Sunday, June 22, 2014

A Mysterious Sound Is Driving People Insane — And Nobody Knows What's Causing It

By Jared Keller June 19, 2014

Dr. Glen MacPherson doesn't remember the first time he heard the sound. It may have started at the beginning of 2012, a dull, steady droning like that of a diesel engine idling down the street from his house in the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia. A lecturer at the University of British Columbia and high school teacher of physics, mathematics and biology, months passed before MacPherson realized that the noise, which he'd previously dismissed as some background nuisance like car traffic or an airplane passing overhead, was something abnormal.

"Once I realized that this wasn't simply the ambient noise of living in my little corner of the world, I went through the typical stages and steps to try to isolate the sources," MacPherson told Mic. "I assumed it may be an electrical problem, so I shut off the mains to the entire house. It got louder. I went driving around my neighborhood looking for the source, and I noticed it was louder at night."
Exasperated, MacPherson turned his focus to scientific literature and pored over reports of the mysterious noise before coming across an article by University of Oklahoma geophysicist David Deming in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, a peer-reviewed academic journal devoted to exploring topics outside of mainstream science. "I almost dropped my laptop," says MacPherson. "I was sure that I was hearing the Hum."
"The Hum" refers to a mysterious sound heard in places around the world by a small fraction of a local population. It's characterized by a persistent and invasive low-frequency rumbling or droning noise often accompanied by vibrations. While reports of "unidentified humming sounds" pop up in scientific literature dating back to the 1830s, modern manifestations of the contemporary hum have been widely reported by national media in the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia since the early 1970s.

Regional experiences of the phenomenon vary, and the Hum is often prefixed with the region where the problem centers, like the "Windsor Hum" in Ontario, Canada, the "Taos Hum" in New Mexico, or the "Auckland Hum" for Auckland, New Zealand. Somewhere between 2 and 10% of people can hear the Hum, and inside isolation is no escape. Most sufferers find the noise to be more disturbing indoors and at night. Much to their dismay, the source of the mysterious humming is virtually untraceable.

While the uneven experience of the Hum in local populations has led some researchers to dismiss it as a "mass delusion," the nuisance and pain associated with the phenomenon make delusion a dissatisfying hypothesis. Intrigued by the mysterious noise, MacPherson launched The World Hum Map and Database in December 2012 to collect testimonies of other Hum sufferers and track its global impact (he now also moderates a decade-old Yahoo forum along with Deming).

MacPherson quickly discovered that what to him was a strange rumbling was actually having pernicious effects on hundreds of people, from headaches to irritability to sleep deprivation. There are reports that weeks of insomnia caused by the Bristol Hum drove at least three U.K. residents to suicide. "It completely drains energy, causing stress and loss of sleep," a sufferer told a British newspaper in 1992. "I have been on tranquilizers and have lost count of the number of nights I have spent holding my head in my hands, crying and crying." Thousands of people around the world have shared similar experiences of the Hum; some, like MacPherson, are devoting their time to finally uncovering its source.

Above: Self-reported experiences of the Hum, recorded as part of The World Hum Map and Database by Glen MacPhearson, British Columbia.

Tom Moir, a professor at the Auckland University of Technology and Hum investigator, first started looking into the Hum after an Auckland resident called Moir's office at Massey University in 2002. Moir, a professor of control engineering, placed an ad in the local paper after receiving a visit from a Hum sufferer who desperately wanted to find the source of the racket. He received dozens of responses within days, all describing a mysterious droning noise matching the one described in Deming's landmark paper. Residents of Auckland's northern shore claimed that the Hum was so intense that it was preventing them from sleeping or concentrating. "When it's loud, it's like there's vibrations between your ears, that your brain is vibrating," one resident told local TV in 2011. Another Auckland resident said that the noise had been so disruptive to his life that he'd deafened himself in one ear with a chainsaw so he could sleep through the night. Many had lived a life of vibroacoustic agony, unsure if what they were hearing was real or not.

"For my entire life, I was a perfect sleeper," says Steve Kohlhase, 60, who first started to experience the Hum at night in his Brookfield, Connecticut home in September 2009. A mechanical engineer in the chemical industry, Kohlhase, like so many other Hum sufferers, has devoted his free time to searching for the source of the noise. "I immediately felt the effects in my head: It feels like your fingers are in your ears. Other people have different experiences: Sometimes the floorboards in the house have a distinct vibration to them, or they they feel it in their feet in their bedsprings. Many people find their ears ringing."

Above: "The Torment of the Hum" by Rosemarie Mann (2004).

So what's behind the Hum? After nearly four decades, Hum investigators may finally have some idea. The general consensus among sufferers is that the Hum is comprised of very low frequency (or 'VLF', in the range of 3 kHz to 30 kHz and wavelengths from 10 to 100 kilometers) or extremely low frequency (or 'ELF', in the range of 3 to 30 Hz, and corresponding wavelengths from 100,000 to 10,000 kilometers) radio waves, which can penetrate buildings and travel over tremendous distances.

Both ELF and VLF waves have been shown to have potentially adverse affects on the human body. While the common refrain about ELF radiation in popular culture normally involves your cell phone giving you cancer, research by the World Health Organization and the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers has shown that external ELF magnetic fields can induce currents in the body which, at very high field strengths, cause nerve and muscle stimulation and changes in nerve cell excitability in the central nervous system. And VLF waves, like other low-frequency electromagnetic radiation, have also been shown to have a direct impact on biological functions

Finally, there's a body of empirical evidence that makes this theory more appealing. A study funded by the Canadian government and led by University of Windsor mechanical engineering professor Dr. Colin Novak spent the last year listening to the "Windsor Hum" that's been torturing residents in the Windsor area of Ontario since 2011. A previous study had confirmed the existence of the low frequency noise in the vicinity of Zug Island, a highly industrialized island located on Michigan side of the Detroit River. The researchers used specialized equipment to capture and develop a sonic "fingerprint" of the mysterious sound. The study concluded that not only does the Windsor Hum actually exist, but its likely source was a blast furnace at the U.S. Steel plant on Zug Island, which reportedly generates a high volume of VLF waves during its hours of operation. "It sounds like a large truck or a train locomotive is parked outside your house, buzzing away, causing the windows to shake," Novak, himself a Hum sufferer, told Canada's CTV News. "It can be quite uncomfortable at times."

"I have been on tranquilizers and have lost count of the number of nights I have spent holding my head in my hands, crying and crying."

Dr. Novak's study caps off decades of Hum theories, but given the inconsistent experience of the phenomenon around the world, cataloguers of the Hum still aren't quite sure if it has a single, definitive source. While ELF and VLF waves may cause people to experience the incessant droning, not every local Hum appears to have an easily traceable source. What about the Aukland and Taos Hums? And why does the Hum seem to appear and disappear for months at a time?

Some Hum investigators suspect that there's a global source responsible for the Hum worldwide. Deming's research, considered close to authoritative in the Hum community, suggests that evidence of the Hum corresponds with an accidental, biological consequence of the "Take Charge and Move Out" (TACAMO) system adopted by the US Navy in the 1960s as a way for military leaders to maintain communications with the nation's ballistic missile submarines, land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, and long-range bombers during a nuclear war. As part of TACAMO, military aircraft use VLF radio waves to send instructions to submarines: Because of their large wavelengths, VLF can diffract around large obstacles like mountains and buildings, propagate around the globe using the Earth's ionosphere and penetrate seawater to a depth of almost 40 meters, making them ideal for one-way communication with subs. And VLF, like other low-frequency electromagnetic waves, have been shown to have a direct impact on biological functions. (Strategic Communications Wing One at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma, which is responsible for the manning, training and equipping of aircraft utilized as part of the TACAMO system, did not respond to requests for comment.)

And there are other theories. While Moir agrees with MacPherson that the disturbance is occurring at a very low frequency, he's convinced that the source of the Auckland Hum is primarily acoustic rather than electromagnetic, partially because he claims his research team has managed to capture a recording of the Hum.

Listen: An alleged recording of the Auckland Hum by Prof. Tom Moir. Plug in your headphones or increase the volume of your speaker system to maximum to hear.

Listen: A simulation of the Auckland Hum created by a research team lead by Prof. Tom Moir.

"It's a very, very low wavelength noise, perhaps between 50 or 56 Hz," Moir told Mic. "And it's extremely difficult to stop infrasound because it can have a wavelength of up to 10 meters, and you'd need around 2.5 meter thick walls, built with normal materials, to keep it out. It gets into our wooden houses very easily. And part of the reason people have so much trouble identifying the source of it is because of how low frequency the Hum is: It literally moves right through your head before you can figure out which ear picked it up first."

This isn't to say that an electromagnetic explanation is impossible: There could be both electromagnetic or acoustic sources that complement each other. The real difficulty is separating the two hypotheses through testing. "There haven't been tests done were you subject people to these frequencies and put them in an anechoic chamber," says Moir, referring to rooms designed to completely absorb reflections of either sound or electromagnetic waves. "But until you can actually prove that by doing tests, there's no way to firmly come to that conclusion."

These tests can't come soon enough for Steve Kohlhase, the mechanical engineer hunting for the Hum in Connecticut. Kohlhase, like Dr. Novak and the researchers who traced the Windsor Hum to Zug Island, hypothesizes that the source of the Connecticut Hum is industrial rather than military, generated by a network of nearby high volume gas pipelines. The arrival of the Hum, Kohlhase argues, coincided with increased development of natural gas pipelines in northern Fairfield County, and the increased hydraulic pressure used by the Iroquois and Algonquin interstate pipelines that run through his corner of Connecticut could result in the non-directional, extremely low frequency (ELF) humming noise previously unheard in the region.

This a pressing public health issue. It is not just some casual annoyance, claims Kohlhase. The resulting infrasonic sounds blanketing the region could result in widespread vibroacoustic disease — an occupational disease occurring from long-term exposure to large pressure amplitude and low frequency noise — the symptoms of which include those often described by Hum suffers: depression, mood swings, insomnia and other stress-induced pathologies.

The Hum may transition from unexplained mystery to unfortunate byproduct of modernity, a fixture of human geography like light pollution.

State and local governments may finally be paying attention. Worried about the potential behavioral effects of the Connecticut Hum, Kohlhase dispatched concerned emails to state and local health officials laying out his research. Kohlhase was so persistent that he contacted Connecticut State Police investigators almost six weeks after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, insisting that the Hum allegedly produced by nearby gas pipelines could have had something to do with Adam Lanza's behavior leading up to the shooting. While law enforcement officials field a flood of calls from conspiracy theorists and pranksters following any major incident, investigators deemed the information Kohlhase provided "appropriate" for inclusion in the 7,000 images, audio files, videos and documents released to the public.

