The decline and eventual fall of the USA as world superpower?

[soaring crane]

I think the problem with America is the illusion of a two party system,

 

That is in fact a weakness with the US Constitution; there are no provisions for dealing with party mentality, so it's left up to the parties to create the rules as they see fit. And over time, they create rules that benefit themselves. Sounds like a familiar argument, no?

[Aaron]

That is in fact a weakness with the US Constitution; there are no provisions for dealing with party mentality, so it's left up to the parties to create the rules as they see fit. And over time, they create rules that benefit themselves. Sounds like a familiar argument, no?

 

I'm not so sure that our forefathers weren't expecting a two party system, in fact I think that they intended for a two party system, especially in light of the Federalist and anti-Federalist debates. However you're right, the opportunity for corruption is greater in a two party system. What I see happening in the near future is the creation of smaller parties that will have a major impact on the political landscape. When this happens you'll see more cooperation, simply because one party alone wont be able to maintain the status quo.

 

Aaron

[BaguaKicksAss]

http://falkvinge.net/2013/11/17/nsa-asked-linus-torvalds-to-install-backdoors-into-gnulinux/

 

"The NSA has asked Linus Torvalds to inject covert backdoors into the free and open operating system GNU/Linux. This was revealed in this week’s hearing on mass surveillance in the European Parliament. Chalk another one up of the United States NSA trying to make information technology less secure for everyone."

Edited November 19, 2013 by BaguaKicksAss

[Aaron]

http://falkvinge.net/2013/11/17/nsa-asked-linus-torvalds-to-install-backdoors-into-gnulinux/

 

"The NSA has asked Linus Torvalds to inject covert backdoors into the free and open operating system GNU/Linux. This was revealed in this week’s hearing on mass surveillance in the European Parliament. Chalk another one up of the United States NSA trying to make information technology less secure for everyone."

 

This doesn't surprise me. The goal of the NSA is to be able to crack any form of encryption and follow any data transmission to its source. With systems like TOR in place, it makes that very hard, the only feasible way to do that is to have a backdoor that makes it impossible to hide one's location. Of course they say this is to catch criminals, but the reality is that it's to track what everyone is doing at any time. This is fundamentally unconstitutional, in fact the notion that they have made it illegal to use some forms of encryption is illegal as well. This all violates our right to privacy, but when we began to let fear rule our conscience, we seem to have given up that right without even knowing it. Until we wake up as a nation to these intrusions and stop listening to the propaganda justifying these types of intrusions, we will never have freedom, because we will never have privacy.

 

Aaron

Edited November 20, 2013 by Aaron

[BaguaKicksAss]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ety2FEHQgwM

[Aaron]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ety2FEHQgwM

 

One of the major causes for the War of 1812 was the impressment of American Sailors into the British Navy during the Napoleonic War. Because the sailors were born in Britain, they were not recognized as Americans and were forced to man British Naval vessels during wartime, resulting in numerous deaths.

 

Also, the War of 1812 ended in a stalemate, with neither side really winning over the other. However I'm certain if the only people fighting against the American's were the Canadians, they would've most certainly have lost, since without Britain's naval superiority and additional soldiers, they wouldn't have been able to hold up against the superior training and numbers of the American military.

 

Aaron

[BaguaKicksAss]

[Formless Tao]

The Little Horn of Daniel 8The Little Horn of Daniel 8 does not literally refer to the Antichrist, but it literally describes the desecration of the Temple by Antiochus Epiphanes. Antiochus' desecration of the temple was to last 2,300 evenings and mornings before its cleansing (8:14). Some have thought this as 2300 days, but it is preferable to interpret this as 2300 evening and morning sacrifices, which would be 1150 days. It was the sacrifices that were interrupted when Antiochus offered a sow on the alter on December 16, 167 B.C. Judas Maccabeus restored the temple and refurbished it in late 164 and on into 163 B.C. when all the Jewish sacrifices were fully restored and religious independence gained for Judah. If the 2300 evenings and mornings referred to 2300 days, then the time period would have lasted from Antiochus incursion into Jerusalem in 170 B.C. until the restoration of the temple in late 164 B.C. by Judas Maccabeus. The 1150 days is most likely the correct interpretation.Even though the Little Horn of Daniel 8 literally refers to Antiochus Epiphanes, he definitely typifies the coming of Antichrist to desecrate the temple in the near future. The Little Horn of Daniel 8 has already been literally fulfilled in Antiochus, but there is yet a prophetic fulfillment in the individual called Antichrist.Antiochus teaches us that (1) Antichrist will achieve great power by subduing others (v. 24). (2) He will rise to power by promising false security to the world and Israel (v. 25). (3) He will be very intelligent and persuasive (v. 23). (4) He will be controlled or empowered by another (i.e., Satan) (v. 24). (5) He will subjugate Israel as its adversary and authority (vv. 24-25). (6) He will oppose the Prince of Princes, or the Lord Jesus Christ (v. 25).(7) His rule will be terminated by supernatural divine judgment (v. 25). Consequently, we see that Antiochus Epiphanes was the literal fulfillment of the Little Horn of Daniel 8, but Antichrist is the type of the Little Horn in Daniel 8.Antichrist will achieve great power by taking over the helm of New Babylon (i.e., the USA) by casting away our Constitution and national sovereignty. He will then link the new dictatorial government of America with the European Union (i.e., the Ten-Horn Beast). There are currently 27 members of the European Union (EU), but there are only 13 members of the group called Schengen. This group utilizes the Euro as currency and the members of these 13 countries are not required to show a passport when traveling from one country to another. Schengen may very well be the group of the European Union that will be reduced to 10 in the turmoil that brings about the reappearance and rise of Antichrist to power. Antichrist is the 11th horn that comes up among the other horns of the EU. He will subdue three of the horns by taking away their power and authority. The empire of Antichrist will consist of ten nations of the European Union and the United States. It is the union of America and the EU that will be so powerful that no country in the world will be able to fight against it for a period of time. Even Russia will be conquered militarily with the fulfillment of Ezekiel 38 and 39. Then at the end of the seven year tribulation period, China and the kings from the East will come against Antichrist and totally destroy America or Babylon the Great, as this destruction has been ordained by God.Antichrist is the beast in the following verse:Rev 17:11 (KJV) And the beast that was, and is not, even he is the eighth, and is of the seven, and goeth into perdition. This is perhaps the most revealing verse for identifying the Antichrist. This verse tells us that Antichrist will be the leader of the eighth world power, the revived Roman Empire. The ten toes of iron and clay mentioned in Daniel 2:42-43 represent the empire of Antichrist. This means that he will be the leader of the Ten-Horned Beast, which will almost certainly arise from the European Union. This is also the Ten-Horned Beast mentioned in Revelation 13:1 and Daniel 7. The most intriguing part of this verse is that the Antichrist is also of the seventh power. The seventh power is Babylon the Great, which is the United States of America. This means that Antichrist will have been a President of the United States of America, but he suffered a mortal head wound witnessed by the whole world. The whole world will think that he is dead, but the world will be greatly astonished when it is revealed that Antichrist is still alive. It is confirmed in the following verse that the mortal head wound of Antichrist only appeared to be a death wound. Antichrist will miraculously recover from the mortal head wound to cause the world to be astonished and admire him greatly.(Rev 13:3 NIV) One of the heads of the beast seemed to have had a fatal wound, but the fatal wound had been healed. The whole world was astonished and followed the beast.The beast is the Ten-Horned beast, and the head with the fatal wound is the Little Horn or Antichrist. Please note that the fatal wound took place in the past, and the healing took place in the past when Antichrist makes his reappearance. In the same way that Jesus came the first time to die for the sins of the world, Antichrist will mimic Jesus Christ in dying at his first appearance, and then making his reappearance as the conqueror on the white horse. Anyone with just a little knowledge of American history should be able to identify Antichrist from the Biblical description of him. America has only had one leader that the whole world believes died with a mortal head wound. The mortal head wound has been witnessed by literally billions of people in movies and television. One can even purchase his own personal copy of the computer enhanced video showing the mortal head wound. This is the primary reason that the whole world has been greatly deceived into being absolutely certain that Antichrist is dead. Antichrist will be revealed in the very near future with his mortal head wound healed, and the world will be astonished, just as the Scriptures state.

