Plunderers Pumping Pelf - Max Keiser with Professor Steven A. Ramirez

Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss the American legal system that authorizes plunder, a moral code that glorifies it and a financial system that profits from it.  In the second half of the show, Max Keiser talks to Professor Steven A. Ramirez, a former Enforcement Attorney at the US Securities and Exchange Commission, about the broken social contract, when that contract got broken and how to mend it. Source

Italian Scandal Widens As Italy's Third Largest Bank Set To Get Third Bailout In 3 Years; Draghi, Monti Implicated

Submitted by Tyler Durden: While little has been said in the mainstream western press about the ongoing fiasco surrounding Siena's Banca Monte dei Pasci, Italy's third largest bank and the world's oldest which may get its third bailout in three years - or even be nationalized - as soon as today, for fears that it may break the thin veneer of "recovery" in the European financial system, the situation on the ground in Italy is getting more serious by the minute, and will have implications on both next month's general election, on Mario Monti, on Silvio Berlusconi, on frontrunner for the Prime Minister post Pier Luigi Bersani, and reach as far up as the head of the ECB - Mario Draghi.

Several hours ago, on Saturday morning, the four-member board of the Bank of Italy - this time without its prior president Mario Draghi - met to consider the position of scandal-hit bank Monte dei Paschi di Siena and decide whether to authorize its request for 3.9 billion euros ($5.3 billion) of state loans.
As we reported previously, it has emerged over the past week that due to previously undisclosed derivative contracts first exposed by Bloomberg, the Siena bank has hid as much as $1 billion in losses. However as was explained in "Will The Super Goldman Mario Brothers Succeed In Covering Up The Latest Italian Bailout Scandal", this discovery has far greater implications for both the bank's future viability, as well as the implied credibility of both the Bank of Italy, and especially the man who headed it for five years before becoming head of the ECB (where he now demands the same supervisory authority over all European banks that he had in Italy, only to supposedly let countless derivative fiascos slip through his fingers).

Polish Refugee Warns of Communism Taking Over the West

AJ: Bert Pachulski says America is very rapidly becoming like the soviet union he once lived in over 60 years ago. Source

Desperate Dave’s throw of the dice: an EU referendum – to save himself

By Richard Cottrell: If you read the general reaction in the UK media to David Cameron’s famous speech concerning the UK’s future relationship with the EU, then you might think it pushes Churchill’s famous wartime ‘we’ll fight them on the beaches’ exhortation aimed at Hitler’s hordes into the shade.
The reality is rather more prosaic. Stripped bare, the celebrated peroration was nothing but a classic political sticking plaster. The European issue can tear the Tory apart at the best of times, between the rival ranks of the pros and the antis quarreling over the bone.
Britons, as a whole, are rather ambivalent about the EU. By kicking the can way down the road, promising an ‘in-out’ referendum in 2017, we learn that Cameron is not only quite the worst political operator to reside in Downing Street for  many years, he is also – in the language of the British upper crust  (of which he is such a prominent cadet) – an absolute cad.
Cameron did not, of course, compose the glorious ode. It was written for him by a rather pretty Downing Street poet-in-residence. It was she who allowed the PM’s tongue run away with itself.  The ‘heart and soul’ stuff and such like.
There is an old English adage that runs ‘fine words butter no parsnips.’  Here we have a magnificent instance of its salient truth. What you tend to get from this sort of arrangement is style, but lacking the substance.
He is deluded enough to believe he has put the nagging European issue to sleep for the best part of the next five years. He also thinks Brits will troop to the polling stations at the next general election, offering grateful salutations to the man of integrity and honesty, who at last will let the people decide on this contentious issue.
Wrong, hopelessly so, on both counts.

Anonymous hacks US Sentencing Commission website for Swartz

RT: Hacktivist movement Anonymous has hijacked the US Sentencing Commission website as a personal vendetta to retaliate against the justice system that threatened to imprison web activist Aaron Swartz, who allegedly recently committed suicide, for decades.

The website was hacked early Saturday and a message was placed saying that “a line was crossed” when Swartz killed himself two weeks ago.
“Two weeks ago today, Aaron Swartz was killed. Killed because he faced an impossible choice. Killed because he was forced into playing a game he could not win — a twisted and distorted perversion of justice — a game where the only winning move was not to play,”

Belgian MP LAURENT LOUIS stands against war in Mali and exposes the international neo-colonial plot

Feuillien Geraldine: Belgian MP LAURENT LOUIS stands against war in Mali and exposes the international neo-colonial plot at the Belgian Parliament.

Iceland president: Let banks go bankrupt

Iceland President Olafur Ragnar Grimsson tells Al Jazeera's Stephen Cole that Europe should let banks that are ran "irresponsibly" go bankrupt. Speaking at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Grimsson also held his country as a model of economic recovery after its near-collapse four years ago. "We didn't follow the traditional prevailing orthodoxies. And the end result four years later is that Iceland is enjoying progress and recovery." Source

Get far away from USA...its collapse will be messy - Jeff Berwick

The Dollar Vigilante's Jeff Berwick is back chatting about a myriad of economic and stock market-related issues with Cambridge House Live's anchor, Bridgitte Anderson. Taped at Cambridge House International's Vancouver Resource Investment Conference. Source

Iraq Protests Explained - Hawazen

Morris: There are protests in many cities in Iraq, also Iraq is trying to secure an arms deal with Russia. Hawazen in Iraq explains. Source

WMD's: Top Secret UK Uranium Components Plant "Highly Explosive" Threat to West London Population! "Shutdown" Residents Oblivious

UK Banned Press TV: Not many people would know what goes on at this 880-acre site just an hour's drive west of London. With its barbed wire, multiple check-points and security cameras, this is the heart of Britain's Super WMD nuclear weapons program

Ex-CIA officer Kiriakou gets 30-months prison for intel leak (aka Behavior that conforms to accepted standards of morality)

RT: CIA veteran John Kiriakou has been sentenced to over two years in jail for leaking the identity of an agent. Kiriakou argues he is actually being prosecuted for coming clean over torture practices in the CIA and “going against the grain.”
He was charged on January 23 for violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act and repeatedly disclosing classified information to journalists.

The former chief of counter-terrorist operations in Pakistan pleaded guilty to the charges set against him as part of a deal with prosecutors, “accepting responsibility for his actions.” In return, prosecutors dropped the charges of making false statements under a World War I-era Espionage Act.

"I want to start by saying I accept my sentence of 30 years in prison – oh my God – 30 months in prison," Kiriakou said, at press conference on Wednesday, prompting laughter from his audience. "Oh boy. It was the 30 years I was trying not to get."

"Zionism in crisis" Netanyahu bloc just "scrapes" Israeli general election

George Galloway: Exit polls show incumbent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's hard-line Likud-Beitenu bloc and their allies have won a narrow majority in the Israeli general election.
However, Netanyahu's Likud Party-Yisrael Beitenu and nationalist allies performed far worse than expected in Tuesday's election and lost ground to center-left parties, according to the exit polls.