Making the World Safe from Democracy or: How to Defend Oneself Against the United States

Reflections on State and War
By Hans-Hermann Hoppe

Read part I

After this excursion into the theory of democratic peace I am back to the proposition that there is no greater threat to lasting peace than the democratic state, and in particular the United States. Thus, the question: how to make the world safe from democracy or how to defend oneself against the U.S..

This is not only a problem for foreigners but for Americans as well. After all, the territory constituting the U.S. too is conquered and occupied territory -- conquered by the U.S. government just as Iraq today is conquered by the U.S. government (if only less successfully). Thus recognizing the question as a truly general one allows us to gain a more principled understanding of the issues involved.

Let us assume that a small territory within the borders of the current U.S. -- a village, a town, a county -- declares its independence and secedes from the U.S. What can and will the U.S. do in response? The answer depends on many "ifs" and must be largely speculative, but not entirely so.

It is possible that the U.S. will invade the territory, crush the secessionists, and if necessary kill everyone in its way. This is what the FrenchRepublic did to the seceding Vendee during the French Revolution, for instance, what the Union did to the Confederacy, and on a much smaller scale and more recently, what the U.S. government did in Waco. But history also provides examples to the contrary: the Czechs and Slovaks separated peacefully, Russia let Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia go; the Slovenes were let go; Singapore was even expelled from a previous union with Malaysia.

Obviously, the relative population size matters in the decision to war or not to war. Likewise it matters what resources and technological capabilities are at the secessionists' disposal. Also the geographical location of the secessionists can weigh in favor or against intervention. But this cannot be all. For how is one to explain, for instance, that France has not long ago conquered Monaco, or Germany Luxemburg, or Switzerland Liechtenstein, or Italy Vatican City, or the U.S. Costa Rica? Or how is one to explain that the U.S. does not "finish the job" in Iraq by simply killing all Iraqis. Surely, in terms of population, technology and geography such are manageable tasks.

The reason for these omissions is not that French, German, Swiss, Italian or U.S. state rulers have principled moral scruples against conquest, occupation, expropriation, confiscation, enslavement and the imprisonment or killing of innocents -- they do these things on a daily basis to their "own" population. Bush, for instance, has no compunction ordering to kill innocent Iraqis. He does so every day. Rather, what constrains the conduct of state rulers and explains their reluctance to do things that appear feasible from a "technical" point of view is public opinion, domestically, but also abroad.

As La Boetie, Hume, Mises, Rothbard have explained, government power ultimately rests on opinion, not brute force. Bush does not himself kill or put a gun to the head of those he orders to kill. Generals and soldiers follow his orders on their own. Nor can Bush "force" anyone to continue providing him with the funds needed for his aggression. The citizenry must do so on its own, because it believes that, by and large, it is the right thing to do. On the other hand, if the majority of generals, soldiers and citizens stop believing in the legitimacy of Bush's commands, his commands turn into nothing more than hot air. It is this need for legitimacy that explains why state governments itching to go to war (and especially democratic governments expecting popular war support) must offer a reason for their actions. The public is not typically in favor of killing innocent bystanders for fun or profit. Rather, in order to enlist the public's assistance "evidence" must be manipulated or fabricated so as to make aggression appear as defense (for what reasonable person could be against defense). We know the catchwords: FortSumter, the USS Maine, the Lusitania, Pearl Harbor, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, 9-11.

It thus turns out that not even an overwhelming size advantage is ultimately decisive in determining the course of action. That David Koresh and his followers in Waco could be brutally killed by the U.S. government was due to the fact that they could be easily portrayed as a bunch of crazy child molesters. Had they been "normal people" an invasion might have been considered a public relations disaster and hence prohibitive. Moreover, regardless of whatever disadvantage the secessionists have in terms of size, resources or location, this can be made up by a favorable international public opinion, especially in the internet age when the spread of news is almost instantaneous. If almost everyone anywhere sides with the secessionists and considers their behavior decent, understandable and just, even the seemingly most powerful government on earth must fear for its legitimacy if it decides to crush the "rebellion."

These considerations bring me to the final points: the likelihood of success of the secessionists depends on their choice of internal organization. The new secessionist country can be another state or it can be a free, state-less society. Tying back to my explanation regarding the relationship between state and aggression, I will argue that the likelihood of successful defense against U.S. aggression is higher if the secessionists form a stateless society than if they opt for another state. Because whether large or small, states are good at aggression and bad at defense, except at defending themselves. (Granting, maybe prematurely, that the U.S. had nothing to do with 9-11 directly, the events of that day certainly show that the U.S. was not good at defending its own citizens: first by provoking the attacks and secondly in having its population disarmed and defenseless vis-a-vis box-cutter wielding foreign invaders.)

How would the defensive stance of a free society differ from that of a state and how would this affect the likelihood a) of a U.S. attack and b) of its success?

Ad a): As explained, the likelihood of an attack depends essentially on the ease of manipulating the evidence so as to camouflage aggression as defense -- and to "discover" such evidence is much easier in the case of a state than that of a state-less society. Even the most liberal state has a monopoly of jurisdiction and taxation and thus cannot but commit injustices and create victims which, properly stylized as "victims of human rights violations" or some such, may provide the necessary "excuse" for a planned invasion. Worse, if the new state is a democracy it is unavoidable that one group -- the Catholics or the Protestants, the Shiites or the Sunnis, the Whites or the Blacks, the Haves or the Not-Haves, etc. -- will use its power to dominate another -- and once again there exists an "excuse" for invasion: to "free some oppressed minority." Better still: the oppressed are incited, assisted by financial aid, to "cry out" for U.S. help. Moreover, in reaction to domestic oppression terrorists may grow up who try to "revenge" the injustice: just think of the Red Brigades, the RAF, the IRA, the ETA, the PKK, etc. -- and both: the continued existence of terrorists as well as a policy of trying to eradicate them may provide "reason" to intervene (to prevent the spread of terrorism or to come to the rescue of freedom fighters). In distinct contrast, in a free society only private property owners and private firms, including insurers, police, and arbitration agencies exist. All relationships are contractual. If there is any provocation or aggression, they are the actions not of terrorists but of ordinary criminals: of murderers, rapists, burglars, thieves and plain frauds -- and it is difficult to portray the treatment of criminals as criminals as a reason for an invasion.

Ad b): What if the attack does occur? In that case it might well be best to give up quickly, especially if the secessionist territory is very small. Thus Mogens Glistrup, founder of the Danish Progress Party, once recommended that the Defense Department of tiny Denmark be replaced with an answering machine announcing (to the Russians) that "we surrender." This way, no destruction occurs and yet the prestige, the good name of the invading government as a "defender and promoter of liberty" is likely forever soiled.

