The End of Silver Manipulation

The story of the Hunt Brother's—Nelson and William Herbert—attempt to corner the silver market in the 1980’s is one of the best known examples in the commodity markets of financial heavyweights purchasing enough stock so as to be able to manipulate it as they please. The Hunt brothers did not keep the greatest market share for long, but they certainly did help to make completely lopsided, in favor of finance capital, the silver market since that time.

In the mid-to-late 1970s, the world was a very unstable place, much like today. Not only did the American economy experience during this period inflation and even stagflation, but fear of international communism pulled at the shoulders of nearly everyone. Bunker Hunt believed that silver was undervalued and could only rise in price. In the middle of the 1970s the Hunt brothers owned nearly 10% of all silver stock and, from then on into the 1980s, they put increasing pressure on the market and caused the price of silver to rise from $2 per ounce to $6 per ounce.
 
All of their capital was invested into silver. Further, they were salesmen of the stock, doing what they could to convince others to do the same as them. Eventually, they partnered with a group of Arabian investors who were in such a position to purchase voluminous amounts of silver. The Hunts and these Arabs, over time, gained increasing influence over the silver market, allowing them the means to loan more money and buy more silver, creating a feedback loop of manipulated price discovery.

By 1979 the price of silver was $35 per ounce. By then, other investors started looking to silver as a viable investment opportunity, thus giving the price an even larger boost. In the 1980s, the Hunt Brothers had made a market. Inside of one decade they had inflated the price from $2 per ounce to $50 per ounce at the beginning of the 80’s. Some believed that silver would rise to $200/$300.

But, in the early 80’s, the prices of silver started to stall and fall. The market had grown so inflated that the Hunt brothers could not find paper enough to purchase enough silver to keep the market rising. Investors began investing money into bank certificates for higher interest rates. Moreover, the Brothers had taken on massive loans to fund their silver scheme but could not repay the debts. The brokers, who had made the loans, such as Bache, A.G. Edwards, Merrill Lynch and others, began to protect themselves from a market crash by shorting the price.
 
The Federal Reserve then changed the rules on speculative silver investments, and the price plunged. A broker demanded a $100 million dollar payment. The Hunts defaulted. Out of desperation, the Hunt brothers tried to counterfeit paper obligations backed by their 200 million ounces of silver. Essentially, they tried to create a new international currency backed by silver. By then, however, silver was linked in the public mind with the unstable situation of the Hunts. On Blood Thursday—March 27, 1980—the price hit an all time low. Many of these banks were bailed out by taxpayer money, and investigations found that the Hunts owned considerable stake in Bache.

The banks involved in this silver play had gained insight into the silver market. What they had gained was the ability to suppress the price of silver whenever it began to go up. The price of silver became divorced from supply and demand.

Today, upward pressure on silver stems from somewhat similar circumstances to what the U.S. was experiencing in the mid 1970’s: a lack of confidence in the US economy and therefore the dollar. Not only do such global circumstances and fears of currency devaluation cause the public and institutional buyers—such as central banks—to run to commodities, like gold and silver and agriculture, but increasing transparency regarding manipulation in the silver market by big players such as JPMorgan and HSBC put the precious metals market in the headlines—and with negative sentiment towards Wall Street right now, silver offers people an exciting way of not only preserving purchasing power, but also exposing big banks to risk.

In short, JPMorgan, HSBC and other international financial institutions have over the long-term bet on the price of silver to fall. The capital expended to ensure the price did act in such a way has “artificially depressed the price of silver dramatically downward.” Thus, class-action lawsuits have been filed against the banks.

The CFTC began investigating the manipulation through its Enforcement Division three years ago after issuing letters in 2004 and 2008. As yet, no findings have been made public. Backed by taxpayer money, as it is, one can imagine it has been a rather expensive investigation.

Western economies are bankrupt. Silver and gold will not meet demand in the coming years, which is why platinum and palladium—historically, for the most part, viewed as only industrial metals—will play large roles as monetary hedges. Today, central banks and other large institutions are net buyers of gold, and many are even scooping up large positions in platinum. They were late to the gold game, entering in a meaningful way in 2007 and 2008, more than five years after the start of the extraordinary bull market. Tomorrow, these same institutions will be net buyers of silver in a big way. Again, they will be late. Either way, this will cause the price of silver to snowball in a manner similar to what has been seen in gold over the last fifty years.

The US mint has seen periods this year where they sold just as many dollars in silver as gold, despite that gold is priced in dollars around 40 times the price of silver at any given time. In the Spring, world markets bore witness to a rise in silver of near $50, before heavy manipulation—that is, large sell-offs—took advantage of a quiet market on a Sunday night and early Monday morning, when few trades were being made.

Silver works at times as a sort of schizophrenic precious metals. It has moments where the underlying demand for it as a monetary hedge causes the price to run north quickly. Other times, dismal industrial outlook causes it to follow the coattails of platinum and fall. But, as many young people—and not to mention wealthy folks and institutions— are looking to silver as an investment, a hedge or a savings account, demand for the metal as a monetary instrument is sure to drive price discovery.

Silver prices are poised to rise, thus putting pressure on the JPMorgan stock price. As the JPMorgan stock price and the silver price conflate, investors will concern themselves, in regards to the bank’s stock price and derivatives holdings, with their risky short position in silver. Usually a firm will short a stock 8-1, whilst JPMorgan holds a short of about 40-1.

For every ounce of silver sold on the COMEX, JPMorgan sells between twenty to fifty ounces of silver, similar to fractional reserve banking. This is called naked short selling; that is, they sell silver that does not exist. In fact, it is estimated that the bank has sold between one billion and three billion ounces of non-existent silver. They have sold more silver than exists above ground. In terms of derivatives, JPMorgan has about $1.5 trillion in exposure, much of which are silver shorts. Knowing this, large hedge funds can purchase large quantities of silver, and eventually force JPMorgan to go long.

Silver has a myriad of uses today. Not only is it an investment or a hedge, but for many it is a savings account. It also has industrial purposes and, for some, is representative of a political movement to expose too-big-to-fail banks to risk. It is also the jewelry metal of choice among the youth in the US and Europe, for it is more affordable than gold. Many simply like the color.

