DOCTOR DOCTORIAN FROM ANGEL OF GOD
then the angel said, Financial crisis will come to Asia. I will shake the world.
JAMES 5:1-3
1 Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you.
2 Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are motheaten.
3 Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days.
REVELATION 18:10,17,19
10 Standing afar off for the fear of her torment, saying, Alas, alas that great city Babylon, that mighty city! for in one hour is thy judgment come.
17 For in one hour so great riches is come to nought. And every shipmaster, and all the company in ships, and sailors, and as many as trade by sea, stood afar off,
19 And they cast dust on their heads, and cried, weeping and wailing, saying, Alas, alas that great city, wherein were made rich all that had ships in the sea by reason of her costliness! for in one hour is she made desolate.
EZEKIEL 7:19
19 They shall cast their silver in the streets, and their gold shall be removed: their silver and their gold shall not be able to deliver them in the day of the wrath of the LORD: they shall not satisfy their souls, neither fill their bowels: because it is the stumblingblock of their iniquity.
REVELATION 13:16-18
16 And he(FALSE POPE) causeth all,(WORLD SOCIALISM) both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:(CHIP IMPLANT)
17 And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
18 Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.(6-6-6) A NUMBER SYSTEM
WORLD MARKET RESULTS
http://money.cnn.com/data/world_markets/
CNBC VIDEOS
http://www.cnbc.com/id/15839263/?tabid=15839796&tabheader=false
HALF HOUR DOW RESULTS MON DECEMBER 05,2011
09:30 AM +2.43
10:00 AM +134.07
10:30 AM +155.43
11:00 AM +144.59
11:30 AM +146.94
12:00 PM +144.78
12:30 PM +139.34
01:00 PM +154.43
01:30 PM +138.24
02:00 PM +90.59
02:30 PM +69.63
03:00 PM +80.30
03:30 PM +31.64
04:00 PM +78.41 12,097.83
S&P 500 1257.08 +12.80
NASDAQ 2655.76 +28.20
GOLD 1,725.30 -26.00
OIL 101.74 +0.72
TSE 300 12,119.33 +44.24
CDNX 1553.35 -3.53
S&P/TSX/60 688.63 +2.19
MORNING,NEWS,STATS
YEAR TO DATE PERFORMANCE
Dow +140 points at 4 minutes of trading today.
Dow +1 points at low today.
Dow +159 points at high today so far.
GOLD opens at $1,743.70.OIL opens at $102.25 today.
AFTERNOON,NEWS,STATS
Dow +1 points at low today so far.
Dow +159 points at high today so far.
WRAPUP,NEWS,STATS
Dow +1 points at low today.
Dow +159 points at high today.
GOLD ALLTIME HIGH $1,902.60 (NOT AT CLOSE)
MUSLIM NATIONS
EZEKIEL 38:1-12
1 And the word of the LORD came unto me, saying,
2 Son of man, set thy face against Gog,(RULER) the land of Magog,(RUSSIA) the chief prince of Meshech(MOSCOW)and Tubal,(TOBOLSK) and prophesy against him,
3 And say, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I am against thee, O Gog, the chief prince of Meshech(MOSCOW) and Tubal:
4 And I will turn thee back, and put hooks into thy jaws,(GOD FORCES THE RUSSIA-MUSLIMS TO MARCH) and I will bring thee forth, and all thine army, horses and horsemen, all of them clothed with all sorts of armour, even a great company with bucklers and shields, all of them handling swords:
5 Persia,(IRAN,IRAQ) Ethiopia, and Libya with them; all of them with shield and helmet:
6 Gomer,(GERMANY) and all his bands; the house of Togarmah (TURKEY)of the north quarters, and all his bands:(SUDAN,AFRICA) and many people with thee.
7 Be thou prepared, and prepare for thyself, thou, and all thy company that are assembled unto thee, and be thou a guard unto them.
8 After many days thou shalt be visited: in the latter years thou shalt come into the land that is brought back from the sword, and is gathered out of many people, against the mountains of Israel, which have been always waste: but it is brought forth out of the nations, and they shall dwell safely all of them.
9 Thou shalt ascend and come like a storm, thou shalt be like a cloud to cover the land, thou, and all thy bands, and many people with thee.(RUSSIA-EGYPT AND MUSLIMS)
10 Thus saith the Lord GOD; It shall also come to pass, that at the same time shall things come into thy mind, and thou shalt think an evil thought:
11 And thou shalt say, I will go up to the land of unwalled villages; I will go to them that are at rest, that dwell safely, all of them dwelling without walls, and having neither bars nor gates,
12 To take a spoil, and to take a prey; to turn thine hand upon the desolate places that are now inhabited, and upon the people that are gathered out of the nations, which have gotten cattle and goods, that dwell in the midst of the land.
ISAIAH 17:1
1 The burden of Damascus. Behold, Damascus is taken away from being a city, and it shall be a ruinous heap.
PSALMS 83:3-7
3 They (ARABS,MUSLIMS) have taken crafty counsel against thy people,(ISRAEL) and consulted against thy hidden ones.
4 They have said, Come, and let us cut them off from being a nation; that the name of Israel may be no more in remembrance.
5 For they (MUSLIMS) have consulted together with one consent: they are confederate against thee:(TREATIES)
6 The tabernacles of Edom,(JORDAN) and the Ishmaelites;(ARABS) of Moab, PALESTINIANS,JORDAN) and the Hagarenes;(EGYPT)
7 Gebal,(HEZZBALLOH,LEBANON) and Ammon,(JORDAN) and Amalek;(SYRIA,ARABS,SINAI) the Philistines (PALESTINIANS) with the inhabitants of Tyre;(LEBANON)
DANIEL 11:40-43
40 And at the time of the end shall the king of the south( EGYPT) push at him:(EU DICTATOR IN ISRAEL) and the king of the north (RUSSIA AND MUSLIM HORDES OF EZEK 38+39) shall come against him like a whirlwind, with chariots, and with horsemen, and with many ships; and he shall enter into the countries, and shall overflow and pass over.
41 He shall enter also into the glorious land, and many countries shall be overthrown: but these shall escape out of his hand, even Edom, and Moab, and the chief of the children of Ammon.(JORDAN)
42 He shall stretch forth his hand also upon the countries: and the land of Egypt shall not escape.
43 But he shall have power over the treasures of gold and of silver, and over all the precious things of Egypt: and the Libyans and the Ethiopians shall be at his steps.
EZEKIEL 39:1-8
1 Therefore, thou son of man, prophesy against Gog,(LEADER OF RUSSIA) and say, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I am against thee, O Gog, the chief prince of Meshech (MOSCOW) and Tubal: (TUBOLSK)
2 And I will turn thee back, and leave but the sixth part of thee, and will cause thee to come up from the north parts,(RUSSIA) and will bring thee upon the mountains of Israel:
3 And I will smite thy bow out of thy left hand, and will cause thine arrows to fall out of thy right hand.
4 Thou shalt fall upon the mountains of Israel, thou, and all thy bands,( ARABS) and the people that is with thee: I will give thee unto the ravenous birds of every sort, and to the beasts of the field to be devoured.
5 Thou shalt fall upon the open field: for I have spoken it, saith the Lord GOD.
6 And I will send a fire on Magog,(NUCLEAR BOMB) and among them that dwell carelessly in the isles: and they shall know that I am the LORD.
7 So will I make my holy name known in the midst of my people Israel; and I will not let them pollute my holy name any more: and the heathen shall know that I am the LORD, the Holy One in Israel.
8 Behold, it is come, and it is done, saith the Lord GOD; this is the day whereof I have spoken.
JOEL 2:3,20,30-31
3 A fire(NUCLEAR BOMB) devoureth before them;(RUSSIA-ARABS) and behind them a flame burneth: the land is as the garden of Eden before them, and behind them a desolate wilderness; yea, and nothing shall escape them.
20 But I will remove far off from you the northern army,(RUSSIA,MUSLIMS) and will drive him into a land barren and desolate, with his face toward the east sea, and his hinder part toward the utmost sea, and his stink shall come up, and his ill savour shall come up, because he hath done great things.(SIBERIAN DESERT)
30 And I will shew wonders in the heavens and in the earth, blood, and fire, and pillars of smoke.(NUCLEAR BOMB)
31 The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and the terrible day of the LORD come.
http://www.infowars.com/fear-of-second-obama-term-spurs-record-gun-sales/
Russian leaders: Bad election result is proof of democracy Today DEC 5,11 @ 09:28 By Andrew Rettman
BRUSSELS - Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has said the surprisingly bad result for the ruling United Russia party in Sunday's (4 December) election is proof that the vote was free and fair.The Communist Party almost doubled its vote. (Photo: Boris SV)Speaking alonsgide party leader and current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin after initial results came out, Medvedev said: This is democracy in action. The party has done respectably, the party in essence represents 50 percent of our population ... This result reflects the real mood in the country.Putin himself added: This is an optimal result, which reflects the real situation in the country ... Based on this result, we can guarantee the stable development of our country.
United Russia won 49.5 percent of votes in the Russian Duma based on 96 percent of ballots counted compared to over 64 percent last time around in 2007.The Communist Party almost doubled its vote from 12 percent to 20 percent. Just Russia - a former United Russia ally - won 14 percent. The far-right LDPR climbed to 13 percent, leaving the liberal Yabloko faction struggling to pass the Duma threshold.Outside commentators - such as the Liberal group in the European Parliament - condemned the election as a sham even before it took place. Most independent parties were not allowed to register and Russia declined to let in the normal complement of international monitors.Complaints also flooded in on the day. Independent Russian monitoring group Golos said its website was hacked and its staff were kept out of polling stations. YouTube users posted videos of pens in ballot stations filled with invisible ink, pre-stuffed ballot boxes and buses full of people travelling from place to place to vote multiple times.Opposition politician Boris Nemstov said: We cannot even call them elections. It is the theft of votes from the Russian people.
Some analysts said the result shows an important change of mood in Russian society. Opposition politician Vladimir Ryzhkov called it a collapse in trust in Putin and predicted an even bigger political crisis when Putin runs for president in March. Moscow Carnegie Center analyst Masha Lipman told Reuters: It's a sign of defiance ... The government has turned this election into a farce and in response people are turning their electoral choice into a travesty.With oil prices (the main prop of the Russian economy) riding high and with Putin's security services at full strength (some 50,000 police kept watch in central Moscow on Sunday), the financial world voiced confidence that Putin is here to stay, however.Many politicians have been thrown out of their offices throughout the world following the [financial] crisis, while United Russia managed to keep the majority in the parliament, Prosperity Capital chief Mattias Westman told Bloomberg from London.United Russia has given us stability for two terms and we will get a third term of stability, Quesnell Capital's Ian McCall said from Geneva.Investment houses noted that shares in Russia's state-owned gas monopoly are cheap at the current price. Some also changed their rating for the state-owned oil firm Lukoil from hold to buy.
S. Carolina Legislature Unanimously Endorses United Israel-South Carolina passes a resolution saying Israel is not an attacking force or occupier and is US's best friend in symbolic unanimous vote.By Samuel Sokol
Last Update: 6/26/2011, 8:57 AM http://homelandsecurityus.com
The South Carolina state legislature has unanimously passed a bill calling on the state of Israel to retain control over the West Bank and highlighting what it terms the cordial and mutually beneficial relations enjoyed by Israel and South Carolina since 1948.The bill, which was authored by Representative Alan Clemmons (R), was adopted on June 2 and was intended as an indictment of President Obama's Middle East policy, Rep. Clemmons told Israel National News.The state lawmaker took issue with the President's belief that Jerusalem must be divided and that Israel return to the 1967 lines, he said.Obama said that that was what the American people wanted. I remember that I said to my wife when I heard this on Fox News, that's not what the American people who I know want! The next day I started drafting the Resolution.
Clemmons visited personally with each of the 124 members of the South Carolina House of Representatives to invite their support, he said. Many chose to cosponsor the bill, which later passed unanimously.According to the bill, Israel's enemies are also those of the United States and the State of South Carolina and the nation of Israel have enjoyed cordial and mutually beneficial relations since 1948, a friendship that continues to strengthen with each passing year.The resolution is entitled, To commend the nation of Israel for its relations with the United States of America and with the state of South Carolina.It states, Whereas, Israel has been granted her lands under and through the oldest recorded deed as reported in the Old Testament, a tome of scripture held sacred and reverenced by Jew and Christian, alike, as the acts and words of God; and Whereas, as the Grantor of said lands, God stated to the Jewish people in the Old Testament; in Leviticus, Chapter 20, Verse 24: Ye shall inherit their land, and I will give it unto you to possess it, a land that floweth with milk and honey; and Whereas, God has never rescinded his grant of said lands; and…Whereas, those same haters of Israel also hate, and seek to destroy, the United States of America;…Be it resolved by the House of Representatives: That the members of the South Carolina House of Representatives, by this resolution, commend the nation of Israel for its relations with the United States of America and with the State of South Carolina….Be it further resolved that a copy of this resolution be forwarded to the Speaker of the House of Representatives of each of South Carolina's sister states within the United States of America with the request and recommendation of this body that a similar resolution to that stated herein be proposed within their respective bodies.The resolution resolved that the members of this body support Israel in their natural and God-given right of self-governance and self-defense upon their own lands, recognizing that Israel is neither an attacking force nor an occupier of the lands of others, and that peace can be afforded the region only through a united Israel governed under one law for all people.
While local legislatures do not enjoy any control over foreign policy in the United States, the measure is a harsh indictment of the President's current handling of affairs in the region.Clemmons stated that he has sent copies of the bill to neighboring states and that while I have not yet heard back from other states, I'm hopeful that my resolution will encourage others to speak out to show American solidarity with the people of Israel.A copy of the bill was also sent to Settlement Council head Danny Dayan, who read from it publically on Monday at a symposium in Jerusalem promoting Israeli annexation of the West Bank.My hope was to show the people of Israel that while South Carolina is a small state, with an even smaller Jewish population, they were not alone in their struggles, Clemmons told Israel National News. That average hot-dog-and-apple-pie-eating-Americans recognize that Israel's hero-settlers are settling and defending the lands inherited from their forefathers, who received it from G-d, and that we support them in their efforts.The residents of Israel's settlements have long reminded me of the American Pioneers of the Western United States in the latter half of the 19th Century.Peace cannot come through division,Clemmons told Israel National News, explaining that he and his constituents believe that peace in the region can only come to a united Israel with one law for all of her citizens.The Palestinian Authority did not respond to requests for comment.
