---BREAKAWAY CIVILIZATION ---ALTERNATIVE HISTORY---NEW BUSINESS MODELS--- ROCK & ROLL 'S STRANGE BEGINNINGS---SERIAL KILLERS---YEA AND THAT BAD WORD "CONSPIRACY"--- AMERICANS DON'T EXPLORE ANYTHING ANYMORE.WE JUST CONSUME AND DIE.---
A
regular reader here, Ms. M.W., shared this with me, and even though it
comes from a source that, to American readers, is usually considered to
be on the extreme right of the political spectrum due to its historical
associations with the John Birch Society, it deserves some comment. I’m
certainly not in synch with that wing of the American political
spectrum, but the article itself simply must be shared due to its
intrinsic relevance to some of the hypotheses and scenarios we’ve been
speculating about here, in this case, the scenario of a “retrenchment”
on the part of the Anglo-sphere oligarchs that I have been advancing,
indeed, since George Ann Hughes of The Byte Show first asked me
back in 2008 if I thought the elites were intentionally trying to
collapse the country, I’ve been maintaining that they’re not. There was,
for those unfamiliar with the American “alternative media,” quite a lot
of talk at that time that this was, indeed, the objective and scenario,
and it was an interpretation being advanced by some of the country’s
more well-known talk show hosts, both on the left and on the right.
I argued then that I just didn’t see that being in the cards, since
to do so at that critical juncture in time, would be to rip their own
power base from beneath them. If anything, I argued, they would seek to
shore up their power base, meaning North America. More recently, in
conversations and interviews with former Assistant Secretary of Housing
and Urban Development Catherine Austin Fitts, we have fleshed out this
scenario a bit more, noticing the capital movements from the developing
world back into North America, and the heavy promoting of the 3d
printing meme.
Now, it seems, some on the political right are noticing the same trend: America’s Re-shoring of Jobs Is Accelerating
You’ll notice that the article indicates a number of factors are
leading to the growing attractiveness of the USA as a manufacturing
center, and they are the two most obvious ones: (1) cost of labor, and
(2) cost of energy. The article, however, makes all this seem like the
inevitable result simply of “free markets in play,” except we would do
well to remember that – ideological economic doctrines notwithstanding –
there is no “free market” in the proper sense. All markets are subject to the effects of regulatory policy to some degree, now greater, now lesser, and varying from location and country to location and country.
I suspect, therefore, that we are looking at the consequence both of
market forces and to a certain extent, of deliberate policy,
particularly that vis-a-vis energy costs and fracking. But there is also
in play that factor which I blogged about in respect to Russia’s recent
diplomatic victories, and that is, the western power elite in general,
and the American faction of it in particular, know that the country is
badly over-extended both geopolitically, militarily, and economically. A
broad and ambitious program of unipolarism at the top simply cannot be
sustained on the basis of a narrow economic and manufacturing base at
the bottom and a dwindling professional middle class…. such “inverted
economic pyramids” are simply unbalanced, and all it takes is for a
Putin to come along, and gently nudge that great weight on the top
balanced on the point on the bottom, via a “debt card,” to reinforce the
point. Realpolitik and power politics is about reality, and the
current reality is, that if the west’s financial oligarchs wish to
maintain their power, a thorough reconsideration of their policies of
the past few decades is in order. If nothing else, market realities will
force it. This retrenchment doesn’t necessarily mean that one should
expect American foreign policy to turn from the course it’s been on.
Quite the converse; it will attempt to “hold on” to current positions
while the retrenchment is underway, then reassert itself when the
process is more or less complete. And that means, in the meantime, one
can also expect vigorous pushback from the BRICSA nations. At the same
time, expect them to buy as much influence within that retrenchment,
including technology transfers via investment, as possible, as this
article (also courtesy of Ms. M.W.) indicates: Russia sinks $1.5 billion into U.S. tech firms
In an interview on day two of the partial shutdown of the US
government, broadcast by the pro-business cable TV channel CNBC,
President Barack Obama offered talks on cutting basic social programs
such as Medicare and Social Security in return for Republican support
for funding federal operations and raising the national debt ceiling.
Obama continued to reject any negotiations with House Republicans on a
so-called “continuing resolution” to reopen the government that is tied
to a delay in implementation of his health care overhaul. At the same
time, he linked a “clean” funding bill to passage of legislation to
raise the national debt ceiling before the current limit expires and the
country goes into default, estimated by the Treasury Department for
October 17.
Obama’s remarks added to mounting evidence that behind the appearance
of partisan warfare in Washington, the two big business parties are
planning to use a crisis produced by an extended government shutdown as a
smokescreen for reaching a deal to impose historic attacks on the
bedrock social programs left over from the New Deal and Great Society
periods.
In the interview, Obama said he agreed on the need to continue
eliminating “unnecessary” social programs and was ready to discuss cuts
in “long-term entitlement spending.” He also said he would accept
Republican demands that there be no increase in personal income tax
rates.
“The Democrats have already said they are ready to reopen the
government at funding levels the Republicans have set,” the president
said. He was referring to the acceptance by Democrats in the House of
Representatives of a funding level $42 billion lower than the previous
Democratic proposal.
Obama also hinted that he was willing, as part of future budget
talks, to accede to demands from Republicans, speaking on behalf of
corporate interests, for changes in his Affordable Care Act, which was
passed in 2010 and is slated to become largely operational in January.
The implication was that he would consider proposals such as repealing a
tax on the makers of medical devices and increasing the cutoff for
full-time workers from 30 hours a week, thereby loosening requirements
for employers to provide health care coverage for their workers.
Indicating the sweeping character of the budget deal Obama is
seeking, he said he was prepared to negotiate “a whole range of issues”
if and when Republican House Speaker John Boehner allows a vote to
reopen the government without anti-Obamacare provisions and Republicans
agree to raise the debt ceiling. He wanted, he declared, a budget “that
enables us to deal with problems long-term.”
Later in the day, Obama met at the White House with top congressional
leaders to discuss both the government shutdown and the debt ceiling.
Present were Republican House Speaker Boehner, Republican Senate
Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Democratic House Minority Leader Nancy
Pelosi and Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Prior to the
meeting, both the White House and Republican leaders made clear they
were not prepared to alter their positions in order to secure a quick
reopening of the government.
It appeared the main purpose of the meeting was to set the groundwork
for a government shutdown of at least one week, and more likely longer,
and the merging of talks on reopening the government and the debt
ceiling issue. Both sides emerged from the meeting blaming the other for
refusing to negotiate.
Congressional Democrats and Republicans alike have indicated support
for keeping the shutdown going—with all of its punishing consequences
for working people—in order to bring the budget and debt ceiling
deadlines together and pave the way for a so-called “grand bargain” on
social cutbacks. “Either it’s resolved this week or the debt ceiling
gets rolled into it,” said Senator Richard Burr (Republican of North
Carolina).
A spokesman for House Speaker Boehner said rolling the budget crisis
into the debt crisis “seems like a logical progression.” Representative
Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the chairman of the House Budget Committee and
2012 GOP vice-presidential candidate, said the deadline to address the
debt limit and avoid a default could be “the forcing mechanism to bring
the two parties together.”
A CNBC commentator cited members of Ryan’s congressional staff as
saying the congressman was preparing for negotiations with the White
House and congressional Democrats to begin next week.
Dick Durbin of Illinois, the Democratic Senate whip, said, “This is now all together.”
In the previous manufactured crises of 2010, 2011 and 2012, Obama had
offered to support cuts in cost-of-living raises for Social Security
recipients and structural changes in Medicare, such as increasing the
eligibility age and introducing means testing, along with sharp cuts in
corporate taxes, as part of a broad bipartisan deficit deal.
However, no such deal on entitlement programs was reached. Instead,
more than $2 trillion in cuts in domestic nondefense discretionary
spending were mandated, bringing this category of social spending in the
US—for education, housing, infrastructure, health and safety, the
environment, culture—to its lowest level as a percentage of the gross
domestic product since the 1950s.
Now, the corporate-financial elite is demanding fundamental attacks
on core programs such as food stamps, Social Security and Medicare.