"The reason that it could've affected Lanza is that sound and vibrations can have extremely subtle, detrimental affects on someone who's fragile minded," explains Kohlhase. "Imagine if you're mentally ill or have a brain tumor or are just, well, fragile of mind. I am absolutely not an expert, but if sound sensitivity is such a serious issue to those on the autism spectrum, perhaps extremely low frequency sounds can result in a pernicious effect." Kohlhase points to Aaron Alexis, the defense subcontractor who battled mental health issues and scrawled "My ELF Weapon" into the stock of his shotgun before killing 12 people at the Washington Navy Yard in 2013. "He told his psychiatrist he'd been chased by vibrations. Look at a map of instances like this, in Washington, or the Gabby Giffords shooting in Arizona, and I bet you'll see that each place coincides with a Hum cluster."

Here is the fundamental problem facing Hum sufferers around the world: believability. Scientific data and anecdotal experiences of the Hum vary so much from region the world that it's still unclear whether VLF and ELF waves are the source of it, let alone a catalyst for mass murder. The idea of a mysterious noise driving people to suicide has given birth to all kinds of pseudoscientific conjecture, making the phenomenon a favorite for conspiracy junkies who suspect foul play by some malicious government scheme (or UFOs, obviously). The World Hum, a site devoted to exploring the "mysterious phenomenon being heard by thousands around the world," is riddled with byzantine entries about UFOs crashing in Siberia.

MacPherson knows how insane it sounds. "There's a terrible irony to the vision of a conspiracy nut in a tinfoil hat, trying to keep the government from beaming thoughts into their heads," laughs MacPhearson, "since aluminum does protect against some electromagnetic radiation. This is why you don't put that stuff in the microwave."

The federally funded investigation into the Windsor Hum and the serious examination of Kohlhase's research by Connecticut authorities may serve as a beacon of hope for Hum investigators like MacPherson, Moir, Novak and Kohlhase. State-funded tests on Hum-affected regions may yield data that could lead to a real-world solution, rather than conspiracy theories. Until then, developing a unified picture of the Hum is exactly what MacPherson wants to accomplish in British Columbia. By providing one destination for Hum data and testimony, he's hoping that professional and independent researchers will use the collected data to help develop and execute experiments that could help identify the source of their local Hum.

But until someone funds and conducts rigorous tests in an affected region, says Moir, people will continue to use the Hum as an excuse to blame modern technology, from mobile phones to telecom towers to the digital radio bands used by law enforcement. And that aura of pseudoscientific insanity surrounding the Hum has made the job of independent researchers more challenging. "In the past, I've contacted my representatives, I've contacted my governor," says Kohlhase. "There's willful ignorance going on about this problem and the real consequences it has."

But should researchers like MacPherson and Moir finally pinpoint the local sources of the pain-inducing phenomenon, the Hum may transition from unexplained mystery to unfortunate byproduct of modernity, a fixture of human geography like light pollution. In the meantime, many just want to identify some relief.

"A lot of serious researchers don't want to have their name attached to that, but I'm not a formal academic researcher, and I'm quite willing to lend some credibility to this idea if I can," says MacPherson. "This phenomenon is real and many people are suffering: I'm just trying to do the best I can to help."

Our Best Bet for Colonizing Space May Be Printing Humans on Other Planets

Written by

Meghan Neal

Assuming human deep space travel turns out to be not just incredibly dangerous, but perhaps “crazy idiotic" and "laughable," as Harvard biologist Gary Ruvkun put it, the tenacious dream of an interstellar civilization forces some out-of-the box thinking. What if, instead of rocketing humans to other planets, we made an exact copy on site?

Adam Steltzner, the lead engineer on the NASA JPL's Curiosity rover mission, believes that to send humans to distant planets, we may need to do one of two things: look for ways to game space-time—traveling through wormholes and whatnot—or rethink the fundamental idea of "ourselves."

"Our best bet for space exploration could be printing humans, organically, on another planet," said Steltzner on stage at Smithsonian Magazine’s Future Is Now conference in Washington, DC this month.

Many of science’s brightest minds think that the only way to guarantee the long-term survival of the human race is to colonize other planets—problem is, we have no clue how to safely travel to Mars, let alone further into our cosmic neighborhood. By sending instructions on how to print ourselves to far-flung locales, we could skip the trip.

The "printing" idea starts out by encoding human genetic information in bacteria so that our DNA can hitch a ride to another planet. Scientists recently discovered that microbes can survive the trip from Earth to Mars, so the theory is, why not bring some genetic code along next time? Then once the DNA-toting microbes arrive on the new planet, the building blocks of life are reassembled as a human being.

"Once you propose terraforming, you might as well propose sending bacteria with human sequences. That's not that crazy."

"Maybe we will colonize other worlds not with astronauts in space suits, but with bacteria," said Steltzner at the event. "Those considerations seem beautiful, fantastic."

Beautiful, fantastic, and totally bonkers. Interest piqued, I called up Ruvkun—who along with George Church, his colleague at Harvard Medical School’s genetics department, pioneered the DNA space travel concept—to find out if the idea is just futurist hubris or actually feasible. The short answer is, it’s a little of both.

The printing humans concept is not mine, but belongs to Ruvkun, Church and others Havard Med Dept of Genetics. They think deep and forward.
— Adam Steltzner (@steltzner) May 17, 2014

Ruvkun told me that it is possible to encode segments of human DNA in bacteria and have it survive the trip to other planets. “Like using bacteria like computer memory,” he said. 'It's sort of like an iPod that you send to another planet. And the bacteria can store information very densely."

It’s an extension of the idea to engineer bacteria to send into space to terraform Mars. These microbial pioneers would stimulate the evolution of a new biosphere, the theory goes, providing oxygen and food and the environment that Earthling settlers would need to live on the red planet.

"Once you propose terraforming, you might as well propose sending bacteria with human sequences," said Ruvkun. "That's not that crazy."

Anthony Atala: Printing a human kidney

What is potentially crazy, however, is the plan to reassemble the sequence on the other side. At this point, that’s beyond what’s we’re capable of. "We don't have any ability to sort of reassemble a human from DNA,” said Ruvkun.

But it’s also not entirely outside the realm of possibility. As genetic engineering, cloning, and bioprinting technology advances, it’s providing a lot of food for the imagination. If you put a 100th of a human genome into bacteria, Ruvkun said, you'd have to assemble 100 human segments, Ruvkun said. That seems doable.

"We're only 50 years into the DNA era," he said. "Five thousands years in, we'll probably think of that as a piece of cake."

But engineering bacteria in a university lab is one thing. If you’re trying to reconstruct an entire human on distant planet with no intelligent life, who’s even doing the reassembling? And this is where the idea gets really wacky.

If you want to roll with the terraforming scenario a bit further, you can imagine the human-encoded bacteria reassembles naturally, through organic processes, to eventually evolve into descendant organisms—sort of restarting the human population.

“Maybe that process has happened before,” Steltzner told me over the phone this weekend. “Maybe that's how we got here.”

Image: Rick Guidice/NASA

That line of thinking opens up a host of questions about how life came to be in the first place. Did someone else terraform Earth to create us? Do we share a microbial ancestor with Mars? If we custom-make life to survive on other planets, are we ‘playing god?’ Is ‘life’ more than a reconstructed genome? But let’s snap that Pandora’s Box shut for now and move onto scenario B: artificially constructing our biological building blocks after they hitchhike through deep space.

One idea floated by Steltzner is that we beam the human genome into the universe through radio waves—like we're already doing to try to communicate with intelligent life—and see if anyone receives the transmission and can figure out how to interpret it.

Maybe we send along detailed instructions with the signal, or encode a user’s manual of sorts in the DNA-carrying bacteria. Maybe we even send a robot to another planet, wait a thousand years to make sure we trust the machine, and then "beam the information about a human being and tell it to genetically construct the human," Steltzner mused.

"The idea of 3D printing is, something's created out of matter at the location, just with the information. And that's kind of what we're talking about here,” Steltzner said. "That kind of feels like a very fancy 3D printing to me.”

If we believe it's possible to print a Martian organism on Earth, could it work the other way around?

It sounds far-fetched, but it’s an area of biotech geneticists are currently exploring. Being able to store and transmit genetic code the same as any other kind of data is the principle behind the “life printing” gadget being developed by biologist Craig Venter, the US biologist that’s famous for helping map the human genome and creating the first synthetic life.

Venter is developing a “digital biological converter” device that can transport a digital DNA file, at the speed of light, and recreate the original lifeform in the new location from that data. He calls it biological teleportation, but it’s more like a cosmic fax.

Venter believes the process could be used to “print” alien life, if there is any, here on Earth. If, say, the Mars rover discovers microbes on the planet, it could beam back digital copies of the genomes to sequence here on Earth. There's a prototype already, which unsurprisingly has attracted the support of NASA and DARPA.

So if we believe it's possible to print a Martian organism on Earth, could it work the other way around? At this point, Venter’s experiment is only tackling life-printing at the individual gene level, but single-celled organisms like bacteria are next in line. “More complex creatures,” the New York Times reported, “earthly or Martian, will probably never be possible.”

Probably not. But in Ruvkun’s view, this method of “human” space exploration is worth thinking about, if for no other reason than it’s the least unlikely of all the unlikely schemes to colonize the cosmos.

If we're going to talk about interplanetary settlements anyway, we might as well discuss the strategies that aren't definitely scientifically impossible, he reasoned. We know which laws of physics are standing in the way of transporting people lightyears through the universe, but there aren't obvious laws of nature preventing us from sending DNA-encoded organisms to propagate the species on other planets.

"This is completely speculative," Steltzner said at the end of our interview. "But it doesn't require you moving faster than the speed of light, and it doesn’t require infinite amounts of energy.”