Minister breaks down announcing new Italian austerity
Today DEC 5,11@ 09:27 By Leigh Phillips
BRUSSELS - Italy’s new technocrat-led cabinet has approved a fresh emergency austerity package a day earlier than expected.The government of ex-EU-commissioner Mario Monti outlined the key points of the programme, adopted on Sunday, a day ahead of schedule under pressure from markets.Full details will be made known on Monday as the plan must still be approved by the full sitting of the Italian parliament.The package amounts to €20 billion in savings to 2014.The cornerstone of the cost-cutting measures will be a hike in the retirement age to 62 for women and 66 for men, with women also eventually matching the 66-year rule in six years’ time.The cabinet member responsible for the pension changes, social affairs minister Elas Fornero, was so overwhelmed by her own announcement that she broke down and could not continue.The pension system is a long mechanism between the generations so we need it, and it costs us even psychologically, so we have to ask a…,said Fornero, wiping away tears.The government also agreed to measures aimed at clamping down on tax evasion and an increase to taxes on the assets of the rich, although a one-off wealth-tax has been shelved, according to reports.Monti for his part has offered to forego his own salary as prime minister.While taking these steps, at the same time we’ve thought about the need to create the conditions for growth in Italy. So we must strongly control the deficit and debt. We must not be seen as a source of infection in Europe, but once again as a source of strength,he said in announcing the measures.Separately on Monday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy are to meet in Paris in the hope of agreeing to common proposals for changes to the EU treaties that will deliver what the German leader called last week fiscal union in the eurozone.However, there remain strong differences between the two sides about the future role of national governments. France is in favour of treaty changes, but is loth to permit such infringement of its national sovereignty.The outline of the Franco-German pact comes ahead of a two-day crunch summit of European leaders at the end of the week.EU economy chief Olli Rehn has said that the bloc has just days to save the eurozone.The aim is to embrace stringent new fiscal rules in which budget-making will in effect be taken out of the hands of national parliaments and handed over to the European Commission and the Council of Ministers, with supervision by Brussels backed up by the threat of sanction imposed by European Court of Justice judges.Such measures it is thought would be a sufficient quid pro quo for the European Central Bank, which would then ramp up its bond purchases of troubled governments.The new ECB chief, Mario Draghi, last week in an address to a nearly empty European Parliament, hinted that the Frankfurt institution was ready to move with such purchases, but only after a fiscal compact had been achieved.Over the weekend however, the deputy Dutch foreign minister, Ben Knapen, warned against any expectation of a complete resolution to the crisis at the upcoming summit.I do not suggest that there is a peak and then a deus ex machina solution. This is a marathon, he told Sunday television programme Buitenhof.
DANIEL 7:23-24
23 Thus he said, The fourth beast(THE EU,REVIVED ROME) shall be the fourth kingdom upon earth,(7TH WORLD EMPIRE) which shall be diverse from all kingdoms, and shall devour the whole earth, and shall tread it down, and break it in pieces.(TRADE BLOCKS)
24 And the ten horns out of this kingdom are ten kings that shall arise:(10 NATIONS-10 WORLD REGIONS) and another shall rise after them;(#11 SPAIN) and he shall be diverse from the first, and he shall subdue three kings.(BE HEAD OF 3 KINGS OR NATIONS).
Buzek: Speed up EU lawmaking, but not at cost of democracy
02.12.11 @ 16:27 By Valentina Pop
BRUSSELS - In office for another month, European Parliament chief Jerzy Buzek looks back at the highs and lows of his mandate and advises his successor to reach out to citizens and speed up lawmaking, but not at the expense of democracy.Under a current arrangement between the two main political groups - the centre-right European People's Party and the Social Democrats - the five-year mandate of the president is split in two, with German Social-Democrat Martin Schulz poised to become the next chief of the legislature in January.Martin Schulz is very experienced, politically. He doesn't need advice. I can only say that besides the obvious activities - negotiating the next EU budget and defending the community method, there are some which are very important, even if they are not that obvious: the creation of a European public space and helping to create EU law faster and more efficiently, Buzek told this website.From the 11th floor of the European Parliament, things appear quite distant from the day-to-day life of EU citizens. But a former prime minister and member of the Solidarnosc movement, which brought down Communism in Poland, Buzek knows how important it is to have the support and active engagement of citizens.
I started a few months ago the intense building of what I call a European public space - the best possible way of exchanging views with our citizens, to inform them of the activities and roles of the institutions and to help them avoid seeing challenges as threats, but rather as opportunities, he said.Meetings with students, entrepreneurs, scientists, doctors all over Europe are essential to spur the debate on where Europe is going, he believes. And to involve them politically too.In two and a half years we'll have European elections again. That is very soon. We should achieve a higher turnout and give a clear signal to citizens that EU is part of the solution, not part of the problem, Buzek says, echoing similar calls end efforts by his predecessors and other EU politicians.Still a firm believer in the EU's capacity to overcome the current economic crisis, Buzek admits that the response of the bloc's institutions to the eurozone troubles is much slower than markets would like to see.A proposal to fast-track economic governance legislation in all three stages - the drafting by the European Commission, negotiation and approval by the parliament and member states and then implementation in national law - has been welcomed by the EU executive and member states alike.To speed up negotiations between the parliament and the Council [member states], both sides should be probably better organised, he admits.But fast-tracking legislation should not come at the expense of democratic accountability.If democracy should work, it is impossible to avoid this step in the creation of law. Maybe we could shorten the process by two, three months, but not more. National parliaments also take a few months to pass a law. It is normal. citizens have to be informed,he stressed. The same goes for governments when they take the new EU law and pass it through their own parliaments before it actually comes into force.Democracy takes time. And we should make time for it. We should not expect it to work as fast as financial markets - in a matter of days and weeks.
Belarus and lobbyists
Looking back on the more than two years in office, having helped to convince the Irish in accepting the Lisbon Treaty and then Czech president Vaclav Klaus to sign it was a big success of my mandate, Buzek says.Among other successes he listed, he included securing the negotiating tools for the next EU budget and launch of the European energy community - an initiative to spur energy-grid integration and stricter co-ordination among member states when purchasing gas. Buzek also mentioned the launch of Euronest, a joint assembly with parliamentarians from five countries in the Eastern Partnership - Moldova, Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Armenia.
Belarus, the sixth country in the eastern neighbourhood, is not part of that assembly due to the erosion of democracy under Alexander Lukashenko. Buzek sees one of the great failures under his mandate that we could not achieve any progress in the democratisation of Belarus.Yet he admits that the European Parliament, despite its strong focus on human rights, can only work in support of dissidents within the country. Ultimately it is up to Belarusians themselves to change the regime, he argued. He said that this was his experience in the Soviet bloc: We tried many times - in 1956, 1968, 1970, 1976, 1980. It didn't happen over night. Help from outside was important, but the main drive was from the citizens.Earlier this year, Buzek was the subject of critical articles in the press for having agreed with the chamber's legal services that the EU's anti-fraud office (Olaf) be denied access to the offices of three MEPs involved in a cash-for-amendments scandal. He later on launched a special group to draft a new code of conduct for MEPs, which he now mentions as one of his achievements.
Two MEPs resigned and we lifted the immunity of the third so that prosecutors can carry on their investigations. The new code was not necessary for this. It is necessary given the fact that the parliament is much more powerful under the new EU treaty, with almost 100 percent co-decision with the Council [member states]. So it is necessary to have transparent rules for conflict of interest, declarations of financial interest outside the parliament for each member,Buzek explained.The new code was adopted on Thursday (1 December), but transparency campaigners have said that it does not go far enough. They worry that it does not explicitly preclude MEPs from being paid for consultancy work during their mandate.Buzek however brushed off the criticism and said that the new financial disclosure rules and declarations of interest are among the toughest when compared to those in national parliaments in most member states.He also warned against chastising lobbyists or MEPs who meet them. It is normal for our members to meet with lobbyists, representatives of industry, civil society, small entrepreneurs. All these views have to be taken into account when drafting laws. Without lobbyists, it would not be possible to write a good law for our citizens,Buzek concluded.
TEPCO: Radioactive water may have leaked into sea DEC 5,11
The operator of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant says radioactive water leaked from a water treatment facility may have reached the sea through a gutter.Tokyo Electric Power Company says slightly elevated levels of cesium were detected on Sunday in seawater around an outlet from the gutter.Earlier in the day, workers found that at least 45 tons of water had leaked from a desalinization device at the plant. The water then apparently seeped out of the building and flowed into the gutter.The leaked water also contained radioactive strontium at levels that could pose health risks in case of internal exposure. TEPCO says it will take about 2 weeks to complete its analysis of the situation.Before the leak was spotted, workers had last checked the water treatment device 21 hours ago and found no problems.A TEPCO official says the company did not do enough to contain the leak because it had assumed the water would stay within the building. The official says it will take measures to ensure better detection of leaks.Monday, December 05, 2011 13:11 +0900 (JST) http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/20111205_18.html
NUCLEAR WEAPONS WILL BE USED.
PSALMS 97:3
3 A fire goeth before him, and burneth up his enemies round about.
REVELATION 14:18-20
18 And another angel came out from the altar, which had power over fire; and cried with a loud cry to him that had the sharp sickle, saying, Thrust in thy sharp sickle, and gather the clusters of the vine of the earth; for her grapes are fully ripe.
19 And the angel thrust in his sickle into the earth, and gathered the vine of the earth, and cast it into the great winepress of the wrath of God.
20 And the winepress was trodden without the city,(JERUSALEM) and blood came out of the winepress, even unto the horse bridles, by the space of a thousand and six hundred furlongs.(200 MILES) (THE SIZE OF ISRAEL)
ISAIAH 66:15-18
15 For, behold, the LORD will come with fire, and with his chariots like a whirlwind, to render his anger with fury, and his rebuke with flames of fire.
16 For by fire and by his sword will the LORD plead with all flesh: and the slain of the LORD shall be many.
17 They that sanctify themselves, and purify themselves in the gardens behind one tree in the midst, eating swine's flesh, and the abomination, and the mouse, shall be consumed together, saith the LORD.
18 For I know their works and their thoughts: it shall come, that I will gather all nations and tongues; and they shall come, and see my glory.
ISAIAH 26:21
21 For, behold, the LORD cometh out of his place to punish the inhabitants of the earth for their iniquity: the earth also shall disclose her blood, and shall no more cover her slain.(WW3,1/2 earths population die).
ISAIAH 13:6-13 KJV
6 Howl ye; for the day of the LORD is at hand; it shall come as a destruction from the Almighty.
7 Therefore shall all hands be faint, and every man's heart shall melt:(FROM FRIGHT)
8 And they shall be afraid: pangs and sorrows shall take hold of them; they shall be in pain as a woman that travaileth: they shall be amazed one at another; their faces shall be as flames.
9 Behold, the day of the LORD cometh, cruel both with wrath and fierce anger, to lay the land desolate: and he shall destroy the sinners thereof out of it.
10 For the stars of heaven and the constellations thereof shall not give their light: the sun shall be darkened in his going forth, and the moon shall not cause her light to shine.
11 And I will punish the world for their evil, and the wicked for their iniquity; and I will cause the arrogancy of the proud to cease, and will lay low the haughtiness of the terrible.
12 I will make a man more precious than fine gold; even a man than the golden wedge of Ophir.
13 Therefore I will shake the heavens, and the earth shall remove out of her place, in the wrath of the LORD of hosts, and in the day of his fierce anger.
ISAIAH 24:17-23 KJV
17 Fear, and the pit, and the snare, are upon thee, O inhabitant of the earth.
18 And it shall come to pass, that he who fleeth from the noise of the fear shall fall into the pit; and he that cometh up out of the midst of the pit shall be taken in the snare: for the windows from on high are open, and the foundations of the earth do shake.
19 The earth is utterly broken down, the earth is clean dissolved, the earth is moved exceedingly.
20 The earth shall reel to and fro like a drunkard, and shall be removed like a cottage; and the transgression thereof shall be heavy upon it; and it shall fall, and not rise again.
21 And it shall come to pass in that day, that the LORD shall punish the host of the high ones that are on high, and the kings of the earth upon the earth.
22 And they shall be gathered together, as prisoners are gathered in the pit, and shall be shut up in the prison, and after many days shall they be visited.
23 Then the moon shall be confounded, and the sun ashamed, when the LORD of hosts shall reign in mount Zion, and in Jerusalem, and before his ancients gloriously.
2 TIMOTHY 3:1
1 This know also, that in the last days perilous (DANGEROUS) times shall come.
JOEL 2:3,30
3 A fire devoureth before them; and behind them a flame burneth: the land is as the garden of Eden before them, and behind them a desolate wilderness; yea, and nothing shall escape them.
30 And I will shew wonders in the heavens and in the earth, blood, and fire, and pillars of smoke.
ZECHARIAH 14:12-13
12 And this shall be the plague wherewith the LORD will smite all the people that have fought against Jerusalem; Their flesh shall consume away while they stand upon their feet, and their eyes shall consume away in their holes, and their tongue shall consume away in their mouth.
13 And it shall come to pass in that day, that a great tumult from the LORD shall be among them; and they shall lay hold every one on the hand of his neighbour, and his hand shall rise up against the hand of his neighbour.(1/2-3 BILLION DIE IN WW3)
EZEKIEL 20:47
47 And say to the forest of the south, Hear the word of the LORD; Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I will kindle a fire in thee, and it shall devour every green tree in thee, and every dry tree: the flaming flame shall not be quenched, and all faces from the south to the north shall be burned therein.
ZEPHANIAH 1:18
18 Neither their silver nor their gold shall be able to deliver them in the day of the LORD'S wrath; but the whole land shall be devoured by the fire of his jealousy: for he shall make even a speedy riddance of all them that dwell in the land.
MALACHI 4:1
1 For, behold, the day cometh, that shall burn as an oven; and all the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly, shall be stubble: and the day that cometh shall burn them up, saith the LORD of hosts, that it shall leave them neither root nor branch.
REVELATION 8:7
7 The first angel sounded, and there followed hail and fire mingled with blood, and they were cast upon the earth: and the third part of trees was burnt up, and all green grass was burnt up.
REVELATION 9:18
18 By these three was the third part of men killed, by the fire, and by the smoke, and by the brimstone, which issued out of their mouths.
HALF OF EARTHS POPULATION DIE DURING THE 7 YR TRIBULATION.(THESE VERSES ARE JUDGEMENT SCRIPTURES NOT RAPTURE SCRIPTURES)
LUKE 17:34-37
34 I tell you, in that night there shall be two men in one bed; the one shall be taken, and the other shall be left.
35 Two women shall be grinding together; the one shall be taken, and the other left.
36 Two men shall be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left.
37 And they answered and said unto him, Where, Lord? And he said unto them, Wheresoever the body is, thither will the eagles be gathered together.(Christians have new bodies,this is the people against Jerusalem during the 7 yr treaty)(Christians bodies are not being eaten by the birds).
MATTHEW 24:37-51
37 But as the days of Noe were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.
38 For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark,
39 And knew not until the flood came, and took them all away; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.
40 Then shall two be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left.
41 Two women shall be grinding at the mill; the one shall be taken, and the other left.
42 Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come.
43 But know this, that if the goodman of the house had known in what watch the thief would come, he would have watched, and would not have suffered his house to be broken up.
44 Therefore be ye also ready: for in such an hour as ye think not the Son of man cometh.
45 Who then is a faithful and wise servant, whom his lord hath made ruler over his household, to give them meat in due season?
46 Blessed is that servant, whom his lord when he cometh shall find so doing.
47 Verily I say unto you, That he shall make him ruler over all his goods.
48 But and if that evil servant shall say in his heart, My lord delayeth his coming;
49 And shall begin to smite his fellowservants, and to eat and drink with the drunken;
50 The lord of that servant shall come in a day when he looketh not for him, and in an hour that he is not aware of,
51 And shall cut him asunder, and appoint him his portion with the hypocrites: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
05 December 2011 - 07H29 -US, Israel covert war against Iran suspected: report-A satellite image of the destroyed Revolutionary Guard Corps compound in Bid Ganeh, Iran, following a deadly explosion on November 12, 2011.