This preliminary consideration leads to our central question regarding the comparative effectiveness of states vs. free societies in matters of defense. As a monopolist of ultimate decision-making, the state decides for everyone bindingly whether to resist or not; if to resist, whether in the form of civil disobedience, armed resistance or some combination thereof; and if armed resistance, of what form. If it decides to put up no resistance, this may be a well-meaning decision or it may be the result of bribes or personal threats by the invading state -- but in any case, it will certainly be contrary to the preferences of many people who would have liked to put up some resistance and who are thus put in double jeopardy because as resisters they disobey now their own state as well as the invader. On the other hand, if the state decides to resist, this again may be a well-meaning decision or it may be the result of pride or fear -- but in any case, it too will be contrary to the preferences of many citizens who would have liked to put up no resistance or to resist by different means and who are entangled now as accomplices in the state's schemes and subjected to the same collateral fallout and victor's-justice as everyone else.

The reaction of a free territory is distinctly different. There is no government which makes one decision. Instead, there are numerous institutions and individuals who choose their own defense strategy, either independent of or in cooperation with others, each in accordance with one's own risk assessment. Consequently, the aggressor has far more difficulties gathering information and conquering the territory. It is no longer sufficient to "know" the government, to win one decisive battle or to gain control of government headquarters from where to transmit orders to the native population. Even if one opponent is "known", one battle is won or one defense agency defeated, this has no bearing on others.

Moreover, the multitude of command structures and strategies as well as the contractual character of a free society affect the conduct of both armed and unarmed resistance. As for the former, in state-territories the civilian population is typically unarmed and heavy reliance exists on regular, tax-and-draft-funded armies and conventional warfare. Hence, the defense forces create enemies even among its own citizenry, which the aggressor state can use to its own advantage, and in any case there is little to fear for the aggressor once the regular army is defeated. In contrast, the population of free territories is likely heavily armed and the fighting done by irregular militias led by defense professionals and in the form of guerilla or partisan warfare. All fighters are volunteers and all of their support: food, shelter, logistical help etc. is voluntary. Hence, guerrillas must be extremely friendly to their own population. But precisely this: their entirely defensive character and near-unanimous support in public opinion can render them nearly invincible, even by numerically far superior invading armies. History provides numerous examples: Napoleon's defeat in Spain, France's defeat in Algeria, the U.S. defeat in Vietnam, Israel's defeat in South Lebanon.

This consideration of the relationship between fighters and civilians leads immediately to the other form of defense: unarmed resistance or civil disobedience. Provided only that the secessionists have the will to be free, the effectiveness of this strategy can hardly be overestimated. Just recall that power does not rest alone on brute force but must rely on "opinion." The conquerors cannot put one man next to each secessionist and so force him obey their orders. The secessionists must obey by their own free will. However, if they do not -- and this insight forms the basis of the doctrine of civil disobedience -- the conquerors will fail. Most importantly: civil disobedience can occur in many forms and degrees. It can range from ostentatious acts of defiance to entirely unobtrusive ways, thus allowing almost everyone to participate in the defense effort: the courageous and the timid, the young and the old, men and women, leaders and followers. One may hide armed fighters or not hinder them and keep quiet about their whereabouts. One may publicly refuse to obey certain laws, or evade and ignore them. One may engage in sabotage, obstruction, negligence or simply display a lack of diligence. One may openly scoff at orders or comply only incompletely. Tax payments may be refused or evaded. There may be demonstrations, sit-ins, boycotts, work-stoppages or plain slacking-off. The conquerors may be maltreated, molested, ridiculed, laughed at or simply ostracized and never assisted in anything. In any case: all of this contributes to the same result: to render the conquerors powerless, make them despair and finally resign and withdraw.

As is often the case, the first step in the anti-imperialist-anti-democratic struggle is the most difficult. Indeed, the difficulties are enormous. Once the first step has been successfully taken, however, things get successively easier. Once the number of secessionist territories has reached a critical mass -- and every success in one location will promote imitation by other localities -- the difficulties of crushing the secessionists will increase exponentially. In fact, the more time passes the greater will the comparative economic and technological advantage of free territories become and in light of the ever increasing attractiveness and economic opportunities offered by the free territories the imperialist powers will be increasingly happy if they can hang on to their power rather than risk whatever legitimacy they still have in an attack.
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Hans-Hermann Hoppe [send him mail] is distinguished fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and founder and president of the Property and Freedom Society. His books include Democracy: The God That Failed and The Myth of National Defense. Visit his website.

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Warmist: 'Every Weather Event in the Modern World is Attributable to Climate Change'

Chris | InformationLiberation

In an article from Common Dreams saying the 'Polar Vortex' is due to global warming we find this little gem:

From Common Dreams:

The idea that any particular "weather event" is or is not climate change [...] belies the deeper fact that all weather events are complex results of underlying climate conditions. As Jim Naureckas, a journalist at the media watchdog group FAIR, explained to his readers in the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines last year, "attributing particular weather events to climate change is ridiculously easy."

The reason for that, he continues, is because (emphasis his):

"Every weather event in the modern world is attributable to climate change. This is because weather is a chaotic system, which is to say it varies wildly based on initial conditions. Once we raised global temperature by a degree Celsius?which is an enormous intervention in the physical world?we irrevocably changed all weather, producing an entirely different set of events than the ones that would have otherwise occurred."

The planet's entire history of radical climate change through millions of years now takes a back seat to human emissions. We're told to believe one theoretical change in degree by humankind is bringing the planet to the brink of disaster -- yet somehow the planet survived multiple ice ages, multiple warm periods, and even a mass extinction event which wiped out the dinosaurs.

If you haven't yet realized it, global warmists are an hysterical doomsday cult. When their end-of-the-world global warming predictions failed to materialize, they rebranded their doctrine to "climate change," something which has always been a constant throughout the history of the world, and conveniently something which they hoped could not be "disproved" because it can mean whatever one wants it to mean. To quote Mr. Naureckas, "every weather event" is proof.

What would be truly remarkable and unprecedented is if the climate stopped changing, to suggest the climate changing is some sort of proof of our sins against the planet and our need for repentance by trashing all modernity and returning to the stone age is thoroughly anti-science and anti-human. If there was such a need for a constant permanent climate, the most likely way it would be achieved is through human ingenuity, not through "returning to nature" and getting what we've always got; a constantly changing climate.

The scientific profession, like our economy as a whole, is being destroyed due to political meddling by corrupt politicians intent on enriching themselves at everyone else's expense. The grants given to scientists to research global warming takes scientists' focus away from real issues such as improving technologies and making scientific breakthroughs which improve life on our planet and instead has them studying the migration patterns of birds and how they may or may not be impacted by one degree's change in temperature. Rather than working to invent a new efficient engine, they're working to invent justifications for political policies.

Ironically, this massive drain on human progress could actually bring about the doomsday mass extinction event they so fear, because rather than humanity become independent of the need for planet earth altogether, we're still entirely dependent on it. If we all die to a supervolcano, a devastating meteor strike, or a massive solar flare, what a shame it will be we hadn't colonized space because our scientists were too busy studying global warming's effect on the mating habits of salamanders.
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Chris runs the website InformationLiberation.com, you can read more of his writings here. Follow infolib on twitter here.