Typical was a column that appeared in Tuesday’s Washington Post by
Robert J. Samuelson. It complained that Obama “ducks the real budget
issue, which is coping with the steady rise in spending on the elderly…
He hasn’t confronted the reality that Social Security and Medicare are
slowly squeezing most other government programs and putting upward
pressure on both taxes and deficits. The central budget problem is to
reconcile what’s politically popular today with what’s good for the
country tomorrow.”
The current crisis has been artificially created for the cynical
purpose of fostering more favorable political conditions to impose
policies overwhelmingly opposed by the American people.
The immediate price—which means nothing to Obama and the rest of the
politicians who shed crocodile tears for the victims of the
shutdown—includes the furloughing without pay of 800,000 federal
workers. This comes on top of a three-year pay freeze for the two
million federal employees, payless furloughs under the “sequester” cuts
that began last March, and cuts in retirement benefits.
The partial or total shutdown of most departments other than the
uniformed military and police/intelligence agencies such as the CIA, the
FBI and Homeland Security is hitting broad layers of the population.
Besides the closure of national parks and monuments, some 8.9 million
low-income mothers and children are being denied food aid due to the
shutdown of the WIC program; pension and veterans’ benefit checks are
being delayed; preschool Head Start programs are closing; sick people,
including cancer patients, are being turned away from National
Institutes of Health clinical trials; and foster care payments,
nutrition aid and financial assistance for hundreds of thousands of
Native Americans are being halted.
The priorities of the Obama administration are indicated by the
president’s closed-door meeting Wednesday with top Wall Street bankers
who head the Financial Services Forum. Those present included JPMorgan
Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, currently in talks with Attorney General Eric
Holder to avoid criminal prosecution for mortgage fraud, Goldman Sachs
CEO Lloyd Blankfein, accused by a Senate subcommittee of perjuring
himself at a hearing on his bank’s mortgage machinations, and Bank of
America CEO Brian Moynihan, whose bank received hundreds of billions of
dollars in bailout cash and loan guarantees from the administration.
URGENT MEMO: The current U.S. President has chosen to meet
outside of government law, possibly selling off additional parts of the
nation’s sovereignty – to men in suits who are more than ready to
capitalize on the current US budget crisis.
US Treasury head Jack Lewdescribed the situation as follows: “If
we have insufficient cash on hand, it would be impossible for the
United States of America to meet all of its obligations for the first
time in our history.” Reuters wire reports today that US President Barack Obama
has met with top bank chief executives to discuss ‘the government
shutdown’, and the looming deadline to raise the nation’s debt limit.
The bank chiefs he met with included such upstanding money lenders as Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, Michael Corbat of Citigroup, Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase & Co, and Brian Moynihan
of Bank of America – and it’s worth noting here that each and every one
of these men have presided over one financial fraud or scandal of some
kind over the last 5 years.
As it happens, JPMorgan just offered the Feds $3 Billion to end probes into its dodgy mortgage business. BANKING VULTURES: JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, left, and Goldman
Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein – meeting with Obama in violation
of Antideficiency Act.
Yes, Obama has met with Goldman Sachs and Co, in order to arrange for
a new ‘debt ceiling’, or more accurately – a new line of credit. Only
problem: he cannot do this during a shutdown. Such an act is in direct
violation of the Antideficiency Act of 1870. It was a real law in fact, passed by Congress and also amended several times. This US law clearly
prohibits a government office holders from incurring any monetary
obligation – for which the Congress has not appropriated funds. Question: In his secret meeting with bankers,
what did the President promising to give away in return for a quick
payday loan from the banking opportunists? This should be disclosed to
the public.
Administration officials should be concerned about this important
19th century law – one that could send them packing, or perhaps
imprisoned – should they choose to (as the President has today) take the
law into their own hand behind the back of the American people while
the government is shut down. CNBC reported today:
“CNBC has learned that in several
executive branch departments, high-level staff members review individual
decisions about what government activities to allow for fear of running
afoul of the Antideficiency Act. One White House official said he has
advised his employees not to check their email or cellphones. Under the
act, even volunteering for government service is expressly prohibited.
In a memo to his department employees today, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew cited the law as the reason for reduced staffing.”
If America is a nation of laws, then this should be the last
meeting the President ever attends. If the nation is being run by a
self-serving criminal class of charlatans, then nothing will come of
Obama’s latest affront to constitutional law.
To add insult to injury, the President is also playing games in the press, in attempt to be a clever Dick. From Zerohedge:
In an interview with
CNBC’s John Harwood, Obama once again shows why the polarization in
Congress is at record levels. In a brief: he said he is “exasperated”,
and that the shutdown is “entirely unnecessary” but adds that he is
(finally?) prepared to negotiate, however only after he gets his way
namely after the government is reopened. And another important talking
point: Obama added that while gridlock in D.C. is nothing new, “this
time I think Wall Street should be concerned.” It is unclear how that
statement makes any sense in light of Obama’s right hand senator Chuck
Schumer telling the man who is really in charge, Ben Bernanke, to get to
work. Unless of course, Obama is now angling for a “concerning” market
crash, which sends the Dow down by 20% like in the summer of 2011, and
Obama can tell the stunned public “I told you so.”
There are multiple lines of active inquiry now, as well as various
protests coming on line (not Occupy, but real ones) this month, as an
increasing number of Americans are beginning to see the illusion put
forth by the government and its commercial media arms, about the massive
gravy train for Federal government related agencies, research grants
and contractors. If America wobbles, there will be a huge economic
downturn in the short-term.
Aside from anything, this potentially fatal gaff by Obama should
demonstrate to Americans that politicians DO NOT run the nation – bankers do.
21WIRE’s in-house chief financial health consultant submitted this report just before press time: Diagnosis: The President is presently unable to
perform his duties, and is currently displaying overtly narcissistic and
psychotic behavioral patterns – all of which is unbecoming of a US
chief executive. This could be treated with heavy medication and hormone
replacement therapy, but that would mean he would need to resign
immediately. Both Democrats and Republicans have acquiesced to run-away
spending through the last two administrations and aside from a handful
of sensible Congressmen and women (most of whom have since been run out
of office), they have willingly built a federal Titantic which is now
threatening to sink the fortunes of the American people. US federal
government departments and gravy train contractors are presiding over an
all-you-can-eat buffet, followed by an after dinner crack pipe, and
although doing nicely for themselves, they have been knowingly been
running the country’s fiscal affairs off a cliff. Next 14 Days – Prognosis: Dollar down. Stock market
down. Gold and silver up. But sadly because of the running scam being
run by petroleum companies, this means oil and gasoline in the US will
go up as well. Treatment: No more new lines of credit. Start cutting the totally unnecessary big-ticket items – starting with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
It didn’t even exist before 2001, but it was planned long before 9/11.
Figure that one out. When the DHS is closed, all of its newly unemployed
DHS workers and domestic soldiers should be put to work picking up
trash along the sides of roads and highways in America, or cleaning
toilets at gas stations. All highly skilled redundant employees should
not be wasted however on menial labor, and should immediately be put to
work sorting through recycled trash so as to help make America greener
and more sustainable. Once this transitional cycle is complete, then
repeat this process again with the National Security Agency (NSA).
Repeat process again with the Department of Education. After these
treatments are complete – then they can fuss over Obamacare. Total Savings: $760 billion per annum. Then, at least we’re back in business, with clean roads, toilets etc.
All say aye?
OBAMACARE Reality Shockwave Has BEGUN – Facebook Posts Reveals The True Horrors Of Obamacare
trutherOctober 3, 2013
American people are already exhibiting their dissatisfaction such as this Facebook post about the reality of Obamacare setting in and what it means to your family and checkbook. A post on GLPshares what we have to look forward to with Obamacare and even more
so, what happens when we choose not to opt in. You can see a screenshot
of the Facebook post below as well as a video below from Christopher
Greene on the emerging horrors of Obamacare.