Topics: space, space colonization, printing humans, bioprinting, terraforming, DNA bacteria, science, genetic engineering, beaming human genome, life printing, Futures

THE BEAST IN THE WAR MACHINE

Prophecy is a tricky tool. Its fulfillment is only acknowledged in the eyes of its beholders. It seems that in some odd way people are living as if they have no future ahead of them.
There isn’t one dominant system of thought that controls the actions of western society today. It has become fragmented and those who are on the constant watch for those “troubling signs of the times” are labeled as paranoid, religious nutcases who are waiting for a great savior to come.
There are also those in the same camp, that are slightly off center who want to point to an “antichrist of the week” and in the same exercise come off looking as nutty as their counterparts who probably meet in the same churches, or social groups. Finally there are those who have been thrown into a sense of apathy, not caring either way because it all is a catalyst for depression.
Not just any depression, either, but one where the person is angry but is too beaten up emotionally to even act upon that anger.
The pharmaceutical companies see no problem there. All that needs to be done is a quick dose of some anti-depressant or SSRI and soon the person who is too tired or bored with life gets the energy to grab a gun and start shooting at police officers or open fire in a shopping mall or a school.
It all seems that antidepressants are an easy culprit for all of our ills in society and so many people want to point this out whenever someone slips a lug nut in their brain and starts shooting or stabbing or even eating their victims.
We begin to hear stories of a possible zombie apocalypse or worse, however I am beginning to believe that there seems to be this esoteric beast that is being unleashed in the war machine and it is all for the benefit of turmoil and war not only in the middle east but at home as well.
In my last article and in my last few shows I have opened the dialogue about how there are powerful archetypes that are being introduced by the Cryptocracy in order to change us psychologically. They are found in movies and in television shows and music.
They are subtle and magical and as we look at the plot to this satanic play we start to understand the purpose of the craft and the ritual that the elite want you to be aware of.
We are in transition from a relatively stable world, dominated by a handful of major powers, to something we cannot yet define. It seems clear, however, that there is a greater rapidity of change, accompanied inevitably by manipulation, psychological operations, cover-ups and half truths. Some people won’t even know that they are being lied to, some people are unaware that they are taking part in a massive Satanic ritual where the beast will be conjured and brought forth in the unavoidable war machine.
The motto of Israel’s spy agency, Mossad, is “By way of deception thou shalt do war.”
This seems to be the Modus operandi in a every system that now has been taken over by a shadowy Cryptocracy that uses clues and powerful words and utterances to provide causal and social engineering in times when the powers of the earth are at their height.
On June 21st, 2014 the summer solstice is going to take place. .
For thousands of years our ancestors marked the seasons of the year with festivals. The greatest festivals were the twice yearly solstices.
Coincidences never cease, and the idea of synchronicity in the middle of a ritual is not quickly dismissed, as I am about demonstrate for you.
Anciently, long before the great pyramids were built, the ancient Egyptians developed a powerful religion based on the motions of the sun and stars. This was the earliest type of astrology and magic.
The first solar calendar was created in Egypt as early as the 4th Millennium. These calendars were very accurate and were calibrated on the conjunction of what is called the solar “new dawn” and the rising star Sirius. This was done during the summer solstice sunrise. This was known as the stellar solar marriage of Sirius stellar rise and the solar sun rise of the first say of summer.
Sirius was also known as the Star queen Isis, the mother goddess and her marriage to the sun.
Throughout history the summer solstice and the throne of Isis which basks in the sun of the summer solstice have been very powerful symbols and it is no accident that we have seen these symbolic images before.
We have covered extensively the symbolism of ISIS and the newly organized “Islamic State in Iraq and Syria” and how it is a powerful acronym recognized in the west. We have also covered the appearance of an Isis doppelganger in the Disney Film Maleficent.
We have also spoken of the thousands of years that have transpired since the first caliphate took power after the death of Mohammad and how his name is similar to the leader of the newly formed Isis.
According to it is written that Abu Backr was the first Caliphate or successor to Mohammed.
Backr’s biography states: After Mohammed died (632), an assembly of Muslims in Mecca elected Abu Bakr as the first ‘khalifat rasul Allah’ (successor of the Prophet of God), or caliph. Under him the collection of Mohammed’s revelations was recorded in the Koran. Abu Bakr suppressed tribal uprisings and brought central Arabia under Muslim control, after which he directed Arab armies into Iraq and Syria initiating thus the Muslim conquests. ISIS coincidentally is being lead by an elusive leader named Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi, a man who shares the name with the first caliphate after Mohammad.
Right wing war mongers are now sounding the paranoid alarm that ISIS will be carrying out a 9/11 type attack on the United States soon. According to CBS News, experts are saying that ISIS’s increasing power and reach is concerning, though it’s not entirely clear when they might be able to threaten the U.S.
“You’ve got motivation mixed with opportunity, ideology and foreign fighters and all of that looks like a very extreme version of Afghanistan in the ’90s, plus what was happening in Iraq after the Iraq war,” said CBS News National Security Analyst Juan Zarate. “This is a cauldron of future terrorist threats to the west.”
The bigger danger, Zarate said, is that the U.S. does not yet know exactly what the group will look like once it evolves. While ISIS might not launch an attack on U.S. soil tomorrow, he said, “I think the grave threat here is that you have the seeds of a new terrorist movement emerging very aggressively.”
The same names now are coming forward claiming that something needs to be done soon or we may see another 9/11 style attack in the United States.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” Sunday that U.S. officials have warned the next major attack on U.S. soil could emanate from the region.
“The seeds of 9/11s are being planted all over Iraq and Syria,” Graham said. “They want an Islamic caliphate that runs through Syria and Iraq…and they plan to drive us out of the Mideast by attacking us here at home.”
Graham’s concerns were echoed on ABC’s “This Week” by Ret. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, who said that “all Americans should be concerned” by ISIS’ quick rise and success in Iraq. And on “Fox News Sunday,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Mich., said, “I guarantee you: this is a problem that we will have to face and we’re either going to face it in New York City or we’re going to face it here.”
Now while it seems to be an easy call to state that a 9/11 type attack could happen here, it may be important to go back in time and point out that the goddess influence and the image of Isis was all over the World Trade Center back before the attacks on the United States.
The attacks on New York were similar to the fall of the Etemenanki, Tower of Babel, or temporal Tower. This is the catastrophe that the ancients witnessed in the beginning. It is a metaphor for the destruction of the temporal doorways or entrances that consist of the legendary pillars that hold up heaven.
The Twin towers and their destruction are actually a modern metaphor for striking the temple or destroying the entrance to the unknown. On conscious level the attacks are simply an act of hatred and terror. On the unconscious level it is the leveling of architecture that was literally designed to be symbolic of a worship site.
If that is hard to believe, you must understand that the Twin towers were built to represent the pillars of the temple and the holy Muslim site of Mecca.

The World Trade Center’s architect, Minoru Yamasaki, designed buildings for the Bin laden family and the Saudi royal family. When he designed the towers he used an architectural style that merged modernism with Islamic influences.
When Yamasaki designed the plaza of the world trade center he literally replicated the plan of Mecca’s courtyard with two enormous, perfectly square minarets (the towers), a sphere which represented the Kabba stone and he secured the composition in a Fibonacci spiral, similar to Mecca’s. Muslims believe that the “Golden mean” mapped on earth is The Kabba in Mecca.
The most curious thing between the two towers was the sphere. Some compared it to the Kabba stone while others saw it as the Helios or Benben stone where the first rays of sun fall during the summer solstice.

The sphere was literally a representation of the throne of Isis.
If you want to dig even deeper you will see that the towers themselves are the two pillars that represented the entrance to the throne of the Sun God.

In antiquity all ancient mystery temples had a pillar on either side of them. The design was spoken of in the bible. They were known as the Towers of Jachin and Boaz. The names of the towers had a deeper meaning. One interpretation claimed that the two words mean “In it (the mystery temple) man has strength.”
What is between the two towers represents the mystery. The mystery is known as Babylon the Great. To quote the Bible God hath remembered her iniquities. Some interpret the whore of Babylon to be Isis.
In Qabalah, Jachin and Boaz are the names of the pillars of Mercy and Severity, they also eerily turn up in the Tarot, The High Priestess card shows Isis sitting between the two towers. The High Priestess “Isis” sits on a throne and to either side are the two pillars.

On the left is the black pillar of Severity, with a large “B” for Boaz; on the right is the white pillar of Mercy inscribed “J” for Jachin.
In New York, prior to the fall of the towers, the statue of liberty, known to be a representation of the queen Isis Meri when positioned just right would stand between the two towers illustrating the Goddess between the towers much like is seen with the High priestess card in the tarot.

This is well orchestrated. It is a very dark manipulative exercise that is being used to dig out the very memes that have existed in each of us from the time of our birth and from the times of our ancestors.
It is also important to point out that the Benben stone between the towers is symbolic of the sun sphere where Isis is supposed to appear, and upon the first rays of sun on the advent of the solstice impregnate herself.
Is the day of the solstice going to be a time where ISIS will make its mark in history? Could it be a day for a possible attack or all out war?
It all remains to be seen as the symbolism is abundant and on the day of the Solstice rituals and the invocation of Isis will take place all over the world.
Most of the time, what we feel as a sudden catastrophe is merely the breaking point of disaster, easily seen and easily foretold by those who have witnessed the patterns and have noted the steps that have been carried out in order for the chaos to transpire. It is wise to take a deep breath and try and understand just what the universe is trying to tell you when some crisis happens.
But of course there will be many people who will see these changes and catastrophes as signs that something miraculous is about to happen. The mixture of religion, politics and science is all in the plan to develop an umbrella of belief, a universal construct for whatever new plans are lurking in the shadows. Plans that are meant to lead you into making choices you would not normally make.
The elite are using eschatology and the threat of final judgment as a weapon to further their control over a world that does not take the time to uncover the conspiracy that hides the keys to occult or hidden knowledge.
Most people seem to think that they know when they are being manipulated even though the lines have blurred and our satisfaction wanes. We seem to want something more; we lack contentedness and wonder if we are truly living in the end times.
But these times are the interesting times. They are the times to learn new things and above all live as of every day as if it were your last.
Terror is an emotional response to an attack. A war on terror is a war on emotion. The way this war can be won is for those in power to remove our emotions and leave us without a conscience that controls our ability to feel a spiritual connection with anything transcendent.
When you reach that moment when you begin to see the game for what it truly is, when you can identify the beast in the war machine and see the patterns for what they are. You will then find freedom.

The Complete History of Monsanto, “The World’s Most Evil Corporation”

By E Hanzai

Global Research, June 22, 2014

Waking Times

Theme: Biotechnology and GMO, Science and Medicine

Of all the mega-corps running amok, Monsanto has consistently outperformed its rivals, earning the crown as “most evil corporation on Earth!” Not content to simply rest upon its throne of destruction, it remains focused on newer, more scientifically innovative ways to harm the planet and its people.
1901: The company is founded by John Francis Queeny, a member of the Knights of Malta, a thirty year pharmaceutical veteran married to Olga Mendez Monsanto, for which Monsanto Chemical Works is named. The company’s first product is chemical saccharin, sold to Coca-Cola as an artificial sweetener.
Even then, the government knew saccharin was poisonous and sued to stop its manufacture but lost in court, thus opening the Monsanto Pandora’s Box to begin poisoning the world through the soft drink.