 

Thanks & blessings to Chegg for the above

Edited December 10, 2013 by Formless Tao

[Starjumper]

I think the problem with America is the illusion of a two party system, when in reality both parties are under the influence of corporations that put their own financial interests above the interests of the people.

 

Another thing is that American Congresspeople accept donations from anywhere and everywhere, so what happens is that a lot of foreign governments give them big gifts in order to buy influence.

 

This is like having your military generals in the pay of the enemy.

[Thunder_Gooch]

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/12/05/u-s-spy-rocket-launching-today-has-octopus-themed-nothing-is-beyond-our-reach-logo-seriously/

U.S. Spy Rocket Has Octopus-Themed 'Nothing Is Beyond Our Reach' Logo. Seriously.



This is the real mission patch for a rocket carrying spy satellites heading into space today.

[Thunder_Gooch]

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/12/07/the-fbi-can-secretly-activate-an-individuals-webcam-without-the-indicator-light-turning-on/

 

 

 

The FBI can secretly activate a computer’s webcam to spy on an individual without turning on the indicator light, a former official revealed to the Washington Post in an article published Friday.

 

According to the Washington Post’s account of what Marcus Thomas — former assistant director of the FBI’s Operational Technology Division in Quantico — said, “The FBI has been able to covertly activate a computer’s camera — without triggering the light that lets users know it is recording

 

 

 

 

 

 

2013 VS 1984

 

 

Edited December 10, 2013 by More_Pie_Guy

[Cheshire Cat]

[joeblast]

On The 100th Anniversary Of The Federal Reserve Here Are 100 Reasons To Shut It Down Forever

 

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-12-23/100th-anniversary-federal-reserve-here-are-100-reasons-shut-it-down-forever

 

Submitted by Michael Snyder of The Economic Collapse blog,

December 23rd, 1913 is a date which will live in infamy. That was the day when the Federal Reserve Act was pushed through Congress. Many members of Congress were absent that day, and the general public was distracted with holiday preparations. Now we have reached the 100th anniversary of the Federal Reserve, and most Americans still don't know what it actually is or how it functions. But understanding the Federal Reserve is absolutely critical, because the Fed is at the very heart of our economic problems.

Since the Federal Reserve was created, there have been 18 recessions or depressions, the value of the U.S. dollar has declined by 98 percent, and the U.S. national debt has gotten more than 5000 times larger. This insidious debt-based financial system has literally made debt slaves out of all of us, and it is systematically destroying the bright future that our children and our grandchildren were supposed to have. If nothing is done, we are inevitably heading for a massive amount of economic pain as a nation. The following are 100 reasons why the Federal Reserve should be shut down forever...

#1 We like to think that we have a government "of the people, by the people, for the people", but the truth is that an unelected, unaccountable group of central planners has far more power over our economy than anyone else in our society does.

#2 The Federal Reserve is actually "independent" of the government. In fact, the Federal Reserve has argued vehemently in federal court that it is "not an agency" of the federal government and therefore not subject to the Freedom of Information Act.

#3 The Federal Reserve openly admits that the 12 regional Federal Reserve banks are organized "much like private corporations".

#4 The regional Federal Reserve banks issue shares of stock to the "member banks" that own them.

#5 100% of the shareholders of the Federal Reserve are private banks. The U.S. government owns zero shares.

#6 The Federal Reserve is not an agency of the federal government, but it has been given power to regulate our banks and financial institutions. This should not be happening.

#7 According to Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, the U.S. Congress is the one that is supposed to have the authority to "coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures". So why is the Federal Reserve doing it?

#8 If you look at a "U.S. dollar", it actually says "Federal Reserve note" at the top. In the financial world, a "note" is an instrument of debt.