Just as the gold cartel eventually lost its control over gold in the late sixties, causing its price to begin running upwards from $35 an ounce, the silver cartel sees its days numbered. Today gold is a de facto world reserve currency, and everyday more people catch onto this reality. Silver has historically traded in tandem with the yellow metal. Many analysts see $10,000 an ounce as a given for yellow. At the very feasible 20-1 ratio, that lands silver at roughly $500 an ounce.

*this is an opinion piece and is not designed to be taken as investment advice.
*disclosure: we are bullish on silver

There Is No Incrementalism in Resistance

There is an old story, which tells of a frog in a pot. When the frog was put in the pot while the water inside was boiling, the frog would immediately leap out to safety. But, when the frog was placed into a cool pot, which was then heated up, it would remain in the pot until, eventually, it was cooked and dead. Now, I’ve never put a frog in boiling pot of water, nor have I ever tried to steam a frog, but the thought remains. Then again, maybe it depends on the frog.

For ages, however, this old tale has served as a metaphor for rulers, who, with their instinct of self-preservation intact, have used symbols along specific lines to lead individuals and the collective-mind, according to their self-declared jurisdiction and oft dark desires. Just as the latter frog might have only cooked because the process was incremental, those who make global policies rule by a philosophy of control that can be termed “incrementalism”; in other words, they are ever-so-patient in getting their way.

The capstone income-earners, the rulers--that is, those to whom the mass of wealth and power, in a contrived, yet natural manner, flows--direct investments, actions and reactions so as to unendingly consolidate, secure and promote their unswerving pre-eminence on earth. As monopoly men, they steer economic society in such a way that they increase their profit share. With goods and services on a centralizing course, those at the core of an economic system manage to perpetuate this arrangement. After all, that is how they view it: as managing the planet.

That such behavior is maintained, even when it is only those at the core of the system who benefit, at the fatal expense of a great many, speaks to the psychopathic nature of those who, in their minds, have successfully worked towards becoming CEO’s of the planet. In the captain’s helm of the neo-politburo, which guides the command-and-control economy of Western Civilization in its current stage, conscience is composed of an entirely different arrangement of matter as down below in the gallows, “where the men hang on for their dear lives.”

In incrementalism, the rulers persuade people to follow the path which, in their minds, will most likely result in the preservation of power for themselves. There is too, of course, a pseudo-spiritual or pseudo-religious aspect to this power, as the abuse of it, and the masochistic wielding of it, satiates their sick yearnings, perceived to be of luciferan origin by some of the players. Preserving the power, to be sure, is merely a means to an end, and this is where incrementalism comes in.

Totally authoritarian rule, complete domination and subordination, are the makings of a well-organized and orderly system in which rule is guaranteed to those who have previously wielded it. According to their logic, why they deserve to rule is quite simple: because they have previously ruled, and so therefore it is natural.

However, it is far from easy to implement such measures of control. Historically, in order to do so, ruling classes have, without fail, resorted to bringing in such systems slowly, so that, just as the frog won’t jump from slowly boiled water, people won’t notice and, therefore, act. In incrementalism, there are naturally stages through which society passes, and, as each stage comes into view, the paradigm of society shifts, although the general trajectory is logical in light of its predecessor.

There is no incrementalism in resistance. In a civilization scientifically dissected by/ for the capstone class, opposition to the dominant culture and its overseers would be futile were it to be bit-by-bit; that is, slow motion resistance can never re-create such a civilization towards less nihilistic and grotesque movements. Therefore, our civilization cannot incrementally be reoriented, not when “full spectrum dominance”, the literal construction of an omnipotent God as the system, is the never-ending agenda.

For these reasons, it is crucial for those who seek to help to become self-sustainable. This is done by learning skills such as acquiring even small plots of land, gardening for food, learning weapons skills, investing and securing wealth through gold and silver, seeking a network of reliable friends and family, and educating oneself and others in the techniques of control, consistently utilized by rulers, to protect the cognitive fabric of man.

From 9/11 to 4/20: BP Gulf Oil Leak and a Planned Course for History

A Kickoff for the Century of Change: 9/11
Evidence and September 11th fit well together, like puzzle pieces. The amount of data pointing towards alternative solutions to the who, what, why, and where’s of that fateful day leave many questions officially unanswered; not to mention millions of people perplexed about how their brethren just don’t seem to see what they see. Even former assistant secretary to the Treasury under Reagan and father of Reaganomics, Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, has extensively questioned that day’s events. In February, Roberts wrote an article about that month’s Washington Times article by Jennifer Harper, called “Inside the Beltway,” which detailed 31 press conferences held by Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, an organization of professionals which has 1,000 members, in cities in the US and abroad on February 19. [1]

This organization cites as suspicious the following in regards to the collapse of the north and south towers and WTC 7: for starters, that fires in high rises have never brought down a steel-framed high rise building; in the case of building 7, the tower collapses straight down into its own footprint at freefall acceleration in the first 100 feet or two and a half seconds; in that building, there were 40,000 tons of structural steel designed to resist the collapse of the 47 storey structure, which stood a football field away from the Twin Towers, as well as important Enron and WorldCom records. In the north and south towers, several tons of pooled molten iron—reported by first responders, structural engineers, and documented by FEMA—were detailed, although jet plane impact and normal office fires don’t produce molten iron or steel, since it doesn’t begin to melt until 3,000 degrees. The 9/11 fires probably produced upwards of 1,600 degree temperatures.

