Resistance Girl from South Lebanon Explains the Fighting + Scottish Govt Refuses Referendum on Gay Marriages - Morris

Morris: The Jabal (33 seconds in) are the Alawites in Tripoli. The whole Syrian conflict has been started to weaken Hezbollah. Everyone knows there will be another war in Israel. Her Twitter account is: http://twitter.com/Amani_Lebanon

JFK why he wasn't killed and why he was... Israel

Timothy Geithner, Guianas & Hague - Afshin Rattnasi

This week as ministers from more than 100 countries arrive in Tehran, Afshin takes a look at the global scramble for resources as the old hegemonic powers of Europe and United States die.

Coming up on the show, Russian President Vladimir Putin explains judo to UK Prime Minister David Cameron and the US President Barack Obama targets cows as the next terrorist threat.

The Up-To-The-Minute Guide For Understanding Europe

Submitted by Tyler Durden: From Mark Grant, author of Out of the Box

From the Merriam-Webster Dictionary: "To express in different terms and especially different words: Paraphrase (2): to express in more comprehensible terms: Explain, Interpret"

EUROSPEAK:

“I hail, I congratulate”—little or no meaning; words spoken by every politician in Europe when someone does something, anything and has an actual value of about zero. A reference to Roman times where Caesar hailed the conquering heroes which is a species that has been extinct on the Continent for some years now. 

“I (we) will do everything to save the Euro”---we got ourselves into this mess and we will try to do something/anything to get out of it; rhetoric, hyperbole and more zero value talk. I am the head of the European Central Bank and this sentence was found in Chapter 18, paragraph three, “what to say to the Press when you have run out of things to say.” Chapter 18, paragraph four, by the way, is “divine right” and “the full support of God” so you may expect this shortly.

“End corruption, a more efficient tax system, sell government assets, debt to GDP ratio by (pick a date/any date), stop government waste, just asking for a delay, need more time, extension”---these are all Greekspeak for “Give us more money” and no other meaning should be appended to these phrases. These are all terms of the first sentence and then since any/all might be granted the second sentence will be since this or that has been granted that more money will be required to get there (about $50 billion at the present time).

“The debt to GDP ratio (pick a country/any country) will be X by the year (pick a year/any year)” has no bearing to anything in the real world and is not a mathematically based conclusion. These statements are manufactured by the IMF and created in the special secret room there built by Walt Disney & Co.

An example of practical usage:

“Christine what number should we use this time?”
“I don’t know Angela what does Mario think?”
“To which Mario are you referring Christine?”
“Do you think it really matters Angela?”
“Where is the Ouija Board anyway?”

Apartheid Gulag: EU strengthening economic ties with Israel - Remember Palestine

It was revealed last week that the European Union has approved a massive upgrade in Israel special trading status.
In 2008 there was a freeze on the preferential treatment that the EU gives Israel in the wake of Cast Lead. But now it's business as usual.
How is it possible for EU to overlook its own policies on human rights in order to assist an apartheid state?
In this edition of the show Lauren Booth talks to the British politician and member of the House of Lord; Baroness Jenny Tonge about this conflict of interest. Press TV

The Problem is not Debt, it’s Interest

Anthony Migchels - Real Currencies

How do we know this?

Consider a mortgage. We borrow $200k, and after 30 years we will have payed about $500k. So we pay $300 thousand dollars interest over the loan.

What would happen with our purchasing power, if we only needed to repay the principal? It would mean we would have 10.000 per year more purchasing power during the 30 years we repay the mortgage.

Our credit would greatly improve, because our liabilities would be much smaller.

Interest is payed to those who have money, and payed by those who don’t, and therefore need to borrow.

Interest is therefore a wealth transfer from poor to rich. Margrit Kennedy, a German monetarist, has quantified this wealth transfer in Germany. Her conclusions: the 80% poorest Germans pay 1 billion euros per day (365 billion per year) in interest to the richest 10%. The next richest 10% pay about as much interest as they receive.

Also, with in the 10% brackets the same wealth transfer is happening: so the poorest 8% of the richest 10% pay interest to the richest 1%.

It stands to reason that the situation is more or less the same everywhere. This means, that the poorest 80% Americans pay about 1,5 trillion dollars per year to the richest 10 percent.

This is the key driver centralizing wealth in the hands of the plutocracy.

The Real Bet is on the Pound's Decline

By Stephen L. Bernard and Vincent Cignarella: Feijoada, the traditional black bean stew and national dish of Brazil, will soon replace fish and chips as the cuisine of choice among currency traders.
For these investors, a surging pound--up 20% against the real in six months--has simply gone too far, too fast given the economic comparisons between the countries.
The U.K. is in recession and just recently posted its largest trade deficit on record in June. But Brazil's growth forecast remains strong and the country posted a trade surplus in July equivalent to $2.9 billion, more than double the 20-year average. Source

WikiLeaks reveals impending death of fiat currency + Bitcoin discussed - “Adam vs. The Man”

The Bitcoin wiki: Bitcoin is an experimental new digital currency that enables instant payments to anyone, anywhere in the world. Bitcoin uses peer-to-peer technology to operate with no central authority: managing transactions and issuing money are carried out collectively by the network. Bitcoin is also the name of the open source software which enables the use of this currency.

The software is a community-driven open source project, released under the MIT license and originally created by Satoshi Nakamoto.

Bitcoin is one of the first implementations of a concept called crypto-currency which was first described in 1998 by Wei Dai on the cypherpunks mailing list. Building upon the notion that money is any object, or any sort of record, accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts in a given country or socio-economic context, Bitcoin is designed around the idea of using cryptography to control the creation and transfer of money, rather than relying on central authorities. Sourced from Bitcoin.org and Wikipedia.