#9 In 1963, President John F. Kennedy issued Executive Order 11110 which authorized the U.S. Treasury to issue "United States notes" which were created by the U.S. government directly and not by the Federal Reserve. He was assassinated shortly thereafter.

#10 Many of the debt-free United States notes issued under President Kennedy are still in circulation today.

#11 The Federal Reserve determines what levels some of the most important interest rates in our system are going to be set at. In a free market system, the free market would determine those interest rates.

#12 The Federal Reserve has become so powerful that it is now known as "the fourth branch of government".

#13 The greatest period of economic growth in U.S. history was when there was no central bank.

#14 The Federal Reserve was designed to be a perpetual debt machine. The bankers that designed it intended to trap the U.S. government in a perpetual debt spiral from which it could never possibly escape. Since the Federal Reserve was established 100 years ago, the U.S. national debt has gotten more than 5000 times larger.

#15 A permanent federal income tax was established the exact same year that the Federal Reserve was created. This was not a coincidence. In order to pay for all of the government debt that the Federal Reserve would create, a federal income tax was necessary. The whole idea was to transfer wealth from our pockets to the federal government and from the federal government to the bankers.

#16 The period prior to 1913 (when there was no income tax) was the greatest period of economic growth in U.S. history.

#17 Today, the U.S. tax code is about 13 miles long.

#18 From the time that the Federal Reserve was created until now, the U.S. dollar has lost 98 percent of its value.

#19 From the time that President Nixon took us off the gold standard until now, the U.S. dollar has lost 83 percent of its value.

#20 During the 100 years before the Federal Reserve was created, the U.S. economy rarely had any problems with inflation. But since the Federal Reserve was established, the U.S. economy has experienced constant and never ending inflation.

#21 In the century before the Federal Reserve was created, the average annual rate of inflation was about half a percent. In the century since the Federal Reserve was created, the average annual rate of inflation has been about 3.5 percent.

#22 The Federal Reserve has stripped the middle class of trillions of dollars of wealth through the hidden tax of inflation.

#23 The size of M1 has nearly doubled since 2008 thanks to the reckless money printing that the Federal Reserve has been doing.

#24 The Federal Reserve has been starting to behave like the Weimar Republic, and we all remember how that ended.

#25 The Federal Reserve has been consistently lying to us about the level of inflation in our economy. If the inflation rate was still calculated the same way that it was back when Jimmy Carter was president, the official rate of inflation would be somewhere between 8 and 10 percent today.

#26 Since the Federal Reserve was created, there have been 18 distinct recessions or depressions: 1918, 1920, 1923, 1926, 1929, 1937, 1945, 1949, 1953, 1958, 1960, 1969, 1973, 1980, 1981, 1990, 2001, 2008.

#27 Within 20 years of the creation of the Federal Reserve, the U.S. economy was plunged into the Great Depression.

#28 The Federal Reserve created the conditions that caused the stock market crash of 1929, and even Ben Bernanke admits that the response by the Fed to that crisis made the Great Depression even worse than it should have been.

#29 The "easy money" policies of former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan set the stage for the great financial crisis of 2008.

#30 Without the Federal Reserve, the "subprime mortgage meltdown" would probably never have happened.

#31 If you can believe it, there have been 10 different economic recessions since 1950. The Federal Reserve created the "dotcom bubble", the Federal Reserve created the "housing bubble" and now it has created the largest bond bubble in the history of the planet.

#32 According to an official government report, the Federal Reserve made 16.1 trillion dollars in secret loans to the big banks during the last financial crisis. The following is a list of loan recipients that was taken directly from page 131 of the 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

#33 The Federal Reserve also paid those big banks $659.4 million in "fees" to help "administer" those secret loans.

#34 During the last financial crisis, big European banks were allowed to borrow an "unlimited" amount of money from the Federal Reserve at ultra-low interest rates.

#35 The "easy money" policies of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke have created the largest financial bubble this nation has ever seen, and this has set the stage for the great financial crisis that we are rapidly approaching.

#36 Since late 2008, the size of the Federal Reserve balance sheet has grown from less than a trillion dollars to more than 4 trillion dollars. This is complete and utter insanity.

#37 During the quantitative easing era, the value of the financial securities that the Fed has accumulated is greater than the total amount of publicly held debt that the U.S. government accumulated from the presidency of George Washington through the end of the presidency of Bill Clinton.

#38 Overall, the Federal Reserve now holds more than 32 percent of all 10 year equivalents, and that percentage is rising by about 0.3 percent each week.

#39 Quantitative easing creates financial bubbles, and when quantitative easing ends those bubbles tend to deflate rapidly.

#40 Most of the new money created by quantitative easing has ended up in the hands of the very wealthy.

#41 According to a prominent Federal Reserve insider, quantitative easing has been one giant "subsidy" for Wall Street banks.

#42 As one CNBC article recently stated, we are seeing absolutely rampant inflation in "stocks and bonds and art and Ferraris".

#43 Donald Trump once made the following statement about quantitative easing: "People like me will benefit from this."

#44 Most people have never heard about this, but a very interesting study conducted for the Bank of England shows that quantitative easing actually increases the gap between the wealthy and the poor.

#45 The gap between the top one percent and the rest of the country is now the greatest that it has been since the 1920s.

#46 The mainstream media has sold quantitative easing to the American public as an "economic stimulus program", but the truth is that the percentage of Americans that have a job has actually gone down since quantitative easing first began.

#47 The Federal Reserve is supposed to be able to guide the nation toward "full employment", but the reality of the matter is that an all-time record 102 million working age Americans do not have a job right now. That number has risen by about 27 million since the year 2000.

#48 For years, the projections of economic growth by the Federal Reserve have consistently overstated the strength of the U.S. economy. But every single time, the mainstream media continues to report that these numbers are "reliable" even though all they actually represent is wishful thinking.

#49 The Federal Reserve system fuels the growth of government, and the growth of government fuels the growth of the Federal Reserve system. Since 1970, federal spending has grown nearly 12 times as rapidly as median household income has.

