How Edward Snowden could sidestep extradition USA Today
Snowden versus the dragons Reuters
The Terror Con Indeed papicek Firedoglake
Fisa court oversight: a look inside a secret and empty process Glenn Greenwald. Neglected to include this yesterday
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2013/06/jon-hilsenrath-to-rick-santelli/
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-06-19/guest-post-who-are-real-traitors
***
Fractional reserve banking, conjuring what they claim is 'money,' but
that which is really debt (since there is nothing of inherent value
backing it), from thin air, leveraging it up by many multitudes,
getting a nation to endorse it as monopolistic fiat (and enforce the
monopolistic recognition of it as such), is the problem.
If 95% of loans go bad (or more), the fractional reserve bankers lose nothing.
They created this fiat money from nothing and received the protection of the nation in distributing fiat monopoly currency.
Not
only do they lose nothing, they actually gain any real assets that
were pledged as collateral to securitize most of the loans that went
'bad' - Harvest.
Repeat this process of Harvest by first inflating the
money supply, getting people deeply indebted (many of whom weren't
indebted before), and soon enough, with enough cycles of harvest, what
belonged to many will be concentrated in the hands of a few, all via
the sham that is fractional reserve banking.
It's the biggest scam in the history of mankind.
Once a person grasps this basic concept, they'll understand why
events have taken place as they have (Bretton Woods*; Plaza Accord;
Federal Reserve Act of 1913; closing of the gold standard in 1971*,
etc.), and they'll finally grasp how a select few have rigged the game
to be able to harvest assets continually, and concentrate wealth and
power, by doing nothing other than maintaining Deep Capture of a
nation's legislative and judiciary branches (and executive, in the case
of the U.S.) of government.
*On August 15, 1971, the United States unilaterally
terminated convertibility of the dollar to gold. As a result, "[t]he
Bretton Woods system officially ended and the dollar became fully fiat
currency, backed by nothing but the promise of the federal
government." This action, referred to as the Nixon shock, created the
situation in which the United States dollar became the sole backing of
currencies and a reserve currency for the member states. At the same
time, many fixed currencies also became free floating.
If you could print a currency at no cost, that had no instrinsic
value, and get the legal system to recognize it as the only legally
permissibly 'tender' to satisfy all debt, public and private, would you
print as much as you could, loan it out to as many entities and people
as you could, and sit back, not caring whether 90% or 9% of the loans
were repaid, since it cost you nothing to produce the loan, meaning that
you can only gain assets (securitized) and indebt institutions (create
indebted parties that you can then garnish), and literally lose not
one atom of anything of inherent value?
Further, if you had access to an entity that could do the above, and
you could borrow that currency at absurdly low interest rates, and
moreover, you had an express or at least implicit taxpayer guarantee
against losses (too big to fail), would you also not do exactly the
same?
If you're the former entity, you literally can lose nothing, no matter how reckless your actions or lending standards.
If you're the latter party, your risk of loss is inconsequential,
since you're backed by the taxpayers (involuntarily), and even if you
weren't, if you're a very large entity able to tap absurdly low interest
loans from the former, unless you are galactically idiotic on a level
that equals Lehman or beyond (where derivatives did them in, along with
a non-bailout), you'd be hard pressed to lose money if even -
completely hypothetical and arbitrary % - 20% of the cheap interest
money you borrowed and then re-loaned out wasn't paid back to you.
If you're the former, you have not only no risk, but you can't possibly lose anything, since your investment is nothing.
If you're the latter, your risk is incredibly small.
This is why our economy, under fractional reserve banking practices,
using currency created from thin air, tied to absolutely nothing of
inherent value, and bestowed monopoly status as legal tender, is a
factual, literal Ponzi Scheme.
This is why we had to close the gold standard, lest we couldn't show
"growth" (even though it was merely nominal, credit/debt based
transactions) in our official GDP going forward.
You don't even have to tie the fiat to gold in order to force the
economy to produce honest numbers and detect the real level of economic
growth or contraction: tie the currency to anything that has inherent
value, and that can be stored, and that isn't infinite in quantity.
The mind bender part for the newly initiated (as I was at one time)
to the Matrix is that there's no real 'debt' from the perspective of the
fractional reserve central bank; it's hard for those steeped in
conventional economics to rip out the notion from their brain that the
fractional reserve central bank can't lose anything (they didn't lend
anything of value or that cost them anything - they have ZERO skin in
the game), and that their favored entities that are TBTF have only
slightly less risk (because they will always be able to socialize their
losses via taxpayer bailouts in the wake of busts, while they retain
their ill-gotten gains during the booms), and that what most refer to as
debt in this system is only a liability for the debtor. If the debtor
doesn't repay what was they borrowed (a monopoly currency that cost the
lender nothing to produce), they can lose their farm, construction
equipment, home, machinery, infrastructure, vehicle, etc. that was used
to securitize or collateralize the loan, or even if the loan was
unsecuritized, they can at least see their revenue or wages garnished,
be sent into involuntary bankruptcy (where their general pool of assets
will be seized upon by creditors, including lenders), and squeezed in
other ways.
The only way to avoid this is to not play the game. During crack up
booms, you miss out on fiat-based gains, if you don't play the game, and
the incentive for playing that game is that if your timing is correct,
you can get rid of all debt and convert the excess fiat gains into
hard assets having inherent value or other things of inherent value,
before the fractional reserve alchemists induce another
inflationary-deflationary (or vice-versa) harvest.
If one were fortuitous enough to play the game, and have the skill
and/or luck to convert fiat gains into real wealth before the boom turns
to bust, they'd probably be idiotic to repledge their real wealth
assets as collateral for loans ever again (I say probably, because there
are exceptions to every general rule, but these people would have to
be extremely smart, competent and or connected to the alchemists in
such a way that they'd be assured a bailout in the event of another
bust whereby their real assets are pledged as collateral for fiat
loans).
The Harvest is the end game for the fractional reserve bankers and their minions.
As just one example
of the rape that is harvest, even generations of families that were
land rich (let's say a family that has owned two square miles of prime
farmland yielding high value crops for three generations, carrying no
debt) can find that an economic downturn suddenly forces them to take
the step of obtaining a loan, pledging their farm and equipment as
collateral, in the belief that the loan will allow them to survive the
downturn and become more profitable at some future point - they're now
'harvestable.'
By pledging real assets to secure a loan of fiat money (conjured from
thin air at no cost), one is playing right into the hands of
The Money Masters.
The Secret of Oz - Winner, Best Documentary of 2010
Money As Debt-Full Length Documentary
The Money Masters - Full Version
Money, Banking and the Federal Reserve