1920s: Monsanto expands into industrial chemicals and drugs, becoming the world’s largest maker of aspirin, acetylsalicyclic acid, (toxic of course). This is also the time when things began to go horribly wrong for the planet in a hurry with the introduction of their polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs).

“PCBs were considered an industrial wonder chemical, an oil that wouldn’t burn, impervious to degradation and had almost limitless applications. Today PCBs are considered one of the gravest chemical threats on the planet. Widely used as lubricants, hydraulic fluids, cutting oils, waterproof coatings and liquid sealants, are potent carcinogens and have been implicated in reproductive, developmental and immune system disorders. The world’s center of PCB manufacturing was Monsanto’s plant on the outskirts of East St. Louis, Illinois, which has the highest rate of fetal death and immature births in the state.”(1)

Even though PCBs were eventually banned after fifty years for causing such devastation, it is still present in just about all animal and human blood and tissue cells across the globe. Documents introduced in court later showed Monsanto was fully aware of the deadly effects, but criminally hid them from the public to keep the PCB gravy-train going full speed!
1930s: Created its first hybrid seed corn and expands into detergents, soaps, industrial cleaning products, synthetic rubbers and plastics. Oh yes, all toxic of course!
1940s: They begin research on uranium to be used for the Manhattan Project’s first atomic bomb, which would later be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese, Korean and US Military servicemen and poisoning millions more.
The company continues its unabated killing spree by creating pesticides for agriculture containing deadly dioxin, which poisons the food and water supplies. It was later discovered Monsanto failed to disclose that dioxin was used in a wide range of their products because doing so would force them to acknowledge that it had created an environmental Hell on Earth.
1950s: Closely aligned with The Walt Disney Company, Monsanto creates several attractions at Disney’s Tomorrowland, espousing the glories of chemicals and plastics. Their “House of the Future” is constructed entirely of toxic plastic that is not biodegradable as they had asserted. What, Monsanto lied? I’m shocked!

“After attracting a total of 20 million visitors from 1957 to 1967, Disney finally tore the house down, but discovered it would not go down without a fight. According to Monsanto Magazine, wrecking balls literally bounced off the glass-fiber, reinforced polyester material. Torches, jackhammers, chain saws and shovels did not work. Finally, choker cables were used to squeeze off parts of the house bit by bit to be trucked away.”(2)

Monsanto’s Disneyfied vision of the future:

1960s: Monsanto, along with chemical partner-in-crime DOW Chemical, produces dioxin-laced Agent Orange for use in the U.S.’s Vietnam invasion. The results? Over 3 million people contaminated, a half-million Vietnamese civilians dead, a half-million Vietnamese babies born with birth defects and thousands of U.S. military veterans suffering or dying from its effects to this day!

Monsanto is hauled into court again and internal memos show they knew the deadly effects of dioxin in Agent Orange when they sold it to the government. Outrageously though, Monsanto is allowed to present their own “research” that concluded dioxin was safe and posed no negative health concerns whatsoever. Satisfied, the bought and paid for courts side with Monsanto and throws the case out. Afterwards, it comes to light that Monsanto lied about the findings and their real research concluded that dioxin kills very effectively.
A later internal memo released in a 2002 trial admitted

“that the evidence proving the persistence of these compounds and their universal presence as residues in the environment is beyond question … the public and legal pressures to eliminate them to prevent global contamination are inevitable. The subject is snowballing. Where do we go from here? The alternatives: go out of business; sell the hell out of them as long as we can and do nothing else; try to stay in business; have alternative products.”(3)

Monsanto partners with I.G. Farben, makers of Bayer aspirin and the Third Reich’s go-to chemical manufacturer producing deadly Zyklon-B gas during World War II. Together, the companies use their collective expertise to introduce aspartame, another extremely deadly neurotoxin, into the food supply. When questions surface regarding the toxicity of saccharin, Monsanto exploits this opportunity to introduce yet another of its deadly poisons onto an unsuspecting public.
1970s: Monsanto partner, G.D. Searle, produces numerous internal studies which claim aspartame to be safe, while the FDA’s own scientific research clearly reveals that aspartame causes tumors and massive holes in the brains of rats, before killing them. The FDA initiates a grand jury investigation into G.D. Searle for “knowingly misrepresenting findings and concealing material facts and making false statements” in regard to aspartame safety.
During this time, Searle strategically taps prominent Washington insider Donald Rumsfeld, who served as Secretary of Defense during the Gerald Ford and George W. Bush presidencies, to become CEO. The corporation’s primary goal is to have Rumsfeld utilize his political influence and vast experience in the killing business to grease the FDA to play ball with them.
A few months later, Samuel Skinner receives “an offer he can’t refuse,” withdraws from the investigation and resigns his post at the U.S. Attorney’s Office to go work for Searle’s law firm. This mob tactic stalls the case just long enough for the statute of limitation to run out and the grand jury investigation is abruptly and conveniently dropped.
1980s: Amid indisputable research that reveals the toxic effects of aspartame and as then FDA commissioner Dr. Jere Goyan was about to sign a petition into law keeping it off the market, Donald Rumsfeld calls Ronald Reagan for a favor the day after he takes office. Reagan fires the uncooperative Goyan and appoints Dr. Arthur Hayes Hull to head the FDA, who then quickly tips the scales in Searle’s favor and NutraSweet is approved for human consumption in dried products.This becomes sadly ironic since Reagan, a known jelly bean and candy enthusiast, later suffers from Alzheimers during his second term, one of the many horrific effects of aspartame consumption.
Searle’s real goal though was to have aspartame approved as a soft drink sweetener since exhaustive studies revealed that at temperatures exceeding 85 degrees Fahrenheit, it “breaks down into known toxins Diketopiperazines (DKP), methyl (wood) alcohol, and formaldehyde.”(4), becoming many times deadlier than its powdered form!
The National Soft Drink Association (NSDA) is initially in an uproar, fearing future lawsuits from consumers permanently injured or killed by drinking the poison. When Searle is able to show that liquid aspartame, though incredibly deadly, is much more addictive than crack cocaine, the NSDA is convinced that skyrocketing profits from the sale of soft drinks laced with aspartame would easily offset any future liability. With that, corporate greed wins and the unsuspecting soft drink consumers pay for it with damaged healths.
Coke leads the way once again (remember saccharin?) and begins poisoning Diet Coke drinkers with aspartame in 1983. As expected, sales skyrocket as millions become hopelessly addicted and sickened by the sweet poison served in a can. The rest of the soft drink industry likes what it sees and quickly follows suit, conveniently forgetting all about their initial reservations that aspartame is a deadly chemical. There’s money to be made, lots of it and that’s all that really matters to them anyway!
In 1985, undaunted by the swirl of corruption and multiple accusations of fraudulent research undertaken by Searle, Monsanto purchases the company and forms a new aspartame subsidiary called NutraSweet Company. When multitudes of independent scientists and researchers continue to warn about aspartame’s toxic effects, Monsanto goes on the offensive, bribing the National Cancer Institute and providing their own fraudulent papers to get the NCI to claim that formaldehyde does not cause cancer so that aspartame can stay on the market.
The known effects of aspartame ingestion are: “mania, rage, violence, blindness, joint-pain, fatigue, weight-gain, chest-pain, coma, insomnia, numbness, depression, tinnitus, weakness, spasms, irritability, nausea, deafness, memory-loss, rashes, dizziness, headaches, seizures, anxiety, palpitations, fainting, cramps, diarrhoea, panic, burning in the mouth. Diseases triggered/mimmicked include diabetes, MS, lupus, epilepsy, Parkinson’s, tumours, miscarriage, infertility, fibromyalgia, infant death, Alzheimer’s… Source : U.S. Food & Drug Administration.(5)
Further, 80% of complaints made to the FDA regarding food additives are about aspartame, which is now in over 5,000 products including diet and non-diet sodas and sports drinks, mints, chewing gum, frozen desserts, cookies, cakes, vitamins, pharmaceuticals, milk drinks, instant teas, coffees, yogurt, baby food and many, many more!(6) Read labels closely and do not buy anything that contains this horrific killer!
Amidst all the death and disease, FDA’s Arthur Hull resigns under a cloud of corruption and is immediately hired by Searle’s public relations firm as a senior scientific consultant. No, that’s not a joke! Monsanto, the FDA and many government health regulatory agencies have become one and the same! It seems the only prerequisite for becoming an FDA commissioner is that they spend time at either Monsanto or one of the pharmaceutical cartel’s organized crime corps.
1990s: Monsanto spends millions defeating state and federal legislation that disallows the corporation from continuing to dump dioxins, pesticides and other cancer-causing poisons into drinking water systems. Regardless, they are sued countless times for causing disease in their plant workers, the people in surrounding areas and birth defects in babies.
With their coffins full from the massive billions of profits, the $100 million dollar settlements are considered the low cost of doing business and thanks to the FDA, Congress and White House, business remains very good. So good that Monsanto is sued for giving radioactive iron to 829 pregnant women for a study to see what would happen to them.
In 1994, the FDA once again criminally approves Monsanto’s latest monstrosity, the Synthetic Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH), produced from a genetically modified E. coli bacteria, despite obvious outrage from the scientific community of its dangers. Of course, Monsanto claims that diseased pus milk, full of antibiotics and hormones is not only safe, but actually good for you!

Worse yet, dairy companies who refuse to use this toxic cow pus and label their products as“rBGH-free” are sued by Monsanto, claiming it gives them an unfair advantage over competitors that did. In essence, what Monsanto was saying is “yeah, we know rBGH makes people sick, but it’s not alright that you advertise it’s not in your products.”

The following year, the diabolical company begins producing GMO crops that are tolerant to their toxic herbicide Roundup. Roundup-ready canola oil (rapeseed), soybeans, corn and BT cotton begin hitting the market, advertised as being safer, healthier alternatives to their organic non-GMO rivals. Apparently, the propaganda worked as today over 80% of canola on the market is their GMO variety.

A few things you definitely want to avoid in your diet are GMO soy, corn, wheat and canola oil, despite the fact that many “natural” health experts claim the latter to be a healthy oil. It’s not, but you’ll find it polluting many products on grocery store shelves.

Because these GM crops have been engineered to ‘self-pollinate,’ they do not need nature or bees to do that for them. There is a very dark side agenda to this and that is to wipe out the world’s bee population.