#50 The Federal Reserve is supposed to look out for the health of all U.S. banks, but the truth is that they only seem to be concerned about the big ones. In 1985, there were more than 18,000 banks in the United States. Today, there are only 6,891 left.

#51 The six largest banks in the United States (JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley) have collectively gotten 37 percent larger over the past five years.

#52 The U.S. banking system has 14.4 trillion dollars in total assets. The six largest banks now account for 67 percent of those assets and all of the other banks account for only 33 percent of those assets.

#53 The five largest banks now account for 42 percent of all loans in the United States.

#54 We were told that the purpose of quantitative easing is to help "stimulate the economy", but today the Federal Reserve is actually paying the big banks not to lend out 1.8 trillion dollars in "excess reserves" that they have parked at the Fed.

#55 The Federal Reserve has allowed an absolutely gigantic derivatives bubble to inflate which could destroy our financial system at any moment. Right now, four of the "too big to fail" banks each have total exposure to derivatives that is well in excess of 40 trillion dollars.

#56 The total exposure that Goldman Sachs has to derivatives contracts is more than 381 times greater than their total assets.

#57 Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has a track record of failure that would make the Chicago Cubs look good.

#58 The secret November 1910 gathering at Jekyll Island, Georgia during which the plan for the Federal Reserve was hatched was attended by U.S. Senator Nelson W. Aldrich, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Department A.P. Andrews and a whole host of representatives from the upper crust of the Wall Street banking establishment.

#59 The Federal Reserve was created by the big Wall Street banks and for the benefit of the big Wall Street banks.

#60 In 1913, Congress was promised that if the Federal Reserve Act was passed that it would eliminate the business cycle.

#61 There has never been a true comprehensive audit of the Federal Reserve since it was created back in 1913.

#62 The Federal Reserve system has been described as "the biggest Ponzi scheme in the history of the world".

#63 The following comes directly from the Fed's official mission statement: "To provide the nation with a safer, more flexible, and more stable monetary and financial system." Without a doubt, the Federal Reserve has failed in those tasks dramatically.

#64 The Fed decides what the target rate of inflation should be, what the target rate of unemployment should be and what the size of the money supply is going to be. This is quite similar to the "central planning" that goes on in communist nations, but very few people in our government seem upset by this.

#65 A couple of years ago, Federal Reserve officials walked into one bank in Oklahoma and demanded that they take down all the Bible verses and all the Christmas buttons that the bank had been displaying.

#66 The Federal Reserve has taken some other very frightening steps in recent years. For example, back in 2011 the Federal Reserve announced plans to identify "key bloggers" and to monitor "billions of conversations" about the Fed on Facebook, Twitter, forums and blogs. Someone at the Fed will almost certainly end up reading this article.

#67 Thanks to this endless debt spiral that we are trapped in, a massive amount of money is transferred out of our pockets and into the pockets of the ultra-wealthy each year. Incredibly, the U.S. government spent more than 415 billion dollars just on interest on the national debt in 2013.

#68 In September, the average rate of interest on the government’s marketable debt was 1.981 percent. In January 2000, the average rate of interest on the government’s marketable debt was 6.620 percent. If we got back to that level today, we would be paying more than a trillion dollars a year just in interest on the national debt and it would collapse our entire financial system.

#69 The American people are being killed by compound interest but most of them don't even understand what it is. Albert Einstein once made the following statement about compound interest...

"

Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it … he who doesn’t … pays it."

#70 Most Americans have absolutely no idea where money comes from. The truth is that the Federal Reserve just creates it out of thin air. The following is how I have previously described how money is normally created by the Fed in our system...

When the U.S. government decides that it wants to spend another billion dollars that it does not have, it does not print up a billion dollars.

 

Rather, the U.S. government creates a bunch of U.S. Treasury bonds (debt) and takes them over to the Federal Reserve.

 

The Federal Reserve creates a billion dollars out of thin air and exchanges them for the U.S. Treasury bonds.

#71 What does the Federal Reserve do with those U.S. Treasury bonds? They end up getting auctioned off to the highest bidder. But this entire process actually creates more debt than it does money...

The U.S. Treasury bonds that the Federal Reserve receives in exchange for the money it has created out of nothing are auctioned off through the Federal Reserve system.

 

But wait.

 

There is a problem.

 

Because the U.S. government must pay interest on the Treasury bonds, the amount of debt that has been created by this transaction is greater than the amount of money that has been created.

 

So where will the U.S. government get the money to pay that debt?

 

Well, the theory is that we can get money to circulate through the economy really, really fast and tax it at a high enough rate that the government will be able to collect enough taxes to pay the debt.

 

But that never actually happens, does it?

 

And the creators of the Federal Reserve understood this as well. They understood that the U.S. government would not have enough money to both run the government and service the national debt. They knew that the U.S. government would have to keep borrowing even more money in an attempt to keep up with the game.

#72 Of course the U.S. government could actually create money and spend it directly into the economy without the Federal Reserve being involved at all. But then we wouldn't be 17 trillion dollars in debt and that wouldn't serve the interests of the bankers at all.

#73 The following is what Thomas Edison once had to say about our absolutely insane debt-based financial system...

That is to say, under the old way any time we wish to add to the national wealth we are compelled to add to the national debt.

 

Now, that is what Henry Ford wants to prevent. He thinks it is stupid, and so do I, that for the loan of $30,000,000 of their own money the people of the United States should be compelled to pay $66,000,000 — that is what it amounts to, with interest. People who will not turn a shovelful of dirt nor contribute a pound of material will collect more money from the United States than will the people who supply the material and do the work. That is the terrible thing about interest. In all our great bond issues the interest is always greater than the principal. All of the great public works cost more than twice the actual cost, on that account. Under the present system of doing business we simply add 120 to 150 per cent, to the stated cost.

 

But here is the point: If our nation can issue a dollar bond, it can issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good makes the bill good.

#74 The United States now has the largest national debt in the history of the world, and we are stealing more than 100 million dollars from our children and our grandchildren every single hour of every single day in a desperate attempt to keep the debt spiral going.

#75 Thomas Jefferson once stated that if he could add just one more amendment to the U.S. Constitution it would be a ban on all government borrowing....