I just saw a repost from a Facebook page – An alleged comment on the Affordable Care Act FB page states that a person had signed up online, under the $45-55,000 income range, pre-existing condition of type I diabetes. They chose the “Silver” plan…
Their premium came back as $597 per month, with an almost $14,000
annual deductible! And when the person clicked the “opt out” option,
they shortly received an e-mail stating that their fine would be $4,037,
and could be attached to their annual tax return and if you don’t have the $4,037 on time, then the repercussions for non-payment begin with your drivers license being suspended until the fine is paid, and if it goes 24 months without payment, a tax lien is placed on you property. It gives you the option to provide your bank info so your penalties can be withdrawn weekly, or biweekly, etc. That comes out to about $350/month for not opting in, or $597
plus pretty much all your medical expenses for the year out of pocket
(deductible) – unless you have some type of major surgery or catstrophic
illness, which you then get to cough up $14,000 plus your monthly payments.
OBAMACARE: 800,000+ Federal Workers Furloughed in Shutdown!!
A man who attempted to sign up for Obamacare online was told that a
fine of over $4,000 dollars a year for refusing to take out mandatory
health insurance could be taken directly from his bank account, and that
his drivers license would be suspended and a federal tax lien placed
against his home, according to an entry on the HealthCare.gov Facebook
page.
If true, the implementation of Obamacare is going to be a whole lot more draconian than Americans have been led to believe.
Will Sheehan claims that when he tried to sign up for
Obamacare and then register to opt out, he received an ominous warning.
Sheehan’s full Facebook post reads;
“I actually made it through this morning at 8:00 A.M. I
have a preexisting condition (Type 1 Diabetes) and my income base was
45K-55K annually I chose tier 2 “Silver Plan” and my monthly premiums
came out to $597.00 with $13,988 yearly deductible!!! There is NO
POSSIBLE way that I can afford this so I “opt-out” and chose to continue
along with no insurance.
I received an email tonight at 5:00 P.M. informing me
that my fine would be $4,037 and could be attached to my yearly income
tax return. Then you make it to the “REPERCUSSIONS PORTION” for
“non-payment” of yearly fine. First, your drivers license will be
suspended until paid, and if you go 24 consecutive months with
“Non-Payment” and you happen to be a home owner, you will have a federal
tax lien placed on your home. You can agree to give your bank
information so that they can easy “Automatically withdraw” your
“penalties” weekly, bi-weekly or monthly! This by no means is “Free” or
even “Affordable.”
Sheehan went on to point out that the site makes you
input all your personal information before giving you an indication of
the costs, meaning a database of the “uninsured” is being built. He
added that he could not afford to pay the premium so would have to break
the law and pay the fine, leaving him with no health care coverage.
The federal government has consistently denied that any
fines pertaining to Obamacare non-compliance could be seized from bank
accounts, despite reports last year that the IRS had hired 16,500 new agents to harass citizens who attempt to evade the new law.
“There’s no criminal sanctions for not paying this, and
there’s no ability to levy a bank account or do seizures,” then-IRS
commissioner Douglas Shulman said in April 2010.
In addition, Americans who refuse to pay for mandatory
health insurance “shall not be subject to any criminal prosecution,”
according to the law itself.
Section 1501(g)(2) of the Affordable Care Act also
states that the IRS cannot “file notice of lien with respect to any
property of a taxpayer by reason of any failure to pay the penalty
imposed by this section.”
EIther Sheehan’s claim that he received this notice is a
lie, or the feds have been dishonest with the American people all
along, and the revolt against Obamacare is about to take “don’t tread on
me” to a whole new level.
Read a copy of the full exchange on Facebook below.
I don't know how good I will be able to put this all together in the
short time I have (I am only allowing two hours a day for this site at
random locations for security reasons, and that's forum, Mail, the front
page, EVERYTHING, BUT . . . It is confirmed - Larry Silverstien's co-criminal at the WTC
owned that mall. The parking garage was inadequately built and was
unsafe. So they staged this little terror psy op, with actors, fake
blood, the whole 9 yards to once again back stab Muslims and as a bonus,
collect twice what they needed with dual insurance policies to fix
their stinking mall, and make a profit doing it. To hell with whoever
got hurt or had their car burned or crushed. AND I HAVE PROOF.
ALSO
Happy Obamacare - where you will now be forced under penalty of law to
buy health insurance that is really crappy and expensive, and after
paying FAR MORE for medical than you EVER did before, you then get the
privilege of wandering through a communist style system where panels and
boards decide what care you get at a cattle trail pace, if you get it
at all. Wanna know what it is like to get the shaft? Obamacare is IT,
and this is true 100 percent - Those who could not afford health care
before ALREADY HAD STATE MEDICAL CARE THROUGH MEDICAID, and all
Obamacare did was force people who already had health insurance to pay
private companies exorbitant rates for rotten service while the STATE
now gets to decide how you get treated. And if you don't comply, pay
the fine while getting no health coverage AT ALL or GO TO JAIL. Obamacare is a RIP OFF of EPIC proportions that does POSITIVELY NOTHING GOOD AT ALL.
Now back to that mall.
Whatreallyhappened
has been running this photo which proves the shootings were staged and
totally phony. Look at this man's wounds. See how the fake blood
separated out, with the dye staying right on the "wound"? Many people,
including EMT's nurses and others with experience have gone vocal saying
that real blood does not do that. Duh, obviously it does not. Not to
mention the fact that if those were gunshot wounds this guy would not be
walking
This one photo blows the entire scam wide open. It's all fake folks,
and that's all you need to know, other than the motive. On to that now.
Frank Lowy, who happened to be Larry Silverstein's bed pal at
the WTC owned that mall. Interesting it is that the worst "Muslim"
terror attack in history happened to Larry and Frankie, with Frankie
walking away with a substantial portion of the $4 billion USD from the
insurance claim at the WTC. But that was not enough for Frankie, who
built his mall poorly and wanted a little rebuild cash. And it looks
like he will get it - approximately 80 million USD (converted from Kenyan shillings) compliments of yet another "Islamic" terror attack, compliments of B'nai whatever synagogue.
Take a look at this parking garage. The bricks used to make it
look nice, which provide absolutely no structural support were way too
much weight for the thin concrete under them. THAT parking garage was
hanging by the rebar.
How do you explain this collapse?
While doing their phony drill or whatever, a team of demolition people
put a little C-4 on the support columns and let it rip. Good enough
for a rebuild. Certainly even if the place was a piece of garbage a few
hand grenades would not have brought it down, this is intentional
pre-meditated destruction all the way and given the fake blood? well,
it does not take much to see what is going on here.
And if you want more proof, just type kenya mall fake into google and
look at all the nicely staged photos with soldiers playing around in the
background
standing up and joking while others were on the ground putting on a
show for the photographer. It's all paper thin B.S., obviously expert
liars did not handle this one.
________________________
Why the credit of the United States is hanging by a thread
The rollout of ObamaCare and the subsequent
government shutdown have engaged the attention of millions of
Americans. Unfortunately, both issues are inconsequential compared to
what will likely be another battle over raising the debt ceiling. Even
more unfortunately, most Americans have little grasp of the economic
issues that have brought us to the precipice for the second time in two
years.
Most
Americans do know the nation is $16.7 trillion in debt, but far fewer
understand the implications of such debt. In fact, precious few
Americans even know which nation underwrites more of our debt than any
other. The overwhelming majority believes it is either China or Japan.
The overwhelming majority couldn’t be more wrong. The largest
underwriter of U.S. debt is the United States of America, courtesy of
the Federal Reserve.
The Fed’s Keynesian-economics-on-steroids buying spree is called
“Quantitative Easing” (QE). It consists of spending $85 billion per
month, with no end in sight. Of that total, $40 billion is spent on mortgage-backed securities and $45 billion on longer-term Treasury securities.
Where does the Fed get the money to buy these securities? It “prints”
money to buy them. To put this in household terms, the Fed is
essentially paying down one credit card—by charging it to another credit card.
During the Obama administration, QE, along with Congress spending
additional revenue we don’t really have, has increased the national debt
by an additional $6 trillion. QE has also debased the currency, since
creating more currency makes each piece of currency worth less—on the
way to becoming worthless.
The
Fed has coupled this idea with a Zero Rate Interest Policy (ZIRP),
thoroughly convinced that both agendas will “stimulate” the economy,
because borrowing money is cheap, and the new money has to go somewhere.