Many former US intelligence officials and Iran experts believe the explosion at the military base near Tehran was part of a covert effort by the US, Israel and other states to disable Iran's nuclear and missile programs, The Los Angeles Times reported
A satellite image of the destroyed Revolutionary Guard Corps compound in Bid Ganeh, Iran, following a deadly explosion on November 12, 2011. Many former US intelligence officials and Iran experts believe the explosion at the military base near Tehran was part of a covert effort by the US, Israel and other states to disable Iran's nuclear and missile programs, The Los Angeles Times reported
AFP - Many former US intelligence officials and Iran experts believe last month's explosion at a military base near Tehran was part of a covert effort by the US, Israel and other states to disable Iran's nuclear and missile programs, The Los Angeles Times reported late Sunday.The huge explosion ripped through the Revolutionary Guard Corps base on November 12, leveling most of the buildings and killing 17 people, including a founder of Iran's ballistic missile program, General Hassan Tehrani Moghaddam.The newspaper said the goal of the covert effort is to derail Iran's quest for a nuclear weapons capability and to stave off an Israeli or US airstrike to eliminate or lessen the threat.It looks like the 21st century form of war,the paper quotes Patrick Clawson, who directs the Iran Security Initiative at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, as saying.It does appear that there is a campaign of assassinations and cyber war, as well as the semi-acknowledged campaign of sabotage.Any such operation would be highly classified, and those who might know are not talking, the report said.For years, the United States and its allies have sought to hinder Iran's weapons programs by secretly supplying faulty parts, plans or software, The Times said. No proof of sabotage has emerged, but Iran's nuclear program clearly has hit obstacles that thwarted progress in recent years.
We definitely are doing that, the report quotes Art Keller, a former CIA case officer who worked on Iran, as saying.It's pretty much the stated mission of the (CIA's) counter-proliferation division to do what it takes to slow Iran's weapons of mass destruction program.Many Western experts are convinced that American and Israeli engineers secretly fed the Stuxnet computer worm into Iran's nuclear program in 2010, The Times pointed out.The virus reportedly caused centrifuges used to enrich uranium to spin out of control and shatter, the paper said.Neither the US nor the Israeli government has acknowledged any role in the apparent cyber-attack, the report noted.
Monday, December 05, 2011
Sunday, December 04, 2011
TORAH PORTION DEC 4-10,2011
TORAH PORTION DEC 4-10,2011
http://israndjer.blogspot.com/2010/11/parshah-vayishlach-genesis-324-3643.html
http://israndjer.blogspot.com/2010/11/parshah-vayishlach-genesis-324-3643.html
Saturday, December 03, 2011
THE DERIVATIVES MARKET SCAM
Goldman Sachs, Citibank, JP Morgan Chase, Bank Of America Have Assets of $5 trillion & Carry $235 TRILLION In Risk Exposure, 1/3 Of World Total In Uncategorized on October 4, 2011 at 5:17 pm
http://theoldspeakjournal.wordpress.com/2011/10/04/goldman-sachs-citibank-jp-morgan-chase-bank-of-america-have-assets-of-5-trillion-carry-235-trillion-in-risk-exposure-13-of-world-total/
Oldspeak:With Megabanks carrying 50 to 1 leverage on a hundreds of trillions dollar sized largely unregulated and non-public OTC derivatives market, the next collapse of the global economic system is not a matter of if, but when. OTC derivatives are an unregulated dark pool of money with no public market. These are basically debt bets between two entities on things such as credit risk, currencies, interest rates and commodities. According to the latest report from the Comptroller of the Currency, just four U.S. banks have an eye popping $235 trillion of OTC derivative leverage. (Click here for the complete Comptroller of the Currency report.) As a nation, U.S. banks have a total OTC derivative exposure of $250 trillion. So, the fact that just four U.S. banks have this much leverage and risk is astounding! -Greg Hunter It’s going to be really interesting to see what happens when this gargantuan house of cards falls down. I’ll bet quite a few more people will be for occupying wall street then.
By Greg Hunter @ USAWatchdog.com :I keep hammering away at the fact the Fed doled out $16 trillion in the wake of the credit crisis of 2008. This is an enormous sum that is greater than the all goods and services produced in the U.S. in a single year. Domestic banks and companies got the money, right along with foreign banks and companies. In effect, the Federal Reserve bailed out the world financial system. Now, we are right back to square one facing another financial meltdown with European banks and sovereign debt. If the Fed spent $16 trillion, why in the heck is this problem not fixed and why isn’t the world economy taking off like a rocket? The simple answer is it wasn’t enough money.The Bank of International Settlements pegs the total world over-the-counter (OTC) derivative exposure at around $600 trillion, but many experts say the real figure is more than twice that amount. No matter which figure you use, it is a gargantuan sum. OTC derivatives are an unregulated dark pool of money with no public market. These are basically debt bets between two entities on things such as credit risk, currencies, interest rates and commodities. According to the latest report from the Comptroller of the Currency, just four U.S. banks have an eye popping $235 trillion of OTC derivative leverage. (Click here for the complete Comptroller of the Currency report.) As a nation, U.S. banks have a total OTC derivative exposure of $250 trillion. So, the fact that just four U.S. banks have this much leverage and risk is astounding! The banks are listed below in order of size and approximate OTC exposure:
1.) JP MORGAN CHASE BANK NA OH
$78.1 trillion OTC derivatives
2.) CITIBANK NATIONAL ASSN
$56.1 trillion OTC derivatives
3.) BANK OF AMERICA NA NC
$53.15 trillion OTC derivatives
4.) GOLDMAN SACHS BANK USA NY
$47.7 trillion OTC derivatives
Considering that the total assets of these four banks are a little more than $5 trillion, I see a frightening amount of risk with a total derivative exposure of $235 trillion! This is nearly 50 to 1 leverage. On top of that, assets such as real estate or mortgage-backed securities can be held on the books at whatever value the banks think they can sell them for in the future. I call this government sanctioned accounting fraud, or mark to fantasy accounting. Who knows what the true value of the banks assets really are.I am sure the banks would say that the net exposure is really not near that great because the banks have hedged their bets. The banks will probably say, by and large, these debt bets will cancel out or back up one another. It is known in the banking world as bilateral netting. A recent article in Zerohedge.com explained the enormous risk by saying, The best example of how the flaw behind bilateral netting almost destroyed the system is AIG: the insurance company was hours away from making trillions of derivative contracts worthless if it were to implode, leaving all those who had bought protection from the firm worthless, a contingency only Goldman hedged by buying protection on AIG. And while the argument can further be extended that in bankruptcy a perfectly netted bankrupt entity would make someone else whole on claims they have written, this is not true, as the bankrupt estate will pursue 100 cent recovery on its claims even under Chapter 11, while claims the estate had written end up as General Unsecured Claims which as Lehman has demonstrated will collect 20 cents on the dollar if they are lucky.(Click here to read the complete Zerohedge.com story.) The global economy is still in trouble. Everyone is focusing on Europe because the sovereign debt crisis there is likely to cause the European Union to break apart and kill the Euro. The Head of UniCredit global securities, Attila Szalay-Berzeviczy said recently, The euro is beyond rescue . . . . The only remaining question is how many days the hopeless rearguard action of European governments and the European Central Bank can keep up Greece’s spirits . . . . A Greek default will trigger an immediate magnitude 10 earthquake across Europe.(Click here for more on that story.) If the EU goes under, do not expect all the highly leveraged U.S. banks to walk away unscathed. They will need another bailout to stay afloat.
You must remember the U.S. still is at the epicenter of the ongoing credit crisis. At the moment, America looks like it is in better shape than Europe, but that will not last. According to the latest report from John Williams of Shadowstats.com, The root source of current global systemic instabilities largely has been the financially-dominant United States, and it is against the U.S. dollar that the global markets ultimately should turn, massively. The Fed and the U.S. Treasury likely will do whatever has to be done to prevent a euro-area crisis from triggering a systemic collapse in the United States. Accordingly, it is not from a euro-related crisis, but rather from within the U.S. financial system and financial-authority actions that an eventual U.S. systemic failure likely will be triggered, seen initially in a rapidly accelerating pace of domestic inflation—ultimately hyperinflation.Sure, the dollar may gain in value for a while in absence of the Euro as a competing currency, but, ultimately, the dollar too will crash, right along with a few very big banks.
America's Big Bank $244 Trillion Derivatives Market Exposed| September 15, 2011 | includes: BAC, C, GS, HBC, JPM
I have been extremely interested in the global derivatives market ever since I saw the documentary Collapse. I am not going to bore you with the details of this documentary, but to summarize, the documentary focuses on the unsustainable global dependence on oil supply (which is decreasing), and the unsustainable nature of our current capitalistic society (topic for another day). In this documentary the main character/pundit/whistleblower, Michael Ruppert, states that the world derivatives market is in excess of $700 trillion. Needless to say I was blown away by this amount, and I vowed to do some research and figure out how there can be an active financial market 50 times that of the United States Gross Domestic Product. I am not going to attempt to delve into the global derivatives market as a whole. Instead, I will focus on the derivatives that are written by U.S. commercial banks, talk about the various derivatives out there, and explain the amount of exposure to the United States banking system. To do this I will be using the most recent OCC report on derivatives held by commercial banks here in the U.S.
Summary of the U.S. Derivatives Market
-U.S. commercial banks currently hold a notional value of $244 trillion in derivatives.
-Trading exposure, which is measured by VaR (Value at Risk), is $677 million.
-Net Current Credit Exposure of commercial banks to derivatives is $353 billion, due to bilateral netting.
-Potential Future Exposure is $814 billion, bringing Total Credit Exposure (NCCE + PFE) to $1.2 trillion.
-The total amount of Credit Derivatives outstanding is $14.9 trillion.
-30 days or more past due derivatives equaled $42 million, and $74 million in derivatives was charged off this quarter.
-59% of counterparties are banks and securities firms, 35% are corporations, 1% are monoline financial firms, 2% are hedge funds, and 3% are sovereign funds.
-Banks hold collateral equal to 72% of Net Current Credit Exposure.
-82% of derivatives are interest rate products, 10.9% in FX contracts, 6.1% in credit derivatives, and .6% are in commodities and equity contracts, respectively.
Five banks dominate the U.S. derivatives market, J.P. Morgan Chase (JPM), Bank of America (BAC), Citigroup (C), Goldman Sachs (GS), and HSBC (HBC), accounting for 96% of the derivatives activity. However, a total of 1,047 U.S. banks participated in the derivatives market in the first quarter.Banks reported trading revenue (revenue pertaining to derivatives) of $7.4 billion in the first quarter of 2011.This is a lot of information to handle so I am going to delve deeper into all of the summary points, and shed some light on all of these statements.U.S. commercial banks currently hold a notional value of $244 trillion in derivatives.Notional value is the face amount of the derivative used to calculate payment on swaps, options, futures, and forward contracts. This is not the amount of exposure that banks have to the derivatives market. Here is a simple example: Two parties approach a bank, and they want to do an interest rate swap for a loan. One wants a fixed interest rate, while the other wants a floating interest rate. The bank acts as a clearinghouse and third party overseer for this transaction. Both parties pay a set fee (usually a spread on the interest rates) to the bank based on the amount of the loan amount they are swapping payments on, they also give their respective payments on the loan amount through the bank, and the bank sends the payment to the other party. Now if the amount of the loan that the two parties were swapping interest rates on was $1 trillion that $1 trillion would be included in the notional value of derivatives held by the banks. Another example: If a bank buys or sells (hedges risk or assumes risk) a Credit Default Swap the face amount is included in the notional value.
Trading exposure, which is measured by VaR (Value at Risk), is $677 million.VaR (value at risk) is a statistical analysis performed by banks to determine the potential amount of maximum expected losses (on their trading activities) that they could sustain over a specified duration of time and under normal market conditions. Here is an example from the OCC report.A VaR of $50 million at 99% confidence measured over one trading day, for example, indicates that a trading loss of greater than $50 million in the next day on that portfolio should occur only once in every 100 trading days under normal market condition.Basically, the VaR is telling us that the bank is 99% confident (confidence level depends on the standard deviation used) that over the next 100 trading days it will lose a maximum of $50 million. So the total VaR of $677 million for the quarter is the maximum expected aggregate loss that banks think they could lose.Net Current Credit Exposure of U.S. commercial banks is $353 billion, due to bilateral netting.How can notional derivatives equal $244 trillion and the banks only be exposed to $353 billion in potential losses? There is a common misconception that the credit risk experienced in the derivatives market is the same as the credit risk experienced in the loan market. The credit risk in the regular loan market is the face amount of the loan given to the borrower, the exposure is unilateral. The credit risk in derivatives is different due to the fact that there are two parties to the vast majority of derivatives contracts. The bank enters into a legally binding contract with counterparties called bilateral netting. This contract states that if one of the parties defaults, the remaining balance of the contract would be the net sum of all positive and negative fair values of contracts included in the bilateral netting arrangement.
How does the OCC calculate Net Current Credit Exposure? They start by looking at the fair value amount that is owed to the banks this amount is called derivatives receivable or Gross Positive Fair Value (this does not take into account collateral held by banks). This is the amount that the banks would be in the hole if all of their counterparties defaulted. They then look at the fair value amount that the banks owe to their counterparties, this amount is called derivatives payable or Gross Negative Fair Value (this amount does not take into account collateral held by the counterparties.) This is the amount that the banks' counterparties would lose if the banks' defaulted. The OCC then subtracts the amount at risk (Gross Positive Fair Value) from the amount owed to the counterparties and that is the Net Current Credit Exposure.Potential Future Exposure is $814 billion, bringing Total Credit Exposure (NCCE + PFE) to $1.2 trillion.Essentially, Potential Future Exposure is an amount calculated at a certain confidence level (much like VaR), for the remaining life of the contract. The $814 billion is the maximum potential exposure banks could face for the life of all their derivatives contracts. Potential Future Exposure takes into account future increases in value of the derivatives receivable. The $814 billion is a future increase in value of the receivables owed to the banks increases their total credit exposure. An increase in value can be attributed to any number of reasons from a change in foreign exchange rates to a rising or falling of interest rates. Here is a somewhat outdated (2002), but great explanation.
The Total Amount of Credit Derivatives Outstanding is $14.9 trillion.The vast majority (97%) of credit derivatives are Credit Default Swaps. The $14.9 trillion is just a notional amount however. As of this quarter, banks assumed risk (wrote credit derivatives) in the amount of $7.4 trillion, and hedged risk (bought credit derivatives) in the amount of $7.5 trillion. Due to the fact that 43% of the notional amount of derivatives is sub- investment grade, the banks are obviously betting that certain parties are going to default, and they are hoping to make some trading revenue on their credit derivatives.30 Days or More Past Due Derivatives Equaled $42 million, and Banks Charged Off $74 Million in Derivatives Contracts This Quarter.This is exactly how it reads. Out of a notional value of $244 trillion banks had to charge off a mere $74 million. Granted, during the financial crisis that amount was $847 million in the fourth quarter of 2008, but needless to say things have vastly improved since then.59% of counterparties are banks and securities firms, 35% are corporations, 1% are monoline financial firms, 2% are hedge funds, and 3% are sovereign funds.No need to elaborate here, except to say that this illustrates why there are the terms TBTF and contagion. The game dominoes really comes to mind at this moment.Banks Hold Collateral Equal to 72% of Net Current Credit Exposure.
88% of this collateral is cash and treasury securities (very liquid assets). Depending on the counterparty banks like hold a certain percentage of collateral. 93% collateral was held against the NCCE to banks and securities firms, 302% against hedge funds' NCCE, 5% against sovereign governments' NCCE, and 36% against corporations'.82% of derivatives are interest rate products, 10.9% in FX contracts, 6.1% in credit derivatives, and .6% are in commodities and equity contracts, respectively.These products can be broken down into five different types of derivatives: Futures, Forwards, Swaps, Options, and Credit Derivatives. Needless to say these are very complex financial products that are hard to understand, but I will do my best to explain them for you.Swaps - are used exactly as their name suggests, to swap (exchange) cash flows at a certain date. These types of derivatives are used mainly for interest rate swaps, but can be used to swap cash flows from equities, commodities, or foreign currency.Futures & Forwards - I am going to lump these two together because they are similar, but not the same. Engaging in a forward requires you to buy/sell a certain equity/commodity/foreign currency at a set price at a set point in time. Engaging in a future is almost the same agreement as a forward but, your position is usually opened on margin, and is traded marked to market, and you can close your position out at any time.Credit Derivatives - Basically an assumption or a hedging of risk on any kind of asset, or liability.Options - Gives the owner the right to buy/sell the underlying security before or on the expiration date at a certain price.