I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution. I would be willing to depend on that alone for the reduction of the administration of our government to the genuine principles of its Constitution; I mean an additional article, taking from the federal government the power of borrowing.

#76 At this moment, the U.S. national debt is sitting at $17,251,528,475,994.19. If we had followed the advice of Thomas Jefferson, it would be sitting at zero.

#77 When the Federal Reserve was first established, the U.S. national debt was sitting at about 2.9 billion dollars. On average, we have been adding more than that to the national debt every single day since Obama has been in the White House.

#78 We are on pace to accumulate more new debt under the 8 years of the Obama administration than we did under all of the other presidents in all of U.S. history combined.

#79 If all of the new debt that has been accumulated since John Boehner became Speaker of the House had been given directly to the American people instead, every household in America would have been able to buy a new truck.

#80 Between 2008 and 2012, U.S. government debt grew by 60.7 percent, but U.S. GDP only grew by a total of about 8.5 percent during that entire time period.

#81 Since 2007, the U.S. debt to GDP ratio has increased from 66.6 percent to 101.6 percent.

#82 According to the U.S. Treasury, foreigners hold approximately 5.6 trillion dollars of our debt.

#83 The amount of U.S. government debt held by foreigners is about 5 times larger than it was just a decade ago.

#84 As I have written about previously, if the U.S. national debt was reduced to a stack of one dollar bills it would circle the earth at the equator 45 times.

#85 If Bill Gates gave every single penny of his entire fortune to the U.S. government, it would only cover the U.S. budget deficit for 15 days.

#86 Sometimes we forget just how much money a trillion dollars is. If you were alive when Jesus Christ was born and you spent one million dollars every single day since that point, you still would not have spent one trillion dollars by now.

#87 If right this moment you went out and started spending one dollar every single second, it would take you more than 31,000 years to spend one trillion dollars.

#88 In addition to all of our debt, the U.S. government has also accumulated more than 200 trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities. So where in the world will all of that money come from?

#89 The greatest damage that quantitative easing has been causing to our economy is the fact that it is destroying worldwide faith in the U.S. dollar and in U.S. debt. If the rest of the world stops using our dollars and stops buying our debt, we are going to be in a massive amount of trouble.

#90 Over the past several years, the Federal Reserve has been monetizing a staggering amount of U.S. government debt even though Ben Bernanke once promised that he would never do this.

#91 China recently announced that they are going to quit stockpiling more U.S. dollars. If the Federal Reserve was not recklessly printing money, this would probably not have happened.

#92 Most Americans have no idea that one of our most famous presidents was absolutely obsessed with getting rid of central banking in the United States. The following is a February 1834 quote by President Andrew Jackson about the evils of central banking....

I too have been a close observer of the doings of the Bank of the United States. I have had men watching you for a long time, and am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the Bank. You tell me that if I take the deposits from the Bank and annul its charter I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin!

You are a den of vipers and thieves. I have determined to rout you out and, by the Eternal,

(bringing his fist down on the table)

I will rout you out.

#93 There are plenty of possible alternative financial systems, but at this point all 187 nations that belong to the IMF have a central bank. Are we supposed to believe that this is just some sort of a bizarre coincidence?

#94 The capstone of the global central banking system is an organization known as the Bank for International Settlements. The following is how I described this organization in a previous article...

An immensely powerful international organization that most people have never even heard of secretly controls the money supply of the entire globe. It is called the Bank for International Settlements, and it is the central bank of central banks. It is located in Basel, Switzerland, but it also has branches in Hong Kong and Mexico City. It is essentially an unelected, unaccountable central bank of the world that has complete immunity from taxation and from national laws. Even Wikipedia admits that "

it is not accountable to any single national government.

" The Bank for International Settlements was used to launder money for the Nazis during World War II, but these days the main purpose of the BIS is to guide and direct the centrally-planned global financial system. Today, 58 global central banks belong to the BIS, and it has far more power over how the U.S. economy (or any other economy for that matter) will perform over the course of the next year than any politician does. Every two months, the central bankers of the world gather in Basel for another "Global Economy Meeting". During those meetings, decisions are made which affect every man, woman and child on the planet, and yet none of us have any say in what goes on. The Bank for International Settlements is an organization that was founded by the global elite and it operates for the benefit of the global elite, and it is intended to be one of the key cornerstones of the emerging one world economic system.

#95 The borrower is the servant of the lender, and the Federal Reserve has turned all of us into debt slaves.

#96 Debt is a form of social control, and the global elite use all of this debt to dominate all the rest of us. 40 years ago, the total amount of debt in our system (all government debt, all business debt, all consumer debt, etc.) was sitting at about 2 trillion dollars. Today, the grand total exceeds 56 trillion dollars.

#97 Unless something dramatic is done, our children and our grandchildren will be debt slaves for their entire lives as they service our debts and pay for our mistakes.

#98 Now that you know this information, you are responsible for doing something about it.

#99 Congress has the power to shut down the Federal Reserve any time that they would like. But right now most of our politicians fully endorse the current system, and nothing is ever going to happen until the American people start demanding change.

#100 The design of the Federal Reserve system was flawed from the very beginning. If something is not done very rapidly, it is inevitable that our entire financial system is going to suffer an absolutely nightmarish collapse.

The truth is that we do not have to have a Federal Reserve. The greatest period of economic growth in U.S. history was when we did not have a central bank. If we are ever going to turn this nation around economically, we are going to have to get rid of this debt-based financial system that is centered around the Federal Reserve. On the path that we are on now, there is no hope. Please share this article with as many people as you can. It is imperative that we try to wake the American people up while we still have time.

[Marblehead]

Well, just to cheer y'all up, just saw on CNN news that 8 of the existing tax breaks are coming to an end. Guess who they effect. You've got it! Lower and middle class Americans. Not one of them effecting the wealthy of our nation.

 

That should disturb ever the Chinese people living on Mainland China.

Edited December 27, 2013 by Marblehead

[silent thunder]

six words, otherwise innocuous but when coupled in a certain way, turn America into AmeriKa.