Chemical evidence of a high-tech incendiary called nano-thermite—used to cut through steel—was found in all the dust sprinkled throughout lower Manhattan. In this dust, there are several tons of tiny spheres of previously molten iron, a by-product of thermite. [2]

Retired army Major General Albert Stubblebine, who, in his last assignment, was responsible for all of the army’s strategic intelligence forces around the world, is one of many authoritative personalities on the 9/11 events; in his last command, he held the responsibility for signals intelligence, photos intelligence, counter-intelligence and human intelligence. While speaking out for 9/11 truth, he warrants his suspicious by citing his vast experience analyzing photos, and for all sorts of evidence at that. About his conclusions regarding the Pentagon explosion, the former Major General has said: “from the photographs that I have analyzed and looked at very carefully, it was not an airplane…for one thing, if you looked at the hole that was made in the Pentagon, the nose penetrated far enough so that there should have been wing-marks in the wall of the Pentagon…so where were they?” [3]

“A thousand architects and engineers want to know, and are calling on Congress to order a new investigation into the destruction of the Twin Towers and Building 7,” reports the Washington Times. The Times reports that the architects and engineers have concluded that FEMA and the National Institute of Standards and Technology garnered “insufficient, contradictory and fraudulent accounts of the circumstances of the towers’ destruction” and are “calling for a grand jury investigation of NIST officials.” [3]

Further implications abound, like pseudo-sophisticated trades made on insider information that caused huge profits for manipulators who foresaw the stocks of certain airline and insurance companies plummeting in the days after Sept. 11 2001.

The Institute for Counter Terrorism (ICT), in Herzliya, Israel, printed an article entitled, “Black Tuesday: World’s Largest Insider Trading Scam?” on Sept. 19, 2001. Author Don Radlauer, an expert in stock options and derivatives, gave details of the types and volumes of the trades, saying: “Obviously, anyone who had detailed knowledge of the attacks before they happened was, at the very least, an accessory to their planning; and the overwhelming probability is that the trades could have been made only by the same people who masterminded the attacks themselves.” According to Radlauer, the timing, specificity, size and unusual nature of the trades made them suspect. “The trading is sure to have been done under false names, behind shell corporations, and in general to have been thoroughly obfuscated.”

Up there with the most suspicious spikes in trading activity were high increases in “put options,” which are highly leveraged bets that a certain stock’s share price will fall. The spike in “put options” placed on the two airlines involved in the hijackings of Sept. 11, United Airlines (UAL) and American Airlines, have not been officially or satisfactorily investigated.

A 9,000 percent jump in United Air Lines (UAL) put options between Sept. 6 and Sept. 10, with a 285 percent jump on the Thursday before the attack, coincides with a 6,000 percent jump in American Airlines put options. There was no similar trading activity on other airlines, according to market reports. Major brokerage houses with offices in WTC, Morgan Stanley and Merrill-Lynch, had 27-fold and 12-fold increases in put option purchases on their respective shares between Sept. 7 and Sept. 10.

“The afternoon before the attack, alarm bells were sounding over unusual trading in the U.S. stock options market,” the CBS program 60 Minutes reported on Sept. 19. Investigator Michael C. Ruppert ensures: “These trades were certainly noticed after the attacks.”

“This could very well be insider trading at the worst, most horrific, most evil use you’ve ever seen in your entire life . . . this would be one of the most extraordinary coincidences in the history of mankind if it was a coincidence,” Bloomberg Business News’ Dylan Ratigan said Sept. 20.

Although the chief of enforcement at the Securities and Exchange Commission, William McLucas, said regulators would “certainly be able to track down every trade, where the trade cleared, where the trade was directed from,” no U.S. or foreign agency has made public arrests as a result of investigations into these trades. [4]


Making Economic Society for a Specific Transformation

Evidently, there was quite a bit of insider information to trade on in the days and weeks leading up to 9/11. That major Wall Street firms protected themselves and prospered from “lucky” trading, evidences perceived usefulness of 9/11 to major players of the planet’s increasingly total corporatocracy. A section entitled “Creating Tomorrow’s Dominant Force” in the neo-conservative think-tank Project for the New American Century’s document, Rebuilding America’s Defenses, vaguely, but clearly to those fluent in technocraticese, outlines what is needed to spur societal change: “Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.” Many analysts see 9/11 as the “Pearl Harbor” prophesized by PNAC, whose membership includes Richard Dick Cheney, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Donald Rumself, Paul Wolfowitz, Steve Forbes, Jeb Bush, among others. Therefore, 9/11 can be seen as a multi-faceted opportunity on which policy makers could capitalize in favor of long-desired plans.

Shorting the Gulf Region: environmental and financial terrorism?
Just like trades before 9/11 should cause concern and questions, so too do trades made by major players in the days leading up the BP oil leak. Goldman Sachs, a premiere brokerage firm, sold 4,680,822 shares of BP in the first quarter of 2010. Goldman’s sales represented the largest of any firm during that period. If the firms’ shares been sold at the average price of BP’s stock that quarter, it would have gained more than $266 million from its holdings. Had the firm sold those shares today, their investment would have lost 36+ percent on its value; so, roughly $96+ million. Shares sold were 44 percent of Goldman’s position in the Big Oil firm, the largest sales of oil shares in its trading history. Of course, the remaining holdings have lost tens of millions in their value. [5]

Paul Noel, an expert on the Gulf Oil subject, provided intelligence on the shorting: [6]

There is a reason they could have known the rig was going to fail up to two weeks ahead of its failure. The nature of these wells is that they leave the drill mud in the well and compress using very heavy drill mud to keep the well from blowing up unlimited. The well would begin to bump (similar to boiling a big bubble) and the acoustic signals would tell the rig was in trouble that far ahead. Goldman Sachs could just have had inside info. They also know the scale of things. This is the best explanation. It could be otherwise.

If you were going to sabotage a drilling team, all you would have to do is load a lighter mud in the mix as they pulled a drill pipe…There are lots of ways to have this happen either accidentally or deliberately. Goldman teams are great on statistical stuff sort of like the odds of rolling dice. They might just have figured stats for probability of failure??? Of course we could surmise other reasons are possible.

Such movements of volume—such as those seen before 9/11 and 4/20, the first day of the oil leak—are not atypical of large asset management firms, for Wall Street brokerages regularly buy and sell huge blocks of shares, not only for themselves, but for their oftentimes uber-rich clients as well. That such a voluminous movement of economic power preceded incomprehensible destruction is par for the course in the embryonic, soviet modeled command-and-control global economy of today (and other deference systems before that, for that matter). By way of economic democracy, intriguing, but delicate super-alliances and their under-the-table agreements forge the future. For centuries, society has been made economically, and clearly today fits in well with the pattern: to usher in crises as a means to justifying artificial scarcity, presenting new solutions previously unviable, followed by the policy’s and courses to which those solutions lead.

