Governments Have Been Covering Up Nuclear Meltdowns for Fifty Years to Protect the Nuclear Power Industry

 Posted on March 19, 2011 by WashingtonsBlog   

As a History Chanel special notes, a nuclear meltdown occurred at the world’s first commercial reactor only 30 miles from downtown Los Angeles, and only 7 miles from the community of Canoga Park and the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles.
Specifically, in 1959, there was a meltdown of one-third of the nuclear reactors at the Santa Susana field laboratory operated by Rocketdyne, releasing – according to some scientists’ estimates – 240 times as much radiation as Three Mile Island.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRdC5I0Yn2k&feature=player_embedded

But the Atomic Energy Commission lied and said only there was only 1 partially damaged rod, and no real problems. In fact, the AEC kept the meltdown a state secret for 20 years.
There were other major accidents at that reactor facility, which the AEC and Nuclear Regulatory Commission covered up as well. See this.
Kyshtm
Two years earlier, a Russian government reactor at Kyshtm melted down in an accident which some claim was even worse than Chernobyl.
The Soviet government hid the accident, pretending that it was creating a new “nature reserve” to keep people out of the huge swath of contaminated land.
Journalist Anna Gyorgy alleges that the results of a freedom of information act request show that the CIA knew about the accident at the time, but kept it secret to prevent adverse consequences for the fledgling American nuclear industry.
1980s Studies and Hearings
In 1982, the House Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs received a secret report received from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission called “Calculation of Reactor Accident Consequences 2″.
In that report and other reports by the NRC in the 1980s, it was estimated that there was a 50% chance of a nuclear meltdown within the next 20 years which would be so large that it would contaminate an area the size of the State of Pennsylvania, which would result in huge numbers of a fatalities, and which would cause damage in the hundreds of billions of dollars (in 1980s dollars).
Those reports were kept secret for decades.
Other Evidence
Well-known writer Alvin Toffler pointed out in Powershift (page 156):

At least thirty times between 1957 and 1985—more than once a year—the Savannah River nuclear weapons plant near Aiken, South Carolina, experienced what a scientist subsequently termed “reactor incidents of greatest significance.” These included widespread leakage of radioactivity and a meltdown of nuclear fuel. But not one of these was reported to local residents or to the public generally. Nor was action taken when the scientist submitted an internal memorandum about these “incidents.” The story did not come to light until exposed in a Congressional hearing in 1988. The plant was operated by E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Company for the U.S. government, and Du Pont was accused of covering up the facts. The company immediately issued a denial, pointing out that it had routinely reported the accidents to the Department of Energy.

At this point, the DoE, as it is known, accepted the blame for keeping the news secret.
And former soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev said on camera for a Discovery Network special (“The Battle of Chernobyl”) that the Soviets and Americans have each hidden a number of nuclear accidents from the public. (17:02 into video.)
Ongoing?
In light of the foregoing, the following quote from the San Jose Mercury News may not seem so far-fetched:

EPA officials, however, refused to answer questions or make staff members available to explain the exact location and number of monitors, or the levels of radiation, if any, being recorded at existing monitors in California. Margot Perez-Sullivan, a spokeswoman at the EPA’s regional headquarters in San Francisco, said the agency’s written statement would stand on its own.
Critics said the public needs more information.
“It’s disappointing,” said Bill Magavern, director of Sierra Club California. “I have a strong suspicion that EPA is being silenced by those in the federal government who don’t want anything to stand in the way of a nuclear power expansion in this country, heavily subsidized by taxpayer money.”

Coverup: Risk of Nuclear Melt-Down in U.S. Higher than it was at Fukushima

U.S. Nuclear Facilities

Numerous American nuclear reactors are built within flood zones:
As one example, on the following map (showing U.S. nuclear power plants built within earthquake zones), the red lines indicate the Mississippi and Missouri rivers: Numerous dam failures have occurred within the U.S.:

Reactors in Nebraska and elsewhere were flooded by swollen rivers and almost melted down. See this, this, this and this.
The Huntsville Times wrote in an editorial last year:

A tornado or a ravaging flood could just as easily be like the tsunami that unleashed the final blow [at Fukushima as an earthquake].

An engineer with the NRC says that a reactor meltdown is an “absolute certainty” if a dam upstream of a nuclear plant fails … and that such a scenario is hundreds of times more likely than the tsunami that hit Fukushima :

An engineer with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) … Richard Perkins, an NRC reliability and risk engineer, was the lead author on a July 2011 NRC report detailing flood preparedness. He said the NRC blocked information from the public regarding the potential for upstream dam failures to damage nuclear sites.
Perkins, in a letter submitted Friday with the NRC Office of Inspector General, said that the NRC “intentionally mischaracterized relevant and noteworthy safety information as sensitive, security information in an effort to conceal the information from the public.” The Huffington Post first obtained the letter.
***
The report in question was completed four months after … Fukushima.
The report concluded that, “Failure of one or more dams upstream from a nuclear power plant may result in flood levels at a site that render essential safety systems inoperable.”

Huffington Post reported last month:

These charges were echoed in separate conversations with another risk engineer inside the agencywho suggested that the vulnerability at one plant in particular — the three-reactor Oconee Nuclear Station near Seneca, S.C. — put it at risk of a flood and subsequent systems failure, should an upstream dam completely fail, that would be similar to the tsunami that hobbled the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility in Japan last year.***
The engineer is among several nuclear experts who remain particularly concerned about the Oconee plant in South Carolina, which sits on Lake Keowee, 11 miles downstream from the Jocassee Reservoir. Among the redacted findings in the July 2011 report — and what has been known at the NRC for years, the engineer said — is that the Oconee facility, which is operated by Duke Energy, would suffer almost certain core damage if the Jocassee dam were to fail. And the odds of it failing sometime over the next 20 years, the engineer said, are far greater than the odds of a freak tsunami taking out the defenses of a nuclear plant in Japan.
“The probability of Jocassee Dam catastrophically failing is hundreds of times greater than a 51 foot wall of water hitting Fukushima Daiichi,” the engineer said. “And, like the tsunami in Japan, the man‐made ‘tsunami’ resulting from the failure of the Jocassee Dam will –- with absolute certainty –- result in the failure of three reactor plants along with their containment structures.
“Although it is not a given that Jocassee Dam will fail in the next 20 years,” the engineer added, “it is a given that if it does fail, the three reactor plants will melt down and release their radionuclides into the environment.”
***

In the letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Huffington Post, Richard H. Perkins, a reliability and risk engineer with the agency’s division of risk analysis, alleged that NRC officials falsely invoked security concerns in redacting large portions of a report detailing the agency’s preliminary investigation into the potential for dangerous and damaging flooding at U.S. nuclear power plants due to upstream dam failure.
Perkins, along with at least one other employee inside NRC, also an engineer, suggested that the real motive for redacting certain information was to prevent the public from learning the full extent of these vulnerabilities, and to obscure just how much the NRC has known about the problem, and for how long.