 

Military Industrial Complex

Federal Reserve Bank

[ralis]

[Marblehead]

Hehehe. They haven't had to worry for a long time now.

 

Yes, we have a strong military but that's not our governing body.

[ralis]

Noam Chomsky has been stating this problem for years and very few listen.

 

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/12/27/noam-chomsky-were-no-longer-a-functioning-democracy-were-really-a-plutocracy/

 

 

The world faces two potentially existential threats, according to the linguist and political philosopher Noam Chomsky.

“There are two major dark shadows that hover over everything, and they’re getting more and more serious,” Chomsky said. “The one is the continuing threat of nuclear war that has not ended. It’s very serious, and another is the crisis of ecological, environmental catastrophe, which is getting more and more serious.”

Chomsky appeared Friday on the last episode of NPR’s “Smiley and West” program to discuss his education, his views on current affairs and how he manages to spread his message without much help from the mainstream media.

 

He told the hosts that the world was racing toward an environmental disaster with potentially lethal consequence, which the world’s most developed nations were doing nothing to prevent – and in fact were speeding up the process.

“If there ever is future historians, they’re going to look back at this period of history with some astonishment,” Chomsky said. “The danger, the threat, is evident to anyone who has eyes open and pays attention at all to the scientific literature, and there are attempts to retard it, there are also at the other end attempts to accelerate the disaster, and if you look who’s involved it’s pretty shocking.”

Chomsky noted efforts to halt environmental damage by indigenous people in countries all over the world – from Canada’s First Nations to tribal people in Latin America and India to aboriginal people in Australia—but the nation’s richest, most advanced and most powerful countries, such as the United States, were doing nothing to forestall disaster.

“When people here talk enthusiastically about a hundred years of energy independence, what they’re saying is, ‘Let’s try to get every drop of fossil fuel out of the ground so as to accelerate the disaster that we’re racing towards,’” Chomsky said. “These are problems that overlie all of the domestic problems of oppression, of poverty, of attacks on the education system (and) massive inequality, huge unemployment.”

He blamed the “financialization” of the U.S. economy for income inequality and unemployment, saying that banks that were “too big to fail” skimmed enormous wealth from the market.

“In fact, there was a recent (International Monetary Fund) study that estimated that virtually all the profits of the big banks can be traced back to this government insurance policy, and in general they’re quite harmful, I think, quite harmful to the economy,” Chomsky said.

 

Those harmful effects can be easily observed by looking at unemployment numbers and stock market gains, he said.

“There are tens of millions of people unemployed, looking for work, wanting to work (and) there are huge resources available,” Chomsky said. “Corporate profits are going through the roof, there’s endless amounts of work to be done – just drive through a city and see all sorts of things that have to be done – infrastructure is collapsing, the schools have to be revived. We have a situation in which huge numbers of people want to work, there are plenty, huge resources available, an enormous amount to be done, and the system is so rotten they can’t put them together.”

The reason for this is simple, Chomsky said.

“There is plenty of profit being made by those who pretty much dominate and control the system,” he said. “We’ve moved from the days where there was some kind of functioning democracy. It’s by now really a plutocracy.”

Chomsky strongly disagreed with Smiley and West that he had been marginalized for his views, saying that he regretfully turned down dozens of invitations to speak on a daily basis because he was otherwise engaged.

He also disagreed that a platform in the mainstream media was necessary to influence the debate.

“If you take a look at the progressive changes that have taken place in the country, say, just in the last 50 years – the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, opposition to aggression, the women’s movement, the environmental movement and so on – they’re not led by any debate in the media,” Chomsky said. “No, they were led by popular organizations, by activists on the ground.”

He recalled the earliest days of the antiwar movement, in the early 1960s, when he spoke in living rooms and church basements to just a handful of other activists and they were harassed – even in liberal Boston – by the authorities and media.

But that movement eventually grew and helped hasten the end of the Vietnam War, and Chomsky said it’s grown and become so mainstream that antiwar activists can limit wars before they even begin.

He said President Ronald Reagan was unable to launch a full-scale war in Central America during the 1980s because of the antiwar movement, and he bitterly disputed the idea that antiwar activists had no impact on the Iraq War.

“I don’t agree; it had a big effect,” Chomsky said. “It sharply limited the means that were available to the government to try to carry out the invasion and subdue the population. In fact, it’s one reason why the U.S. ended up really defeated in Iraq, seriously had to give up all of its war aims. The major victor in Iraq turns out to be Iran.”

Despite these limitations, he said the Iraq War had been one of the new millennium’s worst atrocities and had provoked a violent schism between Sunni and Shiite Muslims that had sparked regional conflicts throughout the Middle East.

“The United States is now involved in a global terror campaign largely against the tribal people of the world, mostly Muslim tribes, and it’s all over. The intention is to go on and on,” Chomsky said. “These are all terrible consequences, but nevertheless they’re not as bad as they would be if there weren’t public opposition.”

[silent thunder]

Chomsky is another hero of mine.

<deep bow>

[ralis]

More alarming news from the NSA. The do nothing Congress does nothing about this intrusion.

 

 

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/the-nsa-uses-powerful-toolbox-in-effort-to-spy-on-global-networks-a-940969.html

 

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024245470

[Marblehead]

More alarming news from the NSA. The do nothing Congress does nothing about this intrusion.

Yeah, I already knew that. Congress pretends they didn't know about it but it is my opinion that they lied about that too.

 

No changes will be made. But we Americans need to know that they are lying to us.

[BaguaKicksAss]

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/29/drones-us-military

[ralis]

http://www.salon.com/2014/01/02/big_brothers_little_siblings_how_local_police_departments_are_spying_on_us_now_too/

 

 

By now, it’s well known that the National Security Agency is collecting troves of data about law-abiding Americans. But the NSA is not alone: A series of new reports show that state and local police have been busy collecting data on our daily activities as well — under questionable or nonexistent legal pretenses. These revelations about the extent of police snooping in the U.S. — and the lack of oversight over it — paint a disturbing picture for anyone who cares about civil liberties and privacy protection.