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The underlying "engine" of all this is the fact that modern capitalist economy can't function without some "big idea" at every given period, the catalyst of the development. Like drug addict, it can't live daily life in just "regular mode", it needs a doze of stimulant. In various periods it was different things - building the roads, exploring the universe, then was short period of Y2K hysteria, then security hysteria. Given that the global warming, or climate change, is much less harmful than "war on terror", maybe it's the lesser evil. They're both frauds. A free market economy unlike the state-capitalism we have today is driven by production, not state theft and redistribution. Through the servicing of people's needs you make profit, not through lobbying the criminals in power to give you tax-slaves' loot. Real capitalism is about voluntary trade, you want what someone else has so you trade them something you value less for something you value more -- you want an apple more than you want a dollar, the farmer wants a dollar more than an apple -- both profit in such an exchange. State-capitalism based around central banking and an ever expanding money supply is dependent on constant expansion like any other ponzi scheme, yet when things come crashing down 'free markets' are blamed. If by modern capitalism you mean state-capitalism or non-free market fascism then I agree, but free market capitalism should not be tarnished by something which is it's polar opposite. There have been 5 mass extinctions in the history of life on earth and we are living in the 6th. Climate change deniers seem to all be the same. Taking a practical, testable and proven phenomenon and twisting it to be some dastardly feat of mental manipulation by the powers that be. Whether or not it is natural or man-made, climate change does indeed happen...it is not inconsequential as you all seem to be implying. Chris I like your site but sometimes i wonder if you are directing your distrust at the right issue...well, mostly just the climate change thing. It seems more like a "haha I was right, scientists are wrong" sort of deal. Once again I like your site and do agree with much of what you post. Also I agree that the yellowstone supervolcano, solar unrest, cosmic impacts, magnetic polar shifts and nuclear disasters are potentially much more immediate and definitely need to be addressed. anybody notice that the climate change people wear the heaviest coats and clothes?

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How Medical Innovation Redefines Our World

Jeffrey Tucker

On a Sunday afternoon swim, a 6-year-old boy was bugging me in a sweet sort of way. He rode up and down the handrail on the stairs in the shallow end of the pool where I was trying to sit in peace. He was laughing and talking, but I couldn't understand a word through the giggles.

I spoke to him to try to engage him in conversation.

His mother was sitting on the side of pool and said to me, "He can't hear a word you are saying."

I thought by that she meant that when he is having fun, he is not interested in adult conversation. So I laughed and tried again. She clarified what she meant: He is completely deaf. Literally, he can't hear anything.

I felt embarrassed.

But then she added something that amazed and surprised me. She said that when he is not swimming, he wears equipment that allows him to hear completely normally. He just has to take off the equipment for the water.

I asked for details, simply because, for whatever reason, I hadn't really known about this technology. As she explained, the boy's disability became apparent in the first few weeks of his life. In any other era, he would never have heard a sound. Fortunately, starting in the year 2000, implants became available for children. The ear implants that give him hearing came after about six months. Since then, he has heard nearly as well as everyone else.

My jaw just dropped open. Here is a miracle of our time, a brilliant example of how technological progress isn't really about machines and efficiency, but about the quality and vibrancy of human life itself.

Deafness has been part of human life as far back as we can look in recorded history. It is mentioned by Aristotle, and Socrates was said to have addressed the issue. It is mentioned in Hebrew law and by the fathers of the Christian religion. It figured into folklore throughout the Middle Ages. Most of what was written and said treated deafness as a curse.

With growing enlightenment as to the nature of disability, we began to see real therapeutic efforts toward helping the deaf. In the 19th century, universities were founded. Languages were codified. Activists worked to have society treat deafness not as a wicked malady, but as a condition that comes with special gifts. A more humanitarian approach replaced age-old bias and even demonization.

Then, suddenly, everything changed. In our own time, vast numbers of deaf people have been given hearing, even from infancy. Technology changed everything. "Cochlear implants" became accessible to vast numbers of people. These small machines are put deep inside the ear to fix what is really just a small physical problem, and they are operated by sophisticated equipment that is barely visible.

It is today entirely possible that a deaf person will never know the fate of millions and millions of people throughout history, that of never hearing a song or the spoken world. The world has been opened up to them through the efforts of scientists and commercial providers over the course of some 50 years. As usual, when the solution arrives, people tend to forget the problem ever existed. That is where we are headed with deafness today.

As alert as I am to the surprises brought to us by market-based experimentation and innovation, learning of this genuinely surprised me. I suppose I had thought deafness was a permanent accident that humanity would always deal with. Before the late 19th century, people probably thought the same about infant mortality and hundreds of diseases that have since been cured. In the Middle Ages, it must have been this way with tooth pain, the pain of childbirth, and the inability to communicate with anyone outside your immediate vicinity.

All human problems seem intractable and perpetual when they are ever-present. But there are always a few among us who do not see problems this way. They see problems as rooted in the lack of some technological solution. And they get to work on a fix. Given time, given resources, given an open market in which to sell their fixes, they change history.

Work on fixing the problem of deafness through cochlear implants began in the 1950s, but no technology works out of the box. It takes learning and trying among many people who attempt marginal improvements, one bit at a time. Work picked up in the 1970s as the prospect of commercial viability of implants inspired more manufacturers to work with doctors and scientists.

As always, it took longer than it should have, but implants for adults were finally approved by the FDA in 1984. It wasn't until just 13 years ago, however, that the government approved them for use in children as young as 6 months old. Another factor that slowed down development, as always, was the patent, which essentially assigned a monopoly of knowledge to certain individual firms. Even now, the market is hobbled and the devices overly expensive because of them. In other words, without government intervention, we would have seen more progress sooner.

Even so, I was fascinated to see a real-life example of how science and commerce radically changes life itself. How many people would have even imagined such a thing 100 years ago? Very few. Here is a beautiful example of how allowing entrepreneurs to be free of restrictions gives rise to genius solutions to problems most everyone else thinks are permanent.

And there is a still a long way to go. Already, this nice family that I met is looking into getting the next edition of the implants the child is using, because the new version is actually waterproof. He will be able to swim and hear at the same time. There are still other factors that need improvement: battery life, cosmetic appearance, the stability of the machinery itself, etc. And everyone looks forward to the day when the entire apparatus can be implanted with no external operation at all. These times are not far off.

Oh, and by the way, the implants are all manufactured by those kinds of capitalistic institutions everyone loves to hate. There is Cochlear Limited in Australia, Advanced Bionics (in the U.S, but a division of a Swiss company), and Med-El in Austria.

All are for-profit enterprises.

As we think about such things ? seeming miracles accomplished through science and market entrepreneurship ? what can we say about today's anti-technology and socialist attitudes among the educated elite? The greens are habituated to be against all industrial progress. The neo-Luddites put down every advance. The socialists tell us that all solutions come from the public sector. Books and articles appear daily that tell us about the evils of technology and how it is ruining human community.

Meanwhile, people sneer at smartphones, gaming, and social media, and speak with trepidation about how Google Glass is going to turn us into cyborgs. The romantics long for a return to the simple life.