Huffington Post notes today:

An un-redacted version of a recently released Nuclear Regulatory Commission report highlights the threat that flooding poses to nuclear power plants located near large dams — and suggests that the NRC has misled the public for years about the severity of the threat, according to engineers and nuclear safety advocates.
“The redacted information shows that the NRC is lying to the American public about the safety of U.S. reactors,” said David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer and safety advocate with the Union of Concerned Scientists.
***
According to the NRC’s own calculations, which were also withheld in the version of the report released in March, the odds of the dam near the Oconee plant failing at some point over the next 22 years are far higher than were the odds of an earthquake-induced tsunami causing a meltdown at the Fukushima plant.
The NRC report identifies flood threats from upstream dams at nearly three dozen other nuclear facilities in the United States, including the Fort Calhoun Station in Nebraska, the Prairie Island facility in Minnesota and the Watts Bar plant in Tennessee, among others.
***
Larry Criscione, a risk engineer at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission who is one of two NRC employees who have now publicly raised questions about both the flood risk at Oconee and the agency’s withholding of related information, said assertions that the plant is “currently able to mitigate flooding events,” amounted to double-speak.
Criscione said this is because current regulations don’t include the failure of the Jocassee Dam — 11 miles upriver from Oconee — in the universe of potential flooding events that might threaten the plant. “I think they’re being dishonest,” Criscione said in a telephone interview. “I think that we currently intend to have Duke Energy improve their flooding protection and to say that the current standard is adequate is incorrect.”
According to the leaked report, NRC stated unequivocally in a 2009 letter to Duke that it believed that “a Jocassee Dam failure is a credible event” and that Duke had “not demonstrated that the Oconee Nuclear Station units will be adequately protected.” These statements — along with Duke’s own flood timeline associated with a Jocassee Dam failure and NRC’s calculated odds of such a failure — were among many details that were blacked out of the earlier, publicly released report.
***
Richard H. Perkins, a risk engineer with the NRC and the lead author of the leaked report, pointed to the analysis by the Association of Dam Safety Officials in an email message to The Huffington Post. “I felt it made a significant point that large, fatal, dam failures occur from time to time,” he said. “They are generally unexpected and they can kill lots of people. It’s not credible to say ‘dam failures are not credible.’”
Dave Lochbaum, the Union of Concerned Scientists engineer who reviewed a copy of the un-redacted report, says these revelations directly contradict the NRC’s assertions that Oconee is currently safe. “Fukushima operated just under 40 years before their luck ran out,” Lochbaum, who worked briefly for the NRC himself between 2009 and 2010, and who now heads the Nuclear Safety Project at UCS, said in a phone call. “If it ever does occur here, the consequences would be very, very high.
“Japan is now building higher sea walls at other plants along its coasts. That’s great for those plants, but it’s too late for Fukushima. If in hindsight you think you should have put the wall in,” Lochbaum said, “then in foresight you should do it now.”

Other Comparisons Between Dangers In U.S. and Fukushima

There are, in fact, numerous parallels between Fukushima and vulnerable U.S. plants.
A Japanese government commission found that the Fukushima accident occurred because Tepco and the Japanese government were negligent, corrupt and in collusion. See this, this and this. The U.S. NRC is similarly corrupt.
The operator of the Fukushima complex admitted earlier this month that it knew of the extreme vulnerability of its plants, but:

If the company were to implement a severe-accident response plan, it would spur anxiety throughout the country and in the community where the plant is sited, and lend momentum to the antinuclear movement ….

The U.S. has 23 reactors which are virtually identical to Fukushima.
Most American nuclear reactors are old. They are aging poorly, and are in very real danger of melting down.
And yet the NRC is relaxing safety standards at the old plants. Indeed, while many of the plants are already past the service life that the engineers built them for, the NRC is considering extending licenses another 80 years, which former chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority and now senior adviser with Friends of the Earth’s nuclear campaign David Freeman calls “committing suicide”:

You’re not just rolling the dice, you’re practically committing suicide … everyone living within a 50 mile radius is a guinea pig.

Indeed, the Fukushima reactors were damaged by earthquake even before the tsunami hit (confirmed here). And the American reactors may be even more vulnerable to earthquakes than Fukushima.
Moreover, the top threat from Fukushima are the spent fuel pools. And American nuclear plants have fuel pool problems which could dwarf the problems at Fukushima.
And neither government is spending the small amounts it would take to harden their reactors against a power outage.
The parallels run even deeper. Specifically, the American government has largely been responsible for Japan’s nuclear policy for decades. And U.S. officials are apparently a primary reason behind Japan’s cover-up of the severity of the Fukushima accident … to prevent Americans from questioning our similarly-vulnerable reactors.

The Biggest Financial Scandal In History? #Libor

We always knew that the financial markets were rigged, but this is getting ridiculous.  It is now being alleged that 20 major banks have been systematically fixing global interest rates for years.  Barclays has already been fined hundreds of millions of dollars for manipulating Libor (the London Inter Bank Offered Rate).  But Barclays says that a whole bunch of other banks were doing this too.  This is shaping up to be the biggest financial scandal in history, and criminal investigations have been launched on both sides of the Atlantic.  What those investigations are likely to uncover could shake the financial markets to their very core.  In the end, this scandal could absolutely devastate confidence in the global financial system and it could potentially bring down a number of major global banks.  We have never seen anything quite like this before.

What Is Libor?
As mentioned before, Libor is the London Inter Bank Offered Rate.  A recent Washington Post article contained a pretty good explanation of what that means....

In the simplest terms, LIBOR is the average interest rate which banks in London are charging each other for borrowing. It’s calculated by Thomson Reuters — the parent company of the Reuters news agency — for the British Banking Association (BBA), a trade association of banks and financial services companies.

Why Does Libor Matter?
If you have a mortgage, a car loan or a credit card, then there is a very good chance that Libor has affected your personal finances.  Libor has been a factor in the pricing of hundreds of trillions of dollars of loans, securities and assets.  The following is from a recent article by Maureen Farrell....

These traders influenced the pricing of the London Interbank Offered Rate or Libor, a benchmark that dictates the pricing of up to $800 trillion of securities (yes trillion)

$800 trillion?
That is a number that is hard to even imagine.
Most American consumers do not even know what Libor is, but it actually plays a key role in the U.S. economy as the Washington Post recently explained....

In the United States, the two biggest indices for adjustable rate mortgages and other consumer debt are the prime rate (that is, the rate banks charge favored or “prime” consumers) and LIBOR, with the latter particularly popular for subprime loans. A study from Mark Schweitzer and Guhan Venkatu at the Cleveland Fed looked at survey data in Ohio and found that by 2008, almost 60 percent of prime adjustable rate mortgages, and nearly 100 percent of subprime ones, were indexed to LIBOR

Who Was Involved In This Scandal?
According to the Daily Mail, in addition to Barclays it is being alleged that at least 20 banks (including some major U.S. banks) were involved in this interest rate fixing scandal....

Hundreds of bankers across three continents are embroiled in the interest-rate fixing scandal that has left Barclays chief executive Bob Diamond fighting to save his job.
As pressure intensified on Britain’s highest paid banking boss to quit, MPs heard a string of other financial institutions across the world were under investigation.
At least 20 banks are believed to be under suspicion, with growing demands for a criminal investigation.