Monsanto knows that birds and especially bees, throw a wrench into their monopoly due to their ability to pollinate plants, thus naturally creating foods outside of the company’s “full domination control agenda.” When bees attempt to pollinate a GM plant or flower, it gets poisoned and dies. In fact, the bee colony collapse was recognized and has been going on since GM crops were first introduced.
To counter the accusations that they deliberately caused this ongoing genocide of bees, Monsanto devilishly buys out Beeologics, the largest bee research firm that was dedicated to studying the colony collapse phenomenon and whose extensive research named the monster as the primary culprit! After that, it’s “bees, what bees? Everything’s just dandy!” Again, I did not make this up, but wish I had!
During the mid-90s, they decide to reinvent their evil company as one focused on controlling the world’s food supply through artificial, biotechnology means to preserve the Roundup cash-cow from losing market-share in the face of competing, less-toxic herbicides. You see, Roundup is so toxic that it wipes out non-GMO crops, insects, animals, human health and the environment at the same time. How very efficient!

Because Roundup-ready crops are engineered to be toxic pesticides masquerading as food, they have been banned in the EU, but not in America! Is there any connection between that and the fact that Americans, despite the high cost and availability of healthcare, are collectively the sickest people in the world? Of course not!

As was Monsanto’s plan from the beginning, all non-Monsanto crops would be destroyed, forcing farmers the world over to use only its toxic terminator seeds. And Monsanto made sure farmers who refused to come into the fold were driven out of business or sued when windblown terminator seeds poisoned organic farms.
This gave the company a virtual monopoly as terminator seed crops and Roundup worked hand in glove with each other as GMO crops could not survive in a non-chemical environment so farmers were forced to buy both.

Their next step was to spend billions globally buying up as many seed companies as possible and transitioning them into terminator seed companies in an effort to wipe out any rivals and eliminate organic foods off the face of the earth. In Monsanto’s view, all foods must be under their full control and genetically modified or they are not safe to eat!

They pretend to be shocked that their critics in the scientific community question whether crops genetically modified with the genes of diseased pigs, cows, spiders, monkeys, fish, vaccines and viruses are healthy to eat. The answer to that question is obviously a very big “no way!”
You’d think the company would be so proud of their GMO foods that they’d serve them to their employees, but they don’t. In fact, Monsanto has banned GM foods from being served in their own employee cafeterias. Monsanto lamely responded “we believe in choice.” What they really means is “we don’t want to kill the help.”
It’s quite okay though to force-feed poor nations and Americans these modified monstrosities as a means to end starvation since dead people don’t need to eat! I’ll bet the thought on most peoples’ minds these days is that Monsanto is clearly focused on eugenics and genocide, as opposed to providing foods that will sustain the world. As in Monsanto partner Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, the wicked witch gives the people the poisoned GMO apple that puts them to sleep forever!
2000s: By this time Monsanto controls the largest share of the global GMO market. In turn, the US gov’t spends hundreds of millions to fund aerial spraying of Roundup, causing massive environmental devastation. Fish and animals by the thousands die within days of spraying as respiratory ailments and cancer deaths in humans spike tremendously. But this is all considered an unusual coincidence so the spraying continues. If you thought Monsanto and the FDA were one and the same, well you can add the gov’t to that sorry list now.
The monster grows bigger: Monsanto merges with Pharmacia & Upjohn, then separates from its chemical business and rebrands itself as an agricultural company. Yes, that’s right, a chemical company whose products have devastated the environment, killed millions of people and wildlife over the years now wants us to believe they produce safe and nutritious foods that won’t kill people any longer. That’s an extremely hard-sell, which is why they continue to grow bigger through mergers and secret partnerships.

Because rival DuPont is too large a corporation to be allowed to merge with, they instead form a stealth partnership where each agrees to drop existing patent lawsuits against one another and begin sharing GMO technologies for mutual benefit. In layman’s terms, together they would be far too powerful and politically connected for anything to stop them from owning a virtual monopoly on agriculture; “control the food supply & you control the people!”

Not all is rosy as the monster is repeatedly sued for $100s of millions for causing illness, infant deformities and death by illegally dumping all manner of PCBs into ground water, and continually lying about products safety – you know, business as usual.
The monster often perseveres and proves difficult to slay as it begins filing frivolous suits against farmers it claims infringe on their terminator seed patents. In virtually all cases, unwanted seeds are windblown onto farmers’ lands by neighboring terminator-seeded farms. Not only do these horrendous seeds destroy the organic farmers’ crops, the lawsuits drive them into bankruptcy, while the Supreme Court overturns lower court rulings and sides with Monsanto each time.
At the same time, the monster begins filing patents on breeding techniques for pigs, claiming animals bred any way remotely similar to their patent would grant them ownership. So loose was this patent filing that it became obvious they wanted to claim all pigs bred throughout the world would infringe upon their patent.

The global terrorism spreads to India as over 100,000 farmers who are bankrupted by GMO crop failure, commit suicide by drinking Roundup so their families will be eligible for death insurance payments. In response, the monster takes advantage of the situation by alerting the media to a new project to assist small Indian farmers by donating the very things that caused crop failures in the country in the first place! Forbes then names Monsanto “company of the year.” Sickening, but true.

More troubling is that Whole Foods, the corporation that brands itself as organic, natural and eco-friendly is proven to be anything but. They refuse to support Proposition 37, California’s GMO-labeling measure that Monsanto and its GMO-brethren eventually helped to defeat.

Why? Because Whole Foods has been in bed with Monsanto for a long time, secretly stuffing its shelves with overpriced, fraudulently advertized “natural & organic” crap loaded with GMOs, pesticides, rBGH, hormones and antibiotics. So, of course they don’t want mandatory labelling as that would expose them as the Whole Frauds and Whore Foods that they really are!

However, when over twenty biotech-friendly companies including WalMart, Pepsico and ConAgra recently met with FDA in favor of mandatory labelling laws, this after fighting tooth and nail to defeat Prop 37, Whole Foods sees an opportunity to save face and becomes the first grocery chain to announce mandatory labelling of their GMO products…in 2018! Uh, thanks for nothing, Whore.

And if you think its peers have suddenly grown a conscience, think again. They are simply reacting to the public’s outcry over the defeat of Prop 37 by crafting deceptive GMO-labelling laws to circumvent any real change, thus keeping the status quo intact.

To add insult to world injury, Monsanto and their partners in crime Archer Daniels Midland, Sodexo and Tyson Foods write and sponsor The Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009: HR 875. This criminal “act” gives the corporate factory farms a virtual monopoly to police and control all foods grown anywhere, including one’s own backyard, and provides harsh penalties and jail sentences for those who do not use chemicals and fertilizers. President Obama decided this sounded reasonable and gave his approval.

With this Act, Monsanto claims that only GM foods are safe and organic or homegrown foods potentially spread disease, therefore must be regulated out of existence for the safety of the world. If eating GM pesticide balls is their idea of safe food, I would like to think the rest of the world is smart enough to pass.
As further revelations have broken open regarding this evil giant’s true intentions, Monsanto crafted the ridiculous HR 933 Continuing Resolution, aka Monsanto Protection Act, which Obama robo-signed into law as well.This law states that no matter how harmful Monsanto’s GMO crops are and no matter how much devastation they wreak upon the country, U.S. federal courts cannot stop them from continuing to plant them anywhere they choose. Yes, Obama signed a provision that makes Monsanto above any laws and makes them more powerful than the government itself. We have to wonder who’s really in charge of the country because it’s certainly not him!
There comes a tipping point though when a corporation becomes too evil and the world pushes back…hard! Many countries continue to convict Monsanto of crimes against humanity and have banned them altogether, telling them to “get out and stay out!”

The world has begun to awaken to the fact that the corporate monster does not want control over the global production of food simply for profit’s sake. No, it’s become clear by over a century of death & destruction that the primary goal is to destroy human health and the environment, turning the world into a Mon-Satanic Hell on Earth!

Research into the name itself reveals it to be latin, meaning “my saint,” which may explain why critics often refer to it as “Mon-Satan.” Even more conspiratorially interesting is that free masons and other esoteric societies assigned numbers to each letter in our latin-based alphabet system in a six system. Under that number system, what might Monsanto add up to? Why, of course 6-6-6!

Know that all is not lost. Evil always loses in the end once it is widely exposed to the light of truth as is occurring now. The fact that the Monsanto-led government finds it necessary to enact desperate legislation to protect its true leader proves this point. Being evicted elsewhere, the United States is Monsanto’s last stand so to speak.

Yet, even here many have begun striking back by protesting against and rejecting GMO monstrosities, choosing to grow their own foods and shop at local farmers markets instead of the Monsanto-supported corporate grocery chains.

The awakening people are also beginning to see they have been misled by corporate tricksters and federal government criminals poisoned by too much power, control and greed, which has resulted in the creation of the monstrous, out-of-control corporate beast.

Notes
(1,3) http://bestmeal.info/monsanto/company-history.shtml
(2) http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Monsanto

Where has the Bailout Money Gone? Good Billions After Bad

can anybody say ...the Hidden/DEEP Black/Finance /Off World ,Off the Books ...system ??? um oh yea the 900.00 $ hammers or ah um 2000.00 $ toilet seats ...yep or maybe just maybe ..the nazi's want "their" loot ..back Oops

By Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele

Global Research, September 27, 2009

Vanity Fair 27 September 2009

Region: USA

Theme: Global Economy

Where has the Bailout Money Gone? Good Billions After Bad

As the Bush administration waned, the Treasury shoveled more than a quarter of a trillion dollars in tarp funds into the financial system—without restrictions, accountability, or even common sense. The authors reveal how much of it ended up in the wrong hands, doing the opposite of what was needed.
Just inside the entrance to the U.S. Treasury, on the other side of a forbidding array of guard stations and scanners that control access to the Greek Revival building, lies one of the most beautiful interior spaces in all of Washington. Ornate bronze doors open inward to a two-story-high chamber. Chandeliers line the coffered ceiling, casting a soft glow on the marble walls and richly inlaid marble floor.
In this room, starting in 1869 and for many decades thereafter, the U.S. government conducted many of its financial transactions. Bags of gold, silver, and paper currency arrived here by horse-drawn vans and were carted upstairs to the vaults. On the busy trading floor, Treasury clerks supplied commercial banks with coins and currency, exchanged old bills for new, cashed checks, redeemed savings bonds, and took in government receipts. In those days, anyone could observe all this activity firsthand—could actually witness the government and the nation’s bankers doing business. The public space where this occurred became known as the Cash Room.
Today the Cash Room is used for press conferences, ceremonial functions, and departmental parties. And that’s too bad. If Treasury still used the room as it once did, then perhaps we’d have more of a clue about what happened to the billions of dollars that flew out of Treasury to selected American banks in the waning days of the Bush administration.
Last October, Congress passed the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, putting $700 billion into the hands of the Treasury Department to bail out the nation’s banks at a moment of vanishing credit and peak financial panic. Over the next three months, Treasury poured nearly $239 billion into 296 of the nation’s 8,000 banks. The money went to big banks. It went to small banks. It went to banks that desperately wanted the money. It went to banks that didn’t want the money at all but had been ordered by Treasury to take it anyway. It went to banks that were quite happy to accept the windfall, and used the money simply to buy other banks. Some banks received as much as $45 billion, others as little as $1.5 million. Sixty-seven percent went to eight institutions; 33 percent went to the rest. And that was just the money that went to banks. Tens of billions more went to other companies, all before Barack Obama took office. It was the largest single financial intervention by Treasury into the banking system in U.S. history.
But once the money left the building, the government lost all track of it. The Treasury Department knew where it had sent the money, but nothing about what was done with it. Did the money aid the recovery? Was it spent for the purposes Congress intended? Did it save banks from collapse? Paulson’s Treasury Department had no idea, and didn’t seem to care. It never required the banks to explain what they did with this unprecedented infusion of capital.
Exactly one year has elapsed since the onset of the financial crisis and the passage of the bailout bill. Some measure of scrutiny and control has since been imposed by the Obama administration, but even today it’s hard to walk back the cat and trace the money. Up to a point, though, it’s possible to reconstruct some of what happened in the first chaotic and crucial three months of the bailout, when Treasury was still in the hands of Henry Paulson and most of the money was disbursed. Needless to say, there is no central clearinghouse for information about the tarp money. To get details of any kind means starting with the hundreds of individual recipients, then poring over S.E.C. filings, annual reports, and other documentation—in other words, performing the standard due diligence that the government itself failed to perform. In the report that follows, we have no more than dipped a toe into the morass, but one fact emerges clearly: a lot of the money wound up in the coffers of some very surprising institutions— institutions that should have been seen as “troubling” as much as “troubled.”
A Reverse Holdup
The intention of Congress when it passed the bailout bill could not have been more clear. The purpose was to buy up defective mortgage-backed securities and other “toxic assets” through the Troubled Asset Relief Program, better known as tarp. But the bill was in fact broad enough to give the Treasury secretary the authority to do whatever he deemed necessary to deal with the financial crisis. If tarp had been a credit card, it would have been called Carte Blanche. That authority was all Paulson needed to switch gears, within a matter of days, and change the entire thrust of the program from buying bad assets to buying stock in banks.
Why did this happen? Ostensibly, Treasury concluded that the task of buying up toxic assets would take too long to help the financial system and unlock the credit markets. So, theoretically, something more immediate was needed—hence the plan to inject billions into banks, whether or not they wanted or needed the money. To be sure, Citigroup and Bank of America were in precarious condition. So was the insurance giant A.I.G., which had already received an infusion from the Federal Reserve and ultimately would receive more tarp money—$70 billion—than any single bank. But rather than just aiding institutions in distress, Treasury set out to disburse money in a more freewheeling way, hoping it would pass rapidly into the financial system and somehow address the system-wide credit crunch. Even at this early stage, it was hard to escape the feeling that the real strategy was less than scientific—amounting to a hope that if a massive pile of money was simply thrown at the economy, some of it would surely do something useful.
On Sunday, October 12, between 6:30 and 7 p.m., Paulson made a series of calls to the C.E.O.’s of the biggest banks—the so-called Big 9—and asked them to come to Treasury the next afternoon for a meeting on the financial crisis. He was short on details, as he would be throughout the crisis. A series of e-mails obtained by Judicial Watch, a Washington public-interest group, offers a window on the moment. The C.E.O. of Citigroup, Vikram Pandit, had agreed to attend, but asked his staff to scope out the purpose. “Can you find out soon as possible what Paulson invite to VP [Vikram Pandit] for meeting at Treasury this afternoon is about?” a Citigroup executive in New York wrote the bank’s Washington office. When Citi’s high-powered lobbyist Nicholas Calio called Paulson’s office, he was told only that Pandit should attend.
Top Treasury staffers were likewise in the dark. Paulson’s chief of staff, James Wilkinson, sent out a 7:30 a.m. e-mail: “Can someone tell Michele Davis, [Kevin] Fromer and me who the ‘Big 9’ are?”
By midmorning, people finally had the names—Vikram Pandit, of Citigroup; Jamie Dimon, of J. P. Morgan Chase; Kenneth Lewis, of Bank of America; Richard Kovacevich, of Wells Fargo; John Thain, of Merrill Lynch; John Mack, of Morgan Stanley; Lloyd Blankfein, of Goldman Sachs; Robert Kelly, of the Bank of New York Mellon; and Ronald Logue, of State Street bank. Their destination was Room 3327, the Secretary’s Conference Room, on the third floor.
Paulson laid before them a one-page memo, “CEO Talking Points.” He wasn’t there to ask for their help, Paulson would say; he was there to tell them what he expected from them. To “arrest the stress in our financial system,” Treasury would unveil a $250 billion plan the next day to buy preferred stock in banks. Paulson’s memo told the bankers bluntly that “your nine firms will be the initial participants.” Paulson wasn’t calling for volunteers; he made it clear the banks had no choice but to allow Treasury to buy stock in their companies. It was basically a reverse holdup, with Paulson holding the gun and forcing the banks to take the money.
Some of the C.E.O.’s had misgivings, fearing that by accepting tarp money their banks would be perceived as shaky by investors and customers. Paulson explained that opting out wasn’t an option. “If a capital infusion is not appealing,” the memo continued, “you should be aware that your regulator will require it in any circumstance.” Paulson gave the bankers until 6:30 p.m. to clear everything with their boards and sign the papers.
Treasury had prepared a form with blank spaces for the name of the bank and the amount of tarp money requested. Each C.E.O. filled in the two blanks by hand—$10 billion, $15 billion, $25 billion, whatever—and then signed and dated the document. That was all it took.
“There Is No Problem Here”
But this was just the beginning. It’s one thing to call nine big banks into a room and give them what turned out to be a total of $125 billion. That required little more than a few hours. It’s quite a different matter to look out over the landscape of 8,000 other U.S. banks and decide which ones should get slices of the tarp pie. Moreover, the guiding principle was never clear. Was it to give money to essentially sound banks, so that they could help inject more money into the credit markets? Was it to pull troubled banks into the clear? Was it both—and more?
Regardless, the mechanism to disburse all this money even more widely was an entity called the Office of Financial Stability. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a functioning office yet—it was just a name written into a piece of legislation. To lead it, Paulson picked Neel Kashkari, a 35-year-old former Goldman Sachs banker who had followed Paulson to Treasury when he became secretary, in July 2006. Kashkari was an odd choice to oversee a federal bailout of private companies. A free-market Republican, he had downplayed the gravity of the subprime-mortgage crisis only months before his appointment, reportedly sending the message to one gathering of bankers, “There is no problem here.”
Kashkari and other Paulson aides cobbled together the Office of Financial Stability under immense time pressure. They press-ganged people from elsewhere in Treasury and from far-flung government departments. By the end of the year, there were more “detailees” on loan from other offices (52) than there were permanent staff (38). They were spread out all over Treasury, from the ground floor to the third. Some occupied space in leased offices six blocks away. It was a strange agglomeration of people—stretching from Washington to San Francisco—who had never worked together before.
There were no internal controls to gauge success or failure. The goal was simply to dispense as much money as possible, as fast as possible. When Treasury began giving billions to the banks, the department had no policies in place to ensure that the banks were using the money in ways that met the purposes of the program, however defined. One main purpose, as noted, was to free up credit, but there was no incentive to lend and nothing to stop a bank from simply sitting on the money, bolstering its balance sheet and investing in Treasury bills. Indeed, Treasury’s plan was expressly not to ask the banks what they did with the money. As the Government Accountability Office later learned, “the standard agreement between Treasury and the participating institutions does not require that these institutions track or report how they plan to use, or do use, their capital investments.” When the G.A.O. asked Treasury if it intended to ask all tarp recipients to provide such an accounting, Treasury said it did not—and would not. “There’s not a bank in this country that would lend money under [these] terms,” Elizabeth Warren, the chair of a Congressional Oversight Panel that was eventually charged by Congress with overseeing tarp activities, would tell a Senate committee.
There wasn’t even anyone within the tarp office to keep track of the money as it was being disbursed. tarp gave that job—along with a $20 million fee—to a private contractor, Bank of New York Mellon, which also happened to be one of the Big 9. So here was a case of a beneficiary helping to oversee a process in which it was a direct participant. Most of the tarp contracts—for everything from legal services to accounting—were awarded under an expedited procedure that government watchdogs regard as “high-risk,” because it lacks a wide array of routine safeguards. In its first three months of operation, the Office of Financial Stability awarded 15 contracts worth tens of millions of dollars to law firms, fiscal agents, management consultants, and providers of various other services. There was enormous potential for conflicts of interest, and no procedure to deal with them. When the possibility of conflict of interest was raised, two of the contractors voiced vague promises to maintain an “open dialog” and “work in good faith” with Treasury, and left it at that.
When Henry Paulson unveiled the bank-rescue plan, he emphasized that it wasn’t a bailout. “This is an investment, not an expenditure, and there is no reason to expect this program will cost taxpayers anything,” he declared. For every $100 Treasury invested in the banks, he maintained, it would receive stock and warrants valued at $100. This claim proved optimistic. The Congressional Oversight Panel that later reviewed the 10 largest tarp transactions concluded that Treasury “paid substantially more for the assets it purchased under the tarp than their then-current market value.” For each $100 spent, Treasury received assets worth about $66.
Ask and You Shall Receive
In those first few weeks, money gushed out of Treasury and into the tarp pipeline at a torrential rate. After giving $125 billion to the big banks, Treasury moved on to the second round, wiring $33.6 billion to 21 other banks on November 14 in exchange for preferred stock. A week later it sent $2.9 billion to 23 more banks. As noted, by the time Barack Obama took office, the tarp tab totaled more than a quarter of a trillion dollars. In its first six months, the new administration disbursed an additional $125 billion to banks, mortgage companies, A.I.G., and the big auto manufacturers.
To the public, the bailout looked like a gold rush by banks competing for tarp money. It was indeed partly that, but the reality is more complex. While some banks lobbied aggressively for tarp money, many others that had no interest in the money were pressured to take it. Treasury’s explanation is that regulators knew which banks were strongest and wanted to get more capital into their hands in order to free up credit. But it’s also true that spreading the money around to a large number of small and medium-size banks helped create the impression that the bailout wasn’t just for a few big boys on Wall Street.
It’s impossible to overstate how casual the process was, or how little Treasury asked of the banks it targeted. Like most bankers, Ray Davis, the C.E.O. of Umpqua Bank, a solid, respectable local bank in Portland, Oregon, followed with great interest all the news out of Washington last fall. But he didn’t see that tarp had much relevance to his own bank. Umpqua was well run. It wasn’t bogged down by a portfolio of bad loans. It had healthy reserves.
Then he got a call from a Treasury Department representative asking if Umpqua would like to participate in the Treasury program and suggesting it would be a good thing for Umpqua to do. Davis listened politely, but the fact was, he says, that Umpqua “didn’t need the funds. Our capital resources were very high.”
The next day, Davis was in his office when another call came through from the same Treasury representative. “Basically what he said was that the secretary of the Treasury would like to have your application on his desk by five o’clock tomorrow afternoon,” Davis recalls.
The “application” was the paperwork for a capital infusion, and Davis was told it would be faxed over right away. By now he was sold on participating. “Here was somebody from the secretary of the Treasury calling,” Davis says, “and complimenting us on the strength of our company and saying you need to do this, to help the government, to be a good American citizen—all that stuff—and I’m saying, ‘That’s good. You’ve got me. I’m in.’”
The most urgent task was to complete the application and get it back to Treasury the next day, and this had Davis in a sweat: “I pictured this 200-page fax that would take me three weeks of work crammed into one evening.” Imagine Davis’s surprise when a staff member walked in soon afterward with the official “Application for tarp Capital Purchase Program.” It consisted of two pages, most of it white space.
If tarp accomplishes nothing else, it has struck a mighty blow for simplicity in government. The application was only 24 lines long, and asked such tough questions as the name and address of the bank, the name of the primary contact, the amount of its common and preferred stock, and how much money the bank wanted. Anyone who has filled out the voluminous federal forms required in order to be eligible for a college loan would die for such an application. Davis recalls that, when the two faxed pages were brought to him, all he could say was “Really?” As soon as Umpqua’s application was approved, Treasury wired $214 million to Umpqua’s account.
What happened in Portland happened elsewhere across the country. Peter Skillern, who heads the Community Reinvestment Association, a nonprofit group in North Carolina, describes a conference he attended where bankers explained that they had been “contacted by their regulators and told by them that they would be taking tarp.”
One policy that tarp did decide to adopt was to keep confidential the name of any bank that was denied tarp funds—but it never had to invoke this rule. In those early months, with billions being wired all across the country, no financial institution that asked for tarp money was turned away.
Small Bank, Sharp Teeth
With few restrictions or controls in place, bailout money found its way not only to banks that didn’t really need it but also to banks whose business practices left much to be desired. On November 21, $180 million in tarp money wound up in the affluent seaside community of Santa Barbara, California. The tarp dollars flowed mostly into the coffers of a beige, Spanish-style building on Carrillo Street, home to the Santa Barbara Bank & Trust.
This might appear to be just the kind of regional bank that Treasury had in mind as an ideal beneficiary of tarp. The bank has been a fixture in Santa Barbara for decades, serving small businesses as well as wealthy individuals. It sponsors Little League teams, funds scholarships to send local kids to college, and takes an active role in community groups. It plays up its “longstanding commitment to giving back to the communities we serve.”