But do these people consider the lives of people such as this boy I met? Here is the truth: The return to the simple life means that deafness will not be cured. The simple life means pain, suffering, hunger, disease, malnutrition, early death, and the horror of struggling every day just to live another day. Every bit of the progress humanity has made over the state of nature is due to the unleashing of human creativity in the framework of an open society and an open market. This is the way to unleash the genius of innovative human service.

This is the path of progress. The path of regress is the opposite: command, regulate, control, coerce, and rule by those who imagine that they know what we need and construct a political order to impose it on us. Under such forms of political management, answers to intractable problems do not emerge through the regulatory thicket.

In the end, this is what is most scary about health care solutions like Obamacare. It is not so much how such political solutions misallocate existing resources. The real problem is how such systems lock down and control human creativity and end up preventing us from discovering what we currently do not know. They stop the emergence of seeming miracles such as tools to allow the blind to see, the deaf to hear, and the lame to walk again.

Might we someday truly find a cure for the remaining horrors in our world, such as cancer? It can happen, provided we have systems that are open to experimentation, commercial creativity, and trial and error. I met the living proof of this, a happy boy who will never know a world in which there was no solution for his disability.
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Jeffrey Tucker is the publisher and executive editor of Laissez-Faire Books, the Primus inter pares of the Laissez Faire Club, and the author of Bourbon for Breakfast: Living Outside the Statist Quo, It's a Jetsons World: Private Miracles and Public Crimes, and A Beautiful Anarchy: How to Build Your Own Civilization in the Digital Age, among thousands of articles. Click to sign up for his free daily letter. Email him: tucker@lfb.org | Facebook | Twitter | Google

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The Liberal Way to Run the World - "Improve" or We'll Kill You

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by John Pilger

What is the world's most powerful and violent "ism"? The question will summon the usual demons such as Islamism, now that communism has left the stage. The answer, wrote Harold Pinter, is only "superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged", because only one ideology claims to be non-ideological, neither left nor right, the supreme way. This is liberalism.

In his 1859 essay On Liberty, to which modern liberals pay homage, John Stuart Mill described the power of empire. "Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians," he wrote, "provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end." The "barbarians" were large sections of humanity of whom "implicit obedience" was required. The French liberal Alexis de Tocqueville also believed in the bloody conquest of others as "a triumph of Christianity and civilisation" that was "clearly preordained in the sight of Providence".

"It's a nice and convenient myth that liberals are the peacemakers and conservatives the warmongers," wrote the historian Hywel Williams in 2001, "but the imperialism of the liberal way may be more dangerous because of its openended nature - its conviction that it represents a superior form of life [while denying its] selfrighteous fanaticism." He had in mind a speech by Tony Blair in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks, in which Blair promised to "reorder this world around us" according to his "moral values". At least a million dead later - in Iraq alone - this tribune of liberalism is today employed by the tyranny in Kazakhstan for a fee of $13m.

Blair's crimes are not unusual. Since 1945, more than a third of the membership of the United Nations - 69 countries - have suffered some or all of the following. They have been invaded, their governments overthrown, their popular movements suppressed, their elections subverted and their people bombed. The historian Mark Curtis estimates the death toll in the millions. This has been principally the project of the liberal flame carrier, the United States, whose celebrated "progressive" president John F Kennedy, according to new research, authorised the bombing of Moscow during the Cuban crisis in 1962. "If we have to use force," said Madeleine Albright, US secretary of state in the liberal administration of Bill Clinton, "it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future." How succinctly she defines modern, violent liberalism.

Syria is an enduring project. This is a leaked joint US-UK intelligence file:

"In order to facilitate the action of liberative [sic] forces... a special effort should be made to eliminate certain key individuals [and] to proceed with internal disturbances in Syria. CIA is prepared, and SIS (MI6) will attempt to mount minor sabotage and coup de main [sic] incidents within Syria, working through contacts with individuals... a necessary degree of fear... frontier and [staged] border clashes [will] provide a pretext for intervention... the CIA and SIS should use... capabilities in both psychological and action fields to augment tension."

That was written in 1957, though it might have come from a recent report by the Royal United Services Institute, A Collision Course for Intervention, whose author says, with witty understatement: "It is highly likely that some western special forces and intelligence sources have been in Syria for a considerable time." And so a world war beckons in Syria and Iran.

Israel, the violent creation of the west, already occupies part of Syria. This is not news: Israelis take picnics to the Golan Heights and watch a civil war directed by western intelligence from Turkey and bankrolled and armed by the medievalists in Saudi Arabia. Having stolen most of Palestine, attacked Lebanon, starved the people of Gaza and built an illegal nuclear arsenal, Israel is exempt from the current disinformation campaign aimed at installing western clients in Damascus and Tehran.

On 21 July, the Guardian commentator Jonathan Freedland warned that "the west will not stay aloof for long... Both the US and Israel are also anxiously eyeing Syria's supply of chemical and nuclear weapons, now said to be unlocked and on the move, fearing Assad may choose to go down in a lethal blaze of glory." Said by whom? The usual "experts" and spooks.

Like them, Freedland desires "a revolution without the full-blown intervention required in Libya". According to its own records, Nato launched 9,700 "strike sorties" against Libya, of which more than a third were aimed at civilian targets. They included missiles with uranium warheads. Look at the photographs of the rubble of Misurata and Sirte, and the mass graves identified by the Red Cross. Read the Unicef report on the children killed, "most [of them] under the age of ten". Like the destruction of the Iraqi city of Fallujah, these crimes were not news, because news as disinformation is a fully integrated weapon of attack.

On 14 July, the Libyan Observatory for Human Rights, which opposed the Gaddafi regime, reported, "The human rights situation in Libya now is far worse than under Gaddafi." Ethnic cleansing is rife. According to Amnesty, the entire population of the town of Tawargha "are still barred from returning [while] their homes have been looted and burned down".

In Anglo-American scholarship, influential theorists known as "liberal realists" have long taught that liberal imperialists - a term they never use - are the world's peacebrokers and crisis managers, rather than the cause of a crisis. They have taken the humanity out of the study of nations and congealed it with a jargon that serves warmongering power. Laying out whole nations for autopsy, they have identified "failed states" (nations difficult to exploit) and "rogue states" (nations resistant to western dominance). Whether or not the regime is a democracy or dictatorship is irrelevant. The same is true of those contracted to do the dirty work. In the Middle East, from Nasser's time to Syria today, western liberalism's collaborators have been Islamists, lately al-Qaeda, while longdiscredited notions of democracy and human rights serve as rhetorical cover for conquest, "as required". Plus ?a change.

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Spoilt for choice as every Ism is a schism created through zionIsm aka world dominance/governance and a dance of necromance. Commune-Ism has only left the stage as it has infected the entire audience. Please stop using al-Qaeda and instead use CIA as much of the population recognises it to be so.