There are also indications that the Bank of England itself may have been involved in this scandal.
What Did They Do?
Employees at Barclays (and apparently at about 20 other major banks) were brazenly manipulating interest rates.  A recent Yahoo Finance article described how this worked...

To help the bank's trading positions between 2005 and 2009, and most notably during the global financial crisis of 2007-09, the bank made false submissions to the Libor-setting committee, which agrees rates daily in London.
At the request of its own traders of interest-rate derivatives, Barclays made false submissions relating to Libor and Euribor (the eurozone benchmark rate). By doing this, Barclays personnel aimed to help their trading colleagues to profit by manipulating Libor.
Rigging the world's leading benchmark for interest rates is pretty serious stuff. Indeed, in the words of the FSA, "Barclays' behaviour threatened the integrity of the rates, with the risk of serious harm to other market participants".

Many in the financial world have been absolutely horrified by the details of this scandal that have been emerging.
One recent CNN article declared that "the stench" coming from London is now "overwhelming"....

The Libor scandal has confirmed what many of us have known for some time: There is something smelly in the London financial world and the stench is now overwhelming.
But It is only when I read the Financial Services Authority report -- all 44 pages of it -- that is became clear just how widespread, how blatant was the fixing of the benchmark interest rate Libor and Euribor by Barclays. Brazen is the only word for it.
The emails and phone calls reveal that on dozens of occasions those who stood to gain by the decisions asked for favors (and got them) from those who helped set the interest rates.

You can read many examples of the kinds of emails that were exchanged between traders in New York and traders at Barclays in London right here.
What Does This Scandal Mean For The Future?
This scandal is making the global financial system look really, really bad.  Confidence in global financial markets has already been declining, and these new revelations are not going to help at all.  The following is how an article in the Huffington Post put it....

The ballooning interest rate manipulation scandal at Barclays, coupled with stock market instability, is likely to fuel fresh doubts about the integrity of the stock market, insiders said.
“Every time people begin to gain a little confidence, something else comes up,” said Randy Frederick, managing director of active trading and derivatives at Charles Schwab. “If it’s not Europe, it’s [troubled] IPOs, or JPMorgan or Barclays. Something new blows up and people say, ‘I knew it was rigged.’"

In addition, we are undoubtedly going to see a huge wave of lawsuits come out of this scandal.  Those lawsuits alone will gum up the financial system for a decade or more.
So needless to say, this is a very big deal.  Sadly, the revelations that have come out about Barclays in recent days are probably just the very tip of the iceberg.  Before this is all over, we are probably going to find out that most of the major global banks were involved.

At a time when the global financial system is already on the verge of a major implosion, this is not welcome news.  This financial scandal is just another reason to be deeply concerned about the second half of 2012.  The house of cards is starting to look really shaky, and nobody knows exactly when it will fall, but anyone with half a brain can see that things are progressively getting worse.
A "perfect storm" is rapidly developing, and when it strikes it is going to be very, very painful.

Quantitative Easing Did Not Work For The #Weimar Republic Either

By Michael Snyder
Economic Collapse
Sept 26, 2012
Did printing vast quantities of money work for the Weimar Republic?  Nope.  And it won’t work for us either.

If printing money was the secret to economic success, we could just print up a trillion dollars for every American and be done with it.  The truth is that making everyone in America a trillionaire would not mean that we would all suddenly be wealthy.  There would be the same amount of “real wealth” in our economy as before.  But what it would do is render our currency meaningless and totally destroy faith in our financial system.Sadly, we have not learned the lessons that history has tried to teach us.  Back in April 1919, it took 12 German marks to get 1 U.S. dollar.  By December 1923, it took approximately 4 trillion German marks to get 1 U.S. dollar.
So was the Weimar Republic better off after all of the “quantitative easing” that they did or worse off?  Of course they were worse off.  They destroyed their currency and wrecked all confidence in their financial system.  There was an old joke that if you left a wheelbarrow full of money sitting around in the Weimar Republic that thieves would take the wheelbarrow and they would leave the money behind.

Will things eventually get that bad in the United States someday?
Of course we are not going to see hyperinflation in the U.S. this week or this month.
But don’t think that it will never happen.  The people of Germany never thought that it would happen to them, but it did.  The following is an excerpt from a Wikipedia article about the Weimar Republic.  Take note of the similarities between what the Weimar Republic experienced and what we are going through today….

The cause of the immense acceleration of prices that occurred during the German hyperinflation of 1922–23 seemed unclear and unpredictable to those who lived through it, but in retrospect was relatively simple.
The Treaty of Versailles imposed a huge debt on Germany that could be paid only in gold or foreign currency. With its gold depleted, the German government attempted to buy foreign currency with German currency, but this caused the German Mark to fall rapidly in value, which greatly increased the number of Marks needed to buy more foreign currency.
This caused German prices of goods to rise rapidly which increase the cost of operating the German government which could not be financed by raising taxes. The resulting budget deficit increased rapidly and was financed by the central bank creating more money. When the German people realized that their money was rapidly losing value, they tried to spend it quickly.
This increase in monetary velocity caused still more rapid increase in prices which created a vicious cycle. This placed the government and banks between two unacceptable alternatives: if they stopped the inflation this would cause immediate bankruptcies, unemployment, strikes, hunger, violence, collapse of civil order, insurrection, and revolution.
If they continued the inflation they would default on their foreign debt. The attempts to avoid both unemployment and insolvency ultimately failed when Germany had both.

When the Weimar Republic first started rapidly printing money everything seemed fine at first.  Economic activity was buzzing and unemployment was very low.
But as the following chart shows, when hyperinflation kicks in, it can happen very quickly.  By late 1922, the effects of all of the money printing were really starting to hit the German economy….

Once you start printing money it is really, really hard to stop.
By late 1922, inflation was officially out of control.  An article in The Economist described what happened next….

Prices roared up. So did unemployment, modest as 1923 began. As October ended, 19% of metal-workers were officially out of work, and half of those left were on short time. Feeble attempts had been made to stabilise prices. Some German states had issued their own would-be stable currency: Baden’s was secured on the revenue of state forests, Hanover’s convertible into a given quantity of rye.
The central authorities issued what became known as “gold loan” notes, payable in 1935. Then, on November 15th, came the Rentenmark, worth 1,000 billion paper marks, or just under 24 American cents, like the gold mark of 1914.

Hyperinflation hurts the poor, the elderly and those on fixed incomes the worst.  The following is an excerpt from a work by Adam Fergusson….

The rentier classes who depended on savings or pensions, and anyone on a fixed income, were soon in penury, their possessions sold. Barter often took over from purchase. By law rents could not be raised, which allowed employers to pay low wages and impoverished landlords in a country where renting was the norm. The professional classes — lawyers, doctors, scientists, professors — found little demand for their services.
In due course, the trade unions, no longer able to strike for higher wages (often uncertain what to ask for, so fast became the mark’s fall from day to day), went to the wall, too.

Workers regularly got wage increases during this time, but they never seemed to keep up with the horrible inflation that was raging all around them.  So they steadily became poorer even though the amount of money they were bringing home was steadily increasing.
People started to lose all faith in the currency and in the financial system.  This had an absolutely devastating effect on the German population.  American author Pearl Buck was living in Germany at the time and the following is what she wrote about what she saw….

