Taibbi: Muni Bond-Rigging Billions (on Imus)

SWAT tries to take down Internet meanie; raids grandma instead

An Evansville, Indiana SWAT team recently attempted to execute a search warrant that was issued to make an example out of an anonymous Internet user who made malicious remarks on the Web. Instead, they destroyed the home of an innocent grandmother.

When members of the Midwest town’s SWAT team plotted their raid on the alleged home of the person behind some unpleasant remarks published on an Internet forum, they invited a local television crew to accompany them so that they could catch the whole thing on camera. Instead of arresting the author of the ill-tempered posts, however, the Evansville SWAT ravaged the home of an elderly woman and confiscated her 18-year-old granddaughter’s laptop.

The SWAT team did not have the name of who they were going after. They barely even had an identity. What they did have to work with, though, was the IP address of a person who logged onto the Topix.com Web forums and made discouraging remarks about local law enforcement.

Where Does Money Come From? The Giant Federal Reserve Scam That Most Americans Do Not Understand

How is money created?  If you ask average people on the street this question, most of them have absolutely no idea.  This is rather odd, because we all use money constantly.  You would think that it would only be natural for all of us to know where it comes from.  So where does money come from?  A lot of people assume that the federal government creates our money, but that is not the case.  If the federal government could just print and spend more money whenever it wanted to, our national debt would be zero.  But instead, our national debt is now nearly 16 trillion dollars.  So why does our government (or any sovereign government for that matter) have to borrow money from anybody?  That is a very good question.  The truth is that in theory the U.S. government does not have to borrow a single penny from anyone.  But under the Federal Reserve system, the U.S. government has purposely allowed itself to be subjugated to a financial system in which it will be constantly borrowing larger and larger amounts of money.  In fact, this is how it works in the vast majority of the countries on the planet at this point.  As you will see, this kind of system is not sustainable and the structural problems caused by such a system are at the very heart of our debt problems today.

So where does money come from?  In the United States, it comes from the Federal Reserve.

More banks face interest rate rigging investigation

Robert Preston: Barclays has admitted that a group of traders lied about what it was costing the bank to borrow. Now, why does this matter?

It matters because lots and lots of deals involving clients of Barclays used the interest rate into which Barclays was feeding this information, about its own borrowing costs, to determine the profit and loss on their own deals.

It's quite hard to think of behaviour by a bank as shocking as this: not telling the truth about what it is costing you to borrow, that then becomes a benchmark for pricing other deals.

The statement from the US regulator, which levied a big chunk of the fine, talks about how Barclays was working with other banks to try to fix this interest rate.

This of course implies that Barclays is simply the first bank to settle and we will see fines and punishments against some of the other big banks of the world.

A number of banks are being investigated and could face sanctions after Barclays was fined £290m ($450m) for trying to manipulate interest rates at which banks lend to each other.

5 years Jail for a Blog? Quislings in a Kangaroo Court! - WWII War Hero: "Worse than the gas chambers, in Britain - NOW!"

"... at Leeds Magistrates' Court on 2nd February 2012, used a concealed camera to record the proceedings before District Judge Roy Anderson.   He subsequently published the recording ... on the You tube website." 

The above accusation against a man who states "WW2 veteran, born 1925, Proud to be British until the age of 70, when I began to learn that this is a ruthless, lawless, murderous & merciless Police State, just as bad as Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Russia, but less honest, the victims fewer - AS YET!

So a war hero is being threatened with 5 years in jail and or the mad house!  "... any additional directions the court may be minded to make, including, SHOULD THE COURT FIND IT APPROPRIATE, an order under the Mental Health Act 1983 (Section 14(4) of the Act)." Source

Quislings in a Kangaroo Court! This Hearing in Leeds Magistrates

Technocrat Monti hails 'historic' Italian labour reform bill

On Wednesday, the technocrat government led by Mario Monti (unelected bankster government head) obtained from the Parliament a final vote of confidence, the fifth in a few months, over the much-discussed labor market reform bill. Source

U.S. Army Admits Troops on The Streets Are Illegal

Syria Can Only End Up As a World War

Morris: Because Iran, Russia, China and Hezbollah all know they are next. And NATO has been given its orders - to bring Syria to its knees. Source

New Film Destroys Vaccine Hoax

"The science doesn't support it, the science isn't there and these policies are not based on a sound foundation of science." Alex talks with Leslie Manookian, writer and producer of the award winning film The Greater Good, a documentary that questions government vaccination policies. Source

End The Fed: Ron Paul’s Federal Reserve audit approved by House committee

By Stephen C. Webster: One of Rep. Ron Paul’s (R-TX) lifelong policy goals is on the brink of becoming a reality.

In a nearly unanimous voice vote on Wednesday, the House Oversight Committee approved a bill that would require the U.S. Federal Reserve to conduct a first-ever complete audit of its books and divulge details about its monetary policy discussions. The bill is expected to be taken up by the full House of Representatives sometime next month.

Paul, a longtime critic of the Fed and fiat currencies in general, had previously supported an audit that became part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. That audit required the Fed to disclose its lending practices during the 2008 financial crisis, revealing that the bank doled out more than $16 trillion in loans and assets swaps to financial institutions all over the world in an effort to stabilize global markets and keep credit flowing.

Paul, however, felt that the audit which ultimate cleared the U.S. Senate was a stripped down version of what he believes is needed, and most of his colleagues now agree. His bill has garnered an impressive bipartisan coalition of more than 257 co-sponsors — more than half the House — giving it enough votes to pass.

Community Banks take on Wall Street "Uncle Sam meets Mr. Market!" - Barclays PLC $450 million settlement for Market Manipulation +

Barclays PLC and its subsidiaries will pay $450 million to settle with US and UK authorities over accusations the bank attempted to manipulate key interest rates to benefit derivatives trading positions. This is just the first settlement, and a global investigation involving many of the world's biggest banks is on-going . Are you sick of this? Do you want to put your money in a bank that simply uses your deposits to make loans to finance the economy, not to finance speculation? Well we'll talk to CEO of EagleBank Ron Paul, about community banks as an alternative.

EU creates ‘pro-democracy’ regime change slush fund to ‘fight tyrants’???

By Madison Ruppert:

Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko in December 2007 (Image credit: NATALIA KOLESNIKOVA/AFP/Getty Images)

Member nations of the European Union have agreed to create a fund for “pro-democracy” purposes, which is nothing less than a thinly-veiled regime change slush fund.

While regime change has been big business for quite a while, in recent years it has been kicked up a notch or two thanks to the covert activities of groups of terrorist operatives like al Qaeda, the MEK, and armed opposition groups which are used to destabilize foreign governments which refuse to bow down before the Western powers.

Furthermore, considering the global expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), it is hardly surprising that such a fund was created to be used to overtly undermine sovereign nations.

According to Charter 97, the fund will likely be up and operational by as early as next year. It will mostly be leveraged to target the nations on the edge of the European Union who have not been so friendly to NATO and Western demands in general.

Such a nation is Belarus where President Alexander Lukashenko runs a nation where individuals are allegedly “routinely jailed for showing opposition.”