How much tarp money made its way through S.B.B.&T. and into the local community is not known. But, as it happens, the bank also operates a little-known and controversial program far from the lush enclaves of Santa Barbara. Like an absentee landlord, the community bank with the “give back” philosophy in Santa Barbara turns out to be a big player in poor neighborhoods throughout the country. And not in a nice way. Outside Santa Barbara, S.B.B.&T. peddles what are known as refund-anticipation loans (rals)—high-interest loans to the poor that are among the most predatory around.
A ral is a short-term loan to taxpayers who have filed for a tax refund. Rather than waiting one or two weeks for their refund from the I.R.S., they take out a bank loan for an amount equal to their refund, minus interest, fees, and other charges. Banks operate in concert with tax preparers who complete the paperwork, and then the banks write the taxpayer a check. The loan is secured by the taxpayer’s expected refund. rals are theoretically available to everyone, but they are used overwhelmingly by the working poor. Ordinarily, the loans have a term of only a few weeks—the time it takes the I.R.S. to process the return and send out a check—but the interest charges and fees are so steep that borrowers can lose as much as 20 percent of the value of their tax refund. A recent study estimated that annual rates on some rals run as high as 700 percent.
Santa Barbara is one of three banks that dominate this obscure corner of the banking market—the other two being J. P. Morgan Chase and HSBC. But unlike the two big banks, for which rals are but one facet of a broad-based business, Santa Barbara has come to rely heavily for its financial well-being on these high-interest loans to poor people. Interest earned from rals accounted for 24 percent of the banking company’s interest earnings in 2008, second only to income generated by commercial-real-estate loans. Under pressure from consumer groups, some banks, including J. P. Morgan Chase, have lowered their ral fees. Not Santa Barbara. Chi Chi Wu, of the National Consumer Law Center, in Boston, calls Santa Barbara Bank & Trust “a small bank with sharp teeth.”
The U.S. Department of Justice and state authorities in California, New Jersey, and New York have taken action against tax preparers with whom S.B.B.&T. works, charging them with deceptive advertising and with preparing fraudulent returns. Santa Barbara later took a $22 million hit on its books because of unpaid refund-anticipation loans.
The bank insists that its tarp money didn’t go to finance ral. “The capital received by Santa Barbara Bank & Trust under the U.S. Treasury Department’s Capital Purchase Program was not intended nor is it being used to fund or provide liquidity for any Refund Anticipation Loans,” according to Deborah L. Whiteley, an executive vice president of Pacific Capital Bancorp, Santa Barbara’s parent company. Other banks that have received tarp money have made similar statements, contending that money received from Washington simply became part of their capital base and was not earmarked for any specific purpose. But in a conference call with analysts on November 21, Stephen Masterson, the chief financial officer of Pacific Capital Bancorp, admitted that tarp “obviously helps us .… We didn’t take the tarp money to increase our ral program or to build our ral program, but it certainly helps our capital ratios.”
Indeed, the infusion from Treasury may well have been a lifeline for Santa Barbara. The Community Reinvestment Association of North Carolina, which has been tracking S.B.B.&T.’s finances and its ral program for years, concluded in 2008 that S.B.B.&T. would be losing money if it weren’t putting the squeeze on poor people around the country.
Gouging Needy Students
KeyBank of Cleveland is another institution that was given the nod by Treasury officials—and another bank whose lending practices prompt the question: What were they thinking?
Last fall KeyBank received $2.5 billion in tarp money. Its parent company is KeyCorp, a major bank holding company headquartered in Cleveland. With 989 full-service branches spread across 14 states, KeyCorp describes itself as “one of the nation’s largest bank-based financial services companies,” with assets of $98 billion. It also ranks as the nation’s seventh-largest education lender. In the summer of 2008, as banks and Wall Street firms were unraveling faster than they could count up their losses, KeyCorp delivered a decidedly upbeat report on its condition to investors. “Our costs are well controlled,” the company stated. “Our fee revenue is strong.…Our reserves are strong.…We remain well capitalized.”
What the report did not mention was a host of other problems. KeyCorp was in the midst of negotiations with the I.R.S. over questionable tax-leasing deals, and had had to deposit $2 billion in escrow with the government—forcing it to raise emergency capital and slash dividends after 43 consecutive years of annual growth. Meanwhile, consumer advocates had KeyBank in their sights because of the way it conducted its student-loan business, which they described as nakedly predatory. The Salt Lake Tribune reported that “KeyBank not only funds unscrupulous schools, it seeks them out, strikes up lucrative partnerships, and, in the process, suckers students into thinking the schools are legitimate.”
Over the years, thousands of students have secured education loans from KeyBank to attend a broad range of career-training schools—schools offering instruction in how to use or repair computers, how to become an electronics technician or even a nurse. One of the schools was Silver State Helicopters, which was based in Las Vegas and operated flight schools in a half-dozen states. During high-pressure sales pitches, people looking to change careers were encouraged to simultaneously sign up for flight school and complete a loan application that would be forwarded to KeyBank. Once approved, KeyBank, in keeping with long-standing practice, would give all the tuition money up front directly to Silver State. If a student dropped out, Silver State kept the tuition and the student remained on the hook for the full amount of the loan, at a hefty interest rate.
The same rule applied if Silver State shut itself down, which it did without warning on February 3, 2008. “Because the monthly operating expenses, even at the recently streamlined levels, continue to exceed cash flow,” an e-mail to employees explained, “the board has elected to suspend all operations effective at 5 p.m. today.” More than 750 employees in 18 states were out of work. More than 2,500 students had their training (for which they had paid as much as $70,000) cut short.
Silver State Helicopters was a flight school, but it might more accurately be thought of as a Ponzi scheme, according to critics. As long as there was a continual source of loan money, keeping the scheme afloat, all was well. KeyBank bundled the loans into securities, just as the subprime-mortgage marketers had done, and sold them on Wall Street. But when Wall Street failed to buy at an adequate interest rate, the money supply evaporated. As KeyBank dryly put it, “In 2007, Key was unable to securitize its student loan portfolio at cost-effective rates.” Without the loans—in other words, without the cooperation of Wall Street—the school had no income.
In February 2009, Fitch Ratings service, which rates the ability of debt issuers to meet their commitments, placed 16 classes of KeyCorp student-loan transactions totaling $1.75 billion on “Ratings Watch Negative,” signaling the possibility of a future downgrade in their creditworthiness.
Predator to the Rescue
The credit-card behemoth Capital One, an institution that many Americans probably don’t even realize is a bank, maintains its headquarters in McLean, in northern Virginia. Over the years, Capital One’s phenomenally successful marketing strategy has made the company the fifth-largest credit-card issuer in the U.S., and it has used its profits to expand into retail banking, home-equity loans, and other kinds of lending.
Capital One never revealed what it planned to do with the $3.5 billion tarp check it received from the U.S. Treasury on November 14, 2008, but three weeks later, the company bought one of Washington’s premier financial institutions, Chevy Chase Bank. To Washingtonians, Chevy Chase was a model corporate citizen. But outside Washington, it had a different reputation. The company’s mortgage subsidiary had engaged in practices that were at the core of the nation’s mortgage meltdown—risky loans with teaser interest rates that later went bad. The bank’s portfolio of mortgages from around the country was stuffed with a high percentage of so-called option arm—adjustable-rate mortgages with many different payment options. One of the most common kept a homeowner’s monthly payment the same for years, but the interest rate rose almost immediately. When the interest exceeded the amount of the monthly payment, the excess was tacked onto the principal, pushing homeowners ever deeper into debt. Having been lured by what a federal judge would call the “siren call” of this kind of mortgage, many Chevy Chase mortgage holders were on the brink of foreclosure, or had already fallen over the edge. By mid-2008, Chevy Chase’s “nonperforming” assets had tripled to $490 million since the previous September.
With Chevy Chase rapidly deteriorating, along came Capital One. Flush with tarp money, Capital One became a bailout czar of its own. It bought Chevy Chase for $520 million and assumed $1.75 billion of its bad loans. The purchase price was a fraction of what Chevy Chase would have brought before it wandered off into the wilderness of exotic mortgages and risky lending.
Meanwhile, even as it was bailing out Chevy Chase, Capital One was putting the squeeze on many thousands of its own credit-card holders, sharply raising their interest rates and imposing other conditions that made credit far more expensive and difficult to obtain. For many cardholders, rates jumped overnight from 7.9 percent to as much as 22.9 percent. Rather than using its multi-billion-dollar government infusion to prime the credit pump, Capital One in fact began turning off the spigot.
Capital One’s actions enraged its customers, many of whom had been cardholders for decades. The bank was engulfed with complaints. “The last I checked you were given money from the government for the specific purpose of freeing up credit to stimulate spending and help move the economy out of recession,” wrote a woman in Holland, Michigan. This was “just the opposite of what you did.” But other credit-card companies that received federal bailout money, such as Bank of America, J. P. Morgan Chase, and Citibank, would take the same route as Capital One, sharply raising interest rates, cutting off credit to millions of people, and frustrating the stated rationale for Treasury’s bailout.
After the Earthquake
Because all dollar bills are alike, and because follow-up tracking by the government has been so minimal, it’s often impossible to determine if any bank or other financial institution used tarp money for any particular, discernible purpose. Only A.I.G., Bank of America, and Citigroup were subject to any reporting requirements at all, and the reporting has been spotty. But what is possible to say is that tarp allowed many recipients to spend money in ways they would have been unable to do otherwise. It’s also the case that recipients of tarp money continued to behave as if a financial earthquake hadn’t just shaken the world economy.
The Riviera Country Club is about a mile from the Pacific Ocean, in a scenic canyon north of Los Angeles. Riviera is home to one of the most storied tournaments on the P.G.A. Tour. This year the tournament was sponsored by a tarp recipient, the Northern Trust Company of Chicago. Northern was founded more than a century ago to cater to wealthy Chicagoans, and not much about its clientele has changed since then, except that now the company caters to the wealthy not just in Chicago but everywhere. According to the bank, its wealth-management group caters to those “with assets typically exceeding $200 million.” The company manages $559 billion in assets—a sum nearly as great as what has so far been spent on the tarp program itself.
When Northern Trust received $1.6 billion in tarp funds, a spokesman for the bank said that it was “too soon to say specifically” how the money would be used. But the company’s president and C.E.O., Frederick Waddell, noted that “the program will provide us with additional capital to maximize growth opportunities.” Three months later, the bank sponsored the Northern Trust Open, flying in wealthy clients from around the country. To entertain them, the bank brought in Sheryl Crow, Chicago, and Earth, Wind & Fire. A Northern Trust spokesman declined to say how much all this cost, but explained that it was really just a business decision “to show appreciation for clients.”
Northern Trust was acting no differently from many other tarp recipients. One of the most blatant examples was Citigroup’s plan to buy a $50 million private jet to fly executives around the country. A public outcry forced Citigroup to abandon that scheme, but the bank quietly went ahead with a $10 million renovation of its executive offices on Park Avenue, in New York. Given that Citigroup had already gone to the government three times for tarp assistance totaling $45 billion, and was not a paragon of public trust, retrofitting the windows with “Safety Shield 800” blastproof window film may have just been common sense.
The excesses weren’t confined to big-city banks. A subsidiary of North Carolina–based B.B.&T., after accepting $3.1 billion in tarp money, sent dozens of employees to a training session at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Sarasota, Florida. TCF Financial Corp., based in Wayzata, Minnesota, sent 40 “high-performing” managers, lenders, and other employees on a junket in February to Cancún, soon after receiving more than $360 million in tarp funds.
But let’s face it: episodes like these, infuriating as they may be, aren’t the real issue. The real issue is tarp itself, one of the most questionable ventures the U.S. government has ever pursued. Adopted as a plan to buy up toxic assets—one that was quickly deemed impractical even by those who first proposed it—it evolved into something more closely resembling an all-purpose slush fund flowing out to hundreds of institutions with their own interests and goals, and no incentive to deploy the money toward any clearly defined public purpose.
By and large, the cash that went to the Big 9 simply became part of their capital base, and most of the big banks declined to indicate where the money actually went. Because of the sheer size of these institutions, it’s simply impossible to trace. Bank of America no doubt used a portion of its $25 billion in tarp funds to help it absorb Merrill Lynch. Citigroup revealed in its first quarterly report after receiving $45 billion in tarp funds that it had used $36.5 billion to buy up mortgages and to make new loans, including home loans.
A.I.G., the largest single tarp beneficiary, wasn’t even a bank. The insurance company used its $70 billion in tarp funds to pay off a previous government infusion from the Federal Reserve. The original bailout money had flowed through A.I.G. to Wall Street firms and foreign banks that had incurred big losses on credit-default swaps and other exotic obligations. These were basically the casino-style wagers made by A.I.G. and the counterparties—wagers they lost. The government justified the help by saying it was necessary to prevent disruption to the economy that would be caused by a “disorderly wind-down” of A.I.G. The collapse of Lehman Brothers had occurred just days before the Fed took action, and the shock waves on Wall Street from yet another implosion might have been catastrophic. Bankruptcy court, where troubled corporations routinely wind down their disorderly affairs, would have been another option, though that prospect might not have quickly enough addressed the gathering sense of urgency and doom. We’ll never know. Certainly bankruptcy court would not have allowed A.I.G.’s clients to get full value for their bad investments.
Instead, A.I.G. was able to pay off its counterparties 100 cents on the dollar. The largest payout—$12.9 billion—went to Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street investment house presided over by Paulson before he moved into his Treasury job. Merrill Lynch, the world’s largest brokerage—then in the process of being taken over by Bank of America—received $6.8 billion. Bank of America itself received $5.2 billion. Citigroup, the nation’s largest bank, received $2.3 billion. But it wasn’t just Wall Street that benefitted. A.I.G. also funneled tens of billions of tarp dollars to banks on the other side of the Atlantic.
Some banks receiving tarp funds bristle at the notion that the taxpayer-funded program is a bailout. They say it is an investment in banks by the federal government, one that requires them to pay interest and ultimately pay back the money or face a financial penalty. In fact, many banks are making their scheduled payments to Treasury, and others have paid off billions of dollars in tarp funds (as well as interest). To tarp supporters, this is evidence of a sound investment. But at this stage it isn’t clear that every institution will be able to make the interest payments and buy back the government’s holdings. As of this writing, some banks, including Pacific Capital Bancorp, the parent of Santa Barbara Bank & Trust, have not been able to make their scheduled payments. No one can predict how many banks will ultimately come up short. But in the meantime tarp has been a very good deal for banks, because it gave them, courtesy of the taxpayers, access to capital that would have cost them substantially more in the private market, while exacting nothing from the beneficiaries in the form of a quid pro quo.
Based on the reluctance of many banks to take the money in the first place, and the swiftness with which other banks have repaid tarp funds, the main conclusion to be drawn is that relatively few were actually endangered. Rather than targeting the weak for relief—or allowing them to fail, as the government allowed millions of ordinary Americans to fail—Paulson and Treasury pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into the financial system without prior design and without prospective accountability. What was this all about? A case of panic by Treasury and the Federal Reserve? A financial over-reaction of cosmic proportions? A smoke screen to take care of a small number of Wall Street institutions that received 100 cents on the dollar for some of the worst investments they ever made?
More than five months after the bulk of the bailout money had been distributed into bank coffers, Elizabeth Warren plaintively raised the central and as yet unanswered question: “What is the strategy that Treasury is pursuing?” And she basically threw up her hands. As far as she could see, Warren went on, Treasury’s strategy was essentially “Take the money and do what you want with it.”
www.globalresearch.ca/where-has-the-bailout-money-gone-good-billions-after-bad/15420" data-title="Where has the Bailout Money Gone? Good Billions After Bad">

