meltdown. Interest rates on Alt-A loans, which began to rocket upward this year, are causing a new round of defaults.

Goldman has taken multiple steps to put its subprime dealings behind it, including publicly saying that Wall Street firms regret their mistakes. Last winter, the company cancelled a Las Vegas conference, avoiding any images of employees flashing wads of bonus cash at casinos.

More recently, the firm has launched a public relations campaign to answer the criticism of its huge bonuses, Washington connections and federal bailout. In late October, Blankfein argued that Goldman's activities serve "an important social purpose" by channeling pools of money held by pension funds and others to companies and governments around the world.

KNOWING WHEN TO FOLD THEM

For investment banks such as Goldman, the trick was knowing when to exit the high-stakes subprime game before getting burned.

New York hedge fund manager John Paulson was one of the first to anticipate disaster. He told Congress that his researchers discovered by early 2006 that many subprime loans covered the homes' entire value, with no down payments, and so he figured that the bonds "would become worthless."

He soon began placing exotic bets — credit-default swaps — against the housing market. His firm, Paulson & Co., booked a $3.7 billion profit when home prices tanked and subprime defaults soared in 2007 and 2008. (He isn't related to Henry Paulson.)

At least as early as 2005, Goldman similarly began using swaps to limit its exposure to risky mortgages, the first of multiple strategies it would employ to reduce its subprime risk.

The company has closely guarded the details of most of its swaps trades, except for $20 billion in widely publicized contracts it purchased from AIG in 2005 and 2006 to cover mortgage defaults or ratings downgrades on subprime-related securities it offered offshore.

In December 2006, after "10 straight days of losses" in Goldman's mortgage business, Chief Financial Officer David Viniar called a meeting of mortgage traders and other key personnel, Goldman spokesman DuVally said.

Shortly after the meeting, he said, it was decided to reduce the firm's mortgage risk by selling off its inventory of bonds and betting against those classes of securities in secretive swaps markets.

DuVally said that at the time, Goldman executives "had no way of knowing how difficult housing or financial market conditions would become."

In early 2007, the firm's mortgage traders also bet heavily against the housing market on a year-old subprime index on a private London swap exchange, said several Wall Street figures familiar with those dealings, who declined to be identified because the transactions were confidential.

The swaps contracts would pay off big, especially those with AIG. When Goldman's securities lost value in 2007 and early 2008, the firm demanded $10 billion, of which AIG reluctantly posted $7.5 billion, Viniar disclosed last spring.

As Goldman's and others' collateral demands grew, AIG suffered an enormous cash squeeze in September 2008, leading to the taxpayer bailout to prevent worldwide losses. Goldman's payout from AIG included more than $8 billion to settle swaps contracts.

DuVally said Goldman has made other bets with hundreds of unidentified counterparties to insure its own subprime risks and to take positions against the housing market for its clients. Until the end of 2006, he said, Goldman was still betting on a strong housing market.

However, Goldman sold off nearly $28 billion of risky mortgage securities it had issued in the U.S. in 2006, including $10 billion on Oct. 6, 2006. The firm unloaded another $11 billion in February 2007, after it had intensified its contrary bets. Goldman also stopped buying risky home mortgages after the December meeting, though DuVally declined to say when.

I'VE GOT A SECRET

Despite updating its numerous disclosures to investors in 2007, Goldman never revealed its secret wagers.

Asked whether Goldman's bond sellers knew about the contrary bets, spokesman DuVally said the company's mortgage business "has extensive barriers designed to keep information within its proper confines."

However, Viniar, the Goldman finance chief, approved the securities sales and the simultaneous bets on a housing downturn. Dan Sparks, a Texan who oversaw the firm's mortgage-related swaps trading, also served as the head of Goldman Sachs Mortgage from late 2006 to April 2008, when he abruptly resigned for personal reasons.

The Securities Act of 1933 imposes a special disclosure burden on principal underwriters of securities, which was Goldman's role when it sold about $39 billion of its own risky mortgage-backed securities from March 2006 to February 2007.

The firm maintains that the requirement doesn't apply in this case...

COMING MONDAY: Goldman Takes on New Role - Taking Away People's Homes

Since the economic collapse that swept millions of Americans out of their jobs and homes, Goldman Sachs has moved aggressively to recover its losses. The firm is pursuing marginally qualified borrowers into state courts federal and bankruptcy across the country and seeking to seize their homes. McClatchy examines one couple's multi-year attempt to get Goldman to admit that it had purchased their mortgage.

COMING TUESDAY: Goldman Left Foreign Investors Holding the Subprime Bag

Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms turned to secret Cayman Islands deals to draw overseas investors, including European banks and other foreign financial institutions, to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in securities tied to risky U.S. home loans. Unlike U.S. investors that lost money on the securities, however, these overseas institutions have fewer legal options.

COMING WEDNESDAY: Why Did Blue-Chip Goldman Take a Walk on Subprime's Wild Side?

Goldman Sachs was among the last Wall Street giants to enter the lucrative world of subprime mortgages. However, it didn't take long before the elite investment house was cutting deals with highflying firms, such as California's New Century Financial, whose lax standards would prove disastrous. Perhaps no lender was more emblematic of the subprime mortgage industry's spectacular rise and fall.

More Coverage (from McClatchy Newspapers)
Story: Mortgage crisis shows why financial regulation is needed
Story: Mystery: Why did Goldman stop scrutinizing loans it bought?
Story: How Moody's sold its ratings - and sold out investors
Graphic: Goldman's revolving door with government
Video: One couple stands up to Goldman Sachs
Video: Goldman Sachs' secret bets
On the Web: State-by-state data on troubled mortgages
On the Web: See our complete Goldman report

Report: Goldman Bet Against Own Products
22 Reasons Why this Recession is Different and Why it Will Endure
How Did America Fall So Fast?
Facing a Total Breakdown of Financial Markets
Goldman's chief executive apologizes for part in fiscal crisis
New Derivatives Legislation "Was Probably Written by JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs"
JP Morgan: Largest Provider of Food Stamp Benefits in the U.S.
Goldman E-Mail Lays Bare Trading Conflicts
Goldman admits 'improper' actions in sales of securities
Goldman Sachs accused of rigging tax vote
Discover to Pay $775 Million to Morgan Stanley in Settlement
Goldman Sachs: Don't Blame Us
On Apr. 7 Goldman Sachs will release its 2009 annual report with a letter to shareholders that will, for the first time, explicitly defend its conduct during the mortgage bubble and subsequent collapse.
U.S. Accuses Goldman Sachs of Fraud
Goldman fraud charges trigger possible wider crackdown
Senate probe: Goldman planned to profit from bust
Goldman “Sideshow” Hyped To Push Through Obama Banking Reform
Supreme Court nominuee Kagan sat on a Goldman Sachs advisory council
What is good for Goldman Sachs is bad for the world

Updated 5/12/10 (Newest Additions at End of List)

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