“The cities were still there, the houses not yet bombed and in ruins, but the victims were millions of people. They had lost their fortunes, their savings; they were dazed and inflation-shocked and did not understand how it had happened to them and who the foe was who had defeated them.
Yet they had lost their self-assurance, their feeling that they themselves could be the masters of their own lives if only they worked hard enough; and lost, too, were the old values of morals, of ethics, of decency.”

Of course not everyone in Germany was opposed to the rampant inflation that was happening.  There were some business people that became very wealthy during this time.
The hyperinflation rendered their past debts meaningless, and by investing paper money (that would soon be worthless) into assets that would greatly appreciate thanks to inflation, many of them made out like bandits.
The key was to take your paper money and spend it on something that would hold value (or even increase in value) as rapidly as possible.
The introduction of the Rentenmark brought an end to hyperinflation, but the damage to the stability of the German economy had been done.  The German economy went through several wild swings which ultimately resulted in the rise of the Nazis.  The following description of this time period is from an article by Alex Kurtagic….

The post-hyperinflationary credit crunch was, not surprisingly followed by a credit boom: starved of money and basic necessities for so long (do not forget the hyperinflation had come directly after defeat in The Great War), many funded lavish lifestyles through borrowing during the second half of the 1920s. We know how that ended, of course: in The Great Depression, which eventually saw the end of the Weimar Republic and the beginning of the National Socialist era.

By the end of the decade unemployment really started to take hold in Germany as the following statistics reveal….
September 1928 – 650,000 unemployed
September 1929 – 1,320,000 unemployed
September 1930 – 3,000,000 unemployed
September 1931 – 4,350,000 unemployed
September 1932 – 5,102,000 unemployed
January 1933 – 6,100,000 unemployed
By the end of 1932, over 30 percent of all German workers were unemployed.  This created an environment where people were hungry for “change”.
On January 30th, 1933 Hitler was sworn in as chancellor, and the rest is history.
So where will all of this money printing take America?
As I wrote about in a previous article, the amount of excess reserves that banks have stashed with the Federal Reserve has risen from about 9 billion dollars on September 10th, 2008 to about 1.5 trillion dollars today….

What is going to happen to inflation when all of those excess reserves start flowing out into the regular economy?
It won’t be pretty.
Just consider the ominous words that Philadelphia Fed President Charles Plosser used earlier this week….

“Inflation is going to occur when excess reserves of this huge balance sheet begin to flow outside into the real economy.  I can’t tell you when that’s going to happen.”
“When that does begin if we don’t engage in a fairly aggressive and effective policy of preventing that from happening, there’s no question in my mind that that will lead to lots of inflation.”

Oh great.
And so what is Bernanke doing?
He is printing up lots more money.
But isn’t this supposed to help the economy?
I wouldn’t count on it.
According to USA Today, the following is what Plosser says about the effect that QE3 is likely to have on our economy….

“We are unlikely to see much benefit to growth or to employment from further asset purchases.”

But we will get more inflation, so our monthly budgets will not go as far as they did before.
The other day I was going to the supermarket, and my wife told me that she wanted some croissants.  When I got to the bakery section I discovered that it was $4.49 for just four croissants.
If it had just been for me, I would have never gotten them.  I am the kind of shopper that doesn’t even want to look at something unless there is a sale tag on it.
But I did get the croissants for my wife.
Unfortunately, thanks to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke soon none of us may be able to afford to buy croissants.
I still remember the days when I could fill up my entire shopping cart for 20 bucks.
And it was not that long ago – I am talking about the late 90s.
But paying more for food is not the greatest danger we are facing.  Bernanke is destroying the credibility of our currency and he is destroying faith in our financial system.
Bernanke may believe that he is preventing the next great collapse from happening, but the truth is that what he is doing is going to make the eventual collapse far worse.
Better get your wheelbarrows ready.

In July Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke actually sent five thank you letters to members of Congress that gave speeches on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives encouraging their fellow lawmakers to vote against the bill to audit the Fed.

By Michael Snyder
Economic Collapse
Oct 1, 2012

The Federal Reserve continues to pump up this “bubble economy” by recklessly printing money and by setting interest rates artificially low, and the U.S. Congress continues to stand aside and allow them to systematically destroy our economy.
The U.S. Congress could choose to end this madness at any time, but the truth is that Congress won’t even pass a law that would allow the American people to see what is going on over at the Federal Reserve.
Congress has voted down every single bill that would authorize a comprehensive audit of the Federal Reserve.  So the folks over at the Fed will continue to be able to destroy our future in secret.
In fact, back in July Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke actually sent five thank you letters to members of Congress that gave speeches on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives encouraging their fellow lawmakers to vote against the bill to audit the Fed.

Since the U.S. Congress continues to refuse to do anything to hold the Federal Reserve accountable, the Fed will continue to print unprecedented amounts of money, it will continue to set interest rates insanely low and it will continue to pump up the greatest debt bubble in the history of the world.
Unfortunately, all debt bubbles eventually burst, and when this one does it is going to be a financial nightmare unlike anything we have ever seen before.

It was Politico that first broke the story about the thank you letters that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke sent to five members of Congress back in July.

Bernanke acknowledged in the letters that there was never any worry that the “Audit the Fed” bill would actually get through Congress and be signed into law, but he was still extremely grateful that a number of members of Congress got up and publicly denounced the bill….

In July, the Fed chairman sent letters of gratitude to five Democratic members of Congress after they delivered speeches on the House floor urging fellow lawmakers to reject the “Audit the Fed” bill authored by retiring Texas Republican Ron Paul, the central bank’s chief antagonist.
Their efforts failed to defeat the bill, but they were not in vain, at least in Bernanke’s eyes.
“While the outcome of the vote was not in doubt, your willingness to stand up for the independence of the Federal Reserve is greatly appreciated,” Bernanke wrote in the letters, which were obtained by POLITICO through a Freedom of Information Act request.

So who did Bernanke send those letters to?
According to Politico, the thank you letters were delivered to U.S. Representatives Barney Frank, Elijah Cummings, Melvin Watt, Carolyn Maloney and Steny Hoyer.
By refusing to take action against the Federal Reserve, the U.S. Congress is silently endorsing their incredibly foolish policies.

Sadly, most Americans don’t even realize that the Federal Reserve has more control over our economy than anyone else does.
Most Americans that are actually concerned about politics are busy arguing over whether Obama or Romney will be better for the economy when it is actually the Fed that controls the levers of economic power.  Just think about it.

The Federal Reserve played a major role in creating the housing bubble which severely damaged our financial system a few years ago.  As the chart below shows, after 9/11 the Federal Reserve dropped interest rates to historically low levels.  This allowed potential home buyers to get into much larger mortgages, and the big banks (which the Fed supposedly “regulates”) started making home loans to almost anyone with a pulse.  When interest rates started to go back up to normal levels in 2005, many home owners discovered that their adjustable rate mortgages started to become much more painful.  By 2007, we started to see a massive wave of mortgage defaults.  In 2008, the financial system crashed.  In response to the financial crisis of 2008, the Federal Reserve dropped interest rates to record low levels.  The effective federal funds rate is essentially at zero at this point, and the Fed has promised to keep interest rates at ultra-low levels all of the way into 2015.
But didn’t artificially low interest rates cause many of our problems in the first place?  The central planners over at the Fed are convinced that this is the right course for our economy, but can we really live in a zero interest rate bubble indefinitely?  Won’t this eventually cause even greater problems?….