That “somewhere” has been the stock market, which has been pushed to
record highs as a result. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and his fellow
Keynesians believe that pumping up the market will result in a “trickle
down” effect, as those Americans who feel wealthy with regard to their
stock portfolios will spend money and create new jobs. The Fed has
pursued QE in one form or another for five years.
During those same five years, the official
unemployment rate has never dipped below 7.4 percent, according to the
Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). That number is a fraud because it
fails to acknowledge that we have lowest workforce participation rate in
35 years, and BLS doesn’t count the people who have given up looking
for work as unemployed. If the workforce participation rate were the
same as it was just before the financial crisis hit in 2008, the
unemployment rate would be approximately 11.3 percent.
Furthermore, despite the nation being in a so-called recovery since 2009, we have record numbers of Americans receiving food stamps, record numbers collecting disability checks, and a record number of Americans living in poverty. Americans’ annual household income has also declined by 4.4 percent during the recovery, which is worse than the 1.8 decline that occurred during the recession.
Fed’s QE approach is nothing less than disastrous
As for inflation, the Fed claims it is under control. Americans might
argue otherwise, considering the reality that food and fuel prices have
gone up substantially under this administration. Yet many of those same
Americans are unaware of the reality that food and fuel prices are not included when the government calculates the inflation rate. While not counting the price of fuel might
have some validity, since many Americans use public transportation,
every American has developed a habit of eating to sustain themselves.
In short, the Fed’s QE approach is nothing less than disastrous.
And despite everything you hear from this president, his
administration, and the rest of the Democratic Party that purports to
care for “ordinary Americans,” aka the middle class, it’s precisely the
middle class that is being squeezed. ZIRP is a so-called
“one-percenter’s” dream, because it pumps up the banks and Wall Street,
even as the middle class that prefers not to invest its hard-earned
money in the stock market can’t get decent return on savings anywhere
else. On the other end of the spectrum, the aforementioned dependency
class is also getting taken care of, due to the reality that the statist
party is more than willing to countenance increasing numbers of
Americans on the government dole in return for their loyalty.
This dual accommodation of both the financial and entitlement
communities has engendered a monstrous amount of national debt, fueled
by the record-setting, trillion dollar-plus annual deficits needed to
pay for it. And despite the Fed’s money printing prowess, even they
can’t pony up the kind of revenue necessary to underwrite the entire
effort.
Thus we tax, and we do borrow from other nations.
On the tax side of the equation, those who pay them have done
yeoman’s work. For the first 11 months of FY2013, the federal
government received a record-setting $2.47 trillion in revenues. Yet they spent all of it, plus
an additional $755 billion during the same period. Thus, on the
borrowing side of the equation, we are constantly adding to our national
debt, and have again “maxed out” our spending limit, reaching the
so-called debt ceiling.
Yet even as we constantly bump up against a new debt ceiling, we
continue paying interest on the debt we’ve already accumulated. In 2012,
the interest on that debt totaled $360 billion. Like the minimum payment on a household credit card, that massive amount of spending does nothing more than maintain the debt at its present levels. Nothing is being paid down.
For the nation in the short term, the media-driven hysteria about the
notion that America would default on paying its debt if we don’t raise
the debt ceiling, is pernicious nonsense. Currently, interest payments are running
about 7 percent of revenue. The worst case scenario is that the
Treasury Department would be forced to prioritize where the rest of the
money would be spent. Undoubtedly this would ignite a huge fight, as
Congress and the administration would be forced to decide which
government programs are truly important, and which, to use the
jargon-du-jour, are “non-essential.”
Such a fight would be extremely unpleasant, but the nation would
survive. Furthermore, neither party has said they are willing to default
on our debt, but Republicans want concessions aimed at bringing the
debt under control.
Why Republicans want those concessions brings us back to the Federal
Reserve and their ZIRP. What the overwhelming majority of Americans
don’t know is that we’re paying a record lowinterest rate of 2.4 percent just to maintain the status quo. The average interest rate
the Treasury paid on U.S. debt over the last 20 years is 5.7 percent.
Americans might tolerate paying 7 percent of every dollar collected just
for interest, but what about 10 percent, or 20 percent—or more? Not for
more Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare,
military, or any other government program. Just interest. Just to
maintain. How many American families could sustain themselves if 20
percent of their income or more did nothing but keep their credit card debt right where it is now?
And 20 percent may be an optimistic number. CNBC’s Peter J. Tanous explains that just our public debt—as opposed to the money the government owes itself because the politicians have raided the Social Security
“lockbox,” for example—will be $16.6 trillion in seven years, according
to Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates. At an average interest rate of 5.7 percent, the interest payment will be about $930 billion. In 2012, the IRS collected $1.1 trillion in personal income taxes. Based on that figure, debt service would consume 85 cents of every dollar Americans pay in personal income taxes.
Tanous notes something else as well. “Some economists will also
suggest that interest rates may go much higher than 5.7 percent largely
as a result of the massive QE exercise of printing money at an
unprecedented rate,” he warns.
What then? It is not inconceivable that America could be headed for a real
debt ceiling, described by National Review’s Kevin Williams as one
where immutable reality boils down to “a more or less identical partial
shutdown of the government plus suspending most or all Social
Security payments indefinitely, eliminating federal health-care
benefits, and/or defaulting on our bonds and enduring the subsequent
economic chaos” (italic in the original).
An American politician vividly expressed the consequences of continually raising our borrowing limit and accumulating more debt as a result:
“The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt
limit is a sign of leadership failure,” he said. “It is a sign that the
U.S. Government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend
on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our
Government’s reckless fiscal policies. ... Leadership means that ‘the
buck stops here.’ Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad
choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America
has a debt and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better. I
therefore intend to oppose the effort to increase America’s debt limit.”
That politician was Barack Obama in 2006.
Barack Obama in 2013?
“Raising the debt ceiling, which has been done over a hundred times,
does not increase our debt; it does not somehow promote profligacy.”
Except that it does. Every time we have raised the debt ceiling, our
debt level has increased.
Thus, “insane”
Republicans are demanding concessions for raising the current debt
ceiling. Those concessions include a one year delay of the new and
massively expensive (more than triple
its original cost estimate) healthcare bill, a blueprint for tax
reform, medical malpractice reform, approval of the Keystone pipeline,
and an increase in offshore drilling for energy. The president’s Twitter
response is telling. “I won’t negotiate on anything when it comes to the full faith and credit of the United States of America.”
Due to unprecedented levels of government spending by both parties—nothing more, nothing less—the full faith and credit of the United States of America is hanging by a thread. Either we stop engaging in that insanity or we are finished as a nation. Politicians lie. Math does not.
