Constitution Halts Irish Sheriff + Why The Truth About Iceland Is So Dangerous To The U.S. +

Ben Gilroy: On the 20 February 2012 the deputy Sheriff arrived at another Irish family's home to repossess it and give the keys to the bank in Co Laois. Thus putting another Irish family onto the streets.

Debt = Serfdom

Charles Hugh Smith: Debt-serfdom and the dominance of Financial Power are two sides of the same coin.

Let's be clear about three things:

1. Too Big to Fail financialization is the metastasizing cancer that has crippled democracy and capitalism. 

2. Financialization feeds on expanding debt and cannot survive without it. 

3. Debt is serfdom. I have covered this in depth for years:

The New Road to Serfdom: A Negative-Equity Mortgage (May 9, 2006)
The Company Store, Debt and Serfdom (October 24, 2008)
Debt-Serfdom Is Now the New American Norm (October 18, 2011)
The Origins of American Debt-Serfdom (October 19, 2011)
EU Fiscal Union = EU Debt Serfdom (December 7, 2011)
Debt Serfdom in One Chart (May 4, 2012)
By Incentivizing Debt, We've Guaranteed Debt-Serfdom and Stagnation (June 12, 2012)
The Road to Debt-Serfdom (January 25, 2013)

There are three key dynamics to debt-serfdom:

A. The serf is never free of debt, i.e. he/she is programmed to being indebted for life.

The Great Cyprus Bank Robbery

Ron Paul: The dramatic recent events in Cyprus have highlighted the fundamental weakness in the European banking system and the extreme fragility of fractional reserve banking. Cypriot banks invested heavily in Greek sovereign debt, and last summer's Greek debt restructuring resulted in losses equivalent to more than 25 percent of Cyprus' GDP. These banks then took their bad investments to the government, demanding a bailout from an already beleaguered Cypriot treasury. The government of Cyprus then turned to the European Union (EU) for a bailout.
The terms insisted upon by the troika (European Commission, European Central Bank, International Monetary Fund) before funding the bailout were nothing short of highway robbery. While bank depositors have traditionally been protected in the event of bankruptcy or liquidation, the troika insisted that all bank depositors pay a tax of between 6.75 and 10 percent of their total deposits to help fund the bailout.
While one can sympathize with EU taxpayers not wanting to fund yet another bailout of a poorly-managed banking system, forcing the Cypriot people to pay for the foolish risks taken by their government and bankers is also criminal. In their desire to punish a “tax haven” catering supposedly to Russian oligarchs, the EU elites ensured that ordinary citizens would suffer just as much as foreign depositors. Imagine the reaction if in September 2008, the US government had financed its $700 billion bank bailout by directly looting American taxpayers' bank accounts!

Bitcoin vs Banksters - Max Keiser with William Mook

Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss the elbowed dreams and broken markets that continue to apparently thrive while a hedge fund managers advice for young people is 'get a job' (in a hollowed-out wasteland of an economy) and 'save for retirement' (with the same banks that have stolen trillions from the global investor). In the second half of the show, Max Keiser talks to entrepreneur and inventor, William Mook, about a near future when bitcoin means banks will not even be needed and 3D printing makes factories obsolete but a present day in which financial wise guys have stopped investing in the economy because there is no fuel supply to support the growth. Source

CYPRUS: What they knew, and what we didn’t +

Electricity Authority withdrew €19.5m four days before bailin 

Troika agreement specifically includes gas/energy clauses

The Slog: Details of a memorandum signed between Nicosia and troika officials leaked to the media stress the creation of infrastructure to exploit the island’s undersea reserves, and of the need for a fund to “manage” State revenues derived from natural gas finds. And Nicosia’s Electricity Authority was one of the biggest withdrawers prior to the depositor theft announcement.
Both Greeks and Cypriots are pondering this morning about evidence of hard bargaining in the detail of the Troika/Cyprus deal – a deal leaked to the media late yesterday. The final signed memorandum gives Nicosia one more year than anticipated to post a primary surplus – setting a deadline of 2017 rather than 2016 – and is being seen by some as the price the EU/IMF/ECB axis had to pay to get what they wanted: access to the gas reserves around the island.

US Backed 8-year-old FSA soldier - Ahmed,

One of the least shocking yet clearly wrong images from the Syrian war. An US Backed eight-year-old boy draws deeply on a cigarette, the small fingers of his other hand clutching a an AK-47 rifle that balances awkwardly against his chest. Source

Fascist Military USA: More research to create new exotic directed energy weaponry!

By Madison Ruppert: While it may sound like complete science fiction, the US Air Force Killers are actually preparing to spend $49 million to research the biological effects of 'non-lethal' directed energy weapons in hopes of creating future weaponry that manipulates the body on a biochemical or molecular level.
This may sound wildly farfetched but given that the military has researched unbelievable “human enhancement” technologies, weaponized hallucinations, autonomous robotic jellyfish, insect-sized killer drones and fully automated “killer robots,” this shouldn’t be all that surprising.
Furthermore, the US military has already developed a wide range of directed energy (DE) weapons ranging from the defunct Airborne Laser program to a “heat ray” and an overall greater emphasis on directed energy weaponry of all kinds.
The Air Force Bioeffects Division recently announced a new program testing how “directed energy, riot control agents, broadband light, acoustic sounds, and blunt impact materials” change the body.
While many people may not be familiar with radio frequency (RF) and high power microwave (HPM) emitting devices, the US Air Force says they have “been at the forefront of research on the biological effects of RF/HPM radiation for more than 30 years.”
This latest round of research involves laboratory tests, studies and field experiments beginning in September of this year with tests in San Antonio, Texas expected to go on for seven years.