Goldman was not the only asset firm to sell huge blocks of BP stock in the first quarter, though these other firms sold off fractions of what Goldman did. Wachovia, owned by Wells Fargo, sold 2,667,419 shares, while UBS—a Swiss bank—sold 2,667,419 shares. A staggering fact that points towards numerous interesting conversational rabbit holes, especially concerning Goldman Sachs’s clout, Wachovia and UBS sold greater percentages of their BP stock; those being, 98 percent and 97 percent respectively.

BP Chief Executive, Tony Hayward, also sold considerable stock in BP. Four weeks before the oil leak, the BP chief cashed in about a third of his holdings in the company. By doing so, he avoided losing £423,000 pounds when BP's share price plunged after the leak. His decision, however, helped him to avoid losing more than £423,000 when BP’s share price plunged after the oil spill began six weeks ago. [7] Further, on April 12th, more than a week before the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, Haliburton, the world's second largest oilfield services corporation, unexpectedly acquired Boots & Coots, a small but much experienced oil well-control company. The company handles fires and blowouts on oil rigs and oil wells. [8]

Wellington Management, a large asset firm, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation were reported to be purchasing BP’s stock. [5]


Corporate Operational Defiance Disorder and the Management of Globalization

BP officially admits to just a few thousand barrels hemorrhaging into the ocean each day. Contradictorily, experts estimate the true figure at 60,000 barrels or 2.5 million gallons daily. Truth being, the real figures are unknowable, considering that BP has barred independent engineers from looking at the breach. When this part of the Earth will run out of oil, nobody can be certain. Meanwhile, under the radar of the corporate media, Transocean Ltd.—the owner of the Deepwater Horizon rig leased by BP—has made $270 million off the oil leak through post-disaster insurance payouts. [9]

On May 20th, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ordered the London-based BP to cease dispersant of Corexit 9500 (used to break up the leaked oil) or to describe in detail why other dispersants do not meet environmental standards. BP stated that the chemical product now in use is “the best option for subsea application.” [10]

The 1989 Exxon Valdez spill leaked nearly 11 million gallons of crude, killing vibrant and diverse wildlife and damaging the reputation of Exxon. In fact, the leader of containment efforts in the hours just after the tanker began leaking was not Exxon Mobil Corp, but, truly, BP, owing to their 1989 ownership of a controlling 50.01 percent share in the consortium.

Watching the crisis in the Gulf unfold is akin to reliving the Valdez disaster for attorney Zygmut Plater, who conducted the legal team for the state-appointed Alaska Oil Spill Commission that investigated the Exxon spill. “I feel this horrible, sickening feeling,” said Plater, now a teacher at Boston College. “What happened in Alaska was determined by decisions coming from (BP in) Houston,” he said.

Today, Plater laments an approach in regards to the ’89 spill that attempted to avoid pointing fingers. “In retrospect, it could’ve focused attention on BP and created transparency which would’ve changed the internal culture,” he said. “As we see the internal culture appears not to have changed with tragic results.” [11]

One defense yet to be tried to stop the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico is billions of hydrocarbon-chewing microbes, like Alcanivorax Borkumensis. One purpose of the 830,000 chemical dispersants used to combat the oil slick is to break the oil into smaller droplets, which are easier for bacteria to consume. Nature hosts innumerable types of organisms who, as a community, combine to decompose oil. No single microbe has proved more efficient than this natural defense. “Every ocean we look at, from the Antarctic to the Arctic, there are oil-degrading bacteria,” says Atlas, who analyzed genetically engineered microbes and other cleanup methods in the wake of the Exxon-Valdez oil spill in Alaska. “Petroleum has thousands of compounds. Its complex and the communities that feed on it are complex. A superbug fails because it competes with this community that is adapted to the environment.” Marine-dwelling bacteria and fungi use hydrocarbons as fuel by breaking up hydrocarbons with enzymes and oxygen, their populations growing exponentially in days. [12]


Basis for Legal Action

A clause buried in the U.S. Clean Water Act means that BP and others could be charged with, for all intents and purposes, near unlimited fines. The act enables the government to seek civil penalties in court for each drop of oil that spills into US navigable waters, including the area of the leaking well. The US government could fine BP or others up to $4,300 for each barrel leaked into the Gulf and surrounding marine ecosystems, say legal experts familiar with official documents. Should the US government aggressively pursue legal action, the amount of fines could potentially bankrupt BP. [13]

Those investors who divested from BP could have done so due to information regarding pipe conditions, since BP knew of equipment problems on the Deepwater Horizon rig at least hours before the explosion, implicating them as accessory to the events. In mid-May, the House of Representatives energy and commerce committee learned that documents and company briefings were suggestive that BP, the well’s owner; Transocean, the rig owner; and Haliburton, the company which cemented into place the casing for the well, ignored 20 April tests that indicated faulty equipment. Among the failures are a dead battery in the blowout preventer, suggestions of a breach in the well casing, and “failure” in the shear ram, which was the device responsible for cutting through and sealing the drill pipe in the event of blowout.

While the energy and commerce committee reviewed the gross negligence on the part of the oil industry, Senator John Kerry and Joe Lieberman introduced a climate and energy bill that for the very first time will put a price on carbon and impose cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.

“This is a bill for energy independence after a devastating oil spill, a bill to hold polluters accountable, a bill for billions of dollars to create the next generation of jobs and a bill to end America’s addiction to foreign oil,” said Kerry, who believes the oil spill would help get the American Power Act passed. The passage of this law is viewed by experts as essential to a global deal on climate change. [14]

Or maybe the stocks were sold pre-spill due to predicted drops in the price of the oil due to a poor economy. The US Energy Information Administration reduced its 2010 and 2010 forecasts for oil prices. The change represents a drop in oil prices since the last report, the reason being concerns over an elusive economic recovery. To cite this as a reason for Goldman Sach's largest divestment from an oil company in its history would be unsatisfactory. [15]

Trickle Down Terror

Like the 9/11 events were used to justify “transformation” towards a more totalitarian order in not only the United States, but myriad countries, 4/20 could give way to its own transformations. Thus far, all evidence suggests it is the largest environmental catastrophe in US history. While actions taken after 9/11 were officially said to be crucial to America’s collective safety, the aftermath of 4/20 might result in a quickening of the U.S. economy’s greening. The ‘green’ economy program has been criticized by many for its ultimate results, which mirror IMF and World Bank austerity measures and structural adjustments, also known as “economic medicine.” Spain’s experience with a ‘green’ economy speaks to that trend.