Five banks dominate the U.S. derivatives market, J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and HSBC, accounting for 96% of the derivatives activity. However, a total of 1,047 U.S. banks participated in the derivatives market in the first quarter.The amount in notional derivatives written by the five biggest banks from highest to lowest goes in this order J.P. Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and HSBC.
Conclusion:While the $244 trillion notional derivative market looks menacing on paper, once you break it down, it isn't as scary as it looks. The banks have collateral on the majority of their Net Current Credit Exposure, and the economy (for all its current faults) is getting better. In my opinion, the derivatives market is an essential tool for traders, hedge funds, companies, and banks to hedge risks and reap rewards. There is no possible way that this market is just going to disappear overnight. I think that $99 billion (when you subtract collateral) in NCCE is acceptable, when you consider the benefits that the derivatives market gives the global economy.Disclosure: I am long BAC.
http://seekingalpha.com/article/293830-america-s-big-bank-244-trillion-derivatives-market-exposed
http://theoldspeakjournal.wordpress.com/2011/10/04/goldman-sachs-citibank-jp-morgan-chase-bank-of-america-have-assets-of-5-trillion-carry-235-trillion-in-risk-exposure-13-of-world-total/
Oldspeak:With Megabanks carrying 50 to 1 leverage on a hundreds of trillions dollar sized largely unregulated and non-public OTC derivatives market, the next collapse of the global economic system is not a matter of if, but when. OTC derivatives are an unregulated dark pool of money with no public market. These are basically debt bets between two entities on things such as credit risk, currencies, interest rates and commodities. According to the latest report from the Comptroller of the Currency, just four U.S. banks have an eye popping $235 trillion of OTC derivative leverage. (Click here for the complete Comptroller of the Currency report.) As a nation, U.S. banks have a total OTC derivative exposure of $250 trillion. So, the fact that just four U.S. banks have this much leverage and risk is astounding! -Greg Hunter It’s going to be really interesting to see what happens when this gargantuan house of cards falls down. I’ll bet quite a few more people will be for occupying wall street then.
By Greg Hunter @ USAWatchdog.com :I keep hammering away at the fact the Fed doled out $16 trillion in the wake of the credit crisis of 2008. This is an enormous sum that is greater than the all goods and services produced in the U.S. in a single year. Domestic banks and companies got the money, right along with foreign banks and companies. In effect, the Federal Reserve bailed out the world financial system. Now, we are right back to square one facing another financial meltdown with European banks and sovereign debt. If the Fed spent $16 trillion, why in the heck is this problem not fixed and why isn’t the world economy taking off like a rocket? The simple answer is it wasn’t enough money.The Bank of International Settlements pegs the total world over-the-counter (OTC) derivative exposure at around $600 trillion, but many experts say the real figure is more than twice that amount. No matter which figure you use, it is a gargantuan sum. OTC derivatives are an unregulated dark pool of money with no public market. These are basically debt bets between two entities on things such as credit risk, currencies, interest rates and commodities. According to the latest report from the Comptroller of the Currency, just four U.S. banks have an eye popping $235 trillion of OTC derivative leverage. (Click here for the complete Comptroller of the Currency report.) As a nation, U.S. banks have a total OTC derivative exposure of $250 trillion. So, the fact that just four U.S. banks have this much leverage and risk is astounding! The banks are listed below in order of size and approximate OTC exposure:
1.) JP MORGAN CHASE BANK NA OH
$78.1 trillion OTC derivatives
2.) CITIBANK NATIONAL ASSN
$56.1 trillion OTC derivatives
3.) BANK OF AMERICA NA NC
$53.15 trillion OTC derivatives
4.) GOLDMAN SACHS BANK USA NY
$47.7 trillion OTC derivatives
Considering that the total assets of these four banks are a little more than $5 trillion, I see a frightening amount of risk with a total derivative exposure of $235 trillion! This is nearly 50 to 1 leverage. On top of that, assets such as real estate or mortgage-backed securities can be held on the books at whatever value the banks think they can sell them for in the future. I call this government sanctioned accounting fraud, or mark to fantasy accounting. Who knows what the true value of the banks assets really are.I am sure the banks would say that the net exposure is really not near that great because the banks have hedged their bets. The banks will probably say, by and large, these debt bets will cancel out or back up one another. It is known in the banking world as bilateral netting. A recent article in Zerohedge.com explained the enormous risk by saying, The best example of how the flaw behind bilateral netting almost destroyed the system is AIG: the insurance company was hours away from making trillions of derivative contracts worthless if it were to implode, leaving all those who had bought protection from the firm worthless, a contingency only Goldman hedged by buying protection on AIG. And while the argument can further be extended that in bankruptcy a perfectly netted bankrupt entity would make someone else whole on claims they have written, this is not true, as the bankrupt estate will pursue 100 cent recovery on its claims even under Chapter 11, while claims the estate had written end up as General Unsecured Claims which as Lehman has demonstrated will collect 20 cents on the dollar if they are lucky.(Click here to read the complete Zerohedge.com story.) The global economy is still in trouble. Everyone is focusing on Europe because the sovereign debt crisis there is likely to cause the European Union to break apart and kill the Euro. The Head of UniCredit global securities, Attila Szalay-Berzeviczy said recently, The euro is beyond rescue . . . . The only remaining question is how many days the hopeless rearguard action of European governments and the European Central Bank can keep up Greece’s spirits . . . . A Greek default will trigger an immediate magnitude 10 earthquake across Europe.(Click here for more on that story.) If the EU goes under, do not expect all the highly leveraged U.S. banks to walk away unscathed. They will need another bailout to stay afloat.
You must remember the U.S. still is at the epicenter of the ongoing credit crisis. At the moment, America looks like it is in better shape than Europe, but that will not last. According to the latest report from John Williams of Shadowstats.com, The root source of current global systemic instabilities largely has been the financially-dominant United States, and it is against the U.S. dollar that the global markets ultimately should turn, massively. The Fed and the U.S. Treasury likely will do whatever has to be done to prevent a euro-area crisis from triggering a systemic collapse in the United States. Accordingly, it is not from a euro-related crisis, but rather from within the U.S. financial system and financial-authority actions that an eventual U.S. systemic failure likely will be triggered, seen initially in a rapidly accelerating pace of domestic inflation—ultimately hyperinflation.Sure, the dollar may gain in value for a while in absence of the Euro as a competing currency, but, ultimately, the dollar too will crash, right along with a few very big banks.
America's Big Bank $244 Trillion Derivatives Market Exposed| September 15, 2011 | includes: BAC, C, GS, HBC, JPM
I have been extremely interested in the global derivatives market ever since I saw the documentary Collapse. I am not going to bore you with the details of this documentary, but to summarize, the documentary focuses on the unsustainable global dependence on oil supply (which is decreasing), and the unsustainable nature of our current capitalistic society (topic for another day). In this documentary the main character/pundit/whistleblower, Michael Ruppert, states that the world derivatives market is in excess of $700 trillion. Needless to say I was blown away by this amount, and I vowed to do some research and figure out how there can be an active financial market 50 times that of the United States Gross Domestic Product. I am not going to attempt to delve into the global derivatives market as a whole. Instead, I will focus on the derivatives that are written by U.S. commercial banks, talk about the various derivatives out there, and explain the amount of exposure to the United States banking system. To do this I will be using the most recent OCC report on derivatives held by commercial banks here in the U.S.
Summary of the U.S. Derivatives Market
-U.S. commercial banks currently hold a notional value of $244 trillion in derivatives.
-Trading exposure, which is measured by VaR (Value at Risk), is $677 million.
-Net Current Credit Exposure of commercial banks to derivatives is $353 billion, due to bilateral netting.
-Potential Future Exposure is $814 billion, bringing Total Credit Exposure (NCCE + PFE) to $1.2 trillion.
-The total amount of Credit Derivatives outstanding is $14.9 trillion.
-30 days or more past due derivatives equaled $42 million, and $74 million in derivatives was charged off this quarter.
-59% of counterparties are banks and securities firms, 35% are corporations, 1% are monoline financial firms, 2% are hedge funds, and 3% are sovereign funds.
-Banks hold collateral equal to 72% of Net Current Credit Exposure.
-82% of derivatives are interest rate products, 10.9% in FX contracts, 6.1% in credit derivatives, and .6% are in commodities and equity contracts, respectively.
Five banks dominate the U.S. derivatives market, J.P. Morgan Chase (JPM), Bank of America (BAC), Citigroup (C), Goldman Sachs (GS), and HSBC (HBC), accounting for 96% of the derivatives activity. However, a total of 1,047 U.S. banks participated in the derivatives market in the first quarter.Banks reported trading revenue (revenue pertaining to derivatives) of $7.4 billion in the first quarter of 2011.This is a lot of information to handle so I am going to delve deeper into all of the summary points, and shed some light on all of these statements.U.S. commercial banks currently hold a notional value of $244 trillion in derivatives.Notional value is the face amount of the derivative used to calculate payment on swaps, options, futures, and forward contracts. This is not the amount of exposure that banks have to the derivatives market. Here is a simple example: Two parties approach a bank, and they want to do an interest rate swap for a loan. One wants a fixed interest rate, while the other wants a floating interest rate. The bank acts as a clearinghouse and third party overseer for this transaction. Both parties pay a set fee (usually a spread on the interest rates) to the bank based on the amount of the loan amount they are swapping payments on, they also give their respective payments on the loan amount through the bank, and the bank sends the payment to the other party. Now if the amount of the loan that the two parties were swapping interest rates on was $1 trillion that $1 trillion would be included in the notional value of derivatives held by the banks. Another example: If a bank buys or sells (hedges risk or assumes risk) a Credit Default Swap the face amount is included in the notional value.
Trading exposure, which is measured by VaR (Value at Risk), is $677 million.VaR (value at risk) is a statistical analysis performed by banks to determine the potential amount of maximum expected losses (on their trading activities) that they could sustain over a specified duration of time and under normal market conditions. Here is an example from the OCC report.A VaR of $50 million at 99% confidence measured over one trading day, for example, indicates that a trading loss of greater than $50 million in the next day on that portfolio should occur only once in every 100 trading days under normal market condition.Basically, the VaR is telling us that the bank is 99% confident (confidence level depends on the standard deviation used) that over the next 100 trading days it will lose a maximum of $50 million. So the total VaR of $677 million for the quarter is the maximum expected aggregate loss that banks think they could lose.Net Current Credit Exposure of U.S. commercial banks is $353 billion, due to bilateral netting.How can notional derivatives equal $244 trillion and the banks only be exposed to $353 billion in potential losses? There is a common misconception that the credit risk experienced in the derivatives market is the same as the credit risk experienced in the loan market. The credit risk in the regular loan market is the face amount of the loan given to the borrower, the exposure is unilateral. The credit risk in derivatives is different due to the fact that there are two parties to the vast majority of derivatives contracts. The bank enters into a legally binding contract with counterparties called bilateral netting. This contract states that if one of the parties defaults, the remaining balance of the contract would be the net sum of all positive and negative fair values of contracts included in the bilateral netting arrangement.
How does the OCC calculate Net Current Credit Exposure? They start by looking at the fair value amount that is owed to the banks this amount is called derivatives receivable or Gross Positive Fair Value (this does not take into account collateral held by banks). This is the amount that the banks would be in the hole if all of their counterparties defaulted. They then look at the fair value amount that the banks owe to their counterparties, this amount is called derivatives payable or Gross Negative Fair Value (this amount does not take into account collateral held by the counterparties.) This is the amount that the banks' counterparties would lose if the banks' defaulted. The OCC then subtracts the amount at risk (Gross Positive Fair Value) from the amount owed to the counterparties and that is the Net Current Credit Exposure.Potential Future Exposure is $814 billion, bringing Total Credit Exposure (NCCE + PFE) to $1.2 trillion.Essentially, Potential Future Exposure is an amount calculated at a certain confidence level (much like VaR), for the remaining life of the contract. The $814 billion is the maximum potential exposure banks could face for the life of all their derivatives contracts. Potential Future Exposure takes into account future increases in value of the derivatives receivable. The $814 billion is a future increase in value of the receivables owed to the banks increases their total credit exposure. An increase in value can be attributed to any number of reasons from a change in foreign exchange rates to a rising or falling of interest rates. Here is a somewhat outdated (2002), but great explanation.
The Total Amount of Credit Derivatives Outstanding is $14.9 trillion.The vast majority (97%) of credit derivatives are Credit Default Swaps. The $14.9 trillion is just a notional amount however. As of this quarter, banks assumed risk (wrote credit derivatives) in the amount of $7.4 trillion, and hedged risk (bought credit derivatives) in the amount of $7.5 trillion. Due to the fact that 43% of the notional amount of derivatives is sub- investment grade, the banks are obviously betting that certain parties are going to default, and they are hoping to make some trading revenue on their credit derivatives.30 Days or More Past Due Derivatives Equaled $42 million, and Banks Charged Off $74 Million in Derivatives Contracts This Quarter.This is exactly how it reads. Out of a notional value of $244 trillion banks had to charge off a mere $74 million. Granted, during the financial crisis that amount was $847 million in the fourth quarter of 2008, but needless to say things have vastly improved since then.59% of counterparties are banks and securities firms, 35% are corporations, 1% are monoline financial firms, 2% are hedge funds, and 3% are sovereign funds.No need to elaborate here, except to say that this illustrates why there are the terms TBTF and contagion. The game dominoes really comes to mind at this moment.Banks Hold Collateral Equal to 72% of Net Current Credit Exposure.
88% of this collateral is cash and treasury securities (very liquid assets). Depending on the counterparty banks like hold a certain percentage of collateral. 93% collateral was held against the NCCE to banks and securities firms, 302% against hedge funds' NCCE, 5% against sovereign governments' NCCE, and 36% against corporations'.82% of derivatives are interest rate products, 10.9% in FX contracts, 6.1% in credit derivatives, and .6% are in commodities and equity contracts, respectively.These products can be broken down into five different types of derivatives: Futures, Forwards, Swaps, Options, and Credit Derivatives. Needless to say these are very complex financial products that are hard to understand, but I will do my best to explain them for you.Swaps - are used exactly as their name suggests, to swap (exchange) cash flows at a certain date. These types of derivatives are used mainly for interest rate swaps, but can be used to swap cash flows from equities, commodities, or foreign currency.Futures & Forwards - I am going to lump these two together because they are similar, but not the same. Engaging in a forward requires you to buy/sell a certain equity/commodity/foreign currency at a set price at a set point in time. Engaging in a future is almost the same agreement as a forward but, your position is usually opened on margin, and is traded marked to market, and you can close your position out at any time.Credit Derivatives - Basically an assumption or a hedging of risk on any kind of asset, or liability.Options - Gives the owner the right to buy/sell the underlying security before or on the expiration date at a certain price.
Five banks dominate the U.S. derivatives market, J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and HSBC, accounting for 96% of the derivatives activity. However, a total of 1,047 U.S. banks participated in the derivatives market in the first quarter.The amount in notional derivatives written by the five biggest banks from highest to lowest goes in this order J.P. Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and HSBC.