According to Senator Bob Graham and Lyndon LaRouche, the Saudi Royal Family were directly involved in the 9/11 WTC Attacks
President George W. Bush meets with Saudi Arabian ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan at the Bush Ranch in Crawford, Texas, Tuesday, Aug. 27, 2002 WHITE HOUSE PHOTO BY ERIC DRAPER
Appearing on RT.com with Abby Martin of Breaking the Set,
Senator Bob Graham discusses the Classified 9/11 Report that contains
evidence of direct Saudi Royal Family involvement in financing 9/11
terrorists. Along with Senator Bob Grahams role in the Joint
Congressional 9/11 Investigation that uncovered the financial links and
people involved, Lyndon LaRouche has emphasized Obama’s role in
covering-up for the Saudi Royal family by not releasing the 28 page
classified report containing this information. The release of this
information was one of Obama’s campaign promises, which like nearly all
the others, was a lie to the public.[1][2]
Lyndon LaRouche has stated on many occasions the Saudi Royal family
were integral in carrying out the logistics of supplying funds to the
hijackers at the direction of a London based intelligence operation,
orchestrated by the British Royal family. Further, his remarkable study
over the past decade of British Royal family operating out of London, is
at the heart of what LaRouche has termed ‘Dope, Inc.’[5][6][7][8][9][10]
While there are countless facts that contradict the official
narrative that is 9/11, it is obvious to millions worldwide that what
actually happened on that day was completely different than what the
public was led to believe.[7] Wikipedia documents in their article ‘Joint Inquiry into
Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks
of September 11, 2001′, the Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community
Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001
is the official name of the inquiry conducted by the Senate Select
Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee on
Intelligence into the activities of the U.S. Intelligence Community in
connection with the September 11, 2001 attacks.[3] The
investigation began in February 2002 and the final report was released
in December 2002. In the months following the attacks, the White House,
Sen Graham and Rep. Goss had rebuffed calls for an inquiry in the weeks
immediately following September 11. In mid-December resolutions in the
Senate called for the establishment of an independent bipartisan
commission; the White House preferred a joint inquiry by the
Congressional Intelligence Committees if there were to be any
investigation at all. On January 29, Vice President Dick Cheney called
Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle arguing that no investigation should
take place, as it would divert resources from the “War on Terrorism”.[4]
Senator Bob Graham: Government Covered Up 9/11-Saudi Connection | Interview
Published on Oct 2, 2013 with 367 views
Government Shutdown? 36 Facts Which Prove That Almost Everything Is Still Running
By Michael Snyder, on October 2nd, 2013
All
of this whining and crying about a "government shutdown" is a total
joke. You see, there really is very little reason why this "government
shutdown" cannot continue indefinitely because almost everything is
still running. 63 percent of all federal workers are still working, and
85 percent of all government activities are still being funded during
this "shutdown". Yes, the Obama administration has been making a big
show of taking down government websites and blocking off the World War
II Memorial, but overall business in Washington D.C. is being conducted
pretty much as usual. It turns out that the definition of "essential
personnel" has expanded so much over the years that almost everyone is
considered "essential" at this point. In fact, this shutdown is such a
non-event that even referring to it as a "partial government shutdown"
would really be overstating what is actually happening. The following
are 36 facts which prove that almost everything is still running during
this government shutdown... #1 According to U.S. Senator Rand Paul, 85 percent of all government activities are actually being funded during this "government shutdown". #2Approximately 1,350,000 "essential" federal employees will continue to work during this "government shutdown". #3 Overall, 63 percent of the federal workforce will continue to work during this "government shutdown". #4 The U.S. Postal Service will continue to deliver our mail. #5 U.S. military personnel will remain on duty and will continue to get paid. #6 Social Security recipients will continue to get their benefits. #7 Medicare recipients will continue to get their benefits. #8 Medicaid recipients will continue to get their benefits. #9 Food stamp recipients will continue to get their benefits. #10 Those on unemployment will continue to get their benefits. #11 Federal retirees will continue to get their pensions. #12 The federal school lunch program has enough money to go through at least the end of this month. #13 Public schools all over the country will continue to stay open. #14 Almost all federal law enforcement officials will continue working. #15 The Federal Reserve will remain "completely functional". #16 The Supreme Court will continue to operate normally and federal courts have enough money to keep going for at least two weeks. #17 TSA employees will continue to molest travelers at our airports. #18 Air traffic controllers will continue to monitor traffic at our airports. #19 Hopelessly outmanned border patrol agents will continue to try to stem the tide of illegal immigration. #20 Visas and passports will continue to be issued by the State Department. #21 The Veterans Administration will continue to offer substandard medical services, and it will be able to continue processing benefit payments at least for now. #22 The Obama administration apparently has plenty of money to spend on closing open-air memorials that are usually open to the public 24 hours a day. #23 The Department of Defense announced the awarding of 94 new contracts worth a combined total of more than 5 billion dollars on September 30th - the day right before the "government shutdown". #24 The "government shutdown" has not prevented the new two billion dollar NSA spy center from opening up. #25 Federal prisons will continue to operate normally. #26 Amtrak trains will continue to run. #27 The Patent and Trademark Office will be open. #28 The Consumer Product Safety Commission will continue to issue product recalls if the products "create an immediate threat to the safety of human life". #29 The National Weather Service and the National Hurricane Center will continue to track weather patterns. #30 If the federal government needs to respond to a natural disaster, this "shutdown" will not affect that. #31 NASA will continue to support the Mars Rover and the two American astronauts up on the International Space Station. #32 All city employees of the D.C. government have been deemed "essential" and will continue to go to work. #33 Even though the Obamacare exchanges are not working properly, people will still be able to access them. #34 The IRS will continue to collect taxes, but it will be suspending punitive audits of conservative organizations. #35 Barack Obama will continue to get paid for the full duration of this "shutdown". #36 The U.S. Congress will continue to get paid for the full duration of this "shutdown".
Of course not everything is operating normally during this government
shutdown. Government parks are closed. The EPA and the Department of
Energy have almost totally closed up shop. But overall, most Americans
are not going to notice much of a difference.
And perhaps now is a good time for the American people to evaluate
whether or not they actually need a gigantic federal government that
wastes enormous mountains of our money.
For example, our federal government recently spent $98,670 to construct a single outhouse in Alaska.
That is more than a lot of Americans pay for their entire houses.
For many more examples like this, please see my previous article entitled "The Waste List: 66 Crazy Ways That The U.S. Government Is Wasting Your Hard-Earned Money".
It is about time that Washington D.C. started experiencing some of
the "belt-tightening" that the rest of the country has been going
through. For far too long, the fatcats in D.C. have been living in an
alternate reality where they have been able to live the high life at our expense. A recent blog post by Daniel Greenfield discussed how this shutdown is going to affect the alternate reality that the Obamas have been living in...
The government shutdown has forced Obama to make do with
only a quarter of his 1,701 person staff. That would leave 436 “vital”
employees. The 90 people who look after his living quarters would be
slashed to 15 to “provide minimum maintenance and support”.
Buckingham Palace, which is twelve times the size of the White House
and has its own clockmaker, only has an 800 person staff. King Harald V
of Norway and his court make do with 152 staffers. King Carl XVI Gustaf
of Sweden gets by with 203.
On Twitter, Michelle Obama announced that she is unable to Tweet on
her own without the aid of all of her sixteen assistants; many of whom
take home six figure salaries. There are more directors, associate
directors and deputy associate directors on Michelle Obama’s staff than
there were in George Washington’s entire administration.
Presidents have fought wars and made peace, explored and annexed vast
territories and built a nation out of a handful of colonies with fewer
senior staffers than are needed to handle Michelle Obama’s Twitter
account.
Oh the humanity! Will Michelle Obama ever tweet again? And how will the White House continue to function without at least one projectionist on duty at the White House 24 hours a day?
No wonder Barack Obama is so upset about this shutdown.
In the end, this shutdown could turn out to be very good for
America. We have a government that is wildly out of control and that
desperately needs to be reigned in.
During the Obama administration, federal debt held by the public has risen by 90 percent, and overall federal government spending has risen by a whopping 317 percent since 1990.
So is it really a bad thing that the federal government has been forced to cut back for a little while?
Our politicians can whine and cry all they want. They won't be getting any sympathy from me.
Yellowstone Supervolcano Alert: The Most Dangerous Volcano In America Is Roaring To Life
By Michael Snyder, on October 2nd, 2013
Right
now, the ground underneath Yellowstone National Park is rising at a
record rate. In fact, it is rising at the rate of about three inches
per year. The reason why this is such a concern is because underneath
the park sits the Yellowstone supervolcano – the largest volcano in
North America. Scientists tell us that it is inevitable that it will
erupt again one day, and when it does the devastation will be almost
unimaginable. A full-blown eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano
would dump a 10 foot deep layer of volcanic ash up to 1,000 miles away,
and it would render much of the United States uninhabitable. When most
Americans think of Yellowstone, they tend to conjure up images of Yogi
Bear and “Old Faithful”, but the truth is that sleeping underneath
Yellowstone is a volcanic beast that could destroy our nation in a
single day and now that beast is starting to wake up.
The Yellowstone supervolcano is so vast that it is hard to put it into words. According to the Daily Mail, the magma “hotspot” underneath Yellowstone is approximately 300 miles wide…
The Yellowstone Caldera is one of nature’s most awesome creations and sits atop North America’s largest volcanic field.
Its name means ‘cooking pot’ or ‘cauldron’ and it is formed when land collapses following a volcanic explosion.