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The Myth of the Fair and Benevolent State: Policing the World

J.G. Vibes, Activist Post

In the string of military conflicts that the United States and NATO have been involved in since the second world war they have always attempted to maintain the high road by claiming that they were responding to some kind of threat, and apparently helping the people that they were bombing.

This approach is largely accepted by the general public who is either too afraid or unable to suspect malicious intentions on the part of their masters. In helping themselves to rationalize the nonsensical things that are happening in their name many people are firm believers in the idea that their government is doing good ?policing the world?.

We hear this phrase all of the time, even among people who generally disagree with wars and government policy. People say that ?NATO has no right to police the world as they do!?, and those people would be right. However, that statement is overlooking one fundamental premise, that being the fact that NATO?s goals and ambitions have nothing to do with ?policing the world?. Just as ancient Rome?s government could care less about ?bringing civilization to the savages?, today?s Western governments are not interested in ?spreading democracy? or ?policing the world?.

This is an extremely important point to make because this idea that they are trying to police the world perpetuates the myth of the fair and benevolent state, and downplays the significant damage that they are doing to people?s lives around the world. If we were being honest with ourselves, we would say that they are trying to take over the world's governments and plunder their natural resources, because that?s what we can see happening around us. War is, and always has been, about conquest for plunder and power. And the many wars that we see taking place around the world today are no different.

Sure, nowadays, the cover story may be that they are ?policing the world?, but there is now a mountain of evidence showing that the primary goal of these military actions are to secure natural resources, hijack the local political and financial systems, and establish more military bases to assist in future conquests.

Time after time Western imperial powers vilify foreign dictators who, in many cases, have been directly funded and supported by those same imperial powers in the past. For at least the past century the UK, US and their allies have been shipping billions of dollars worth of weapons to foreign dictators under the guise of ?foreign aid?. As a side note, ?foreign aid? is another one of those terms that imply a fair and benevolent state, when the reality is far more destructive than the choice of words would lead one to believe.

When hearing ?foreign aid? many people get visions of food being air dropped into war-torn areas with starving refugees. However, the reality of the situation is that this money is being shipped directly to these foreign dictators so they can more effectively suppress and put down their own populations -- and usually goes right into the pockets of U.S. arms manufacturers . This message was blatantly clear to the Egyptian people when they revolted against their government and had tear gas canisters shot at them that were marked with ?made in the USA? labels.

Egypt is certainly not alone. Nearly every dictator that the US and NATO have gone to war with has been one of their very own creations. The volatile situation in the Middle East has without a doubt been fomented by Western powers funding dictators through tax-funded ?foreign aid?. Saddam Hussein in Iraq was kept in power thanks to Western support until he was no longer useful and then became a target. Years after the invasion WikiLeaks cables showed that oil contracts were one of the primary motivations behind attacking Iraq. So again we see natural resources playing a major role.

This is the same way that Osama Bin Laden was used as a hired mercenary to fight against the Soviets as a proxy in the Cold War, and then later became a target when the elite needed a new excuse to invade the Middle East. Along with these very high-profile cases there have been ongoing covert operations in dozens of countries worldwide, many of which are exposed by CIA whistleblower John Perkins in his book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.

If all of the facts, confessions and source documents weren?t enough to show that the US and NATO are intent on conquering the world, as opposed to policing it, then this week?s grisly massacre in Afghanistan surely gives us a more animated picture of what the military is really there to do.

The government is of course telling us that these are just ?a few bad apples,? as if the very reason that they were over there was not to commit mass murder. These young and misguided souls are strapped with weapons, trained to kill and sent into a territory filled with people who they have been taught to despise. Isn?t this sort of violent and irrational behavior to be expected under those conditions? This is obviously unacceptable behavior, but isn't war and all that comes with it unacceptable behavior to begin with?

The first step towards ridding our world of all this violence is seeing it for what it is and calling it what it is out loud. Using softer language to describe the horrors that are going on around us is actually one of the many ways in which we are being prevented from actually addressing these problems and bringing about a more peaceful existence. Given that today?s governments and all governments throughout history have such a tradition of mass murder and human rights violations, we should always be extremely suspicious whenever anyone in power claims to be doing something noble, especially when military force is involved.
__
J.G. Vibes is an author, and artist -- with an established record label. In addition to featuring a wide variety of activist information, his company Good Vibes Promotions hosts electronic dance music events. You can keep up with him and his forthcoming book Alchemy of the Modern Renaissance, at his website. AOTMR will be released in March 2012, thanks to Leilah Publications.

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New World Trade Center Site To Become Military Grade Police State Hub

Steve Watson

Terrorists supposedly attacked the World Trade Center towers on 9/11?because they hated the freedoms of Americans. Now their ilk will be satisfied to learn that anyone in the vicinity of the new World Trade Center will have absolutely no freedoms whatsoever.

According to plans seen by The New York Post, The Port Authority is to deploy military grade security, unrivalled by anything currently used in any city in the world.

The agency is set to roll out chilling technology akin to that described in The Minority Report that will subject Americans to pre-crime interrogations and physiological scans to detect malintent.

The PA plans to install and operate science-fiction-like devices such as infrared and heat sensors that can be outfitted with explosive and radiation detectors.

In what it claims are efforts to protect the new somewhat ironically named ?Freedom Tower?, the PA plans also call for sophisticated surveillance cameras that have built in facial and retina scanners. The cameras will be able to scan everyone in the vicinity and run their biometric features against government criminal databases and terrorist watch lists.

The report also states that the PA is considering behavioral monitoring technology that will track everyone?s movements on the ground and flag up any "unusual movements".

Security personnel and police would be automatically alerted if "artificial intelligence" cameras spotted someone walking erratically, against the flow of pedestrians, deviating from sidewalks or putting a bag down where people do not normally put bags down.

The operation is to be implemented and overseen by Defense Department contractor Behavioral Recognition Systems, which has been developing the technology for some years.

Costing tens of millions of dollars, the entire system would be hooked up to the already existing NYPD Lower Manhattan Security Initiative.

"What we're doing down there has never been done before," an agency official told The Post.

The Department of Homeland Security and the TSA have extensively experimented with some of the technology involved, including behavioral detection devices, retina scanning equipment and mobile radiation-scanning checkpoints

However, the new World Trade Center site, set for completion in 2013, will be the first location that the technology has been permanently implemented.
__
Steve Watson is the London based writer and editor for Alex Jones? Infowars.net, and Prisonplanet.com. He has a Masters Degree in International Relations from the School of Politics at The University of Nottingham in England.

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Molyneux Interviews Rick Rule: The Most Liquid Lie in the World is the U.S. Dollar

Molyneux Interviews Rick Rule: The Most Liquid Lie in the World is the U.S. Dollar - informationliberationinformationliberation
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Molyneux Interviews Rick Rule: The Most Liquid Lie in the World is the U.S. Dollar

At the Casey Research/Sprott Summit When Money Dies, Rick Rule spoke with Stefan Molyneux about energy and gold investments and his outlook for the near-future market overall.

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Hayek's Ghost Haunts the World

by Jeffrey A. Tucker

Did you ever have the feeling that we've been through this before?