The tactics used by law enforcement are aggressive, surreptitious and surprising to even longtime surveillance experts. One report released last month made front page news: an investigation by more than 50 journalists that found that local law enforcement agencies are collecting cellphone data about thousands of innocent Americans each year by tapping into cellphone towers and even creating fake ones that act as data traps.

A new report by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law details how police departments around the country have created data “fusion centers” to collect and share reports about residents. But the information in these reports seldom bears any relation to crime or terrorism. In California, for example, officers are encouraged to document and immediately report on “suspicious” activities such as “individuals who stay at bus or train stops for extended periods while buses and trains come and go,” “individuals who carry on long conversations on pay or cellular phones,” and “joggers who stand and stretch for an inordinate amount of time.” In Houston, the criteria are so broad they include anything deemed “suspicious or worthy of reporting.” Many police departments and fusion centers have reported on constitutionally protected activities such as photography and political speech. They have also demonstrated atroubling tendency to focus on people who appear to be of Middle Eastern origin.

ADVERTISEMENT

Like the NSA – their heavy-handed Big Brother – these fusion centers cast a wide net and risk civil liberties for paltry returns. And all of it is happening without sufficient oversight or accountability. In other words, no one is watching Little Brother.

How did it come to this? In the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, all levels of government – federal, state and local – embarked on a massive effort to improve information sharing. Federal taxpayer dollars fueled the transition into a new role for state and local police as the eyes and ears of the intelligence community.

The ad hoc system that has developed — of individual police departments feeding information to federal authorities — has been plagued by vague and inconsistent rules. For one thing, there’s a lack of agreement about what counts as “suspicious activity” and when that information should be shared.

The goal, in theory, is to reveal potential terrorist plots by “connecting the dots” of disparate or even innocuous pieces of information. But in practice, such programs often infringe on civil liberties and threaten safety, producing a din of data with little or no counterterrorism value. In Boston, for example, the regional fusion center fixated on monitoring peace activists and Occupy Boston protesters but may have been unaware that the FBI conducted an assessment of bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev based on a tip from Russia, or that local authorities had implicated him in a gruesome triple homicide on the anniversary of 9/11.

In fact, a 2012 report by the Senate Homeland Security Committee found that much of the information produced by fusion centers was not only useless, but also possibly illegal. Indeed, more than 95 percent of so-called suspicious activity reports are never investigated by the FBI.

We can do better. First and foremost, there must be a consistent, transparent standard for state and local intelligence activities based on reasonable suspicion of criminal activity – the traditional bar for opening an investigation. The federal government should make this standard a prerequisite for sharing suspicious activity reports on its networks. State and local police should adopt it as well.

Second, stronger oversight and accountability is necessary across the board. At the federal level, Congress should tie continued funding for fusion centers to regular, independent and publicly available audits to assess compliance with privacy rules. State and local elected officials should also consider creating an independent police monitor, such as an inspector general, to safeguard privacy and civil rights.

To be sure, cooperation between levels of government is essential, and state and local law enforcement have an important role to play in keeping Americans safe. But the current system is ineffective, wasteful and harmful to constitutional values.

It is time to recalibrate the system and make the state and local role in national security efficient, rational and fair.

[thelerner]

On The 100th Anniversary Of The Federal Reserve Here Are 100 Reasons To Shut It Down Forever

 

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-12-23/100th-anniversary-federal-reserve-here-are-100-reasons-shut-it-down-forever

 

Submitted by Michael Snyder of The Economic Collapse blog,

I picked one 'fact' at random, the one that said no problem with inflation before the fed was founded. Not true by my research. (http://www.minneapolisfed.org/community_education/teacher/calc/hist1800.cfm) Though at times the problem was deflation which can be just as crippling. Between 1815 and 1821 52% deflation! The average person loses hugely during deflationary times (http://money.usnews.com/money/blogs/flowchart/2010/07/16/why-deflation-is-worse-than-inflation). And during wars there was skyrocketing inflation. From 1862 to 1864 it was 11.1%, 23%, 27%! That makes the stagflation of the 70's look tame. We had high inflation during WWII, but not That bad. (Thank you Fed) You see many 0 years, but 4 to 9% isn't rare.

 

I think the FED shoots for 3% inflation and its achieved unusually well the last 30 years. I could check out some of the other quotes, but don't think I will.

 

I subscribe Phils stock world, so I get my fill of the consistently apocalyptic advice from Snyder and Tyler Durden.

Edited January 3, 2014 by thelerner

[ralis]

Chris Hedges most recent comments on the decline of democracy.

 

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_last_gasp_of_american_democracy_20140105

 

This is our last gasp as a democracy. The state’s wholesale intrusion into our lives and obliteration of privacy are now facts. And the challenge to us—one of the final ones, I suspect—is to rise up in outrage and halt this seizure of our rights to liberty and free expression. If we do not do so we will see ourselves become a nation of captives.

The public debates about the government’s measures to prevent terrorism, the character assassination of Edward Snowden and his supporters, the assurances by the powerful that no one is abusing the massive collection and storage of our electronic communications miss the point. Any state that has the capacity to monitor all its citizenry, any state that has the ability to snuff out factual public debate through control of information, any state that has the tools to instantly shut down all dissent is totalitarian. Our corporate state may not use this power today. But it will use it if it feels threatened by a population made restive by its corruption, ineptitude and mounting repression. The moment a popular movement arises—and one will arise—that truly confronts our corporate masters, our venal system of total surveillance will be thrust into overdrive.

The most radical evil, as Hannah Arendt pointed out, is the political system that effectively crushes its marginalized and harassed opponents and, through fear and the obliteration of privacy, incapacitates everyone else. Our system of mass surveillance is the machine by which this radical evil will be activated. If we do not immediately dismantle the security and surveillance apparatus, there will be no investigative journalism or judicial oversight to address abuse of power. There will be no organized dissent. There will be no independent thought. Criticisms, however tepid, will be treated as acts of subversion. And the security apparatus will blanket the body politic like black mold until even the banal and ridiculous become concerns of national security.