The Fed is also destroying our economy by recklessly printing money.
Once upon a time, the U.S. monetary base rose at a very steady pace.  But since the financial crisis of 2008, Ben Bernanke has been flooding the financial system with money and this has caused an unprecedented explosion in our money supply.
It isn’t too hard to see from this chart what the foolish “quantitative easing” policies of the Federal Reserve have done to our monetary base….

Fortunately a lot of the money from previous rounds of quantitative easing is being stashed by the big banks as “excess reserves” with the Federal Reserve, but when that money starts flowing into the “real economy” (and it will at some point), we are going to have a major problem on our hands.
But more than tripling our monetary base was not enough for Bernanke.  He recently announced yet another round of quantitative easing which he says will last indefinitely.
Basically, Bernanke is taking a sledgehammer to the U.S. dollar.  Our currency is being systematically destroyed, and the U.S. Congress is standing by and doing nothing.
For a lot more on why QE3 is going to be so incredibly destructive for our economy, please see the following five articles….
-”QE3: Helicopter Ben Bernanke Unleashes An All-Out Attack On The U.S. Dollar”
-”How QE3 Will Make The Wealthy Even Wealthier While Causing Living Standards To Fall For The Rest Of Us”
-”The Federal Reserve Is Systematically Destroying Social Security And The Retirement Plans Of Millions Of Americans”
-”QE4? The Big Wall Street Banks Are Already Complaining That QE3 Is Not Enough”
-”Quantitative Easing Did Not Work For The Weimar Republic Either”
The Federal Reserve seems to think that printing more money is always the solution to whatever economic problems we are having.
But of course the Fed has been debasing our currency from the very beginning.  The entire Federal Reserve system is designed to create inflation.
From the time that the Federal Reserve was created back in 1913, the purchasing power of a U.S. dollar has declined from $1.00 to only about 4 pennies today.
And now Bernanke seems bound and determined to wipe out those last 4 pennies.
The Federal Reserve system was also designed to create a never ending spiral of government debt.
Sadly, most Americans simply have no idea where money comes from.  Most Americans have no idea that money that the Federal Reserve zaps into existence out of thin air is loaned to the U.S. government at interest.  Most Americans have no idea that the primary reason why we are 16 trillion dollars in debt is because this is what the system was designed to do to us.
Today, the U.S. national debt is more than 5000 times larger than it was when the Federal Reserve was originally created in 1913.  This did not happen by accident….

Not that our politicians should be off the hook for this.  They have been spending money as if there is no tomorrow.  Most of them have shown no concern at all about the legacy of debt that they are passing on to future generations of Americans.
If our politicians had been more responsible, the national debt would still be there, but it would be at a much more manageable level.
If we ever want to totally get rid of our national debt, the Federal Reserve must be abolished.
There is no other way.
And government debt is not the only bubble that the Federal Reserve has pumped up.
The following is a chart that shows the growth of all forms of debt (government, business, consumer, etc.) in the United States.  The total amount of debt in the United States has grown from less than $2 trillion to more than $55 trillion over the past 40 years….

How in the world could we have been so foolish?
How in the world did we allow the total amount of debt in our country to get more than 27 times larger over the past 40 years?
As you can see, there was a slight “hiccup” in the bubble as a result of the financial crisis of 2008, but now it has started growing again.
At this point our entire financial system is based on debt, and if the debt bubble does not continue to expand the entire thing will collapse.
But no financial bubble grows forever.  History has proven that to us over and over.
At some point this bubble is going to burst.
When it does, we will either experience a deflationary collapse or a hyperinflationary collapse depending on how “the powers that be” respond to what is happening.
History has shown us that financial collapse is often accompanied by social upheaval.   Many times it even leads to war.
So what will happen to America when our economic collapse happens?
That is a very good question.
How would you answer it?

#QE4? The Big Wall Street Banks Are Already Complaining That QE3 Is Not Enough

The Economic Collapse Blog
September 25, 2012
QE3 has barely even started and some folks on Wall Street are already clamoring for QE4.
In fact, as you will read below, one equity strategist at Morgan Stanley says that he would not be “surprised” if the Federal Reserve announced another new round of money printing by the end of the year.  But this is what tends to happen when a financial system starts becoming addicted to easy money.
There is always a deep hunger for another “hit” of “currency meth”.  Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke was probably hoping that QE3 would satisfy the wolves on Wall Street for a while.
His promise to recklessly print 40 billion dollars a month and use it to buy mortgage-backed securities is being called “QEInfinity” by detractors.  During QE3, nearly half a trillion dollars a year will be added to the financial system until the Fed decides that it is time to stop.  This is so crazy that even former Federal Reserve officials are speaking out against it.
For example, former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker says that QE3 is the “most extreme easing of monetary policy” that he could ever remember.  But the big Wall Street banks are never going to be satisfied.
If QE4 is announced, they will start calling for QE5.  As I noted in a previous article, quantitative easing tends to pump up the prices of financial assets such as stocks and commodities, and that is very good for Wall Street bankers.
So of course they want more quantitative easing.  They always want bigger profits and bigger bonus checks at the end of the year.
But at this point the Federal Reserve has already “jumped the shark”.  If you don’t know what “jumping the shark” means, you can find a definition on Wikipedia right here.  Whatever shreds of credibility the Fed had left are being washed away by a flood of newly printed money.
Those running the Fed have essentially used up all of their bullets and the next great financial crisis has not even fully erupted yet.
So what is the Fed going to do if the stock market crashes and the credit market freezes up like we saw back in 2008?
How much more extreme can the Fed go?
One can just picture “Helicopter Ben” strapping on a pair of water skis and making the following promise….
“We are going to print so much money that we’ll make Zimbabwe and the Weimar Republic look like wimps!”
Sadly, the truth is that money printing is not a “quick fix” and it never has been.  Just look at Japan.  The Bank of Japan is on round 8 of their quantitative easing strategy, and yet things in Japan continue to get even worse.
But that is not going to stop the folks on Wall Street from calling for even more quantitative easing.
For example, the top U.S. equity strategist for Morgan Stanley, Adam Parker, made headlines all over the world this week by writing the following….

“QE3 will likely be insufficient to significantly boost equity markets and we wouldn’t be at all surprised to see the Fed dramatically augment this program (i.e., QE4) before year-end, particularly if economic and corporate news continue to deteriorate as they have over the past few weeks.”

Did you get what he is saying there?
He says that QE3 is not going to be enough to boost equity markets (the stock market) so more money printing will be necessary.
But wasn’t QE3 supposed to be about creating jobs and helping the middle class?
I can almost hear many of you laughing out loud already.
As I have written about before, QE3 is unlikely to change the employment picture in any significant way, but what it will do is create more inflation which will squeeze the poor, the middle class and the elderly.
The truth is that quantitative easing has always been about bailing out the banks, and the hope is that this will trickle down to the folks on Main Street as well, but that never seems to happen.
Wall Street is not calling for even more quantitative easing because it would be good for you and I.  Rather, Wall Street is calling for even more quantitative easing because it would be good for them.
A CNBC article entitled “Fed May Need to Boost QE ‘Dramatically’ This Year: Pros” discussed Wall Street’s desire for even more money printing….

