11 Dec 2012

Spooks Incorporated: Does Every Company Need its Own CIA?

By Michael Krieger: This article from Foreign Policy essentially proves what many of us have already suspected.  The ultimate in neo-feudalism is when the corporate sector and the government sector converge, and sadly in these United States this totalitarian marriage is what now dominates the landscape.  This is a very worrying trend.  From Foreign Policy:
Since 9/11, a quiet intelligence revolution has been brewing inside many of America’s leading companies. Hotel chains, cruise lines, airlines, theme parks, banks, chemical companies, consumer products manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, and even tech giants have been developing in-house intelligence units that look and act a lot like the CIA.
These offices are staffed with former CIA, FBI, and military professionals who have close ties to the U.S. government and conduct global threat reporting by working through formal channels and informal networks around the globe. This is the privatization of American intelligence that you’ve never heard of. And it’s part of the innovative and growing business of political risk management.

Bleak day for British banksters as Libor arrests follow record fine for The HSBC Gang

The reputation of Britain's banksters took a fresh battering when the HSBC gang was slapped with a record £1.2bn fine by the Capo di tutti capi of American banksters, the so called 'US regulators' for 'money laundering and sanctions busting', the first arrests were made in the Libor-rigging investigation, and nationalised Northern Rock handed the taxpayer a £270m bill to compensate customers affected by a mistake in its paperwork.
The US Department of Justice (DoJ) detailed how HSBC, Britain's biggest bank, allowed drug traffickers to launder billions of dollars in the US and billions more to be moved across borders to countries facing sanctions, such as Burma, Cuba and Libya.
The department spared HSBC a criminal prosecution only because it considered the bank too big to prosecute. Listing a catalogue of mistakes by HSBC over almost a decade, the DoJ admitted that "collateral consequences" were a factor in its decision not to pursue criminal charges. Those consequences, it said, could have included a ban on doing business in the US, resulting in huge job losses.
The fine being paid by HSBC, and a five-year deferred prosecution agreement which will keep the bank under intense scrutiny and restrict top executive bonuses, was even larger than the £940m HSBC had warned it might face to settle the allegations in July.
HSBC's chief executive, Stuart Gulliver, apologised for the events which included laundering $881m (£547m) for two drug cartels in Mexico and Columbia and accepting $15bn in unexplained "bulk cash", across the bank's counters in Mexico, Russia and other countries.

Whammies of Wall St. Witches and Alice in Switzer-land - Max Keiser with David Smith

Max Keiser  and Stacy Herbert look at the latest BIS warning of a global credit bubble caused by zero percent interest rate policies meant to appease the angry hidden people in the shadow banking system. In the second half, Max Keiser talks to David Smith of GenevaBusinessInsider.blogspot.com about the Swiss currency peg, the global game of honesty limbo in the financial sector and hoping that midnight never comes for Alice in Switzer-land. Source

A clockwork green: terrorizing children using climate change

By Nora Claypool: Apparently Climategate didn’t put global warming in a sufficiently unflattering light to prevent Al Gore from digging that zombie up and reanimating it. In a renewed effort to get a crack at those billions of dollars in carbon taxes, he’s again beating the dead horse of Global Warming by dressing it up as Climate Change.
Note: don’t forget to read Nora’s recent article, “The fiscal cliff a hoax: a ruse to rob us
A scheming UN summit is finding member nation responses understandably weak. Rising sea levels blamed on the melting ice chunks in it result from manmade global warming, right? But at the same time, there’s supposedly a water shortage?
Mere valid scientific evidence to the contrary must not be allowed to screw this up for Al. Where did the water go, into outer space? And why are there more icebergs than ever? Why has no one brought up fluid displacement properties when talking about rising ocean levels? If the Polar Cap all really did melt, which isn’t happening, the shorelines wouldn’t move an inch. This Chicken Little drill has become passé.
Al’s now infamous video “An Inconvenient Truth,” which made the rounds in America’s schools as if based on fact, is nothing more than junk science to support carbon taxation and huge profits which depend on it. As if that’s not bad enough, NASA has now jumped aboard the carbon tax gravy train. NASA is also engaged in terrorizing children who are brainwashed and psychologically manipulated into thinking Earth is a goner, unless they turn informant and get actively involved in a (mythical) fight to save it.