Spain’s current unemployment rate is 18.1 percent, more than twice the European Union average. Gabriel Calzada has furnished a report arguing that Spain’s high-velocity spending on the production of electricity from renewable sources, higher than any other nation, creates only temporary jobs. Moreover, each job devoted to wind farms and other alternative energy projects entails the loss of 2.2 other jobs lost or not created due to politicized investment towards a ‘green’ economy.

The sub-optimum allocation of capital was accompanied by European media reports on so-called “eco-corruption,” which entailed a “footprint of sleaze”—subsidy systems were gamed, profiteering from land sales for wind farms, etc. According to Calzada, the alternative energy job program has subtracted approximately 110,000 jobs from other sectors in Spain’s economy. To further de-industrialize the US economy would be in-line with arrangements of the last decade, such as NAFTA and GATT treaties, which have all abetted the transformation of the US economy into an interdependent service economy. [16]

It comes as no surprise that BP finds itself at the center of controversy on President Obama’s watch, who received a hefty campaign contribution from British Petroleum (the largest of any of the candidates). [17] Overall, the foremost concerns of both BP and the President—Goldman Sachs, by the way, was his largest campaign contributor—have centered on public relations and marketing. The apologist corporate-media have been complicit, but BP has taken further and absolute measures to ensure they control their image. The Big Oil firm bought terms like “oil spill” from search engine providers such as Google Inc. “to help direct users to its website as it attempts to control the worst oil spill in U.S. history.” Taking Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs Cass Sunstein’s theory of “nudging people” to make better decisions, BP has invested capital in the art of “nudging people” away from the environmental catastrophe they were complicit in bringing about. BP will pay fees so its own website would rank higher or top the list of results when Internet users search on terms such as “oil spill,” “volunteer” and “claims.” On the “boob tube”, BP has spent $50 million on TV advertising to bolster its image during the crisis. [18]

As I highlighted earlier, Bloomberg Business News’ Dylan Ratigan said this of the insider trading before 9/11:

“This could very well be insider trading at the worst, most horrific, most evil use you’ve ever seen in your entire life . . . this would be one of the most extraordinary coincidences in the history of mankind if it was a coincidence.”

In these times, is there such a thing as coincidence? Has 4/20 outdone even 9/11?


















1. Roberts, Paul Craig, Phd. 9/11: The Road to Armageddon, CounterCurrents, 26 February 2010.
Accessed at: http://www.countercurrents.org/roberts260210.htm

2. Richard Gage video interview
Accessed at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssuAMNas1us


3. Major General Stubblebine video interview:
Accessed at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssuAMNas1us

4. Bollyn, Christopher. Revealing 9-11 Stock Trades Could Expose The Terrorist Masterminds. Global Research, 18 December 2004.
Accessed at: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/BOL412B.html

5. Byrne, John. Goldman Sachs sold $250 million of BP stock before spill. Raw Story, 2 June 2010.
Accessed at: http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0602/month-oil-spill-goldman-sachs-sold-250-million-bp-stock/

6. Sterling, Allan. No Joke: Goldman Sachs Shorted Gulf of Mexico. Examiner, 5 May 2010.
Accessed at:
http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-8199-Breakthrough-Energy-Examiner~y2010m5d5-No-joke-Goldman-Sachs-shorted-Gulf-of-Mexico

7. Swaine, John and Winnett, Robert. BP chief Tony Hayward sold shares weeks before oil spill. Telegraph UK, 05 June 2010.
Accessed at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/oilandgas/7804922/BP-chief-Tony-Hayward-sold-shares-weeks-before-oil-spill.html


8. Watson, John Paul and Alex Jones. Evidence Points To BP Oil Spill False Flag. InfoWars, 8 June 2010.
Accessed at: http://www.infowars.com/evidence-points-to-bp-oil-spill-false-flag/



9. Perdono, Daniela. Ten Things You Need (But Don’t Want) To Know About the BP Oil Spill. Global Research, 27 May 2010.
Accessed at: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=19408

10. Roosevelt Margot and Carolyn Cole. BP Refuses EPA order to switch to less toxic oil dispersant. LA Times, 23 May 2010.
Accessed at: http://articles.latimes.com/2010/may/23/nation/la-na-oil-spill-0100523

http://blog.al.com/live/2010/05/bp_had_a_key_role_in_the_exxon.html


11. Schwartz, Noaki. BP Had a Key Role in the Exxon Valdez Disaster. Associated Press, 25 May 2010.
Accessed at:


12. Biello, David. Slick Solution: How Microbes Will Clean Up the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, Scientific American, 25 May 2010.
Accessed at: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-microbes-clean-up-oil-spills

13. Schneyer, Joshua. Civil Fine in Gulf Oil Spill Could Be $4,300 barrel. Reuters, 26 May, 2010.
Accessed at:
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64O75Q20100526

14. Goldenberg, Suzanne. Gulf Oil Spill: firms ignored warning signs before blast, inquiry hears. UK Guardian, 13 May 2010.