In Yellowstone, some 400 miles beneath the Earth’s surface is a magma
‘hotspot’ which rises to 30 miles underground before spreading out over
an area of 300 miles across.
Atop this, but still beneath the surface, sits the slumbering volcano.
When most Americans think of volcanic eruptions in the United States,
they remember the catastrophic eruption of Mount St. Helens back in
1980. But that eruption would not even be worth comparing to a
full-blown eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano.
And now the area around Yellowstone is becoming increasingly
seismically active. In fact, Professor Bob Smith says that he has never
seen anything like this in the 53 years that he has been watching Yellowstone…
Until recently, Bob Smith had never witnessed two
simultaneous earthquake swarms in his 53 years of monitoring seismic
activity in and around the Yellowstone Caldera.
Now, Smith, a University of Utah geophysics professor, has seen three swarms at once.
In September, 130 earthquakes hit Yellowstone over the course of a single week. This has got many Yellowstone observers extremely concerned…
Yellowstone’s recent earthquake swarms started on Sept. 10 and were shaking until about 11:30 a.m. Sept. 16.
“A total of 130 earthquakes of magnitude 0.6 to 3.6 have occurred in
these three areas, however, most have occurred in the Lower Geyser
Basin,” a University of Utah statement said. “Notably much of seismicity
in Yellowstone occurs as swarms.”
So what is the worst case scenario?
Well, according to the Daily Mail, a full-blown eruption of Yellowstone could leave two-thirds of the United States completely uninhabitable…
It would explode with a force a thousand times more powerful than the Mount St Helens eruption in 1980.
Spewing lava far into the sky, a cloud of plant-killing ash would fan out and dump a layer 10ft deep up to 1,000 miles away.
Two-thirds of the U.S. could become uninhabitable as toxic air sweeps
through it, grounding thousands of flights and forcing millions to
leave their homes.
Can you think of another potential disaster that could accomplish the same thing?
That is why what is going on at Yellowstone right now is so
important, and the American people deserve the truth. The following are
some more facts about Yellowstone that I compiled that I included in a previous article… #1 A full-scale eruption of Yellowstone could be up to 1,000 time more powerful than the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980. #2 A full-scale eruption of Yellowstone would spew volcanic ash 25 miles up into the air. #3 The next eruption of Yellowstone seems to be
getting closer with each passing year. Since 2004, some areas of
Yellowstone National Park have risen by as much as 10 inches. #4 There are approximately 3,000 earthquakes in the Yellowstone area every single year. #5 In the event of a full-scale eruption of
Yellowstone, virtually the entire northwest United States will be
completely destroyed. #6 A massive eruption of Yellowstone would mean that
just about everything within a 100 mile radius of Yellowstone would be
immediately killed. #7 A full-scale eruption of Yellowstone could also potentially dump a layer of volcanic ash that is at least 10 feet deep up to 1,000 miles away. #8 A full-scale eruption of Yellowstone would cover
virtually the entire midwest United States with volcanic ash. Food
production in America would be almost totally wiped out. #9 The “volcanic winter” that a massive Yellowstone
eruption would cause would radically cool the planet. Some scientists
believe that global temperatures would decline by up to 20 degrees. #10 America would never be the same again after a
massive Yellowstone eruption. Some scientists believe that a full
eruption by Yellowstone would render two-thirds of the United States
completely uninhabitable. #11 Scientists tell us that it is not a matter of
“if” Yellowstone will erupt but rather “when” the next inevitable
eruption will take place.
What makes all of this even more alarming is that a number of other
very prominent volcanoes around the world are starting to roar back to
life right now as well.
For example, an Inquisitr article from back in July described how “the most dangerous volcano in Mexico” is starting to become extremely active…
Popocatepetl Volcano is at it again. The active volcano
near Mexico City erupted again this morning, spewing ash up into the
sky.
The volcano is currently in the middle of an extremely active phase. According to the International Business Times, the volcano has registered 39 exhalations in the last 24 hours.
An eruption earlier this month caused several flights to be canceled in and out of Mexico City.
The BBC
notes that officials raised the alert level yellow following
Popocateptl’s eruption on Saturday morning. Yellow is the third-highest
caution level on the city’s seven step scale.
And an NBC News article from August noted that one of the most dangerous volcanoes in Japan has erupted 500 times so far this year…
Ash wafted as high as 3 miles above the Sakurajima
volcano in the southern city of Kagoshima on Sunday afternoon, forming
its highest plume since the Japan Meteorological Agency started keeping
records in 2006. Lava flowed just over half a mile from the fissure, and
several huge volcanic rocks rolled down the mountainside.
Though the eruption was more massive than usual, residents of the
city of about 600,000 are used to hearing from their 3,664-foot
neighbor. Kagoshima officials said in a statement that this was
Sakurajima’s 500th eruption this year alone.
So what does all of this mean?
Are we now entering a time when volcanic eruptions will become much more common all over the globe?
Could we rapidly be approaching the day when an absolutely devastating volcanic eruption will paralyze much of North America?
Please feel free to share what you think by posting a comment below…
The Dread Pirate Roberts, head of the most brazen drug trafficking
site in the world, was a walking contradiction. Though the government
says he raked in $80 million in commissions from running Silk Road, he
allegedly lived under a false name in one bedroom of a San Francisco
home that he shared with two other guys and for which he paid $1,000 a
month in cash. Though his alleged alter ego penned manifestos
about ending "violence, coercion, and all forms of force," the FBI
claims that he tried to arrange a hit on someone who had blackmailed
him. And though he ran a site widely assumed to be under investigation
by some of the most powerful agencies in the US government, the Dread
Pirate Robert appears to have been remarkably sloppy—so sloppy that the government finally put a name to the peg leg: Ross William Ulbricht.
Yesterday, Ulbricht left his apartment to visit the Glen Park branch
of the San Francisco Public Library in the southern part of the city.
Library staff did not recognize him as a regular library patron, but
they thought nothing of his visit as he set up his laptop in the science
fiction section of the stacks. Then, at 3:15pm, staffers heard a
"crashing sound" from the sci-fi collection and went to investigate,
worried that a patron had fallen. Instead, library communications
director Michelle Jeffers tells us that the staff came upon "six to
eight" FBI agents arresting Ulbricht and seizing his laptop. The agents
had tailed him, waiting for the 29-year old to open his computer and
enter his passwords before swooping in. They marched him out of the
library without incident.
For a promising young physics student from Austin, Texas, this wasn't how things were supposed to turn out.
Ulbricht, in happier times.
“Choose freedom over tyranny”
Sure, you could buy meth, LSD, cannabis, heroin, and MDMA on the Silk
Road, but the hidden website wasn't (just) about drugs. Silk Road was,
said its owner, about freedom. In January 2012, as part of a "State of
the Road Address" posted in the site's discussion forum, the Dread
Pirate Roberts explained the site's goal: "To grow into a force to be
reckoned with that can challenge the powers that be and at last give
people the option to choose freedom over tyranny."
To that end, the Dread Pirate Roberts built the Silk Road marketplace
in 2011 as a "hidden" service accessible only over the encrypted Tor
network. To connect, users first had to install a Tor client and then
visit a series of arcane site names (the most recent was
silkroadfb5piz3r.onion), but the reward was a simple, effective
marketplace to buy drugs from sellers all over the world using such
Internet commerce staples as escrow accounts and buyer feedback. The
product was shipped through the mail, direct from seller to buyer,
keeping the Dread Pirate Roberts clean. The only link between him and
the drugs was the money, and Roberts eventually took only the electronic
currency called Bitcoin to make this hard to trace. He even ran a
program called a "tumbler" to route incoming Bitcoin payments through a
complicated series of dummy transactions, so as to make them infeasible
to trace through the public Bitcoin blockchain. Out of each transaction,
Roberts took a cut—8 to 15 percent, depending on the size of the sale.
This eventually earned Roberts a pirate's treasure. By 2013, Silk
Road had nearly one million user accounts. In the 2.5 years the site
operated, it facilitated 1.2 million transactions worth 9.5 million
Bitcoins—or about $1.2 billion in total money exchanged. (Bitcoin values
varied widely over this period.) Roberts picked up a cool $80 million
in commissions.