The Federal Reserve’s latest easing move has been nicknamed everything from “QE3″ to “QE Infinity” to “QEternal,” but some on Wall Street question whether the unprecedented move will be QEnough.

And of course everyone pretty much understands that QE3 is definitely not going to fix our economic problems.  Even most of those on Wall Street will admit as much.  In theCNBC article mentioned above, a couple of economists named Paul Ashworth and Paul Dales at Capital Economics were quoted as saying the following….

“The Fed can commit to deliver whatever economic outcome it likes, but the problem is that  the crisis in the euro-zone and/or a stand-off in negotiations to avert the fiscal cliff in the U.S. may well reveal it to be like the proverbial Emperor with no clothes”

An emperor with no clothes?
I think the analogy fits.
The Federal Reserve is going to keep printing and printing and printing and things are not going to get any better.
At this point, economists at Goldman Sachs are already projecting that QE3 will likely stretch into 2015….

The Federal Reserve’s QE3 bond buying program announced earlier this month could last until the middle of 2015 and eventually reach $2 trillion, according to an estimate from economists at Goldman Sachs.
The Goldman economists also wrote in a report that they believe the Fed will not raise the federal funds rate until 2016. This rate, which is used as a benchmark for a wide variety of consumer and business loans, has been near 0% since December 2008. The Fed said in its last statement that it expected rates would remain low until mid-2015.

So why is Wall Street whining and complaining so loudly right now?
Well, even with all of the bailouts and even with all of the help from the first two rounds of quantitative easing, things are still tough for them.
For example, Bank of America recently announced that they will be laying off 16,000 workers.
In addition, there are rumors that 100 highly paid partners at Goldman Sachs are going to be getting the axe.  It is said that Goldman will save 2 billion dollars with such a move.
We haven’t even reached the next great financial crisis and the pink slips are already flying on Wall Street.  Meredith Whitney says that she has never seen anything quite like this….

“The industry is as bad as I’ve seen it. So it’s certainly not a great time to be on Wall Street.”

But of course Wall Street is not going to get much sympathy from the rest of America.  The truth is that things have been far rougher for most of the rest of us than things have been for them.
When the last crisis hit, they got trillions of dollars in bailout money and we got nothing.
So most people are not really in a mood to shed any tears for Wall Street.
But of course the Federal Reserve is definitely hoping to help their friends on Wall Street out by printing lots of money.
You never know, by the time this is all over we may see QE4, QE5, QE Reloaded, QE With A Vengeance and QE The Return Of The Bernanke.
Meanwhile, Europe is gearing up to print money like crazy too.
A couple months ago, European Central Bank President  Mario Draghi made the following pledge….

“Within our mandate, the European Central Bank is ready to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro, and believe me, it will be enough.”

And of course the Bank of Japan has joined the money printing party too.  The following is from a recent article by David Kotok….

The recently announced additional program by the BOJ includes a fifty-percent allocation to the purchase of ten-year Japanese government bonds. The other fifty percent will buy shorter-term government securities. Thus, the BOJ is applying half of its additional QE stimulus to extracting long duration from the government bond market, denominated in Japanese yen.

All of the central banks seem to be getting on the QE bandwagon.
But will this fix anything?
Unfortunately it will not, at least according to Paul Volcker….

“Another round of QE is understandable – but it will fail to fix the problem. There is so much liquidity in the market that adding more is not going to change the economy.”

Sadly, most Americans have a ton of faith in the people running our system, but the truth is that they really do not know what they are doing.  Just check out what Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher said the other day….

“The truth, however, is that nobody on the committee, nor on our staffs at the Board of Governors and the 12 Banks, really knows what is holding back the economy. Nobody really knows what will work to get the economy back on course. And nobody – in fact, no central bank anywhere on the planet – has the experience of successfully navigating a return home from the place in which we now find ourselves. No central bank – not, at least, the Federal Reserve – has ever been on this cruise before.”

Can you imagine the head coach of a football team coming in at halftime and telling his players the following….
“Nobody on the coaching stuff really has any idea what will work.”
That sure would not inspire a lot of confidence, would it?
Perhaps the Fed should be open to some input from the rest of us.
Actually, back on September 14th the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco posted a poll on Facebook that asked the following question….
What effect do you think QE3 will have on the U.S. economy?
The following are the 5 answers that got the most votes….
-”Long term, disastrous”
-”Negative”
-”Thanks for $5 gas”
-”I can’t believe you think this will work!”
-”Fire Bernanke”
So what do you think about the quantitative easing that the Federal Reserve is doing?
Please feel free to post a comment with your thoughts below….

The Gold Rush: Why Are We Not Being Told the Truth?

By Richard Cottrell
theintelhub.com
October 19, 2012

We are now approaching one of the most important tipping points in world history and yet we stagger on, besotted by iPhones and other electronic brain frying clutter in the expectation that things being as they are will remain the same in the future.

One can assume that the people of Hiroshima and Dresden thought that too, before they were toasted to a crisp by the latest advances in peace-keeping technology.

The entire new world order that kicked off with Bretton Woods in 1944 and then spread like a global rash – the World Bank, the IMF, the European Union – is now playing one of the most pointless mind games since our ancient ancestors taught themselves how to work markets with systems of exchange.

Forms of money made barter largely redundant. In came precious metals, and especially gold.

The bright shiny stuff was not, of course, easily portable in large quantities. So it was stocked up in treasury houses and money minted according to the value of those reserves judged against the general credit stakes of any given country.

When we read that this, that, or the other country – the US included – is ‘off’ the gold standard, this is nonsense. Nixon took the US ‘off’ the gold standard in 1971 after a caretaker checked one bright morning and found there was nothing left to actually get off.

From that moment on the dollar was consigned to its inevitable fate as a paper fiat currency, supported by other countries with large gold hoards stored at home, or as invariably became the case, in the vaults of the US Federal Reserve.

Editor’s note: The Federal Reserve has formally admitted that they do not, in fact, “officially” own any gold and have not owned gold in some time. See the testimony below:



Lately something very peculiar is happening to gold.

Largely uncommented on by the lackey corporate media, there is a silent war for gold.

The war is led by the ‘Northern Empire’, the United States, which is effectively reversing the Nixon edict by holding large quantities of bullion that belong to other countries.

Whenever the subject does come up we hear the usual ‘safe as houses’ explanation trotted out. Yet, a few canny observers are catching something on the wind that may be so shocking that it seems unreasonable, in practical terms, to contemplate.

Is the ‘Northern Empire’ planning to nationalize gold hordes held in the US on behalf of foreign depositors?

Let’s see. As of right now, 60% of Germany’s gold is locked up in the vaults of the New York Fed.

Not exactly cashable in an emergency, so to speak. Why has Germany dispatched all that heavy metal across the Atlantic?

What’s wrong with the solid basements of the Bundesbank, if the ECB smells so cheesy?