Think of it. Those in charge have only recently sworn ? yet again! ? that if we keep interest rates at zero, keep battling the symptoms of recession and unemployment with spending and jobs programs, clobber the speculators with regulations, and otherwise keep trying to revive moribund industries, all will be well. Just don't cut government spending or let interest rates rise!

So where have we heard it all before? It was the 1930s, when the battle between F.A. Hayek and J.M. Keynes raged in the English-speaking world, not only in the academic journals but in the newspapers in London and the United States.

Hayek gave a series of lectures based on his previous works in German that tried to explain that the ruling elite and their theoretical apparatus had it all wrong.

In a thousand different ways he said the same thing: "To combat the depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about."

Further, "because we are suffering from a misdirection of production, we want to create further misdirection ? a procedure that can only lead to a much more severe crisis as soon as the credit expansion comes to an end."

The essays in which Hayek so prophetically explained the boom and bust are collected in the most convenient form possible: Prices and Production and Other Works. It is a 528-page book that explores every conceivable aspect of business cycles.

Because this book is in print, it is really inexcusable that the same errors should be revisited upon the world today, strangling growth and driving every major economy further into the depths.

Now, granted, many decades went by when these writings were hard to come by. Many people had only bound photocopies they would let others borrow. But since 2008, the Mises Institute has had them all gathered in a single book, with explanatory material and at the price of $25.

Wherever this book lands, and wherever it is read and studied, the answers to what to do and what not to do are clear as bottled water. Hayek could barely mask his frustration. This was hardly the first time that governments and central banks had tried to cure the bust with the very poison that had destabilized the economy in the first place.

He cites, for example, the expansionary policy of the Fed in 1927, which the Fed itself described as "the greatest and boldest operation ever undertaken by the Federal Reserve System." In Hayek's view, it was this very action that caused the explosion in stock prices that led to the bust that wouldn't seem to go away.

He concludes, already in 1932: "We must not forget that, for the last six or eight years, monetary policy all over the world has followed the advice of the stabilizers. It is high time that their influence, which has already done harm enough, should be overthrown."

Note the constant focus: the root of the problem is to be found in the boom, not the bust.

Hayek's frustration was not so intense as to prevent him from very patiently refuting every theory that imagined that the business cycle was caused by something other than monetary factors. He marched through the theories one by one until he concludes that only a distortion in monetary signaling can cause so many to be so wrong in their investment decisions.

Turning to positive theory, Hayek celebrates J.B. Say's view that, absent such interest rate and monetary manipulation, there can be no tendency for entrepreneurs to make such systematic errors that create economy-wide booms followed by busts.

And here we have the heart of the difference between Hayek and Keynes: one knew that markets work to give us the best of all possible worlds, while governments create and exacerbate malfunctions; the other imagined that governments were somehow capable of both perceiving and correcting malfunctions by means of the printing press, provided the right technocrats are in charge.

The fundamental differences are obvious in the 60-page critique that Hayek wrote of Keynes's own Treatise on Money (1930). The criticism came out in 1931, even as Keynes was working on his General Theory. Hayek ? who, as Joseph Salerno points out in the introduction to the collection, was very young at the time but had the courage to correct the current giant of the English-speaking profession ? corrects Keynes on point after point.

Hayek offers a polite but devastating demonstration that Keynes (a) was unfamiliar with any of the most sophisticated capital theory emerging from the Austrian tradition, (b) contradicted himself constantly, and (c) was so unclear in his writing and thought that he made serious correction almost impossible.

After this essay appeared, Keynes casually dismissed it with the comment that he no longer accepted the views put forward in that book. Keynes went one step further and wrote a petty attack on Hayek's own book! Hayek was so discouraged by this that he was loath to take up criticizing the General Theory with the same level of detail.

The experience of the 1930s and since underscores that Hayek's view, beautifully presented in this book, is the one that conforms to reality. Hayek is fastidious in crediting Ludwig von Mises for having been the first to link together all the theoretical parts that make up the Austrian business-cycle theory. Mises is "certainly to be regarded as the most respected and consistent exponent of the monetary theory of the trade cycle," he writes.

Hayek's argument is relentless but all the more praiseworthy given the times. Unlike today, where the dissent against the stimulus is intensifying, Hayek and Mises had very few colleagues whom they could count on to back up their arguments. For this reason, however, Hayek, writing in English, must have felt a special burden of proof. He wrote with vigor, scientific precision, and passionate intensity about the entire topic of boom and bust.

It's as if Hayek had an object in his hand, turning it slowly every which way and describing its shape, color, and size in every way he knew how.

It is also in these essays that Hayek first laid out the triangles that illustrate the relationship between time and the stages of production. This was a true innovation and one of his most lasting contributions to economics. The Hayekian triangle is brilliant in its simplicity, but it highlights a point that had been lost on economists at the time and has still not penetrated today: the capital structure is incredibly complex and embeds a vast range of time horizons within the plans of every actor.

Only a full comprehension of this point prepares a person to see how it is that the manipulation of interest rates by the central bank can cause such damage. But Hayek is also careful to note that reversing the course of monetary policy is probably not enough to end an economic bust.

Monetary policy might have caused the boom, but monetary factors alone are not enough to explain the fullness of the bust. There are other factors: taxes, which discourage savings and production; regulations, which block discovery and entrepreneurship; government spending, which draws resources out of the private sector; debt, crowds out investment, and more.

Hayek concludes by calling not only for an end to discretionary policy but also "a radical revision of public policy" in all areas. The same is precisely true today, which is why rereading Hayek's work from the late 1920s and 1930s is at once eerie and enlightening.

Many decades went by before English-speaking readers were made aware of a parallel series of writings that were taking place in Austria at the time. Mises himself wrote during the same period from 1928 to 1936 and on the same issues. His essays are collected in a book that is a kind of companion volume: The Causes of the Economic Crisis.

However, here we find a much clearer presentation: a different personality, a different audience, a different mode of writing and thinking. If anyone is left with a lack of clarity after reading Hayek, Mises provides the essence of the issue at hand in 1931:

Credit expansion cannot increase the supply of real goods. It merely brings about a rearrangement. It diverts capital investment away from the course prescribed by the state of economic wealth and market conditions. It causes production to pursue paths which it would not follow unless the economy were to acquire an increase in material goods. As a result, the upswing lacks a solid base. It is not real prosperity. It is illusory prosperity. It did not develop from an increase in economic wealth. Rather, it arose because the credit expansion created the illusion of such an increase. Sooner or later it must become apparent that this economic situation is built on sand.

Those words could have been written this very day, describing our very predicament. So it is with Mises and all the Austrians. They wrote not just for their times but for all times.
__
Jeffrey Tucker is the editor of Mises.org and author of It's a Jetsons World: Private Miracles and Public Crimes and Bourbon for Breakfast: Living Outside the Statist Quo. Send him mail. See Jeffrey A. Tucker's article archives.