Conclusion:While the $244 trillion notional derivative market looks menacing on paper, once you break it down, it isn't as scary as it looks. The banks have collateral on the majority of their Net Current Credit Exposure, and the economy (for all its current faults) is getting better. In my opinion, the derivatives market is an essential tool for traders, hedge funds, companies, and banks to hedge risks and reap rewards. There is no possible way that this market is just going to disappear overnight. I think that $99 billion (when you subtract collateral) in NCCE is acceptable, when you consider the benefits that the derivatives market gives the global economy.Disclosure: I am long BAC.
http://seekingalpha.com/article/293830-america-s-big-bank-244-trillion-derivatives-market-exposed
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The Fed’s European Rescue: Another back-door US Bank / Goldman bailout? Nomi Prins Infowars.com December 1, 2011
http://www.infowars.com/the-feds-european-rescue-another-back-door-us-bank-goldman-bailout/
In the wake of chopping its Central Bank swap rates today, the Fed has been called a bunch of names: a hero for slugging the big bailout bat in the ninth inning, and a villain for printing money to help Europe at the expense of the US. Neither depiction is right.The Fed is merely continuing its unfettered brand of bailout-economics, promoted with heightened intensity recently by President Obama and Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner in the wake of Germany not playing bailout-ball. Recall, a couple years ago, it was a uniquely American brand of BIG bailouts that the Fed adopted in creating $7.7 trillion of bank subsidies that ran the gamut from back-door AIG bailouts (some of which went to US / some to European banks that deal with those same US banks), to the purchasing of mortgage-backed–securities, to near zero-rate loans (for banks).Similarly, today’s move was also about protecting US banks from losses – self inflicted by dangerous derivatives-chain trades, again with each other, and with European banks.Before getting into the timing of the Fed’s god-father actions, let’s discuss its two kinds of swaps (jargon alert – a swap is a trade between two parties for some time period – you swap me a sweater for a hat because I’m cold, when I’m warmer, we’ll swap back). The Fed had both of these kinds of swaps set up and ready-to-go in the form of : dollar liquidity swap lines and foreign currency liquidity swap lines. Both are administered through Wall Street’s staunchest ally, and Tim Geithner’s old stomping ground, the New York Fed.
The dollar swap lines give foreign central banks the ability to borrow dollars against their currency, use them for whatever they want – like to shore up bets made by European banks that went wrong, and at a later date, return them. A temporary dollar liquidity swap arrangement with 14 foreign central banks was available between December 12, 2007 (several months before Bear Stearn’s collapse and 9 months before the Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy that scared Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley into getting the Fed’s instant permission to become bank holding companies, and thus gain access to any Feds subsidies.)Those dollar-swap lines ended on February 1, 2010. BUT – three months later, they were back on, but this time the FOMC re-authorized dollar liquidity swap lines with only 5 central banks through January 2011. BUT – on December 21, 2010 – the FOMC extended the lines through August 1, 2011. THEN– on June 29th, 2011, these lines were extended through August 1, 2012. AND NOW – though already available, they were announced with save-the-day fanfare as if they were just considered.Then, there are the sneakily-dubbed foreign currency liquidity swap lines, which, as per the Fed’s own words, provide foreign currency-denominated liquidity to US banks.(Italics mine.) In other words, let US banks play with foreign bonds.These were originally used with 4 foreign banks on April, 2009 and expired on February 1, 2010. Until they were resurrected today, November 30, 2011, with foreign currency swap arrangements between the Fed, Bank of Canada, Bank of England, Bank of Japan. Swiss National Bank and the European Central Bank.They are to remain in place until February 1, 2013, longer than the original time period for which they were available during phase one of the global bank-led meltdown, the US phase. (For those following my work, we are in phase two of four, the European phase.)That’s a lot of jargon, but keep these two things in mind: 1) these lines, by the Fed’s own words, are to provide help to US banks. and 2) they are open ended.
There are other reasons that have been thrown up as to why the Fed acted now – like, a European bank was about to fail. But, that rumor was around in the summer and nothing happened. Also, dozens of European banks have been downgraded, and several failed stress tests. Nothing. The Fed didn’t step in when it was just Greece –or Ireland - or when there were rampant contagion fears, and Italian bonds started trading above 7%, rising unabated despite the trick of former Goldman Sachs International advisor Mario Monti replacing former Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi’s with his promises of fiscally conservative actions (read: austerity measures) to come.Perhaps at that point, Goldman thought they had it all under control, but Germany’s bailout-resistence was still a thorn, which is why its bonds got hammered in the last auction, proving that big Finance will get what it wants, no matter how dirty it needs to play. Nothing from the Fed, except a small increase in funding to the IMF.Rating agency, Moody’s announced it was looking at possibly downgrading 87 European banks. Still the Fed waited with open lines. And then, S&P downgraded the US banks again, including Goldman ,making their own financing costs more expensive and the funding of their seismic derivatives positions more tenuous. The Fed found the right moment. Bingo.Now, consider this: the top four US banks (JPM Chase, Citibank, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs) control nearly 95% of the US derivatives market, which has grown by 20% since last year to $235 trillion. That figure is a third of all global derivatives of $707 trillion (up from $601 trillion in December, 2010 and $583 trillion mid-year 2010. )
Breaking that down: JPM Chase holds 11% of the world’s derivative exposure, Citibank, Bank of America, and Goldman comprise about 7% each. But, Goldman has something the others don’t – a lot fewer assets beneath its derivatives stockpile. It has 537 times as many (from 440 times last year) derivatives as assets. Think of a 537 story skyscraper on a one story see-saw. Goldman has $88 billon in assets, and $48 trillion in notional derivatives exposure. This is by FAR the highest ratio of derivatives to assets of any so-called bank backed by a government. The next highest ratio belongs to Citibank with $1.2 trillion in assets and $56 trillion in derivative exposure, or 46 to 1. JPM Chase’s ratio is 44 to 1. Bank of America’s ratio is 36 to 1.Separately Goldman happened to have lost a lot of money in Foreign Exchange derivative positions last quarter. (See Table 7.) Goldman’s loss was about equal to the total gains of the other banks, indicative of some very contrarian trade going on. In addition, Goldman has the most credit risk with respect to the capital it holds, by a factor of 3 or 4 to 1 relative to the other big banks. So did the Fed’s timing have something to do with its star bank? We don’t really know for sure.Sadly, until there’s another FED audit, or FOIA request, we’re not going to know which banks are the beneficiaries of the Fed’s most recent international largesse either, nor will we know what their specific exposures are to each other, or to various European banks, or which trades are going super-badly.But we do know from the US bailouts in phase one of the global meltdown, that providing liquidity or greasing the wheels of banks in times of emergency does absolute nothing for the Main Street Economy. Not in the US. And not in Europe. It also doesn’t fix anything, it just funds bad trades with impunity.Nomi Prins article first appeared on her blog.
Turns out the Government Sachs conspiracy theorists were right all along Madison Ruppert Infowars.com December 2, 2011
In a shocking article published in Reuters, Felix Salmon confirmed what the so-called conspiracy theorists have said all along: former Secretary of the U.S. Treasury Hank Paulson was giving insider tips to his cronies at Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street titans which directly benefited them.The article is entitled, Hank Paulson’s inside jobs, emphasizing the fact that this wasn’t some one-off lapse of ethics on Paulson’s part, but instead a disturbingly regular practice.For those who are unaware, Paulson was the CEO and chairman at Goldman Sachs from 1999-2006 and he clearly provided them with actionable information that epitomizes the plague upon our economy, and the greater global economic system, that is crony capitalism.
However, this isn’t quite a brand new revelation given the fact that in October of 2009 Andrew Ross Sorkin exposed that Paulson met with the entire Goldman Sachs board in a hotel suite in Moscow at the end of June 2008.Salmon covered this at the time, after Sorkin’s book was released, which detailed the meeting held after the Goldman Sachs boys had dinner with Mikhail Gorbachev.At the time the Treasury chief of staff Jim Wilkinson told Goldman Sachs chief of staff John Rogers, Let’s keep this quiet, indicating that despite the fact that the Treasury’s general counsel Bob Hoyt claimed it wouldn’t run afoul of the ethics guidelines, they were well aware that wasn’t the case.Hoyt said that it was acceptable so long as it was solely a social event, but unsurprisingly, Paulson didn’t record the so-called social event in his official calendar.It is undeniable that these individuals knew very well what they were doing, and clearly they had no misgivings whatsoever.During the Moscow meeting Paulson spoke of the need for the government to have the power to wind down troubled firms, offering a preview of his upcoming speech, according to Sorkin.
This wasn’t just a friend going over a speech with some old pals, as everyone knows the words of the Treasury Secretary heavily affect global markets almost instantly, just like speeches by the likes of Ben Shalom Bernanke, the Chairman of the Board of Governors of the private Federal Reserve.Getting this kind of information ahead of time is critical, and through Sorkin’s writing it is clear that Paulson enlightened them as to the situation with Lehman Brothers, giving Goldman Sachs an unfair advantage over those who didn’t happen to have someone on the inside.Paulson spoke of the possibility that Lehman Brothers very well might collapse, along with giving the Goldman Sachs board other insights into how he was viewing the economic climate and what was to come.As Salmon points out, Maybe it’s not so surprising that Goldman Sachs turned out to be so well positioned when Lehman did indeed [blow up] a few months later.This egregious breach of ethics is a perfect example of the corporatism that pervades Wall Street and has brought us to the brink of collapse where we are precariously perched today.Paulson’s Moscow meeting with Goldman Sachs wasn’t an isolated incident as just a few weeks later on July 28th, 2008, Paulson met with what Salmon characterizes as a who’s who of the hedge-fund world in the Eton Park Capital Management headquarters.Unsurprisingly, Eton Park Capital Management was created by Eric Mindich, formerly of Goldman Sachs as well.In a Bloomberg article published yesterday, Richard Teitelbaum details the meeting between roughly a dozen hedge-fund managers and Wall Street executives, including no less than five former colleagues of Paulson’s from Goldman Sachs.Others in attendance were Stephen Mandel of Pine Capital LLC, Dinakar Singh of TPG-Axon Capital Management LP and Daniel Och of Och-Ziff Capital Management Group LLC.During the meeting Paulson, went on to describe a possible scenario for placing Fannie and Freddie into conservatorship — a government seizure designed to allow the firms to continue operations despite heavy losses in the mortgage markets.Teitelbaum writes, The fund manager says he was shocked that Paulson would furnish such specific information — to his mind, leaving little doubt that the Treasury Department would carry out the plan. The managers attending the meeting were thus given a choice opportunity to trade on that information.
While he points out that law professors say that Paulson himself broke no law by disclosing what amounted to inside information, it is hardly arguable that it is ethically acceptable for the Secretary of the Treasury to furnish information to certain people which would give them an advantage over everyone else.As Salmon points out, Given that it’s taken two years since the release of Sorkin’s book for the Eton Park meeting to be made public, it’s fair to assume that there were other meetings, too — possibly many others.Indeed it is impossible to know how much trading of insider information occurs amongst the financial elite, as we only get a glimpse when sources choose to disclose this information toreporters like Teitelbaum and Sorkin.It is quite unfortunate that this is such a rare occurrence, especially when we look at how the ultra-rich continue to profit at record rates while the rest of us struggle to pay the bills.Surely these meetings did not occur only a couple of times, given the tight connection that Goldman Sachs – or more accurately, as is now painfully clear – Government Sachs enjoys with Washington.Salmon sums up this issue in pointing out that the so-called conspiracy theorists have been right all along.
Salmon writes, Paulson was giving inside tips to Wall Street in general, and to Goldman types in particular: exactly the kind of behavior that Government Sachs conspiracy theorists have been speculating about for years. Turns out, they were right.Now if only the derisive label of conspiracy theorist would be lifted from these issues when it is far from a conspiracy theory and is indeed a conspiracy fact.
I won’t be holding my breath, because so long as governments criminally conspire with multinational corporations and others, the label of conspiracy will be denigrated in order to keep people from discussing and investigating these facts and issues.
TEPCO Again Underplays Severity of Situation at Fukushima Kurt Nimmo Infowars.com December 1, 2011
The Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) is once again trying to mislead the public on the severity of the situation at the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan.
photoA worker enters Fukushima reactor containment vessel number 4 in August.On November 30, TEPCO reported fuel at the No. 1 reactor may have eroded part of the primary containment vessel’s thick concrete floor and has seeped deeper into the floor more than previously thought, according to the Associated Press.Another computer simulation by the government-funded Japan Nuclear Energy Safety Organization said the erosion of the concrete could be worse than TEPCO’s projection. It said the possibility of structural damage to the reactor’s foundation needs to be studied.On November 17, the architect of Fukushima Daiichi Reactor 3, Uehara Haruo, warned that a China Syndrome situation is inevitable at the plant. Haruo said that considering eight months have passed since the tsunami and the crippling of the nuclear plant without any improvement in the condition of the reactors, it is likely melted fuel has escaped the container vessel and is now burning through the earth.Prior to this, on September 20, Hiroaki Koide, assistant professor at Kyoto University’s Research Reactor Institute, estimated that material from the nuclear fuel rods may be twelve meters deep underground at reactors one and three, far worse than the results of TEPCO’s simulation. Haruo said debris is spreading in Pacific Ocean.
In September, scientists from the Japanese government’s Meteorological Research Institute and the Central Research Institute of the Electric Power Industry announced the findings of a study at a meeting of the Geochemical Society of Japan. They said that some of the cesium release from Fukushima will flow into the Indian Ocean and eventually reach the Atlantic Ocean.According to Haruo, if the melted fuel reaches an underground water source, it will result in the contamination of water, soil and the sea. More catastrophic, underground super-heated water will ultimately create a massive hydrovolcanic explosion that will eject more radiation into the atmosphere.Back in July, before the latest developments, Dr. Tatsuhiko Kodama of the Radioisotope Center at the University of Tokyo told the Japanese Diet the amount of radiation emitted from the plant was 29.6 times more than the amount of radiation from the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Kodama announces the findings of his study in the following video.TEPCO’s latest public relations effort to underplay the severity of the ongoing crisis at the plant once again reveals that there will be no serious effort to address the grave situation that may soon get much worse if Haruo’s prediction of a hydrovolcanic explosion occurs.The Japanese government is also actively working to sweep the disaster under the rug. Its Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare recently eliminated Fukushima data from a patient survey it conducts every three years, according to the Fukushima Diary. According to the survey, leukemia cases have increased sevenfold over the last year, the highest rate since 1978 when the ministry first began collecting data.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=hFLipZWlpOs
Have You Heard About The 16 Trillion Dollar Bailout The Federal Reserve Handed To The Too Big To Fails? Economic Collapse Blog Friday, December 2, 2011
What you are about to read should absolutely astound you. During the last financial crisis, the Federal Reserve secretly conducted the biggest bailout in the history of the world, and the Fed fought in court for several years to keep it a secret.Do you remember the TARP bailout? The American people were absolutely outraged that the federal government spent 700 billion dollars bailing out the too big to fail banks. Well, that bailout was pocket change compared to what the Federal Reserve did. As you will see documented below, the Federal Reserve actually handed more than 16 trillion dollars in nearly interest-free money to the too big to fail banks between 2007 and 2010. So have you heard about this on the nightly news? Probably not. Lately Bloomberg has been reporting on some of this, but even they are not giving people the whole picture. The American people need to be told about this 16 trillion dollar bailout, because it is a perfect example of why the Federal Reserve needs to be shut down. The Federal Reserve has been actively picking winners and losers in the financial system, and it turns out that the friends of the Fed always get bailed out and always end up among the winners. This is not how a free market system is supposed to work.According to the limited GAO audit of the Federal Reserve that was mandated by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, the grand total of all the secret bailouts conducted by the Federal Reserve during the last financial crisis comes to a whopping $16.1 trillion.That is an astonishing amount of money.Keep in mind that the GDP of the United States for the entire year of 2010 was only 14.58 trillion dollars.The total U.S. national debt is only a bit above 15 trillion dollars right now.So 16 trillion dollars is an almost inconceivable amount of money.But some other dollar figures have been thrown around lately regarding these secret Federal Reserve bailouts. Let’s take a look at them and see what they mean.