Accessed at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/may/12/deepwater-gulf-oil-spill-hearing

15. Baskin, Brian. EIA Cuts Oil Price Outlook As Uncertainty About Economy Weighs, NASDAQ 8 June 2010.
Accessed at: http://www.nasdaq.com/aspx/stock-market-news-story.aspx?storyid=201006081243dowjonesdjonline000349&title=eia-cuts-oil-price-outlook-as-uncertainty-about-economy-weighs#ixzz0qHZIM2CN

16. Will, George. Spain’s experience with the ‘green’ economy: Save the planet, lose some jobs. The Seattle Times, 25 June 2009.
Accessed at: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2009385016_will26.html

17. Burkart, Karl. Coast Guard and BP threaten journalists with arrest for documenting spill. Mother Nature Network, 18 May 2010


17.Young, Sarah and Bergin, Tom. BP buys search term “oil spill” from Google. Reuters, 9 June 2010.
Accessed at: http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/bp-buys-search-term-oil-spill-from-google-reuters_molt-c8ff670e72dc.html;_ylt=Al_QfhKyykBmyN4XkTc1oqnBXGwF;_ylu=X3oDMTE2djI4c2liBHBvcwMxMgRzZWMDdG9wc3RvcmllcwRzbGsDYnBidXlzc2VhcmNo?x=0

Truth About California’s Gubernatorial Election 2010

California is renowned for all the obvious reasons. As the most populous state in the United States, California holds unprecedented power: often estimated as roughly the eighth largest economy in the world, the region is the second largest national subentity on the globe, behind Sao Paulo, Brazil. Californians mostly dwell on the concrete islands that constitute the Los Angeles-San Diego and San Francisco-San Jose agglomerations, artificial human constructs which are products predominantly of last century. With an economy roughly the size of Italy's, California makes up one of the U.S.'s "FnCOMA" states (Florida, Nevada, California, Oregon, Michigan and Arizona). Between two ages, California today sits at distinct crossroads. Will the 59th largest political entity in the world work for a fairer world or will its superlative-filled ecology—the state boasts the largest, tallest and oldest trees—have its destiny dictated by the most efficient paths to profit by an increasingly consolidated state-enterprise, working as a rule out of New York, City of London, France, and Germany?

That, as of 2005, 57.59 per cent of California residents age five and older spoke English as a first language at home, while 28.21 per cent spoke Spanish, indicates the degree to which the modern keystone border doesn't divide nation-states and citizens of nations. The world's true borders divide the generations living at one time, families and, of course, entire people's based on something as shallow as the color of one's skin, which is an illusion basically conjured by the sun, melanin and time. Nation-states are units of control, influenced as a rule by transnational entities, such as corporations, foundations and think tanks. Today, nearly all of the premiere conglomerations and their subsidiaries—from banking and finance, military and security, to agriculture and medicine—all act as if they're one, influencing the markets and therefore everyday commerce. The current poster-child for such "market making" corporations has been Goldman Sachs, and for considerably good reason. In California, the news is no different: all three leading candidates in the race do business with G-Sachs; they are, Meg Whitman (R), Scott Poizner (D), and Jerry Brown (D). We'll begin with the multi-billionaire CEO, Meg Whitman.

Of her long record of involvement with Goldman Sachs, Whitman says she "regrets" doing business with the investment and securities firm. Whitman, former CEO of eBay, served on Goldman's board from October 2001 to December 2002. The position paid $475,000 in cash and stock options. Still earlier in 1998, she had hired Goldman to advise eBay's Initial Public Offering. The firm advised a second eBay stock offering and also helped the takeover of online biller PayPal in 2002. Meanwhile, Whitman was also a personal banking client of Goldman and engaged in "spinning," a now-illegal practice in which the bank enabled her some of the first shares in companies going public. Once the shares were made widely available, their prices soared. Thus, stock belonging to preferred clients such as Whitman was sold for a quick profit. Whilst spinning was legal, Whitman made $1.78 million through it. [1]

In the LA Times, Michael Hiltzik ponders Whitman's involvement with Goldman Sachs:

Eight years ago, it came out that Whitman was among an elite group of favored executives who had accepted preferential stock deals from Goldman Sachs while it was seeking business from their companies.

In spinning, executives would typically get shares in coveted initial public stock offerings, which they would "spin," or resell, into a soaring market, usually within days and sometimes within hours. Their quick and almost entirely risk-free profits were effectively gifts, and the investment banks the givers.

Whitman attempted to dodge responsibility for her actions by claiming that there was "nothing illegal" about them at the time.

"Such investment opportunities were common at the time," Whitman wrote in her autobiography released this year. "And I had never seen anyone in the government, the media, or anywhere else raise the idea that this practice was a conflict of interest."

In 2002, Congress looked into spinning, and, a year later, the Securities and Exchange Commission banned it. "I supported those changes," she insisted in her book. The day she left the Goldman Sachs board, the government announced a $1.4 billion settlement with Goldman and nine other firms that included a ban on stock spinning. EBay shareholders sued Whitman for conflict of interest. She maintained that she received insider information only through her personal banking relationship with Goldman. Whitman and two other eBay executives settled the suit in 2005, having admitted no wrongdoing.

Seventy-three percent of Americans believe it to be "somewhat likely" that Goldman is guilty of fraud in the home mortgage market after hearing of the Securities and Exchange Commission's lawsuit against the firm last week, says a Rasmussen poll. 75% also don't oppose the auditing of the Federal Reserve, in which Goldman holds stock, according Bob Chapman of the International Forecaster. [2]

Whitman has publicly received $110,500 in campaign contributions last year from Goldman contacts, among whom are two former executives who are members of Whitman's campaign finance committee, according to her website. Investment adviser Brad DeFoor, a Goldman Sachs managing director in San Francisco, gave her campaign $24,900 and Gene Sykes, who co-chairs Goldman's global mergers and acquisitions group in Los Angeles, donated $25,900.

Further, records detail that Whitman's family foundation is managed by a subsidiary of Goldman Sachs, the Ayco Company out of New York,that manages money for wealthy families, according to the description on its website. The Griffith R. Harsh and Margaret C. Whitman Charitable Foundation had $48 million in assets at the time of its 2008 tax filing.

"It is highly disingenuous and hypocritical for Team Brown to make accusations surrounding Meg's service on a board for only 15 months nearly 10 years ago, when Jerry Brown's own sister oversees Goldman Sachs' dealings with the state of California," said Tucker Bounds, a spokesman for Whitman. Brown's sister, Kathleen Brown, has led the West Coast region of municipal finance for Goldman Sachs since 2003.

"Unsurprisingly, Meg Whitman and her campaign is once again trying to avoid her taking responsibility for her actions. Jerry's sister is an adult who needs no one's permission to take a job," said Jerry Brown's campaign spokesman, Sterling Clifford.