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JFK Assassination and Executive Order 11110 – Also Willie Nelson Discusses New World Order

Click to expand conspiracy quotes from this video John was the most charismatic of the presidents and had great support from the American people. And he felt he could defy the international bankers and get away with it. He wasn’t just killed because he was favoring some rights for black people. The president has power to just, with an executive order, make a law. Executive order 11110, signed into law early 1963. Where with the stroke of his pen he took away the power of the Federal Reserve to print the money. He put 4 billion dollars into circulation in 2 dollar and 5 dollar denominations, but all 4 billion was backed by silver. Six months later, like it was with Lincoln, he was shot down in Dealey Plaza. you see, the international bankers must not be defied, because they run presidents and kings.
Related conspiracies: Executive Order 11110, Federal Reserve, JFK conspiracy

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World Debt Is Unpayable, The Only Solution Is Monetary Collapse

source - david icke

Bob Chapman – Global Research

As far as we can discern the US Treasury thus far has spent and borrowed about $100 billion from the federal pension accounts. Unless there is a vote on the cash debt extension prior to August 2nd, government will probably have borrowed some $250 billion to $300 billion. The Treasury is paying virtually no interest on this debt. Three-month Treasury bills are currently yielding zero percent. Our question is how will the funds be generated to fulfill the Treasury’s obligation to the pension fund? What happens if on August 2nd if legislation is not passed? Does this go on forever? We will keep you apprised on new developments.

The current situation regarding the state of recovery in the US has turned from precarious to dismal and as we predicted a year ago May we will have to be treated to QE3 something no one really wants, but as we said before it is inevitable. The Fed and their controllers, the member bank owners of the Fed, know the present approach doesn’t work and it is only a matter of time, as a result of their policies, when more stimulus will be needed, which in turn leads to more inflation.

Due to the current state of affairs Fed Chairman Bernanke has been making one appearance on TV after another. He gets grilled over and over again and he doesn’t like the public reception at all. He shouldn’t, as more and more observers see that two quantitative easings haven’t worked.  They cost at least $3.6 trillion in funds created out of thin air, and all they have done is prolong the agony. The flip side is the policy has caused higher inflation.

What else can one expect when deficits astound and the Fed has to buy $1.6 trillion in Treasury bonds. A large percentage of this debt is used to wage perpetual war for perpetual peace. During this process the President has bypassed the Constitution and is deliberately repressing the freedoms of American citizens. There no longer is a separation of powers, but virtual dictatorship bought and paid for by Wall Street and banking.

It should be firmly implanted in your mind that your masters in government and those controlling government brazenly and arrogantly believe that they know better what is good for you, than you do. That is why when they speak to you their answers are dripping with condescension – as if to say, how dare you question what we tell you. Fed Chairman, Mr. Bernanke, is a perfect example of this. He, others and his predecessors have created a false economy based upon perpetual debt and upon money and credit being created out of thin air.

Today that is accompanied with zero interest rates, a combination that in time can only bring a falling dollar, inflation and a collapsing economy. Mr. Bernanke appears to believe that an increased supply of money has little or no effect on the comparison between money and the prices of goods. He has to be living in a fairy tale land. Thinking such as this can only end up making a bad economic situation worse.

For more than a month the US has been faced with the task of extending the short-term debt limit. The game that is being played is that one side wants to cut the deficit and the other side does not. In reality both sides do not want to cut anything, or should we say the elitists who control these supposed representatives of the people do not want anything cut. They want the game to continue, so they can continue to loot the economy, an interesting take on this sideshow is if Treasury debt is not increased the situation grinds to a standstill.

Congress, the President and the so-called negotiators want an increase in this short-term debt of $2.4 trillion. That would be a short-term debt limit of $16.7 trillion to carry the debt limit past the next election. The offset of reduced spending is to come over the next ten years. How ridiculous and ludicrous. Do they really expect us to buy this charade?

The most recent strategy by the elitists is to keep Japan’s problems under wraps. Just do not let it into the media, even though some Japanese officials say the island could become uninhabitable. This is also why President Obama went to see Chancellor Merkel in Berlin. He urged her to make a deal to settle the Greek problem. He doesn’t understand that such a deal would make her and her party, the CDU, unelectable for a long time. The German citizens want Greece cut loose. They’ll take the losses and the result is many banks will go under. The President is as well trying to bolster his approval ratings.

The propaganda is flowing to keep Americans from panicking in the face of not recovering, no short-term debt extension, municipal and state failures and Europe starting to collapse. The elitists are in serious trouble due to these problems. The icing on the cake for them is the disaster that the Bilderberg meeting turned into in Switzerland.

US consumer confidence is lower now than it was at the beginning of the credit crisis. That isn’t unexpected when unemployment is rising, retail is falling and the manufacturing numbers out of Chicago and New York are falling steeply.

What professionals for the most part do not seem to understand is that the events of 2006/07 have never been solved. On February 2009 the inflationary depression began. There has now been a double dip since then. What we have witnessed is slight revivals caused by the injection of money and credit. Unemployment is close to the same level it was 2-1/2 to 3 years ago. That phenomenon has been the same in the UK and Europe. In the UK the Bank of England and in Europe the ECB are doing the same thing the Fed is doing and that is buying government debt by creating money and credit out of thin air.

The City of London, Wall Street and Frankfurt would have you believe these injections into the systems were working, when in fact all they have done is temporarily bail out Wall Street and the City of London and the European financial centers as well as the governments involved. Nothing has been done to structurally assist the system and put people back to work. What readers have to understand is that what has been done to these economies does not work and the participants know it doesn’t work. Professionals, who are not connected with the elitists, have panicked, because they do not understand what is going on – what is being done to them.

The market was ripe to fall, but there is another important factor, Wall Street wants a short-term debt extension with little or no spending cutbacks. The new conservatives say no, we are not going to do that. The market will be taken lower until these representatives see the light. How far are they willing to take the market down, probably to between 8,500 to 10,000 on the Dow, or until Congress gives them what they want. In the meantime they will attack commodities, gold and silver, so no one can profit. Unfortunately for them, that isn’t working this time. They are lower, but come back every time they are artificially pushed down. We believe that is what this market correction is all about.

Wall Street will take the market down as far as they have to in order to get what they want. In the meantime the Middle East and Europe are in turmoil and wars abound in a number of Middle Eastern countries. Those on the inside understand that the market is fueled by major deficit spending and the injection of money and credit, as government inflates debt away. The economy and the market for the last two years have not justified stock prices at the level they have maintained during that period. The same is true for the UK and Europe.

Most of the professionals do not understand what is really going on and what is being done to them and their clients. Data is weak and getting weaker as economic statistics continue to fall and point to more problems ahead. This is ample justification for a falling market to aid the deliberate reduction in prices. We must remember that the only bastion of gains for the public left is the market. If it comes down Congress will hear from constituents loud and clear. That is what is supposed to force the issue on passing the short-term debt extension.

As a reaction to this free spending foreign governments have slowed or stopped their purchase of Treasury and Agency bonds leaving the job to the Fed. This problem is going to worsen as we go forward. Now it is not only foreign governments that are slowing purchases, but also American households as well. They are selling more than $1 trillion annually and sales are increasing, as mom, pop and hedge funds dump government paper.