$1.2 Trillion
A recent Bloomberg article made the following statement….The $1.2 trillion peak on Dec. 5, 2008 — the combined outstanding balance under the seven programs tallied by Bloomberg — was almost three times the size of the U.S. federal budget deficit that year and more than the total earnings of all federally insured banks in the U.S. for the decade through 2010, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.The $1.2 trillion figure represents the peak outstanding balance on these loans, not the total amount of all the loans. On December 5, 2008 the too big to fail banks owed this much money to the Federal Reserve. Many of them could not pay these short-term loans back right away and had to keep rolling them over time after time. Each time a short-term loan got rolled over that represented a new loan.
$7.7 Trillion
Bloomberg is reporting that the Federal Reserve had made a total of $7.77 trillion in financial commitments to the big banks by the end of March 2009….Add up guarantees and lending limits, and the Fed had committed $7.77 trillion as of March 2009 to rescuing the financial system, more than half the value of everything produced in the U.S. that year.But as mentioned above, a one-time limited GAO audit of the Federal Reserve that was mandated by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act covered an even broader time period and revealed even more bailout loans.According to the GAO audit, $16.1 trillion in secret loans were made by the Federal Reserve between December 1, 2007 and July 21, 2010. The following list of firms and the amount of money that they received was taken directly frompage 131 of the GAO audit report….
Citigroup – $2.513 trillion
Morgan Stanley – $2.041 trillion
Merrill Lynch – $1.949 trillion
Bank of America – $1.344 trillion
Barclays PLC – $868 billion
Bear Sterns – $853 billion
Goldman Sachs – $814 billion
Royal Bank of Scotland – $541 billion
JP Morgan Chase – $391 billion
Deutsche Bank – $354 billion
UBS – $287 billion
Credit Suisse – $262 billion
Lehman Brothers – $183 billion
Bank of Scotland – $181 billion
BNP Paribas – $175 billion
Wells Fargo – $159 billion
Dexia – $159 billion
Wachovia – $142 billion
Dresdner Bank – $135 billion
Societe Generale – $124 billion
All Other Borrowers – $2.639 trillion
This report was made available to all the members of Congress, but most of them have been totally silent about it. One of the only members of Congress that has said something has been U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders.The following is an excerpt from a statement about this audit that was takenfrom the official website of Senator Sanders….As a result of this audit, we now know that the Federal Reserve provided more than $16 trillion in total financial assistance to some of the largest financial institutions and corporations in the United States and throughout the world.So where is everyone else? Why aren’t leading Republicans and leading Democrats crying bloody murder over this report? This scandal should have been front page news for months when it was revealed.But it wasn’t.And Guess what? Not only did the Federal Reserve give 16.1 trillion dollars in nearly interest-free loans to the too big to fail banks, the Fed also paid them over 600 million dollars to help run the emergency lending program. According to the GAO, the Federal Reserve shelled out an astounding $659.4 million in fees to the very financial institutions which caused the financial crisis in the first place.In addition, it turns out that trillions of dollars of this bailout money actually went overseas. According to the GAO audit, approximately $3.08 trillion went to foreign banks in Europe and in Asia.So why were our dollars being used to bail out foreign banks while tens of millions of American families were deeply suffering? That is a very good question.Also, it is important to remember that many of these bailout loans were made at below market interest rates, and this enabled many of these financial institutions to rake in huge profits.
According to a recent Bloomberg article, the big banks brought in an estimated $13 billion by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates….While the Fed’s last-resort lending programs generally charge above-market interest rates to deter routine borrowing, that practice sometimes flipped during the crisis. On Oct. 20, 2008, for example, the central bank agreed to make $113.3 billion of 28-day loans through its Term Auction Facility at a rate of 1.1 percent, according to a press release at the time.The rate was less than a third of the 3.8 percent that banks were charging each other to make one-month loans on that day. Bank of America and Wachovia Corp. each got $15 billion of the 1.1 percent TAF loans, followed by Royal Bank of Scotland’s RBS Citizens NA unit with $10 billion, Fed data show.So once the financial crisis was over, were adjustments made to the financial system to make sure that this type of thing would never happen again? Of course not.Today, the too big to fail banks are larger than ever. The total assets of the six largest U.S. banks increased by 39 percent between September 30, 2006 and September 30, 2011.
So now they are more too big to fail than ever.But this is what happens when we allow unelected central bank bureaucrats to run our financial system.Most Americans do not realize this, but the truth is that the Federal Reserve is not part of the government. In fact, it is about as federal as Federal Express is. The Federal Reserve has admitted that they are a privately owned institution in court many times, and you can see video of a Federal Reserve employee admitting that the Federal Reserve is privately owned right here.The Federal Reserve is an out of control monster that is throwing around trillions of dollars whenever it wants to. Nobody should be allowed to do this. Nobody should be allowed to give bailouts to banks and corporations without the express permission of the U.S. Congress and the president of the United States.
This is a point that I made in my article yesterday. The Federal Reserve decided this week that it is going to provide liquidity support to Europe. If the American people do not like this move, that is just too bad. We do not get a say in the matter.Are you starting to understand why I keep pushing the idea that it is time toshut down the Federal Reserve? Please share this information about the secret 16 trillion dollar Federal Reserve bailout with your family and your friends.If we can get enough people to wake up, perhaps there is still time to change the direction that this country is headed.
Senate bill 1867 would allow U.S. military to detain and murder anti-government protesters Mike Adams Natural News Friday, December 2, 2011
(NaturalNews) I don’t know if you’re all getting this through your heads yet, but Senate Bill 1867 –the National Defense Authorization Act– would openly legalize the U.S. government’s detainment and murder of OWS protesters and the assassination of talk show hosts, bloggers, journalists and anyone who holds a so-called anti-government point of view. This is the open and blatant declaration of war against any who do not going along with TSA thugs reaching down your pants, the Goldman Sachs economic takeover of nations, the secret arrest and torture of American citizens, and other acts of outright tyranny waged by an out-of-control government.Those who have been burying their heads in the sand over the coming police state need to wake up and face the music. That U.S. Senators would knowingly and willfully attempt to pass a bill thatlegalizesthe indefinite detainment, torture and killing of American citizens with no due process whatsoever — and on American soil! — is nothing less than a traitorous betrayal of the once-free American people. These are, our founding fathers would have said,acts of waragainst the People. They reveal the insidious plan to put in place a legal framework to end the Bill of Rights, murder protesters, and overrun America with total police state brutality.And yet the sheeple are still asleeple.I grow weary of trying to warn the American people to wake up and see what is now right in front of their eyes, so for those who want to read these words themselves — right in the Senate bill — you can read it at: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query…
And YES, it has now been confirmed that the indefinite detainment and murder provisions do apply to American citizens on the streets of American cities. As Sen. Lindsey Graham explained in plain language on the Senate floor: …1031, the statement of authority to detain, does apply to American citizens and it designates the world as the battlefield, including the homeland.That means America, for those of you who are still wondering what homeland means. It’s a phrase borrowed from Nazi Germany, of course, which is the source of much of this legislation as you might have noticed.
The power is so broad that even U.S. citizens could be swept up by the military and the military could be used far from any battlefield, even within the United States itself,says the ACLU (http://www.aclu.org/blog/national-s…).
Homefront: The U.S. government’s war against the People
If this bill passes and is signed into law, it would mean that America’s war machine could then be turned against the American people – liberal, conservative, libertarian… it doesn’t matter. If you question the government, you are suddenly an “enemy combatant” and they will cite this law as the legal justification for putting a bullet in your head, fire-bombing your little protest group, or literally running over you and your buddies with tanks. (And they won’t stop like China did in Tiananmen Square when that one brave citizen stood up against tyranny there in 1989.) (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6inW…)The premeditate murder of U.S. protesters (Occupy Wall Street, anyone?) is now being codified into law as the government’s right. Of course, your rights to Free Speech, due process, owning a firearm and other rights are being obliterated in the process. Only the government has rights now, didn’t you know? Theslavesof the nation (i.e. the citizens) are being stripped of all rights, including the right to grow your own food, have a picnic or even buy fresh dairy products from a farmer.
Governments routinely murder far more people than terrorists
Right now, every history teacher in America should be absolutely outraged about all this, as they know what always comes next in the history of nations. Once any government legalizes the murder of its own citizens, it is inevitably followed by a mass-murder holocaust-style event.Tyrants, you see, always like to legalize their mass murder before they pull the trigger. Just read the history of Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao and others. In every case, they worked diligently to put into place a legal framework for the mass murder that was about to be unleashes on their own citizens. That legal framework looks strikingly similar to Senate Bill 1867, which is about to be passed.This also brings to mind the mathematical reality that, statistically speaking, governments are orders of magnitude more deadly than terrorists. While terrorists sometimes success in taking out a fewthousandpeople at a time, governments routinely murder tens of MILLIONS of people.It’s called GENOCIDE, and there’s a long and well-documented history of how governments have committed genocide year after year, one nation after another:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genoci…
See more statistics at:
http://www.scaruffi.com/politics/di…
So if the People of America had any courage at all, they would be running the People’s road blocks and searching government vehicles for weapons! It is the government agents, after all, who are statistically at the highest risk of engaging in mass murder, and very soon the U.S. Senate looks likely to effectivelylegalize that mass murder.At the airports, We the People should be searching the TSA employees and checking them for illegal drugs, child pornography and stolen electronics. At government buildings, We the People should be searching all the government employees who come and go to make sure they don’t stage the demolition of their own buildings as a way to blame whatever convenient enemy they want to discredit — patriots, conservatives, conspiracy theorists or what have you.It’s no longer a conspiracy theory, you see, that the government wants to have the legal right to openly murder U.S. citizens right on the streets of America. It’s written right into the Senate bill. It’s public record. So all those out there still clinging to their pathetic denialist conspiracy theorists rants can now clamp shut their pie holes and throw themselves off a cliff or something. It’s time to face the reality of the total police state tyranny that’s now written in black and white, plain as day.All of you who are still obsessed with your narrow world view of fashion, dancing with the stars, microwaveable processed food and fake mainstream news are about to be rocked out of your easy chairs and dumped into the cesspool of tyranny at your doorstep. Just know that when they come for you, there will be nobody left to speak for you, because you remained silent as all this was rolled out. And I won’t be there for you, either, because I’ll be holed up in Texas, handing out emergency food supplies to the local churches and performing emergency medicine procedures on those protesters wounded by U.S. government military attacks — the ones that are still alive, anyway.
You think none of this is coming? Why would the U.S. Senate write this into law if they didn’t intend on using it to murder Americans? Maybe you need to clear the cobwebs out of your head and open your eyes to what’s really happening right now in the U.S. Senate.Read between the lines, folks. It’s not that difficult to get the full picture here. The very idea that the U.S. Senate is evenconsideringsuch a law to legalize the detainment and murder of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil by U.S. troops is, all by itself, a complete and utter crime against the American people.The U.S. Senate is about to declare WAR on the American people. And I don’t mean that metaphorically. They are trying to make this a military war where anyone who opposes the U.S. government — even if they have nothing at all to do with terrorism — is now a fair game target for precision bombings, assassinations and heavy military armor (i.e. tanks rolling down your driveway).Some good news: Congressman Dennis Kucinich has publicly spoken out against the bill (even though he’s not in the Senate). So has Sen. Rand Paul. His father, Ron Paul, has also stated his opposition to the illegal detainment provision of the bill. There are hints that if the bill passes, President Obama may veto it. If he did, that would be one of the most profound freedom-protecting actions of his administration, but don’t hold your breath on that count. You never know what these politicians will do when they think they have the power to murder their own citizens — they’re drunk with power, after all, and they love to rule over the masses with a kind of devilish insanity. Remember: Obama already has a kill list of Americans to be murdered overseas, but this new Senate Bill 1867 would legalize that right on U.S. soil.
So one day you call in to talk radio and express your discontent with the President, let’s say, and the next day a U.S. marine scout sniper sets up his .338 sniper rifle a couple hundred yards from your house, waits for you to sit down to watch Anderson Cooper vomit out the evening’s news propaganda, and then he pulls the trigger and blows your neck off, causing your head to land smack dab in that bowl of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese you were just trying to shovel down your threat because someone told you it was food. This will all be LEGAL under the new Senate bill 1867 because they will claim you were a terrorist collaborator who questioned the wisdom of the executive leadership of America. Once due process is stripped away,anythingcan be justified by the government, including the open murder of its own citizens.This is the whole point of a nation of LAW. The laws describe specific legal rights afforded to citizens, but most importantly they describe the LIMITS of power of government. It is those limits that the government is now trying to completely obliterate, turning America into a complete military dictatorship / fascist nation where laws are only applied to the People, not to the government itself. These are practically the exact words recently uttered by Newt Gingrich during a recent debate, in which he said due process and the Bill of Rights should only apply to people who engage in common criminal acts such as stealing or robbing people. But no such rights or due process privileges should exist when there is a war going on, Gingrich insisted! And the U.S. Senate is about to declare the entire USA “homeland” to be a battlefield of a never-ending war, get it? Are you grokking all this yet? These tyrants are about to declare the entire USA a battlefield where NO ONE has any due process, no Bill of Rights, no protections under any law, nothing! And if Gingrich becomes President — oh my God please don’t let this happen — then we are looking at the runaway militarization of everything in America, including a huge ramping up of the so-called war on drugs which we’ve already exposed as a total failure and a complete hoax (http://www.naturalnews.com/034289_A…).If this bill passes and is signed into law by the President, the USA is officially at war with its own People, and you can expect the government will immediately begin staging false flag bombings so they can justify a multi-year campaign of total genocide against all who refuse to cower down to the (now admitted) anti-freedom tyrants in Washington.We are on the verge of losing America, my friends. I ask: What the hell are YOU going to do about it?
Indefinite Detention Bill Passes Senate 93-7 -Americans completely stripped of all rights under Section 1031 Paul Joseph Watson Infowars.com Friday, December 2, 2011
The Senate last night codified into law the power of the U.S. military to indefinitely detain an American citizen with no charge, no trial and no oversight whatsoever with the passage of S. 1867, the National Defense Authorization Act.
Detention.One amendment that would have specifically blocked the measures from being used against U.S. citizens was voted down and the final bill was passed 93-7.
Another amendment introduced by Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein that attempted to bar the provision from being used on American soil, an effort to ensure the military won’t be roaming our streets looking for suspected terrorists, also failed, although Feinstein voted in favor of the bill anyway.