His sister oversaw a deal with the city of Oakland, where he "served" as mayor for eight years. The deal, known as an "interest rate swap," was advertised as guaranteeing Oakland stability in its debt payments, but now costs the cash-strapped city $5 million a year. The agreement goes until 2021, with an estimated cancellation cost of $19 million. The city is trying to renegotiate it, and union officials representing government employees are calling on Goldman to let Oakland and other municipalities free of such agreements.

The swap, like those of many governments, began in 1998, one year before Brown assumed office. City officials renegotiated it in 2003, just before his sister, who was also a former state treasurer, began working for Goldman as the West Coast head of municipal finance. In 2005, when the city paid off the debt Goldman had packaged, it left the interest rate swap in place. Municipal servants argued the decision made sense because they would have had to pay $15 million to cancel the deal. In doing so, a major revenue stream for Goldman Sachs remained in place, benefiting them further during the Downturn, while hurting the city.

Bounds called the agreement "a big-money deal for Wall Street that is costing California taxpayers millions of dollar a year...no matter how you look at it, Jerry and his sister were on both ends of a bad deal for taxpayers, and Goldman Sachs pocketed millions." Not only was Brown mayor, responsible for appointments to city administrator and finance officials who oversaw the city borrowing, Brown was president of the Oakland Joint Powers Financing Authority, though in a non-voting capacity, as it renegotiated the deal and repaid Goldman's debt in 2005. Sterling Clifford, Brown's campaign spokesman, claimed he was not involved.

Poizner borrowed $500,000 to finance his 2004 state assembly race with the help of Goldman Sachs, and state financial records detail his history of investments with the firm. "Attacking a candidate for flimsy ties to a private company is exactly what you would expect from a desperate liberal - and I guess that includes Steve Poisner, too," said Whitman's spokesman, Bounds.

Looming in the shadows of campaign rhetoric, is the continued collapse of California. Almost one year ago, the state government was so deeply indebted that it began to issue IOUs instead of wages. It's current unemployment rate nudges 30 per cent. Unannounced and generally ill-perceived austerity measures and structural adjustments have commenced, with spending for education and healthcare slashed, mass layoffs and forced unpaid leave. An epicenter of suburban living, the housing bubble collapse has impoverished millions and forced tens of thousands of families out of their homes. The political system "is locked in paralysis" and the two-term rule of former movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger seen as a disaster. Professor Kevin Starr, who wrote an acclaimed history of the state, recently stated that "California is on the verge of becoming the first failed state in America."

Starr has a history of mulling over the future of the golden state. In 1988, following three years of debate, a who's who of corporate and civic celebrities handed to then Mayor Bradley a detailed plan for the future of Southern California. L.A. 2000: A City for the Future devotes itself to hyperbolic rhetoric about Los Angeles's certain destiny as a "world crossroads" a la imperial Rome or LaGuardian New York. In a section of the epilogue, Starr, showing his colors as a devotee of totalitarian measures, considered what might happen if the city failed to create a new "dominant establishment" to manage the city and regions diverse peoples. He wrote, "there is, of course, the Blade Runner scenario: the fusion of individual cultures into a demotic polyglotism ominous with unresolved hostilities."

At LittleSis.org, there is a list of Goldman Sachs cronies who have worked as U.S. government officials. To be sure, an international version of the list would show connections with key players in countries such as Germany and Greece, as a small example. U.S. connections from LittleSis: [3]


NAME
POSITION
Gary D Cohn
President and COO of Goldman Sachs
Pete Coneway
Investment Banker, Goldman Sachs & Co
Diana Farrell
Deputy director of Obama's National Economic...
Jose Fourquet
Investor, Goldman Sachs & Co.
Stephen Friedman
Chairman of Stone Point Capital; director of...
Gary Gensler
ex-Goldman Sachs executive, Chairman of Commodity...
Dick Gephardt
US Representative from Missouri
Bob Hormats
Under Secretary of State for Economic, Energy,...
Robert J Hurst

Reuben Jeffery III
Undersecretary of State for Economic, Energy, and...
James A Johnson
Vice Chair of Perseus and Goldman director;...
Neel Kashkari
Treasury official in charge of TARP; former...
James C Langdon Jr
Senior Executive Partner at Akin Gump and Bush...
Philip D Murphy
Ambassador to Germany-Designate
Mark Patterson
Chief of Staff to Tim Geithner
Henry M Paulson Jr
Secretary of Treasury under George W Bush; former...
Karthik Ramanathan
Domestic Finance: Acting Assistant Secretary for...
Robert E Rubin
Former Treasury Secretary and senior advisor at...
Faryar Shirzad
Global Head of Government Affairs at Goldman...
Robert K Steel
CEO of Wachovia; Under Secretary of Treasury...
Adam Storch
SEC Chief Operating Officer; former Goldman Sachs...
Larry Summers
Director of the National Economic Council ...
John Whitehead
Banker and public official (ex-Goldman Sachs)
Robert Zoellick
US Trade Representative and World Bank president...

The allegations against Whitman and her ties to G-Sachs have received the most press. For that reason, desperation is setting in at her campaign headquarters. In Roseville on Monday, she told a small audience that she would appoint a grand jury to eliminate the more than $7.5 billion in fraud she claims occurs every year in programs for the poor, seniors, and people with disabilities. Many claim, however, those numbers have little or no basis in reality. [5]

Greg Lucas analyzed her claim from California's Capitol:

Logic suggests hospitals, case workers, emergency room physicians, state administrators, nurses, drug companies, employment training facilities, childcare providers, in-home care workers and the myriad other participants in the three programs would have to work serious overtime to do their jobs and bilk the state 60 cents on the dollar.

SEIU State Council Communications Director Mary Gutierrez:

If Meg Whitman were truly committed to protecting taxpayer dollars, she'd be fighting to protect home care services that fare more cost-effective and compassionate than the alternative -- forcing people with disabilities and our elderly into nursing homes at five times the cost.

In 2008, Goldman Sachs was criticized for proposing ways for investment clients to profit from California's financial Downturn. It urged some of its biggest clients to place investment bets against California bonds despite having collected millions of dollars in fees to help the state sell some of those same bonds. Goldman Sachs financial transactions in Greece reveal that such trades are a uniform policy in Goldman Sachs’s international business model.