No surprise, then, that the Drug Enforcement Administration, the
Internal Revenue Service, Homeland Security Investigations, and the FBI
all joined forces to track down Roberts and the largest sellers on his
marketplace. In November 2011, after coming under pressure from
Congress, the agencies began the hunt and quickly found that Roberts had
been right—encryption, Tor, and "tumbled" Bitcoins were a potent
combination to crack.
Ulbricht at his 21st birthday party.
But investigations always have many threads to pull. The feds
couldn't initially follow the money to Roberts, nor could they find the
physical location of his cloaked servers. In the absence of usual
digital clues, the feds fell back on a low-tech approach: keep going
back in time until you find the first guy to ever talk about the Silk
Road. Find that guy and you probably have a person of interest, if not
Roberts himself.
So they looked, assigning one agent to conduct "an extensive search
of the Internet," in the FBI's words, looking for early Silk Road
publicity. The earliest post ever to mention the site appeared on a
drug-oriented forum called shroomery.org, where a user named "altoid"
had made a single post. It read:
I came across this website called Silk Road. It's a Tor
hidden service that claims to allow you to buy and sell anything online
anonymously. I'm thinking of buying off it, but wanted to see if anyone
here had heard of it and could recommend it.
The post directed readers to visit silkroad420.wordpress.com,
belonging to the blogging operator WordPress, where further instructions
would be found for accessing the real Silk Road site. A subpoena to
WordPress Revealed that the blog had been set up on January 23, only
four days before the Altoid post. If this wasn't the first mention of Silk Road, it was certainly one of them.
Altoid became a person of interest, but who was he? Further research
revealed that Altoid had been posting on a board called Bitcoin
Talk—further suggesting a possible link to the Silk Road, which operated
on Bitcoin. A key break came when the agent found an October 11, 2011
post by Altoid, looking for an "IT pro in the Bitcoin community" and
directing all inquiries to "rossulbricht at gmail dot com."
A subpoena to Google revealed that this account was in fact
registered to one "Ross Ulbricht." The account was also linked to a
Google+ profile, which had a picture of Ulbricht and a link to his favorite videos on YouTube.
The videos provided a key clue; several of them were from the
libertarian Mises Institute, whose views jibed with the leanings of the
Dread Pirate Roberts. In addition, Roberts had repeatedly linked up
Mises videos when posting in the Silk Road forum and had referenced
"Austrian school" economists like Ludwig von Mises, for whom the
Institute was named. The clue was suggestive but not conclusive.
Still, the pieces were coming together.
The economic simulator
Ulbricht and his horseshoe mustache.
With the name Ross Ulbricht, the feds went to other social networks.
They found Ulbricht on LinkedIn, where he talked about his
dissatisfaction with the physics work he had been doing as a graduate
student at Penn State. "Now, my goals have shifted," Ulbricht wrote. "I
want to use economic theory as a means to abolish the use of coercion
and aggression amongst mankind... The most widespread and systemic use
of force is amongst institutions and governments, so this is my current
point of effort. The best way to change a government is to change the
minds of the governed, however. To that end, I am creating an economic
simulation to give people a first-hand experience of what it would be
like to live in a world without the systemic use of force."
Could the "economic simulation" be, in fact, Silk Road? One tantalizing hint comes from an anonymous article published in alternative newspaper The Austin Cut,
located in Austin, Texas where Ulbricht grew up. The story was, in
essence, a primer on how to build Silk Road and an explanation of what
made the site so amazing—and the answers were "freedom" and "lack of
force."
"Hackers, anarchists, and criminals have been dreaming about these
days since forever," wrote the author. "Where you can turn on your
computer, browse the web anonymously, make an untraceable cash-like
transaction, and have a product in your hands, regardless of what any
government or authority decides... This is about real freedom. Freedom
from violence, from arbitrary morals and law, from corrupt centralized
authorities, and from centralization altogether. While Silk Road and
Bitcoin may fade or be crushed by their enemies, we've seen what free,
leaderless systems can do. You can only chop off so many heads."
The article's author then relayed a telling anecdote from Silk Road,
one in which people began arguing over a botched deal. They got angry;
one threatened violence, but he was simply mocked by other users because
he had no way to find his target. "It showed how successful Silk Road
really is," wrote the author. "It makes drug buying and selling so
smooth that it's easy to forget what kinds of violent fuckers drug
dealers can be. That's the whole point of Silk Road. It totally takes
evil pieces of shit out of the drug equation. Whether they're vicious
drug dealers or bloodthirsty narcotics cops, both sides of that coin
suck and end pretty much the same way. Death, despair, madness, prison,
etc. Thanks to decentralization and powerful encryption, we're able to
operate in a digital world that is almost free from prohibition and the
violence it causes."
This fits with Ulbricht's arguments, and the piece might well be by
him, providing a better sense of why he saw the experiment as such an
important one. We asked the editor of the Cut what he thought. "I wondered the same thing," he said, but added that he did not know who wrote the piece.
In any event, the feds had a name but no hard evidence linking
Ulbricht to the site management. They knew that Ulbricht had moved to
San Francisco and was staying for some time with a friend, and they knew
that whoever was logging into the "rossulbricht" Gmail account was
doing it on occasion from the friend's house. But the next link in the
chain only came when the feds uncovered a post on the popular coding
advice site StackOverflow.
In early 2012, Ulbricht registered a StackOverflow account using his
Gmail address; the username was "Ross Ulbricht." On March 16, Ulbricht asked for help
with connecting "to a Tor hidden server using curl in php." He included
several lines of code that weren't working quite right. Perhaps
realizing that this was a bad idea, one minute later Ulbricht changed
his username to "frosty" (he changed his e-mail address a bit later),
but he had already revealed his interest in running Tor sites.
At this point, the government gets cryptic. On July 10, 2013, Customs
and Border Protection intercepted a package coming from Canada into the
US as part of a "routine border search." This package contained nine
counterfeit IDs, each of them in a different name, but each of them
showing a picture of Ulbricht. They were addressed to his San Francisco
address.
Two weeks later, the government found the Silk Road servers in
various foreign countries, though it won't say how. (The FBI gives no
indication that Tor was compromised in this case, though given that the
agency has recently found ways to spy on Tor users, it's hard to
absolutely rule out the possibility.) It's possible that finding various
aliases for Ulbricht enabled agents to track the money used to pay for
the servers, but the events may have been unrelated. The main Silk Road
Web server was found in "a certain foreign country" that has a Mutual
Legal Assistance Treaty with the US. Under the terms of that treaty, the
government asked for an image of the server's hard drives, which was
made on July 23 and then turned over to the FBI.
(Update: Computer security research Nicholas Weaver speculates
that "the FBI (with a warrant) hacked the site sufficient to discover
the site's IP by generating a non-Tor phone-home, and then contacted the
country of the hosting provider which then got the server imaged. Yet
since the server imaging didn't involve taking the server down or
disrupting service sufficient to spook Mr DPR into taking his bitcoins
and running, I suspect that this was some virtual-machine hosting
provider." But at this point, no one knows.)
Three days later, agents from Homeland Security Investigations
visited Ulbricht's 15th Street home in San Francisco. They found him at
home, where his two housemates knew him as "Josh." One of them told the
agents that "Josh" was "always home in his room on the computer." As for
Ulbricht himself, he refused to answer most questions, though he did
volunteer one curious bit of information, apparently as a way of
indicating that such documents could be obtained so easily that anyone
might have ordered them, or that he had been framed.
"Hypothetically," he told the agents, anyone could visit a site named
"Silk Road" on "Tor" and order any drugs or fake IDs they wanted.
“I wouldn't mind if he was executed”
While this was going on, the FBI was tearing into the mirrored
server, where it found all sorts of incriminating information. For one
thing, the server had been set up to accept encrypted SSH logins, and
the server's public key ended with "frosty@frosty." In addition, a
lightly modified version of the code posted to StackOverflow was being
used on the server—apparently with its errors corrected. Private
messages from the Silk Road forums showed that Dread Pirate Roberts had
mentioned his interest in acquiring fake identification documents during
the month before Ulbricht's own fake IDs had been seized at the border.