Feinstein was able to include a largely symbolic amendment which states that nothing in the bill changes current law relating to the detention of U.S. citizens and legal aliens, but this measure is meaningless according to Republican Congressman Justin Amash, a fierce critic of the bill.Some have asserted that Sen. Feinstein’s amendment, S Amdt 1456, protects the rights of American citizens and preserves constitutional due process. Unfortunately, it does not. It’s just more cleverly worded nonsense,Amash wrote on his Facebook page.Though the White House has threatened to veto the bill, the fact that Obama administration lawyers yesterday reaffirmed their backing for state sponsored assassination of U.S. citizens would suggest otherwise. Not voting for the bill, or in other words upholding the oath to protect the Constitution, has been described over and over again as political suicide.The bill puts military detention authority on steroids and makes it permanent, American citizens and others are at greater risk of being locked away by the military without charge or trial, said Christopher Anders, senior legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union.As Spencer Ackerman highlights, the bill completely violates the sixth amendment in that it allows American citizens to be locked up indefinitely, including in a foreign detention center, without any burden of proof whatsoever. An American merely has to be declared a terrorist and they can be abducted off the streets and never seen again.The detention mandate to use indefinite military detention in terrorism cases isn’t limited to foreigners. It’s confusing, because two different sections of the bill seem to contradict each other, but in the judgment of the University of Texas’ Robert Chesney — a nonpartisan authority on military detention — U.S. citizens are included in the grant of detention authority, writes Ackerman.
http://www.infowars.com/the-feds-european-rescue-another-back-door-us-bank-goldman-bailout/
In the wake of chopping its Central Bank swap rates today, the Fed has been called a bunch of names: a hero for slugging the big bailout bat in the ninth inning, and a villain for printing money to help Europe at the expense of the US. Neither depiction is right.The Fed is merely continuing its unfettered brand of bailout-economics, promoted with heightened intensity recently by President Obama and Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner in the wake of Germany not playing bailout-ball. Recall, a couple years ago, it was a uniquely American brand of BIG bailouts that the Fed adopted in creating $7.7 trillion of bank subsidies that ran the gamut from back-door AIG bailouts (some of which went to US / some to European banks that deal with those same US banks), to the purchasing of mortgage-backed–securities, to near zero-rate loans (for banks).Similarly, today’s move was also about protecting US banks from losses – self inflicted by dangerous derivatives-chain trades, again with each other, and with European banks.Before getting into the timing of the Fed’s god-father actions, let’s discuss its two kinds of swaps (jargon alert – a swap is a trade between two parties for some time period – you swap me a sweater for a hat because I’m cold, when I’m warmer, we’ll swap back). The Fed had both of these kinds of swaps set up and ready-to-go in the form of : dollar liquidity swap lines and foreign currency liquidity swap lines. Both are administered through Wall Street’s staunchest ally, and Tim Geithner’s old stomping ground, the New York Fed.
The dollar swap lines give foreign central banks the ability to borrow dollars against their currency, use them for whatever they want – like to shore up bets made by European banks that went wrong, and at a later date, return them. A temporary dollar liquidity swap arrangement with 14 foreign central banks was available between December 12, 2007 (several months before Bear Stearn’s collapse and 9 months before the Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy that scared Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley into getting the Fed’s instant permission to become bank holding companies, and thus gain access to any Feds subsidies.)Those dollar-swap lines ended on February 1, 2010. BUT – three months later, they were back on, but this time the FOMC re-authorized dollar liquidity swap lines with only 5 central banks through January 2011. BUT – on December 21, 2010 – the FOMC extended the lines through August 1, 2011. THEN– on June 29th, 2011, these lines were extended through August 1, 2012. AND NOW – though already available, they were announced with save-the-day fanfare as if they were just considered.Then, there are the sneakily-dubbed foreign currency liquidity swap lines, which, as per the Fed’s own words, provide foreign currency-denominated liquidity to US banks.(Italics mine.) In other words, let US banks play with foreign bonds.These were originally used with 4 foreign banks on April, 2009 and expired on February 1, 2010. Until they were resurrected today, November 30, 2011, with foreign currency swap arrangements between the Fed, Bank of Canada, Bank of England, Bank of Japan. Swiss National Bank and the European Central Bank.They are to remain in place until February 1, 2013, longer than the original time period for which they were available during phase one of the global bank-led meltdown, the US phase. (For those following my work, we are in phase two of four, the European phase.)That’s a lot of jargon, but keep these two things in mind: 1) these lines, by the Fed’s own words, are to provide help to US banks. and 2) they are open ended.
There are other reasons that have been thrown up as to why the Fed acted now – like, a European bank was about to fail. But, that rumor was around in the summer and nothing happened. Also, dozens of European banks have been downgraded, and several failed stress tests. Nothing. The Fed didn’t step in when it was just Greece –or Ireland - or when there were rampant contagion fears, and Italian bonds started trading above 7%, rising unabated despite the trick of former Goldman Sachs International advisor Mario Monti replacing former Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi’s with his promises of fiscally conservative actions (read: austerity measures) to come.Perhaps at that point, Goldman thought they had it all under control, but Germany’s bailout-resistence was still a thorn, which is why its bonds got hammered in the last auction, proving that big Finance will get what it wants, no matter how dirty it needs to play. Nothing from the Fed, except a small increase in funding to the IMF.Rating agency, Moody’s announced it was looking at possibly downgrading 87 European banks. Still the Fed waited with open lines. And then, S&P downgraded the US banks again, including Goldman ,making their own financing costs more expensive and the funding of their seismic derivatives positions more tenuous. The Fed found the right moment. Bingo.Now, consider this: the top four US banks (JPM Chase, Citibank, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs) control nearly 95% of the US derivatives market, which has grown by 20% since last year to $235 trillion. That figure is a third of all global derivatives of $707 trillion (up from $601 trillion in December, 2010 and $583 trillion mid-year 2010. )
Breaking that down: JPM Chase holds 11% of the world’s derivative exposure, Citibank, Bank of America, and Goldman comprise about 7% each. But, Goldman has something the others don’t – a lot fewer assets beneath its derivatives stockpile. It has 537 times as many (from 440 times last year) derivatives as assets. Think of a 537 story skyscraper on a one story see-saw. Goldman has $88 billon in assets, and $48 trillion in notional derivatives exposure. This is by FAR the highest ratio of derivatives to assets of any so-called bank backed by a government. The next highest ratio belongs to Citibank with $1.2 trillion in assets and $56 trillion in derivative exposure, or 46 to 1. JPM Chase’s ratio is 44 to 1. Bank of America’s ratio is 36 to 1.Separately Goldman happened to have lost a lot of money in Foreign Exchange derivative positions last quarter. (See Table 7.) Goldman’s loss was about equal to the total gains of the other banks, indicative of some very contrarian trade going on. In addition, Goldman has the most credit risk with respect to the capital it holds, by a factor of 3 or 4 to 1 relative to the other big banks. So did the Fed’s timing have something to do with its star bank? We don’t really know for sure.Sadly, until there’s another FED audit, or FOIA request, we’re not going to know which banks are the beneficiaries of the Fed’s most recent international largesse either, nor will we know what their specific exposures are to each other, or to various European banks, or which trades are going super-badly.But we do know from the US bailouts in phase one of the global meltdown, that providing liquidity or greasing the wheels of banks in times of emergency does absolute nothing for the Main Street Economy. Not in the US. And not in Europe. It also doesn’t fix anything, it just funds bad trades with impunity.Nomi Prins article first appeared on her blog.
Turns out the Government Sachs conspiracy theorists were right all along Madison Ruppert Infowars.com December 2, 2011
In a shocking article published in Reuters, Felix Salmon confirmed what the so-called conspiracy theorists have said all along: former Secretary of the U.S. Treasury Hank Paulson was giving insider tips to his cronies at Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street titans which directly benefited them.The article is entitled, Hank Paulson’s inside jobs, emphasizing the fact that this wasn’t some one-off lapse of ethics on Paulson’s part, but instead a disturbingly regular practice.For those who are unaware, Paulson was the CEO and chairman at Goldman Sachs from 1999-2006 and he clearly provided them with actionable information that epitomizes the plague upon our economy, and the greater global economic system, that is crony capitalism.
However, this isn’t quite a brand new revelation given the fact that in October of 2009 Andrew Ross Sorkin exposed that Paulson met with the entire Goldman Sachs board in a hotel suite in Moscow at the end of June 2008.Salmon covered this at the time, after Sorkin’s book was released, which detailed the meeting held after the Goldman Sachs boys had dinner with Mikhail Gorbachev.At the time the Treasury chief of staff Jim Wilkinson told Goldman Sachs chief of staff John Rogers, Let’s keep this quiet, indicating that despite the fact that the Treasury’s general counsel Bob Hoyt claimed it wouldn’t run afoul of the ethics guidelines, they were well aware that wasn’t the case.Hoyt said that it was acceptable so long as it was solely a social event, but unsurprisingly, Paulson didn’t record the so-called social event in his official calendar.It is undeniable that these individuals knew very well what they were doing, and clearly they had no misgivings whatsoever.During the Moscow meeting Paulson spoke of the need for the government to have the power to wind down troubled firms, offering a preview of his upcoming speech, according to Sorkin.
This wasn’t just a friend going over a speech with some old pals, as everyone knows the words of the Treasury Secretary heavily affect global markets almost instantly, just like speeches by the likes of Ben Shalom Bernanke, the Chairman of the Board of Governors of the private Federal Reserve.Getting this kind of information ahead of time is critical, and through Sorkin’s writing it is clear that Paulson enlightened them as to the situation with Lehman Brothers, giving Goldman Sachs an unfair advantage over those who didn’t happen to have someone on the inside.Paulson spoke of the possibility that Lehman Brothers very well might collapse, along with giving the Goldman Sachs board other insights into how he was viewing the economic climate and what was to come.As Salmon points out, Maybe it’s not so surprising that Goldman Sachs turned out to be so well positioned when Lehman did indeed [blow up] a few months later.This egregious breach of ethics is a perfect example of the corporatism that pervades Wall Street and has brought us to the brink of collapse where we are precariously perched today.Paulson’s Moscow meeting with Goldman Sachs wasn’t an isolated incident as just a few weeks later on July 28th, 2008, Paulson met with what Salmon characterizes as a who’s who of the hedge-fund world in the Eton Park Capital Management headquarters.Unsurprisingly, Eton Park Capital Management was created by Eric Mindich, formerly of Goldman Sachs as well.In a Bloomberg article published yesterday, Richard Teitelbaum details the meeting between roughly a dozen hedge-fund managers and Wall Street executives, including no less than five former colleagues of Paulson’s from Goldman Sachs.Others in attendance were Stephen Mandel of Pine Capital LLC, Dinakar Singh of TPG-Axon Capital Management LP and Daniel Och of Och-Ziff Capital Management Group LLC.During the meeting Paulson, went on to describe a possible scenario for placing Fannie and Freddie into conservatorship — a government seizure designed to allow the firms to continue operations despite heavy losses in the mortgage markets.Teitelbaum writes, The fund manager says he was shocked that Paulson would furnish such specific information — to his mind, leaving little doubt that the Treasury Department would carry out the plan. The managers attending the meeting were thus given a choice opportunity to trade on that information.
While he points out that law professors say that Paulson himself broke no law by disclosing what amounted to inside information, it is hardly arguable that it is ethically acceptable for the Secretary of the Treasury to furnish information to certain people which would give them an advantage over everyone else.As Salmon points out, Given that it’s taken two years since the release of Sorkin’s book for the Eton Park meeting to be made public, it’s fair to assume that there were other meetings, too — possibly many others.Indeed it is impossible to know how much trading of insider information occurs amongst the financial elite, as we only get a glimpse when sources choose to disclose this information toreporters like Teitelbaum and Sorkin.It is quite unfortunate that this is such a rare occurrence, especially when we look at how the ultra-rich continue to profit at record rates while the rest of us struggle to pay the bills.Surely these meetings did not occur only a couple of times, given the tight connection that Goldman Sachs – or more accurately, as is now painfully clear – Government Sachs enjoys with Washington.Salmon sums up this issue in pointing out that the so-called conspiracy theorists have been right all along.
Salmon writes, Paulson was giving inside tips to Wall Street in general, and to Goldman types in particular: exactly the kind of behavior that Government Sachs conspiracy theorists have been speculating about for years. Turns out, they were right.Now if only the derisive label of conspiracy theorist would be lifted from these issues when it is far from a conspiracy theory and is indeed a conspiracy fact.
I won’t be holding my breath, because so long as governments criminally conspire with multinational corporations and others, the label of conspiracy will be denigrated in order to keep people from discussing and investigating these facts and issues.
TEPCO Again Underplays Severity of Situation at Fukushima Kurt Nimmo Infowars.com December 1, 2011
The Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) is once again trying to mislead the public on the severity of the situation at the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan.
photoA worker enters Fukushima reactor containment vessel number 4 in August.On November 30, TEPCO reported fuel at the No. 1 reactor may have eroded part of the primary containment vessel’s thick concrete floor and has seeped deeper into the floor more than previously thought, according to the Associated Press.Another computer simulation by the government-funded Japan Nuclear Energy Safety Organization said the erosion of the concrete could be worse than TEPCO’s projection. It said the possibility of structural damage to the reactor’s foundation needs to be studied.On November 17, the architect of Fukushima Daiichi Reactor 3, Uehara Haruo, warned that a China Syndrome situation is inevitable at the plant. Haruo said that considering eight months have passed since the tsunami and the crippling of the nuclear plant without any improvement in the condition of the reactors, it is likely melted fuel has escaped the container vessel and is now burning through the earth.Prior to this, on September 20, Hiroaki Koide, assistant professor at Kyoto University’s Research Reactor Institute, estimated that material from the nuclear fuel rods may be twelve meters deep underground at reactors one and three, far worse than the results of TEPCO’s simulation. Haruo said debris is spreading in Pacific Ocean.
In September, scientists from the Japanese government’s Meteorological Research Institute and the Central Research Institute of the Electric Power Industry announced the findings of a study at a meeting of the Geochemical Society of Japan. They said that some of the cesium release from Fukushima will flow into the Indian Ocean and eventually reach the Atlantic Ocean.According to Haruo, if the melted fuel reaches an underground water source, it will result in the contamination of water, soil and the sea. More catastrophic, underground super-heated water will ultimately create a massive hydrovolcanic explosion that will eject more radiation into the atmosphere.Back in July, before the latest developments, Dr. Tatsuhiko Kodama of the Radioisotope Center at the University of Tokyo told the Japanese Diet the amount of radiation emitted from the plant was 29.6 times more than the amount of radiation from the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Kodama announces the findings of his study in the following video.TEPCO’s latest public relations effort to underplay the severity of the ongoing crisis at the plant once again reveals that there will be no serious effort to address the grave situation that may soon get much worse if Haruo’s prediction of a hydrovolcanic explosion occurs.The Japanese government is also actively working to sweep the disaster under the rug. Its Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare recently eliminated Fukushima data from a patient survey it conducts every three years, according to the Fukushima Diary. According to the survey, leukemia cases have increased sevenfold over the last year, the highest rate since 1978 when the ministry first began collecting data.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=hFLipZWlpOs
Have You Heard About The 16 Trillion Dollar Bailout The Federal Reserve Handed To The Too Big To Fails? Economic Collapse Blog Friday, December 2, 2011
What you are about to read should absolutely astound you. During the last financial crisis, the Federal Reserve secretly conducted the biggest bailout in the history of the world, and the Fed fought in court for several years to keep it a secret.Do you remember the TARP bailout? The American people were absolutely outraged that the federal government spent 700 billion dollars bailing out the too big to fail banks. Well, that bailout was pocket change compared to what the Federal Reserve did. As you will see documented below, the Federal Reserve actually handed more than 16 trillion dollars in nearly interest-free money to the too big to fail banks between 2007 and 2010. So have you heard about this on the nightly news? Probably not. Lately Bloomberg has been reporting on some of this, but even they are not giving people the whole picture. The American people need to be told about this 16 trillion dollar bailout, because it is a perfect example of why the Federal Reserve needs to be shut down. The Federal Reserve has been actively picking winners and losers in the financial system, and it turns out that the friends of the Fed always get bailed out and always end up among the winners. This is not how a free market system is supposed to work.According to the limited GAO audit of the Federal Reserve that was mandated by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, the grand total of all the secret bailouts conducted by the Federal Reserve during the last financial crisis comes to a whopping $16.1 trillion.That is an astonishing amount of money.Keep in mind that the GDP of the United States for the entire year of 2010 was only 14.58 trillion dollars.The total U.S. national debt is only a bit above 15 trillion dollars right now.So 16 trillion dollars is an almost inconceivable amount of money.But some other dollar figures have been thrown around lately regarding these secret Federal Reserve bailouts. Let’s take a look at them and see what they mean.