the gipster

Sunday, June 22, 2014

A Mysterious Sound Is Driving People Insane — And Nobody Knows What's Causing It

Our Best Bet for Colonizing Space May Be Printing Humans on Other Planets

Meghan Neal

"Once you propose terraforming, you might as well propose sending bacteria with human sequences. That's not that crazy."

Anthony Atala: Printing a human kidney

Image: Rick Guidice/NASA

If we believe it's possible to print a Martian organism on Earth, could it work the other way around?

THE BEAST IN THE WAR MACHINE

THE BEAST IN THE WAR MACHINE

The Complete History of Monsanto, “The World’s Most Evil Corporation”

Where has the Bailout Money Gone? Good Billions After Bad

can anybody say ...the Hidden/DEEP Black/Finance /Off World ,Off the Books ...system ??? um oh yea the 900.00 $ hammers or ah um 2000.00 $ toilet seats ...yep or maybe just maybe ..the nazi's want "their" loot ..back Oops

About Me

Subscribe To

Sunday, June 22, 2014

"Once you propose terraforming, you might as well propose sending bacteria with human sequences. That's not that crazy."​

Anthony Atala: Printing a human kidney

Image: Rick Guidice/NASA

If we believe it's possible to print a Martian organism on Earth, could it work the other way around?

THE BEAST IN THE WAR MACHINE

The Complete History of Monsanto, “The World’s Most Evil Corporation”

Where has the Bailout Money Gone? Good Billions After Bad

can anybody say ...the Hidden/DEEP Black/Finance /Off World ,Off the Books ...system ??? um oh yea the 900.00 $ hammers or ah um 2000.00 $ toilet seats ...yep or maybe just maybe ..the nazi's want "their" loot ..back Oops

"Once you propose terraforming, you might as well propose sending bacteria with human sequences. That's not that crazy."