As QE2 nears an end investors are getting emotional. It is called panic. They can expect little from the FOMC next week, Europe can expect the same from the EU meeting the following week. Greece is in a state of revolution and there is no agreement in sight. In fact, the banks, governments, the EU and the IMF cannot agree on anything. The Greeks want a break in terms. If they do not get one it is default.

We predicted Greece would pursue these ends and we told them to do so several times on radio, TV and in the press. A Greek default will not only bring the euro down, it will take down the European banking system and that was our intention from the beginning.

Greece and the other countries in financial and economic trouble should have never been included in the euro zone. They simply were not qualified and the solvent countries not only knew that, but also stood by as these countries cooked the books with the help of JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. We wrote about it 11 years ago, but no one was listening.

The Greeks after a year of austerity have had enough of it, and are in no mood to give away their country to the bankers. An interest in the telecom company was recently sold to the Germans for $0.30 on the dollar. The Greeks are not going to stand still for anymore such sweetheart deals. When Greece entered the euro zone on January 1, 2001, they were happy to have an austerity program for entry in as much as they had the highest inflation rate in Europe.

Their deficits were higher than any other EU country at that time, but the bank and sovereign loans kept coming, because it was political. The EU and the euro zone were to be the template for the new world currency and the new world government. That is why Greece and others were rushed into the euro zone. Then there was the novel and stupid concept of one interest for all, which we said at the time guaranteed disaster, and that is what we have ten years later.

We have recommended the purchase of gold and silver coins, bullion and shares since June 2000, after we got subscribers and others out of the stock market in the second week of April 2000, two weeks after the top. We did the same thing at Dow 14,000 and predicted a bottom at 6,600. The fall was to 6,550. We got subscribers out of the real estate market starting in June of 2005. As you can see we have been on top of things all those years. The call on the destruction of the euro we hope will be our best call yet.

The perceived risk from our point of view is that Greece will default and leave the euro to be followed by Ireland and Portugal and later Belgium, Spain and Italy. It will probably take two to three years for this to become reality. Germans do not want the euro and never have wanted it. We believe within three years every country will be back with their own currencies and the dream of one world government for now in Europe will be a dead issue.

The Greek fallout will take down a number of too big to fail European banks, and could cause serious harm to lender countries. These mistakes will not be anything they will do again, anytime soon. We do not believe the Fed will be able to bail out European banks this time. The American public won’t stand for it after having to go to federal appellate court and traverse two years to find out the Fed lied and overstepped its charter by being banker to the world.

The problems in the US are similar to those of Europe and it is only a matter of time before the US financially blows up. If Greek yields can go to 17-1/2%, so can yields in all countries in trouble, and there are plenty of them. The taxpayers in the US, UK and Europe are fed up with paying the bill for all of this speculation and mad political escapades. That will soon come to an end. It has too, as bankruptcy seems to be the only option. Three-month Treasury bills yield zero percent, and 2-year bills yield 0.40%, as the 10’s yield 2.91%. There now is only one way for yields to go and that is up. There is a limit to credit creation, but we are not at the juncture as yet. It is probably two years off, perhaps three years.

One of the aspects of the debt disease we haven’t really discussed is the fallout from Greece if and when it goes under. Thirty-three European banks hold large amounts of bonds in the PIIG countries, and they could all go under if the 5 or 6 weak countries go bankrupt. In addition, there are the countries and others who are loaded with these bonds. Like the Fed the ECB has been bailing out banks and it is against the rules, so that could put the officers in legal jeopardy. The very fact that these bankers broke the rules is onerous.

The big question is are they headed for jail? If they have made mistakes the taxpayer has to pay the bills. We believe they should be in jail. The bill for exposure to the debt of the 5 financially weak nations could be $625 billion. The ECB has done the same thing the Fed has done and that is bankroll insolvent banks by buying the toxic waste they own and putting it on their balance sheets, which the public get to pay for. It is the socialization of corporate debt, fascist style. Most of the garbage has no value or little value. We always wonder what prices the Fed and the ECB pay for the soiled merchandise. Both refuse to tell us.

It is said the ECB is using 24 to 1 leverage with only $116 billion in capital and reserves. If assets fall 4.25% its entire capital base would be wiped out. That could easily happen if Greece and the other four PIIGS default. We call that ominous because none of the problem countries want to repay the debt to a gaggle of bankers who are nothing but criminals. Our take is the 5 will eventually default and perhaps Belgium as well. That means the ECB is insolvent and the major banks throughout the euro zone are as well, including many central banks. Professionals do not have a clue about how serious this is to the entire world financial system. Perhaps we are wrong. The ECB only has $268 billion in Greek bonds. That is simply a trifle for such big socialist hitters. Yet, it is double their capital base.

A Greek default would put 94% of the direct losses on European creditors and 5% would be shared by US creditors. The other side of the equation is US companies making some 90% of all losses being owed by US writers of default insurance. These US banks have sold $120 billion of credit default swaps to European banks. These are the banks that are too big to fail, which American taxpayers will have to pick up the losses for. Have those US banks hedged their exposure?

We do not know, but we do know what they have done is irrational and incompetent. That is unless the US or the Fed had to for some reason guarantee losses. Something similar to what we suspected in the US banks’ sale of toxic waste to these same European banks. If the Fed, the Treasury and the Exchange Stabilization Fund are audited we will find out. These numbers are staggering, but their exposure to $100 billion in Irish debt is equally as onerous.

Such speculation and secret deals have to come to an end if we are going to survive financially. We definitely need to re-pass the Glass-Steagall Act that we fought hard to protect 13 years ago.
We can promise you that if Greece defaults eventually the ECB will be insolvent. We have dreamed of that day for 12 years. The destruction of the ECB and the euro zone, which would in part destroy the Illuminist drive into world government.

We think in order to avoid such a catastrophe the ECB would simply print more money as the Fed has, prolonging the agony. The real bailout mechanism would be France and Germany to put up their gold to save the euro zone and the euro. That is if the US allows Germany to have their gold. We can promise you that if the politicians of these two countries attempted to use their countries gold as collateral or propose its sale they would be lynched.

Like the Fed, the ECB has no credibility left. It is obvious that these two central banks only mission is to save the financial system that owns them. When are people going to smarten up? The ECB and the bankers thought Greece and the Greek people would be a pushover. The bankers thought they would just move in and loot the country. Once the Greeks were educated on the issues they made the proper choices. That is why we spent so much time on radio, TV and in the press there. Now they know the truth and the bankers, the euro and the EU are screwed. The ECB, as a result, is dead meat whether they realize it or not.

World debt is unpayable, especially that of the US, UK and the euro zone. The only solution is collapse. There can be no saving the system. It is only a matter of time and what the catalyst is. It could be Greece.

Bob Chapman is a frequent contributor to Global Research.  Global Research Articles by Bob Chapman

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=25316

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