But in the private forum messages, the feds found something even worse: an alleged murder-for-hire scheme.
This is the point at which an already-crazy story runs right off the
rails and into the ditch, because not only did Roberts want someone
killed—he didn't know enough about what he was doing to make sure it
happened. Indeed, it certainly looks like the Dread Pirate got bilked
out of $150,000.
On March 13, 2013 Roberts was approached through Silk Road's private
messaging feature by "friendlychemist," who failed to live up to his
nickname and instead tried to extort Roberts. Friendlychemist had, he
said, hacked into one of the computers of a major Silk Road dealer and
obtained information on buyers, information he would release to the
world unless Roberts paid up. And who would use Silk Road if it wasn't
secure?
Friendlychemist needed $500,000, he said, to pay off his own drug
suppliers, with whom he had fallen behind. On March 20, Roberts wrote
Friendlychemist, asking to be put in touch with these suppliers. Someone
named "Redandwhite" messaged him on March 25, saying, "I was asked to
contact you. We are the people Friendlychemist owes money to. What did
you want to talk to us about?"
Roberts tried to convince Redandwhite to start doing business on Silk
Road but then added on March 27, "In my eyes, Friendlychemist is a
liability and I wouldn't mind if he was executed." Roberts then provided
an address in White Rock, British Columbia, where Friendlychemist
allegedly lived with his "wife + 3 kids." When Friendlychemist
threatened to release his information within 72 hours if he wasn't paid,
Roberts went back to Redandwhite, asking "I would like to put a bounty
on his head if it's not too much trouble for you. What would be an
adequate amount to motivate you to find him?"
The story then went full-on Breaking Bad nuts, with
Redandwhite demanding $150,000 for a "non-clean" kill and $300,000 for a
"clean" version. Roberts said that he knew the value of such things; he
claimed to have paid $80,000 for a previous "clean" hit, and he wanted a
discount.
Did I say earlier that the story had already gone off the rails into
Crazytown? Reader—I was wrong. Because a federal indictment unsealed
separately today in a Maryland court says that Roberts had in fact arranged such an $80,000 hit just a few weeks earlier. Not crazy enough? Turns out that the "hitman" in this first attempt was actually a federal agent.
Roberts was upset that one of his employees—records show these
employees were paid between $1,000 and $2,000 a week—had stolen from
Roberts and eventually managed to get himself arrested by dealing with
an undercover agent. Roberts wanted the employee tortured so that he
would return the missing Bitcoins. Not knowing much about hitmen,
Roberts ended up talking to the very undercover agent who had helped
bust his employee.
On January 26, 2013, Roberts asked that the former employee get "beat
up, then forced to send the bitcoins he stole back." A day later,
afraid that his former employee would squeal to the police, Roberts
asked if it was possible to "change the order to execute rather than
torture?" Roberts said he had "never killed a man or had one killed
before, but it is the right move in this case." The agent offered to do
the job for $80,000.
The agent was actually paid a $40,000 advance from an Australian bank
account. He soon provided the "proof of death" Roberts wanted, first
feeding Roberts an elaborate story about assassins and how the employee
was "still alive but being tortured" and then later sending staged
photos of the alleged torture. Roberts said he was "a little
disturbed... I'm new to this kind of thing." The agent then said the
employee had died of a heart problem under torture, and he sent along a
fake picture of the "dead man."
"I'm pissed I had to kill him... but what's done is done," Roberts
replied. "I just can't believe he was so stupid... I just wish more
people had some integrity." On March 1, Roberts wired the second $40,000
to the undercover agent. Fast forward two weeks and Roberts, who believed he had just killed a
man, was ready to do it a second time—but he didn't understand why he
had to pay so much. The two sides agreed on $150,000, and Roberts
provided a sequence of random numbers, meant to be written on a card
that would be placed next to Friendlychemist's dead body and
photographed. Roberts' Bitcoin transaction logs showed that he did in
fact send this amount of money to Redandwhite.
On April 1, Redandwhite responded, "Your problem has been taken care
of... Rest easy though, because he won't be blackmailing anyone again."
Redandwhite apparently sent the requested photo, too, because on April
5, Roberts said that he had "received the picture and deleted it. Thank
you again for your swift action."
Bizarre and brutal—but was it real? Redandwhite does not appear to
have been a federal agent, since FBI agent Christopher Tarbell—who was
also involved in bringing down Hector "Sabu" Monsegur from
Anonymous—called up the Canadian police to find out if a murder had
really happened. According to Tarbell, the Canadians have "no record of
there being any Canadian resident with the name DPR passed to
Redandwhite as the target of the solicited murder-for-hire. Nor do they
have any record of a homicide occurring in White Rock, British Columbia
on or about March 31, 2013." The truth of the situation remains murky,
but it sounds a lot like the Dread Pirate Roberts got scammed... in two
very different ways.
Setback
The federal seizure notice that appeared on Silk Road.
The feds arrested Ulbricht yesterday and charged him with being the
Dread Pirate Roberts, they seized the Silk Road domain name, and they
grabbed all the Bitcoins the site held. This particular economic
experiment is now over. But the libertarianism of Dread Pirate
Roberts/Ulbricht isn't an anomaly in tech circles; indeed, it has a long
pedigree, with many geeks (notably the "cypherpunks") believing that
strong cryptography and good technical design would help digital systems
massively expand human freedom, even in ways that nation-states dislike
or outlaw.
Perhaps the most perfect previous realization of this vision was HavenCo, the quixotic "data haven"
that set up shop on a rusting World War II sea fort off the English
coast as a way of evading national law in the early 2000s. Servers would
use crypto so good that not even HavenCo's operators would know what
their clients were doing on the machines, and the goal was similar to
Silk Road's: freedom. The venture never attracted much more than some
online gambling outfits hoping to find a safe place from which to reach
countries like the US, but its romantic location and big dreams made the
company a media superstar.
Ryan Lackey was the key implementor of HavenCo, and he lived aboard
the fort for weeks and even months at a time, trying to turn his
libertarian principles into practical reality. Ten years on from the
HavenCo experiment, I asked Lackey what the Silk Road takedown meant for
the movement.
"Obviously in the short run it's a setback," he told me, because
"Silk Road was the main example of a long-running 'hated by the
government' service which was able to use technical means to operate,
profitably, with a lot of users. I can't condone illegal activity, and
it looks like Silk Road/DPR may have engaged in violent activity over
and above just flouting drug laws, but Silk Road was technically a
really interesting system."
To Lackey, the best way forward for those concerned with using tech
to advance human freedom is to start with something legal. "It would be a
lot better to work on the technology in explicitly legal and protected
areas, like 'an anonymous way to organize political movements in the
US,' versus a drug/murder for hire market," he adds. And what's needed
is a new generation of protocols, "asynchronous, message-based, and
fully pseudonymous, with the ability for users to build reputation
independent of the transport." In Lackey's view, no one worked hard on
these problems for the last decade because "no one believed NSA/FBI/etc.
would seriously go after users; that has been conclusively disproved."
Now, with the Edward Snowden leaks and Silk Road's demise, security
and anonymity have become hot topics once again—and they may spur a
renewed interest in making the 'Net less traceable.
Posts
21WIRE’s in-house chief financial health consultant submitted this report just before press time:
Whatreallyhappened
has been running this photo which proves the shootings were staged and
totally phony. Look at this man's wounds. See how the fake blood
separated out, with the dye staying right on the "wound"? Many people,
including EMT's nurses and others with experience have gone vocal saying
that real blood does not do that. Duh, obviously it does not. Not to
mention the fact that if those were gunshot wounds this guy would not be
walking
This one photo blows the entire scam wide open. It's all fake folks,
and that's all you need to know, other than the motive. On to that now.
approximately 80 million USD (converted from Kenyan shillings) compliments of yet another "Islamic" terror attack, compliments of B'nai whatever synagogue. 
background
standing up and joking while others were on the ground putting on a
show for the photographer. It's all paper thin B.S., obviously expert
liars did not handle this one.
By Michael Snyder, on October 2nd, 2013
By Michael Snyder, on October 2nd, 2013