Israeli forces attack Palestinian NGOs offices in West Bank

Press TV: Israeli regime forces have attacked the offices of three Palestinian non-government organizations (NGOs) in the West Bank, confiscating computers and other material, one of the groups said. Source

October US Exports Plunge By Most Since January 2009 As Trade Deficit With China Hits Record

Tyler Durden's picture The boost to GDP from the declining US trade deficit is over. While the September trade deficit number was revised further lower, to $40.3 billion from $41.5 previously, October saw a pick up to $42.2 billion, slightly less than the expected $42.7 billion, but a headwind to Q4 GDP already. As a result, expect a modest boost to Q3 GDP in its final revision, even as Q4 GDP continues to contract below its consensus of sub stall-speed ~1%. The reason for the decline: a 3.6% decline in exports of goods and services. This was the biggest percent drop in exports since January 2009 as the traditional US import partners are all wrapped in a major recession. What helped, however, was the offsetting drop in imports by 2.1%, the lowest since April 2011, as US businesses are likewise consumed by a concerns about the global economy. And without global trade, whose nexus just happens to be Europe, there can be no global or even regional recovery. So far, all hopes of a pick up in global economy have been largely dashed. Yet one country benefits from the ongoing US slump is China: imports from China - consisting primarily of computers and toys, games, and sporting goods- jumped 6.4% to a record $40.3 billion, offset be a modest rise in exports - primarily soybeans - to $10.8 billion, bring the China deficit to a record $29.5 billion from $29.1 billion in September. Of course, one wouldn't get that impression looking at the Chinese side of the ledger: the Chinese Customs department, reported a September and October trade surplus with the US amounting to $21.1 and $21.7 billion. One wonders, somewhat, where the over $16 billion difference has gone.

Steve Keen - Lessons On The Fiscal Cliff From The 1930s

Tyler Durden's picture The infamous debunker of most-things-classically-economic was recently asked to brief Congress on the fiscal cliff, and how the downturn of 1937 could be a foretaste of what will happen if the Cliff comes to pass. The paper, slides, and presentation - designed to be simple enough for Dennis Kucinich and his colleagues in Congress to comprehend - provide another glimpse as Steve Keen argues that an attempt by the government to reduce its debt now may trigger a renewed bout of deleveraging by the private sector - and this is what appeared to happen in 1937, when confidence that the worst of the Depression was over led to the government reducing its deficit.
Private sector deleveraging, which had stopped in 1934-35, began once more and unemployment rapidly rose from about 10 to almost 20 percent. The main danger with the Fiscal Cliff is therefore not what the reduction of government spending will do on its own, but that it might trigger a renewed bout of deleveraging from the $40 trillion overhang of private debt that Keen calls the "Rock of Damocles".

Jesse Ventura Says Protest Dealey Plaza Closure + Liberals Want to Take Our Guns!

Alex talks with the former governor of Minnesota and host of truTV's "Conspiracy Theory," Jesse Ventura about JFK and Bob Costas Call for a total gun ban.

Jim Sinclair: We Haven’t Seen Anything Yet, Derivatives Collapse Will Be of Mayan Calendar Proportions!


The Doc: In his latest update to CIGA’s, the legendary Jim Sinclair states that we haven’t seen anything yet, and that the financial collapse in progress due to over $1 QUADRILLION in notional OTC derivatives is going to be an event of Mayan calendar proportions.
Sinclair’s full MUST READ alert below:


The 1 oz .999 Silver Bullet Silver Shield Trivium Medallion is available now from SDBullion at only $2.99/oz over spot, ANY QUANTITY!

To the amazement of the young turks and talking heads of Wall Street, economic law has not been repealed. When misuse of finance to the extreme (OTC derivative fraud) and exotic tactics are used to pretend solvency of financial entity balance sheets, the result will be not in terms of phony figures MSM doses daily to the sheeple, but rather in direct relationship to the degree of the true number in the insolvent categories of finance. The true number of OTC derivatives is above one quadrillion dollars as measured by the BIS before they cut the number in half by changing their computer program to value to maturity (which assumes all pay off, yet few will).  
The conclusion based on economic law is that we have not seen anything yet.

World’s most dangerous religion: Atheists face worldwide persecution even in "North America and Europe"– report

Image from livejournal.com user tema
RT: From the Christian West to the Islamic Middle East, atheists face discrimination and persecution including execution, life in prison, the revocation of citizenship and the denial of education and medical services, a new report has revealed.
A 69-page study titled ‘Freedom of Thought 2012: A Global Report on Discrimination Against Humanists, Atheists and the Nonreligious’ has been released by the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU).
The report covers laws affecting freedom of conscience in 60 countries, and lists numerous individual cases where atheists were persecuted for their beliefs.
The report cited discriminatory laws that deny atheists the “right to exist, curtail their freedom of belief and expression, revoke their right to citizenship [and] restrict their right to marry.”
Other laws include “obstructing access to public education, prohibiting them from holding public office, preventing them from working for the state, criminalizing their criticism of religion, and executing them for leaving the religion of their parents.”
The report argues that atheists in Islamic countries – such as Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan – face some of the worst discrimination, including capital punishment. The study did not list specific recent executions, but claimed that capital punishment was often shifted into life imprisonment sentences, as in Afghanistan.
The publication of atheist or humanist views is strictly prohibited under blasphemy laws in countries like Bangladesh, Egypt and Indonesia, the report said.