In practical terms, the Germans are in the same bind as all the other holders of US treasury notes, exchanged as shareholdings in the US economy.

The US demands gold pledges in order to prevent the dollar imploding. Gold is now the ‘ghost Bretton Woods.’  In may also be spectral in other ways, as we will shortly discover.

The unspoken truth is that the dollar system is so thoroughly rotten it makes the euro look like a lively stripling youngster.

If it were not for the fact that it owes some sixteen trillion bucks to the world – and counting – the US government might be tempted to return to the official gold standard to support the dollar.

Unfortunately, this is a misunderstanding of the problem. The American problem is the paper that the US holds – treasury commitments due to foreign central banks – not in the immediate instance, the usefulness or value of solid gold.

But the Fed is not the only central bank with a liquidity problem. The European Central Bank is close to (if not actually) insolvent – and where do you read about that in the corporate coffee house sheets

? Try this on for size. The ECB is out in the breeze for some 3.02 trillion euros at the latest audit, which put another way is about a third larger than the entire Germany economy, reckoned as that is as the power station of Europe.

This is entirely due to a second draw down of loans (bailouts) to tottering duffer states which, at the same time the ECB, in league with the EU and the IMF, is trying to bankrupt. These are the economics of the madhouse.

The ECB does not have the solid assets to back those loans. And do remember dear readers that the various beggar states of the EU are lining up begging bowls empty for another big dollop of porridge.

The real central bank in Germany – namely the Bundesbank – has worked out that should the euro go belly up, then the federal balance sheet will suffer to the extent of half a trillion euros, which is almost twice the size of the annual German state budget. Now this is not just some nightmare which blows away when the sun comes up, because there is no sign of the sun coming up.

Aux la contraire. The euro is heading steadily south in true pear-shaped fashion to Greece, Spain, Portugal, and Italy, where its unkind fate will be decided.

Meanwhile, the Fed stocks up on other people’s gold, if it can get it, that is. Hugh Chavez, the Other Castro, is not backing the western order of things.

Venezuela is the world’s 15th ranking gold holder, she has, practically speaking, more than either Saudi Arabia or the UK (no surprises there, after Gordon Brown emptied the vaults to pay the housekeeping bills, just as gold sunk to rock bottom – proof of the old adage that a fool and his money are soon parted).

Mexico’s central bank, on the other hand, has been compelled to admit that almost 95% of its modest gold holdings are held hostage in New York. Mexico is not a client of the United States.

It is a prostrate vassal. It’s an interesting role reversal if we go back to the Conquistadores who raped El Dorado to prop up a dying, decadent empire with Aztec gold.

No prizes in a reader competition to name the latest dying, decadent empire.

The Mexicans will not get their gold back, ever. Its effectively US property now and will remain so, short of the Mexican army crossing the Rio Grande.

Chavez would not have piled his hoard into New York City in any event. But the fact that he is willing to repose his faith in the Russians or the Chinese speaks volumes.

Chavez watched the fate of the Libyan state, smashed and battered back to the Stone Age for the sake of the Northern Empire getting its sticky hands on Gaddafi’s gold.

Moreover, the Russian treasury is quietly stocking up on gold, so it is not likely to snaffle the gold of others.

Putin has also amassed, as we learned recently, a huge hoard of diamonds, the world’s largest in fact. That the Kremlin should be considered a model of probity represents the fiscal equivalent of a magnetic reversal of the poles.

The Fed’s filching of other people’s wealth should not come as any surprise to anyone who follows the wholesale looting practiced by Wall Street.

The boundary is seamless, of course. If the US is quietly contemplating massive monetary world disorder, in which the only antidote would be gold to support the Northern Empire’s chief currencies, the dollar and the euro, then we begin to understand the beginnings of a bunker policy.

Yet I think this is a serious under estimate of the gravity of the approaching crisis. I opened this piece by saying that people tend to think what they see around them will still be there tomorrow.

One only has to think back to the victims of Boxing Day tsunami in 2005 to see how erroneous this can be.

In softer terms, the victims of the housing foreclosure tsunami in the United States, and those who are losing the real value of their pensions and wages in the artificially imposed austerity crisis right across Europe at this moment.

Perception is deceptive because the mainstream organs of information distort the prism of perception with falsehoods and half-truths and blind the popular audience with soap operas and organized distractions like football, the Olympic games and the recent ‘royal’ jubilee in the UK.

So we ignore the famous law promulgated by Sir Thomas Gresham (an early British entrepreneur) – actually re-formulated, because the basic tenets can be traced back to early thinkers in Arabia – concerning ‘good money driving out bad.’

Gresham and his predecessors were really sending a very important message far into the future concerning over-valued currencies displacing under-valued ones.

Of course in his day there wasn’t a single currency system embracing the whole of Europe – and no USA either.

So today we are better off reading his message as predicting a likely return to alternative payments systems in the wake of a dollar and euro collapse.

Here we find a partial explanation, at least, for the epidemic of ‘local currencies’ sprouting everywhere in Europe, right across North America, and now even in Africa.

In many cases, town, city or regional monies can be operated alongside barter or exchange systems, and which taken together, present viable alternatives to many formerly straight cash operations.

If the lights went out, life would go on, like oxbow rivers constantly seeking new channels.

It is possible now in the UK to pay some utility bills in this fashion, so, are we approaching the legalization of alternative tenders?

Why are governments nodding this through, given their struggles to support stricken mainstream currencies?  The answer of course is to continue even in some primitive form some kind of taxation system.

That is only conceivable so long as the future sees it as essential to maintain the notion of the traditional nation state, rather than a localized patchwork quilt of loyalties.

Tax is one of the main supporting buttresses of what we are still pleased to call the ‘nation-state.’

Governments are invariably wrong in everything that they do, and that is why the battle is on to save an unsaveable currency system like the euro. That is why the printing presses are working around the clock turning out fiat and dollars and euros. The show must go on. But the people pulling levers behind the streams are as about in charge of the situation as the Wizard of Oz with his fantastical smoke and mirrors.

The Mexican people were denied the right by every bureaucratic obstacle to know exactly where the nation’s gold was actually held, until the dams of conspiracy collapsed.  We do not know exactly how much gold the Bank of England really holds. It may not be very much. We do know there are pastiche, doctored gold bars around, which means effectively, in circulation (the mineral equivalent of printing money).  We also know that 60% of Germany’s gold is sleeping quietly close to the Hudson River.

We also know that the price of gold (and to some extent, silver) is ruthlessly manipulated, not so much by speculators (the usual cry) as professional riggers owing loyalties to those hubs of the Northern Empire, Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street and the ECB.

I would not be at all surprised if a full independent audit revealed that the Empire ‘s real gold stocks are lower than proclaimed, not to mention those stocks which might not pass assay.

What then if there were a run on gold? Commentators other than myself regard that as a very interesting question indeed.

Another is whether the gold (and silver) brokers are fibbing concerning how much of what is bought and sold could actually be taken away in physical form if the armored truck called.

There are no independent inventories of gold vaults. We have the feeble word of those who do not, in any event, deal in the truth as a significant medium of exchange.