The Great Disconnect: Markets Vs. Economy

Written by Lance Roberts: Last week I was swamped with interviews, both radio and television, to discuss the meaning of the markets hitting new all-time highs.  The general consensus of the analysts and economists that I was pitted against was that the rise in capital markets, given weak current economic data and a resurgence of the Eurozone crisis, is clearly a sign of economic strength.  This, combined with rising corporate profitability, makes stocks the only investment worth having.  My arguments were much more pragmatic.

First, it is worth noting that the markets have only risen to "all-time highs" only on a nominal basis.  As I posted in this past weekends newsletter entitled "Why You Can Never Beat The Index" I stated that:

"While the markets have hit an all-time high on a nominal basis (due much to the substitution effect as discussed above), there is still much to go before making up lost ground on an inflation adjusted basis.
The chart below shows the S&P 500 adjusted for inflation. Investors today, if they had been able to get exactly the same performance as the index are now back to where there were effectively in 1997. Of course, the reality is that investors have fared far worse given emotional mistakes, jumping from one investment strategy to another, taking on excess risk, and chasing past returns.
As I explain to my kids in baseball – it is not getting hits that win baseball games but rather having fewer errors than your opponents. In investing – the winner is the person with the fewest errors."

Tom Woods Talks Bitcoin…Fantastic Interview

By Michael Krieger: Soon, whether via Bitcoin or whatever comes next, it will be possible to strip banking away from bankers, and money away from governments.
From a recent article in the Spectator titled “How Bitcoin Could Destroy the State”
Support for Bitcoin amongst Austrian economists is growing by they day and in this interview, the highly admired and respected Tom Woods, discusses Bitcoin with Erik Voorhees of Bitinstant (a popular, rapid way of converting fiat into BTC).  This interview very poignantly addresses many of the layperson’s concerns about it that I have heard over the past several months.  Remember, despite the price rise, Ben Bernanke is still creating the equivalent of 75 Bitcoin markets every month with his money printing.
This worth every single minute of your time. Source

Misandrist: Q.If I Admit That ‘Hating Men’ Is a Thing, Will You Stop Turning It Into a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy? A.Feminazi?

Angelo Agathangelou: There are knowns and unknowns and known knowns and unknown knowns! Lidy West runs us around the houses in an attempt to destroy the concept of misandry only to expose her own deep prejudice against fathers or "PATRIARCHY" forgetting UK feminazi control over early indoctrination and government and legal family control mechanisms (i.e. total control over so called 'PATRIARCHY'). My masculinist response to "If I Admit That ‘Hating Men’ Is a Thing, Will You Stop Turning It Into a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy?" is... I will help you with your deficiencies, even the mental ones but in the end your brain washing is thorough. Wake up, You are the villain. ...Of course misogynists don't get they are being idiots just like you don't get that you are the very definition of a misandrist. Equality, everyone deserves it.

Lindy West: Okay, so maybe you are a man. Maybe you haven't had the easiest ride in life—maybe you grew up in poverty; you've experienced death, neglect, and despair; you hate your job, your car, your body. Maybe somebody (or multiple somebodies) pulverized your heart, or maybe you've never even been loved enough to know what a broken heart feels like. Maybe shit started out unfair and became irreparable and you never deserved any of this. Maybe everything looks fine on paper, but you're just unhappy and you don't know why. These are human problems and other human beings feel for you very deeply. It is hard to be a human. I am so sorry.

However...

Eurozone Deposits Not Safe – World War III Begins + Euro Capital Flight Begins

Martin Armstrong: The fact that the German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble has come out stating that savings accounts within the Eurozone are “safe” claiming  that Cyprus was a “special case” and not a template for future rescues, proves that in fact the Eurozone deposits are ABSOLUTELY NOT SAFE! You never state a negative unless there is reason to do so. This is like Clinton – I did not have sexual relations with that girl announcement. In Japan, they assumed the Supreme Court ruled that oral sex is not really sex. I had to explain the Supreme Court made no such ruling.

The whole purpose of the Eurozone was a GUARANTEE that there would NEVER be any default. There was a default so just admit Europe had sexual relations with Cyprus and didn’t even leave a €1 tip.

Jim Willie Returns

TFMR: If you can spare the time, you'd better give this a listen.
Back on Friday, Jim published what he called "one of the most important articles he'd ever written". If you haven't yet, you should read it now. It can be found here.
Jim and I felt that his observations and conclusions were so important and so timely that we needed to record this follow-up podcast as soon as possible. It worked out that we were able to speak on Monday afternoon.
I'm confident that you'll enjoy this informative and compelling podcast.
TF

Jim Willie is an original. If you want to be official about it, you can call Jim a "statistical analyst" as Jim has a PhD in statistics from Carnegie Mellon. Since 2004, however, he's simply been known as "The Golden Jackass".