$1.2 Trillion
A recent Bloomberg article made the following statement….The $1.2 trillion peak on Dec. 5, 2008 — the combined outstanding balance under the seven programs tallied by Bloomberg — was almost three times the size of the U.S. federal budget deficit that year and more than the total earnings of all federally insured banks in the U.S. for the decade through 2010, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.The $1.2 trillion figure represents the peak outstanding balance on these loans, not the total amount of all the loans. On December 5, 2008 the too big to fail banks owed this much money to the Federal Reserve. Many of them could not pay these short-term loans back right away and had to keep rolling them over time after time. Each time a short-term loan got rolled over that represented a new loan.
$7.7 Trillion
Bloomberg is reporting that the Federal Reserve had made a total of $7.77 trillion in financial commitments to the big banks by the end of March 2009….Add up guarantees and lending limits, and the Fed had committed $7.77 trillion as of March 2009 to rescuing the financial system, more than half the value of everything produced in the U.S. that year.But as mentioned above, a one-time limited GAO audit of the Federal Reserve that was mandated by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act covered an even broader time period and revealed even more bailout loans.According to the GAO audit, $16.1 trillion in secret loans were made by the Federal Reserve between December 1, 2007 and July 21, 2010. The following list of firms and the amount of money that they received was taken directly frompage 131 of the GAO audit report….
Citigroup – $2.513 trillion
Morgan Stanley – $2.041 trillion
Merrill Lynch – $1.949 trillion
Bank of America – $1.344 trillion
Barclays PLC – $868 billion
Bear Sterns – $853 billion
Goldman Sachs – $814 billion
Royal Bank of Scotland – $541 billion
JP Morgan Chase – $391 billion
Deutsche Bank – $354 billion
UBS – $287 billion
Credit Suisse – $262 billion
Lehman Brothers – $183 billion
Bank of Scotland – $181 billion
BNP Paribas – $175 billion
Wells Fargo – $159 billion
Dexia – $159 billion
Wachovia – $142 billion
Dresdner Bank – $135 billion
Societe Generale – $124 billion
All Other Borrowers – $2.639 trillion
This report was made available to all the members of Congress, but most of them have been totally silent about it. One of the only members of Congress that has said something has been U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders.The following is an excerpt from a statement about this audit that was takenfrom the official website of Senator Sanders….As a result of this audit, we now know that the Federal Reserve provided more than $16 trillion in total financial assistance to some of the largest financial institutions and corporations in the United States and throughout the world.So where is everyone else? Why aren’t leading Republicans and leading Democrats crying bloody murder over this report? This scandal should have been front page news for months when it was revealed.But it wasn’t.And Guess what? Not only did the Federal Reserve give 16.1 trillion dollars in nearly interest-free loans to the too big to fail banks, the Fed also paid them over 600 million dollars to help run the emergency lending program. According to the GAO, the Federal Reserve shelled out an astounding $659.4 million in fees to the very financial institutions which caused the financial crisis in the first place.In addition, it turns out that trillions of dollars of this bailout money actually went overseas. According to the GAO audit, approximately $3.08 trillion went to foreign banks in Europe and in Asia.So why were our dollars being used to bail out foreign banks while tens of millions of American families were deeply suffering? That is a very good question.Also, it is important to remember that many of these bailout loans were made at below market interest rates, and this enabled many of these financial institutions to rake in huge profits.
According to a recent Bloomberg article, the big banks brought in an estimated $13 billion by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates….While the Fed’s last-resort lending programs generally charge above-market interest rates to deter routine borrowing, that practice sometimes flipped during the crisis. On Oct. 20, 2008, for example, the central bank agreed to make $113.3 billion of 28-day loans through its Term Auction Facility at a rate of 1.1 percent, according to a press release at the time.The rate was less than a third of the 3.8 percent that banks were charging each other to make one-month loans on that day. Bank of America and Wachovia Corp. each got $15 billion of the 1.1 percent TAF loans, followed by Royal Bank of Scotland’s RBS Citizens NA unit with $10 billion, Fed data show.So once the financial crisis was over, were adjustments made to the financial system to make sure that this type of thing would never happen again? Of course not.Today, the too big to fail banks are larger than ever. The total assets of the six largest U.S. banks increased by 39 percent between September 30, 2006 and September 30, 2011.
So now they are more too big to fail than ever.But this is what happens when we allow unelected central bank bureaucrats to run our financial system.Most Americans do not realize this, but the truth is that the Federal Reserve is not part of the government. In fact, it is about as federal as Federal Express is. The Federal Reserve has admitted that they are a privately owned institution in court many times, and you can see video of a Federal Reserve employee admitting that the Federal Reserve is privately owned right here.The Federal Reserve is an out of control monster that is throwing around trillions of dollars whenever it wants to. Nobody should be allowed to do this. Nobody should be allowed to give bailouts to banks and corporations without the express permission of the U.S. Congress and the president of the United States.
This is a point that I made in my article yesterday. The Federal Reserve decided this week that it is going to provide liquidity support to Europe. If the American people do not like this move, that is just too bad. We do not get a say in the matter.Are you starting to understand why I keep pushing the idea that it is time toshut down the Federal Reserve? Please share this information about the secret 16 trillion dollar Federal Reserve bailout with your family and your friends.If we can get enough people to wake up, perhaps there is still time to change the direction that this country is headed.
Senate bill 1867 would allow U.S. military to detain and murder anti-government protesters Mike Adams Natural News Friday, December 2, 2011
(NaturalNews) I don’t know if you’re all getting this through your heads yet, but Senate Bill 1867 –the National Defense Authorization Act– would openly legalize the U.S. government’s detainment and murder of OWS protesters and the assassination of talk show hosts, bloggers, journalists and anyone who holds a so-called anti-government point of view. This is the open and blatant declaration of war against any who do not going along with TSA thugs reaching down your pants, the Goldman Sachs economic takeover of nations, the secret arrest and torture of American citizens, and other acts of outright tyranny waged by an out-of-control government.Those who have been burying their heads in the sand over the coming police state need to wake up and face the music. That U.S. Senators would knowingly and willfully attempt to pass a bill thatlegalizesthe indefinite detainment, torture and killing of American citizens with no due process whatsoever — and on American soil! — is nothing less than a traitorous betrayal of the once-free American people. These are, our founding fathers would have said,acts of waragainst the People. They reveal the insidious plan to put in place a legal framework to end the Bill of Rights, murder protesters, and overrun America with total police state brutality.And yet the sheeple are still asleeple.I grow weary of trying to warn the American people to wake up and see what is now right in front of their eyes, so for those who want to read these words themselves — right in the Senate bill — you can read it at: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query…
And YES, it has now been confirmed that the indefinite detainment and murder provisions do apply to American citizens on the streets of American cities. As Sen. Lindsey Graham explained in plain language on the Senate floor: …1031, the statement of authority to detain, does apply to American citizens and it designates the world as the battlefield, including the homeland.That means America, for those of you who are still wondering what homeland means. It’s a phrase borrowed from Nazi Germany, of course, which is the source of much of this legislation as you might have noticed.
The power is so broad that even U.S. citizens could be swept up by the military and the military could be used far from any battlefield, even within the United States itself,says the ACLU (http://www.aclu.org/blog/national-s…).
Homefront: The U.S. government’s war against the People
If this bill passes and is signed into law, it would mean that America’s war machine could then be turned against the American people – liberal, conservative, libertarian… it doesn’t matter. If you question the government, you are suddenly an “enemy combatant” and they will cite this law as the legal justification for putting a bullet in your head, fire-bombing your little protest group, or literally running over you and your buddies with tanks. (And they won’t stop like China did in Tiananmen Square when that one brave citizen stood up against tyranny there in 1989.) (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6inW…)The premeditate murder of U.S. protesters (Occupy Wall Street, anyone?) is now being codified into law as the government’s right. Of course, your rights to Free Speech, due process, owning a firearm and other rights are being obliterated in the process. Only the government has rights now, didn’t you know? Theslavesof the nation (i.e. the citizens) are being stripped of all rights, including the right to grow your own food, have a picnic or even buy fresh dairy products from a farmer.
Governments routinely murder far more people than terrorists
Right now, every history teacher in America should be absolutely outraged about all this, as they know what always comes next in the history of nations. Once any government legalizes the murder of its own citizens, it is inevitably followed by a mass-murder holocaust-style event.Tyrants, you see, always like to legalize their mass murder before they pull the trigger. Just read the history of Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao and others. In every case, they worked diligently to put into place a legal framework for the mass murder that was about to be unleashes on their own citizens. That legal framework looks strikingly similar to Senate Bill 1867, which is about to be passed.This also brings to mind the mathematical reality that, statistically speaking, governments are orders of magnitude more deadly than terrorists. While terrorists sometimes success in taking out a fewthousandpeople at a time, governments routinely murder tens of MILLIONS of people.It’s called GENOCIDE, and there’s a long and well-documented history of how governments have committed genocide year after year, one nation after another:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genoci…
See more statistics at:
http://www.scaruffi.com/politics/di…
So if the People of America had any courage at all, they would be running the People’s road blocks and searching government vehicles for weapons! It is the government agents, after all, who are statistically at the highest risk of engaging in mass murder, and very soon the U.S. Senate looks likely to effectivelylegalize that mass murder.At the airports, We the People should be searching the TSA employees and checking them for illegal drugs, child pornography and stolen electronics. At government buildings, We the People should be searching all the government employees who come and go to make sure they don’t stage the demolition of their own buildings as a way to blame whatever convenient enemy they want to discredit — patriots, conservatives, conspiracy theorists or what have you.It’s no longer a conspiracy theory, you see, that the government wants to have the legal right to openly murder U.S. citizens right on the streets of America. It’s written right into the Senate bill. It’s public record. So all those out there still clinging to their pathetic denialist conspiracy theorists rants can now clamp shut their pie holes and throw themselves off a cliff or something. It’s time to face the reality of the total police state tyranny that’s now written in black and white, plain as day.All of you who are still obsessed with your narrow world view of fashion, dancing with the stars, microwaveable processed food and fake mainstream news are about to be rocked out of your easy chairs and dumped into the cesspool of tyranny at your doorstep. Just know that when they come for you, there will be nobody left to speak for you, because you remained silent as all this was rolled out. And I won’t be there for you, either, because I’ll be holed up in Texas, handing out emergency food supplies to the local churches and performing emergency medicine procedures on those protesters wounded by U.S. government military attacks — the ones that are still alive, anyway.
You think none of this is coming? Why would the U.S. Senate write this into law if they didn’t intend on using it to murder Americans? Maybe you need to clear the cobwebs out of your head and open your eyes to what’s really happening right now in the U.S. Senate.Read between the lines, folks. It’s not that difficult to get the full picture here. The very idea that the U.S. Senate is evenconsideringsuch a law to legalize the detainment and murder of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil by U.S. troops is, all by itself, a complete and utter crime against the American people.The U.S. Senate is about to declare WAR on the American people. And I don’t mean that metaphorically. They are trying to make this a military war where anyone who opposes the U.S. government — even if they have nothing at all to do with terrorism — is now a fair game target for precision bombings, assassinations and heavy military armor (i.e. tanks rolling down your driveway).Some good news: Congressman Dennis Kucinich has publicly spoken out against the bill (even though he’s not in the Senate). So has Sen. Rand Paul. His father, Ron Paul, has also stated his opposition to the illegal detainment provision of the bill. There are hints that if the bill passes, President Obama may veto it. If he did, that would be one of the most profound freedom-protecting actions of his administration, but don’t hold your breath on that count. You never know what these politicians will do when they think they have the power to murder their own citizens — they’re drunk with power, after all, and they love to rule over the masses with a kind of devilish insanity. Remember: Obama already has a kill list of Americans to be murdered overseas, but this new Senate Bill 1867 would legalize that right on U.S. soil.
So one day you call in to talk radio and express your discontent with the President, let’s say, and the next day a U.S. marine scout sniper sets up his .338 sniper rifle a couple hundred yards from your house, waits for you to sit down to watch Anderson Cooper vomit out the evening’s news propaganda, and then he pulls the trigger and blows your neck off, causing your head to land smack dab in that bowl of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese you were just trying to shovel down your threat because someone told you it was food. This will all be LEGAL under the new Senate bill 1867 because they will claim you were a terrorist collaborator who questioned the wisdom of the executive leadership of America. Once due process is stripped away,anythingcan be justified by the government, including the open murder of its own citizens.This is the whole point of a nation of LAW. The laws describe specific legal rights afforded to citizens, but most importantly they describe the LIMITS of power of government. It is those limits that the government is now trying to completely obliterate, turning America into a complete military dictatorship / fascist nation where laws are only applied to the People, not to the government itself. These are practically the exact words recently uttered by Newt Gingrich during a recent debate, in which he said due process and the Bill of Rights should only apply to people who engage in common criminal acts such as stealing or robbing people. But no such rights or due process privileges should exist when there is a war going on, Gingrich insisted! And the U.S. Senate is about to declare the entire USA “homeland” to be a battlefield of a never-ending war, get it? Are you grokking all this yet? These tyrants are about to declare the entire USA a battlefield where NO ONE has any due process, no Bill of Rights, no protections under any law, nothing! And if Gingrich becomes President — oh my God please don’t let this happen — then we are looking at the runaway militarization of everything in America, including a huge ramping up of the so-called war on drugs which we’ve already exposed as a total failure and a complete hoax (http://www.naturalnews.com/034289_A…).If this bill passes and is signed into law by the President, the USA is officially at war with its own People, and you can expect the government will immediately begin staging false flag bombings so they can justify a multi-year campaign of total genocide against all who refuse to cower down to the (now admitted) anti-freedom tyrants in Washington.We are on the verge of losing America, my friends. I ask: What the hell are YOU going to do about it?
Indefinite Detention Bill Passes Senate 93-7 -Americans completely stripped of all rights under Section 1031 Paul Joseph Watson Infowars.com Friday, December 2, 2011
The Senate last night codified into law the power of the U.S. military to indefinitely detain an American citizen with no charge, no trial and no oversight whatsoever with the passage of S. 1867, the National Defense Authorization Act.
Detention.One amendment that would have specifically blocked the measures from being used against U.S. citizens was voted down and the final bill was passed 93-7.
Another amendment introduced by Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein that attempted to bar the provision from being used on American soil, an effort to ensure the military won’t be roaming our streets looking for suspected terrorists, also failed, although Feinstein voted in favor of the bill anyway.
Feinstein was able to include a largely symbolic amendment which states that nothing in the bill changes current law relating to the detention of U.S. citizens and legal aliens, but this measure is meaningless according to Republican Congressman Justin Amash, a fierce critic of the bill.Some have asserted that Sen. Feinstein’s amendment, S Amdt 1456, protects the rights of American citizens and preserves constitutional due process. Unfortunately, it does not. It’s just more cleverly worded nonsense,Amash wrote on his Facebook page.Though the White House has threatened to veto the bill, the fact that Obama administration lawyers yesterday reaffirmed their backing for state sponsored assassination of U.S. citizens would suggest otherwise. Not voting for the bill, or in other words upholding the oath to protect the Constitution, has been described over and over again as political suicide.The bill puts military detention authority on steroids and makes it permanent, American citizens and others are at greater risk of being locked away by the military without charge or trial, said Christopher Anders, senior legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union.As Spencer Ackerman highlights, the bill completely violates the sixth amendment in that it allows American citizens to be locked up indefinitely, including in a foreign detention center, without any burden of proof whatsoever. An American merely has to be declared a terrorist and they can be abducted off the streets and never seen again.The detention mandate to use indefinite military detention in terrorism cases isn’t limited to foreigners. It’s confusing, because two different sections of the bill seem to contradict each other, but in the judgment of the University of Texas’ Robert Chesney — a nonpartisan authority on military detention — U.S. citizens are included in the grant of detention authority, writes Ackerman.
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