I saw evil of this kind as a reporter in the Stasi state of East Germany. I was followed by men, invariably with crew cuts and wearing leather jackets, whom I presumed to be agents of the Stasi—the Ministry for State Security, which the ruling Communist Party described as the “shield and sword” of the nation. People I interviewed were visited by Stasi agents soon after I left their homes. My phone was bugged. Some of those I worked with were pressured to become informants. Fear hung like icicles over every conversation.

The Stasi did not set up massive death camps and gulags. It did not have to. The Stasi, with a network of as many as 2 million informants in a country of 17 million, was everywhere. There were 102,000 secret police officers employed full time to monitor the population—one for every 166 East Germans. The Nazis broke bones; the Stasi broke souls. The East German government pioneered the psychological deconstruction that torturers and interrogators in America’s black sites, and within our prison system, have honed to a gruesome perfection.

 

The goal of wholesale surveillance, as Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” is not, in the end, to discover crimes, “but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population.” And because Americans’ emails, phone conversations, Web searches and geographical movements are recorded and stored in perpetuity in government databases, there will be more than enough “evidence” to seize us should the state deem it necessary. This information waits like a deadly virus inside government vaults to be turned against us. It does not matter how trivial or innocent that information is. In totalitarian states, justice, like truth, is irrelevant.

 

The object of efficient totalitarian states, as George Orwell understood, is to create a climate in which people do not think of rebelling, a climate in which government killing and torture are used against only a handful of unmanageable renegades. The totalitarian state achieves this control, Arendt wrote, by systematically crushing human spontaneity, and by extension human freedom. It ceaselessly peddles fear to keep a population traumatized and immobilized. It turns the courts, along with legislative bodies, into mechanisms to legalize the crimes of state.

 

The corporate state, in our case, has used the law to quietly abolish the Fourth and Fifth amendments of the Constitution, which were established to protect us from unwarranted intrusion by the government into our private lives. The loss of judicial and political representation and protection, part of the corporate coup d’état, means that we have no voice and no legal protection from the abuses of power. The recent ruling supporting the National Security Agency’s spying, handed down by U.S. District Judge William H. Pauley III, is part of a very long and shameful list of judicial decisions that have repeatedly sacrificed our most cherished constitutional rights on the altar of national security since the attacks of 9/11. The courts and legislative bodies of the corporate state now routinely invert our most basic rights to justify corporate pillage and repression. They declare that massive and secret campaign donations—a form of legalized bribery—are protected speech under the First Amendment. They define corporate lobbying—under which corporations lavish funds on elected officials and write our legislation—as the people’s right to petition the government. And we can, according to new laws and legislation, be tortured or assassinated or locked up indefinitely by the military, be denied due process and be spied upon without warrants. Obsequious courtiers posing as journalists dutifully sanctify state power and amplify its falsehoods—MSNBC does this as slavishly as Fox News—while also filling our heads with the inanity of celebrity gossip and trivia. Our culture wars, which allow politicians and pundits to hyperventilate over nonsubstantive issues, mask a political system that has ceased to function. History, art, philosophy, intellectual inquiry, our past social and individual struggles for justice, the very world of ideas and culture, along with an understanding of what it means to live and participate in a functioning democracy, are thrust into black holes of forgetfulness.

The political philosopher Sheldon Wolin, in his essential book “Democracy Incorporated,” calls our system of corporate governance “inverted totalitarianism,” which represents “the political coming of age of corporate power and the political demobilization of the citizenry.” It differs from classical forms of totalitarianism, which revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader; it finds its expression in the anonymity of the corporate state. The corporate forces behind inverted totalitarianism do not, as classical totalitarian movements do, replace decaying structures with new structures. They instead purport to honor electoral politics, freedom of expression and the press, the right to privacy and the guarantees of law. But they so corrupt and manipulate electoral politics, the courts, the press and the essential levers of power as to make genuine democratic participation by the masses impossible. The U.S. Constitution has not been rewritten, but steadily emasculated through radical judicial and legislative interpretation. We have been left with a fictitious shell of democracy and a totalitarian core. And the anchor of this corporate totalitarianism is the unchecked power of our systems of internal security.

Our corporate totalitarian rulers deceive themselves as often as they deceive the public. Politics, for them, is little more than public relations. Lies are told not to achieve any discernable goal of public policy, but to protect the image of the state and its rulers. These lies have become a grotesque form of patriotism. The state’s ability through comprehensive surveillance to prevent outside inquiry into the exercise of power engenders a terrifying intellectual and moral sclerosis within the ruling elite. Absurd notions such as implanting “democracy” in Baghdad by force in order to spread it across the region or the idea that we can terrorize radical Islam across the Middle East into submission are no longer checked by reality, experience or factually based debate. Data and facts that do not fit into the whimsical theories of our political elites, generals and intelligence chiefs are ignored and hidden from public view. The ability of the citizenry to take self-corrective measures is effectively stymied. And in the end, as in all totalitarian systems, the citizens become the victims of government folly, monstrous lies, rampant corruption and state terror.

The Romanian poet Paul Celan captured the slow ingestion of an ideological poison—in his case fascism—in his poem “Death Fugue”:

 

 

"Black milk of dawn we drink it at dusk

we drink it at noon and at daybreak we drink it at night

we drink it and drink it

we are digging a grave in the air there’s room for us all"

 

We, like those in all emergent totalitarian states, have been mentally damaged by a carefully orchestrated historical amnesia, a state-induced stupidity. We increasingly do not remember what it means to be free. And because we do not remember, we do not react with appropriate ferocity when it is revealed that our freedom has been taken from us. The structures of the corporate state must be torn down. Its security apparatus must be destroyed. And those who defend corporate totalitarianism, including the leaders of the two major political parties, fatuous academics, pundits and a bankrupt press, must be driven from the temples of power. Mass street protests and prolonged civil disobedience are our only hope. A failure to rise up—which is what the corporate state is counting upon—will see us enslaved.

Edited January 7, 2014 by ralis