The Financial System Doesn't Just Enable Theft, It Is Theft

By Charles Hugh Smith: It's not just inflation that is theft. 

It is painfully self-evident that our financial system doesn't just enable theft, it is theft by nature and design. If you doubt this, please follow along.

Inflation is theft, but we accept inflation because we've been persuaded it benefits us. Here's the basic story: our financial system creates new credit money (i.e. debt) in quantities that are only limited by the appetites of borrowers and the value of assets they buy with freshly borrowed money.

If this expansion of credit money exceeds the actual growth rate of the real economy, inflation results.

Since our economy is ultimately based on expanding debt in every sector (government, corporations, households), inflation is a good thing because it enables borrowers to pay back old debt with cheaper money.

For example, if J.Q. Citizen makes $50,000 a year and owes $50,000 on his fixed-rate mortgage, what happens if inflation jumps 100%? Assuming J.Q.'s wages rise along with prices, his earnings jump to $100,000 while mortgage remains at $50,000. Though prices of everything else have also doubled, the debt remains fixed, making it much easier for J.Q. to service the mortgage. Before inflation, it might have taken ten days of earnings to make enough money to pay the mortgage payment; after inflation, it only takes five days' wages to make the payment. 

This apparent benefit evaporates if wages do not rise along with the price of goods and services.

"Allah's Incomparable Mercy" | Min. Louis Farrakhan: The Time & What Must Be Done

FCNN

With every day, the West feels more and more like a Soviet satellite

Erich Hoenecker would feel totally at home in the West today

The Slog: It’s a bit of a mixed news bag this afternoon, but what strikes one is how it really is all pointing in the same direction: people above the Law, bankers cheating, the EU lying, America’s security services intruding etc etc. Here’s a little run-through…
Over the last two years, JP Morgan has run up a staggering $7billion in malfeasance fines. Nobody went to jail, and the weasel ‘without prejudice’ approach to paying up is always the same: “JP Morgan agrees with the facts, but does not admit to any crime”. You couldn’t make it up.
Still nobody has felt Murdoch’s collar, despite the fact that tapes released last week show that he clearly perjured himself at the CM&S, and threatened ‘revenge’ on an entire police force.
Surprise, surprise – the Stafford NHS is being dissolved: so the strategy of demonisation, misrepresented facts and blurred causes has worked. What has happened today is that, when it reemerges from its cryogenic chrysalis, Stafford will have had six key services cut. The idea that this is in response to public demand is a blatant lie: last April, 50,000 people took part in a march from Stafford’s town centre to the hospital, protesting at plans to downgrade Stafford’s services.

THE MANNING CASE: lessons States never learn, and politicians don’t even think about

Why Bradley Manning is worth more than any movement we have in Britain.

The Slog: The Bradley Manning case is an interesting one, because it involves the clash of two very important principles: giving your word, and doing your duty.

Seventy years on, we salute Von Stauffenberg for paying with his life by trying to kill Hitler at the Wolfschanze with a bomb. But Stauffenberg had given an oath of allegiance to his Führer ten years earlier, so he also had to break his word – something which, to a Prussian staff officer, was unthinkable.

Those Nazi officers who turned up alive at Nuremberg in 1946 were, in the main, hanged. “But I voss only obeyink ordass” fell into the language as a standing joke about Germans. Now the American legal system is effectively saying it will bang Manning up for 130 years for doing what Von Stauffenberg did. Were another President to come along in ten years time with a strong sense of ethical foreign policy, Manning would be revered as a hero. The future makes fools of us all – even the Law.

My son won’t get fair trial in US – Snowden’s father

RT: NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden would be better off staying in Russia, because he won’t get a fair trial in the US, believes his father Lon Snowden. He may soon travel to Moscow to meet his son.
Lon Snowden backs Edward’s decision to seek political asylum in Russia, he told Rossiya 24 news channel on Wednesday. The live interview taken in the US was most likely viewed by the NSA whistleblower from his temporary refuge at a Moscow airport transit zone, as he was warned beforehand by his legal representative in Russia Anatoly Kucherena.
If Edward returned to the US for prosecution, he would not be granted the constitutional right of due process, the elder Snowden fears.
“The fact is no assurances have been made that he will be given a fair trial, that he deserves, or any citizen of this nation is given by our Constitution,” he said.
Edward Snowden’s case has taken on all the characteristics of a witch hunt, argues Lon Snowden’s attorney, Bruce Fein, who was interviewed by the channel along with his client. A number of Obama administration officials and lawmakers openly branded the former NSA contractor a traitor although he has yet to be tried on espionage charges.

Ravenous Vampire-Hounds Of Inflationary Hell

By The Mogambo Guru: Thinking back on it, I see that I was, indeed, “on the edge” of going, as I seem to routinely be these days, completely berserk about how the evil Federal Reserve is creating so irresponsibly much, so staggeringly much, so impossibly much, so disastrously much excess currency and credit that We’re Freaking Doomed (WFD) to ruination and complete bankruptcy by the unstoppable inflation in prices, crushing weight of unpayable debt and a monstrous, suffocating government.