The usual rent-a-quote soothsayers are only too happy to pass us off with glib assurances that springtime is just around the corner, the ‘recovery’ is under way, the ‘green shoots of prosperity’ are sprouting once again. This is so much stuff and nonsense.

The world financial order and the global economy are absolutely busted and will not be repaired by any of the quick fixes proposed by the likes of Mario Draghi, head waiter at the ECB, the preposterous little Mervyn King at the Bank of England (who wouldn’t have much better luck running a whelk stall) and ‘eyes wide closed’ Ben Bernanke, chief printer at the Fed.

The future will be peopled with robots turning out goods for diminishing consumers with nothing that could be called real work. That’s not in the far distant future, it is right now.

In such a picture, you may well ask, “what’s gold anyway?” The answer is that gold is the lubricant of an expiring system and the authorities set over our heads either do not or will not understand this.

In the circumstances it is perfectly logical to both inflate the value of gold along with how much of it really is on call for same day delivery and how much, in brute terms, is counterfeit. How much so called held stocks would not pass even a paper assay?

That said, we can now see perfectly behind that curtain where the wizards are at work.

They are performing a confidence trick by snatching up as much spare gold they can lay hands on. But, if we can’t believe in the illusion of precious metals, how then can be expected to repose our trust and faith in worthless fiat currencies?

Richard Cottrell is a writer, journalist and former European MP (Conservative). His new book Gladio: NATO’s Dagger At The Heart Of Europe is now available from Progressive Press. You may order it using the link below (or by clicking here – Gladio, NATO’s Dagger at the Heart of Europe: The Pentagon-Nazi-Mafia Terror Axis):

Note: if you use these links your purchase will also help support End the Lie by giving us a small commission while also supporting the great work that Richard Cottrell is doing. We would sincerely appreciate if you could shop through us.

Edited by Madison Ruppert

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#Fact-Checking #GMO Foods

In the last few decades many Americans have been suffering from different chronic diseases. Many factors could be contributing in the increase in chronic diseases but the most important one is indeed our diet, even more so than our lifestyle.

Many of us are so busy to hold on to our jobs, pay our monthly bills and take care of our families that we hardly even notice that we might be shopping and feeding our families with foods that don’t give us nutrients and/or arenutrition-deficient foods. While these foods give our bodies little energy to maintain its health, the even worrying prospect is when we are given toxic foods without our knowledge and foods that are genetically engineered and altered from its natural state into a DNA modified and potentially hazardous compounds.

In genetic engineering scientists take the gene of one specie and insert it into the DNA of another specie. For example cow genes have been inserted into Pig’s DNA in order to increase the milk production.

There are two major GMO crops, the herbicide tolerant crops and the pesticide producing crops. The herbicide tolerant crops are sprayed with pesticides that won’t kill plants but kill pests and insects. However the pesticide producing crops produce their own toxic insecticides that kill pests by breaking their stomach.

It took million years of evolution to do things in a certain way and not to mix and match different DNA and genes. Over these millions of years, scientists agree that even slight variation or slight mishaps could have resulted in the humans not existing on the planet. Our evolution has been a very precise and calculated phenomenon without any room for error.

Now scientists and large corporations are playing god with people’s lives and that of other specie, in particular our food chain. None of these genetically modified genes and new organisms were a part of evolution and therefore we cannot predict how they will evolve and change our habitat and the food chain that we so much depend on.

There are even more alarming hazards. While inserting genes into DNA of a plant or an animal for its modification, a virus or bacteria is also inserted which is tasked to to turn on the gene. This process in creating a foreign DNA through bacteria insertion could result in mutation and changes at the cellular level which could cause many side effects that would take years to discover past its point of no return.

It took million of  years of evolution for our bodies to digest foods with certain DNA sequence. When our body is exposed to food with a new DNA sequence, our immune system will attack it and treats it as a foreign invader. This is precisely why allergies are a common place now in US, and younger children are more prone to have allergies than 30 years ago.

Should we assume that the biotech companies will protect us from such mutations? Will they know themselves if a mutation has gone wrong before it is too late? Have safety procedures been put in place in order to make absolutely certain that precautions are taken to protect the public?

I myself am not convinced that we can rely on large corporations that have to increase their profitability ever quarter. Every few months there is an outbreak of salmonella and E. Coli bacteria in lettuce, or tomatoes, or sprouts, or chicken, or turkey or some other food product depending on where you live in the country. We have all seen and heard about these outbreaks. What is concerning to proponents of GE labeling and safety regulations and testing before human consumption is that the biotech companies have the power to manipulate the whole creating and evolution of these new GE products and make new genes without acknowledging that the new products can put the health of you and your family at risk.

We’ve been told by these multi-billion dollar biotech companies that GMO is the best technology to feed the world hunger and that isn’t simply TRUE. But, really, do you want to believe what a large “for-profit company or bank” tells you without safeguards to protect your family?

How did we live all these years without GMOs? How come all of a sudden the world can’t feed itself without GMOs? Nature does a much better job than laboratory genetic engineering; it has proven to be safe over millions of years, it’s less expensive, it is sustainable, it does not radically change mutation and make people sick or deformed or damage their organs or cause cancer.

This whole hypocrisy initiated by biotech companies that GMO is the BEST and the ONLY way to feed the world hunger is just preposterous since there are many long term side effects, dangerous toxins, and potentially serioushealth hazards associated with GMOs.

Inflammation causes many chronic diseases. The rates of chronic diseases have been increasing drastically since GMOs were introduced to public.

The figures below show increase ininflammation rate, the rate of chronic diseases such as constipation, gastroesophageal reflux, Crohn’s disease and  diabetes.

Here is Mike Taylor the deputy commissioner of FDA talking about the importance of food safety and nutrition. The original policies of FDA in 1992 points out that GMOs aren’t any different than normal foods so no further studies are required. However a lawsuit againstFDA in 1998 resulted in release of 44,000 secretive memos about GMO harms and danger.

It is self-evident that these memos are indeed a total scandal on how the FDA was dishonest about GMO safety. In fact the memos showed an overwhelming concern in the scientific community about GMOs.  Even FDA SCIENTISTS metioned in their memos how GMOs were DANGEROUS. The memos describe how GMOs could result in allergy increase, malnutrition, new diseases and pathogens.

Additionally, repeated requests by FDA scientists for a full set of long term studies on GMO side effects were ignored and the ongoing studies were stopped or banned.

What people want to know is, why would FDA stop or ban studies by the scientific community to research the safety of GMOs in our food supply?

The fact is that, Mike Taylor the deputy Commissioner of FDA is Monsanto’s former attorney and its current VP. However right now there are no regulations about GMO foods from FDA so Monsanto has the main authority to insure that GM foods aren’t hazardous. So Monsanto is making and regulating GM foods and calls them safe. This is the company that was the producer of DDT, PCBs and Agent Orange and called them safe too at the time.

Most studies and research done on GMOs side effects have been dependent on Monsanto’s funding. However independent studies performed by concerned scientists shows the alarming side effects of GMOs.

For example the American academy of environmental medicine performed independent studies on how GM foodscause immune system disorder, infertility, allergies, accelerated aging, adverse cholesterol level and many other problems like changes in kidneys, damage to liver and gastrointestinal diseases.