Empire State Building shooting victim: police were ‘shooting randomly’

By Madison Ruppert: The tragic recent shooting in New York City has taken another strange turn with one of the nine innocent bystanders shot by officers of the New York Police Department alleging that the police were actually “shooting randomly” into the busy street.

The incident appeared at first to be another in a line of recent shootings until it emerged that the police were actually directly responsible for the vast majority of the violence, injuring nine people.

Thankfully, the police did not mortally wound any of the innocent bystanders, but they still unloaded a whopping 14 rounds between them before killing Jeffrey Johnson, the former accessories designer who murdered his former boss Steve Ercolino.

According to New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, “it appears that all nine of the victims were struck either by fragments or by bullets fired by police.”

After the shooting first occurred on Friday, August 24, 2012, it was unclear if it was Johnson or the officers who were responsible for the nine bystanders left bleeding on the sidewalk but based on the ballistic and other evidence, it appears that Kelly is now quite certain who fired the rounds.

Now one of the wounded pedestrians, named Robert Asika, has accused the police of “shooting randomly” into the street, which is a quite serious allegation indeed.

Asika was unlucky enough to be shot in the elbow by one of the police officers from a mere eight feet away while he was selling tickets for tour buses and the Empire State Building’s observation deck.

He started only a week ago after being unemployed for more than a year and did not hesitate to criticize how the police handled the incident, saying, “If you’re gonna aim try and aim perfectly. If you wanna aim at the target, you got to know what you’re doing because it’s the street. I could have been dead right now. I could have been dead.”

OMG, Tax Evasion In Switzerland! By The Swiss! But At Least It’s “Officially Silenced To Death”

By Testosterone Pit: The arm-wrestling between the US, Switzerland, and Swiss banks over funds that US citizens have stashed away in Swiss bank accounts has been going on for years to the point where the Swiss are now actually cracking down on US citizens, or at least aide them in circumnavigating the reporting requirements. In Germany, a similar fight has broken out, albeit with more consideration for the rich. Other governments, desperate for moolah, are also going after their own with funds in Switzerland. Turns out the Swiss themselves, long praised by their politicians for their tax compliance, do what others do: evade taxes—which is part of the human DNA. In Switzerland, however, it’s “officially silenced to death.”

Now Margret Kiener Nellen, Swiss National Council member, former President of the Finance Commission, and member of the center-left Social Democratic Party, has thrown down the gauntlet when she declared with some bravado, “The Federal Government, cantons, and municipalities are deprived annually of 18 billion.”

With bravado, because there aren’t any real numbers. And that’s part of the problem. To arrive at a number at all, she had to do her own calculations; neither the Federal Tax Administration (ESTV) nor the Finance Directors of the cantons have current estimates, laments Kiener Nellen. They purposefully don’t have them.

“The extent of tax fraud by the Swiss has no numbers,” declared ESTV boss Urs Ursprung before a parliamentary commission when some politicians wanted to find out. In June, however, Finance Minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf fired him for his involvement in a scandal over the acquisition of a data system.

So Kiener Nellen did her own math, as inadequate as that might appear. The basis was a 2006 study, “Tax Evasion in Switzerland,” by economists Lars P. Feld und Bruno S. Frey, that concluded that 23.5% of gross household income remained underground. She applied an annual tax rate of 20%, a “conservative” estimate, to the household income of 2009 as published by the Federal Statistics Agency. Hence her 18 billion Swiss francs.

Other countries aren’t that shy about studying the extent of tax evasion. In France, it costs the state €50 billion annually, according to an inquiry by a Senate commission. Another study estimated that €600 billion in French assets were hidden in tax havens.

Does China have a hidden agenda on gold?

China is currently in some economic difficulty which could impact internal stability and some feel that the global megapower is planning to utilise gold to reboot and pick its way out of an economic meltdown.

By Lawrence Williams: One thing that is most apparent about China relative to virtually any industry is that nothing is done without the approval, or instruction, of government.  When you have an enormous population of over 1.3 billion - around 20% of the global population - the government's policies are all aimed at maintaining order among its people, and for the past decade or so this has revolved around massive internal growth. This has been done, first by becoming the world's supplier of cheap goods, and second the building of an internal demand economy to help support this massive annual growth.

Nearly half the country's population has moved from the country's old rural economy into a modern industrial one - but this is now seen as faltering under massive bank debt, much of it in potentially bad loans brought on by government-engendered cheap finance supporting the country's internal manufacturing and infrastructural growth.  Given the Chinese state-owned company aims are not necessarily to make money, but to provide employment, this may not be a sustainable economic model, which could have some dire consequences for those companies, particularly in the resource sector, which have been providing the raw materials that help keep the Chinese factories maintaining uneconomic production levels.

In the past we have seen Chinese companies begin to make inroads into securing future supplies through investing in and taking over resource companies around the globe, but while  the emphasis has so far been in respect of industrial metals to feed the manufacturing behemoth, we are now seeing similar moves into the western gold mining sector - of which the most recent example is China National Gold Corporation's interest in taking over control of African Barrick Gold. And prior to that the Zijin Mining takeover of Norton Goldfields among others.  An earlier, but perhaps less well flagged deal was China National Gold's offtake deal with Coeur's Kensington Mine in Alaska whereby the mine's output is processed in China, not in Alaska where the mine is located.    It would seem that these deals, or prospective deals, could be the tip of the iceberg if some views on China's gold policy are correct.

Rumi - This is all a dream - Duncan Mackintosh

 Morris: Duncan Mackintosh is Britain's best reciter of Rumi! Rumi said he wasn't interested in poetry