 

And this always leads to the destructive action of angry, unemployed, hungry, bankrupted mobs that such a grotesque inflation in the money supply always -- always! -- produces.

 

As proof, ancient Egypt of the third century B.C. was finally ruined,, according to Jean Philippe Levy in his book “The Economic Life of the Ancient World,” when the government had grown “omnipresent” and had unleashed a “whole army of inspectors” to combat inflation in prices by ruthlessly enforcing horrific price controls “at all levels.”

 

Perhaps this is why ChartoftheDay.com had a quote from Georg Hegel, a German philosopher from the early 18th century, who said, even way back then, “What experience and history teach is this -- that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it," by which he obviously means that “Earthling people are stupid, greedy and corrupt when they allow irresponsible expansions of the money supply when even a cursory look at the history of their own world for the last 2,500 years – even back to the Egyptian pharaohs, for crying out loud! -- proves that this horrible result happens 100% of the time!

Lakshman Achuthan: The US Entered Recession Last Year And "Is Worse Than Japan In the 90s"

Submitted by Tyler Durden: Despite Tom Keene's best efforts to appear fair-and-balanced, this brief interview on Bloomberg TV places ECRI's Lakshman Achuthan in the uncomfortable position of destroying every propagandized 'fact' that the mainstream media is entrusted with disseminating to the Pavlovian investing community. From recessions with job growth ("we believe a US recession began in 2012") to the wealth divide and from GDP revisions to job quality differentials, Achuthan warns the US is becoming Japan, "U.S. growth over the last five years is weaker than Japan during the Lost Decades." Keene's insistence that things are on-the-up (though admitting that Achuthan's call on the decline in growth was correct) is met with the rhetorical question, "you wouldn't have four years of zero-interest rate policy and quantitative easing if everything was okay."
 

DIVORCE LAW IS SEXIST!

GodDammitFrankie: Whilst (of course) not all cases of divorce law fall along these lines, I've seen for myself many instances where a woman has been favoured for no apparent reason in terms of finances and child contact. These are my thoughts. Source

Feminism and the problem with modern academia

ThatCynicalCynicism: Are all of our modern academic institutions really interested in uncovering truth for the benefit of everyone? Or are they instead interested in preserving falsehoods for personal gain?

Bank Of England Helped Reichsbank Sell Its Nazi Gold

Submitted by Tyler Durden: We previously showed hard evidence of the Bank of England's complicit hiding of the truth about the quality of gold stored in the Fed's vaults. Soon after, the Bundesbank seemed to shift its historical stance and demand its gold be repatriated into its own vaults (and we now know the impact that has had on the paper-physical paper markets). However, in yet another one of the 'darkest episodes in central banking history' the FT reports, the Bank of England facilitated the sale of gold that was looted by the Nazis after their invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938. Of course, judging today's central bankers by this ethical (and potentially criminal) behavior of over 70 years ago is unfair but a pattern of whatever-it-takes decisions and opacity appear to be forming.

Via The FT,

The Bank of England played a vital role in one of the darkest episodes in central banking history, facilitating the sale of gold looted by the Nazis after their invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938.

According to a hitherto unpublished history of the BoE’s activities in and around the second world war, the UK’s central bank sold gold on behalf of the Reichsbank – which Germany’s central bank had seized from its Czech counterpart – after the UK government had frozen all Czech assets held in Britain following the Nazi invasion.

US Police in Concord, NH apply for armored vehicle to fight ‘Free Staters, Occupiers, Sovereign Citizens"

By Madison Ruppert: Concord, New Hampshire police may soon accept $258,000 in federal money to purchase an armored vehicle, citing the need to protect police and others from threats including “the Sovereign Citizens, Free Staters and Occupy New Hampshire.”
Concord would be one of countless police departments across America that is being militarized through federal funding and programs like the 1033 program.
In Georgia alone, police acquired some $200 million worth of military-grade weaponry and equipment.
A public hearing will be held about the proposed purchase of a BearCat G3 armored vehicle on August 12. The vehicle would be paid for by a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) grant, according to New Hampshire Union Leader.
While the grant was filed by the Concord Police Department, the department filed it on behalf of a group of 20 local communities, the Merrimack County Sheriff’s Office and Plymouth State University, under the umbrella of the Central New Hampshire Special Operations Unit.
The grant application was unanimously approved last fall by the Concord City Council, according to Concord Police Chief John Duval, but since that time people have been raising concerns about the vehicle.
Some of those concerns are being raised by the New Hampshire Civil Liberties Union (NHCLU).
After all, the application stated, “Groups such as the Sovereign Citizens, Free Staters and Occupy New Hampshire are active and present daily challenges.”
It also cited “several homegrown clusters that are anti-government and pose problems for law enforcement agencies.”