1. Jamison, Jane. Meg Whitman's Troubling Connection to Goldman Sachs. Red County, 30 April 2010

Accessible at:

http://www.redcounty.com/meg-whitmans-troubling-connection-goldman-sachs/39291


2. Marinucci, Carla; Williams, Lance. Whitman feels heat as Goldman's image tarnishes. SFGate, 22 April 2010.


Accessible at: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/04/22/BA6C1D2B0H.DTL#ixzz0oP7be0UP

3. O’Connell, Justin. Profiling the Power-That-Be. DissidentVoice,

Accessible at:

3. Rothfeld, Michael. Whitman, Brown have ties to Goldman Sachs. Los Angeles Times, 24 April 2010.


Accessible at:
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/apr/24/local/la-me-jerry-brown-20100424


4. Harris, Paul. Will California Become America's First Failed State? Guardian UK, 4 October 2009.

Accessible at:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/04/california-failing-state-debt


5. Smith, Steve. Whitman Uses Bogus Claims of Fraud to Attack Workers, Seniors and People with Disabilities. California Progress Report, 18 May 2010.

6. ______. Firm urged to hedge against state bonds it helped sell. Los Angeles Times, 11 November 2008.

7. Liberto, Jennifer. Fed probing Goldman trades with Greece. CNNMoney, 25 February 2010.

And Oh-So Austere: globalization coming into view

The globalization of cultural symbols and concepts has left the world in between two ages, a temporal space where persons and their generations find it hard to find themselves. Thanks to technological developments, the ability for culture to be diffused to distant regions of globe—from, say, a European or American cosmopolitan center to less influential nations and cities—is vastly expanded. Still, despite this intermixing in a global melting pot, with populations fleeing far westward or eastward for reprieve, promotional worlds are built up around users hunched over computers and laptops, where advertisements are personally tailored for them, divorcing them from their cluster of friends.

Whilst most of the literature on the topic of globalization argues that, as fewer and fewer transnational corporations compete to expand market share, once diverse cultures have fallen victim to a homogenization process, some research sees the reality differently. By arguing the case for blowback or resistance to trends of global cultural standardization, these analysts seemingly borrow from laws of physics that state for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

This reaction from below is newfangled nationalisms in nations that perceive a whittling away of their national sovereignty by the vector of global governance, business, and sociality as anti-republican traditions, totally devoid of respect for common law.

In his essay, Learning to be local in Belize, Richard Wilk puts his hand on this transpiration in Belize, where a mere two decades ago, at a time when foreign cultural influence was scarcely so pervasive as now, most Belizeans denied that such a thing as ‘Belizean culture’ existed at all. They did, after all, live where the United States considered backyard. For example, in the realm of cuisine, the honored guest from the north, Wilk, was usually treated to something from a can.

Such observations by Wilk turn his paper not into further proffering of the “progressive penetration of global commodities into every crevice of daily life,” but, instead, as an account of local diversification amid global standardization. To be sure, the global standardization remains, but there is community blossoming and counter-trends taking part that is very much important to the makeup of the dominant culture. In other words, Belizean absorption into international markets and contests has resulted in the people of the country flexing their distinctiveness and diversity apart from other nations. This process represents their entering into, what Wilk terms, the “structure of common difference.” (Wilk 1995)

This Belizean expression of difference positions itself contrary to the ideologies of nonpareil professional marketing managers, who attempt to invoke a transformation in consciousness, in terms of consumer behavior, from an episteme that holds for truth the existence of a universal rationality based on the western model. Put succinctly, a basic premise of their marketing techniques holds that consumers, markets and competitors around the world will behave the same; that, when put in environments more similar than different, the differences in people will tend to blur, to fade with time. This managerial rationality is an “undisputed instrument of knowledge.”

For instance, the field of neuro-marketing helps to make a science of predicting—more to the point, dictating—global consumer habits. The foundational study that gave rise to this field analyzed how, in test subjects shown products with which they identified and, therefore, enjoyed, blood rushed to a small location at the front of the brain called the medial prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain responsible for self-identification and the formation of personality. Such knowledge of human behavior can help to globalize a certain type of commoditization, a professional marketing manager might reason. (Lone 2009)

For some, globalization is an ideology, a fact of life. It certainly is a reality in every person on the plants life. Moreover, its process is a political one. As George Orwell told, everything is politics. Policies of deregulation and philosophies of free trade—a euphemism for corporate expansion—abet globalization and justify not just the macroeconomic axiom of comparative advantage, but, also, the microeconomic foundations of neuro-economics in the neo-classical economic model—including therein basic assumptions of inherent maximizing inclination of ‘Homo-economicus’ in an environment of scarcity. For historically powerful global elite financiers, internationalists and their national bureaucrats, globalization serves as a rationale for the recent history’s restructuring of states and economies; “a historically specific project of global economic management.” It is, for such entrenched power interests, “a view of ordering the world.”


Managers and experts of transnational corporations are particularly strong advocates of globalization because they view it as offering opportunities of boundless proportions; the concept by which to judge quality, mere efficiency. For them, globalization represents the possibility of doing business without restriction; that, de facto, supply and demand does not do autonomous market making and eradication, they can and do. And will continue doing so, in their “view of ordering the world.” They ensure this progression persists.

Such a worldview stands in contraposition to the free market capitalist ideology, by its mainstream definition. The vision of TNC managers, consultants and management academics is a global one. In fact, they are referred to by many as “globalist,” with “globalist” occasionally being prefaced with the qualifier “demise-of-the-state,” meaning, essentially, they hold no allegiances to any nation-state or its culture. TNC marketers built a worldview upon the maxim of globalization, thereby forming theories about consumers and competitive strategies. Although a complex abstraction, globalization daily becomes increasingly the true superstructure of our daily lives. (Applbaum 2002)




1.Wilk, Richard. (1995) Learning to be local in Belize: global systems of common difference,

2.Frank, Lone. “How the Brain Reveals Why we Buy.” Scientific American, 2 November 2009.
Accessed at:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=neuromarketing-brain

3.Applbaum, Kalman. (May 2000). Crossing Borders: Globalization as Myth and Charter in American Transnational Consumer Marketing, American Ethnologist, Vol. 27, No.2, pp. 257-282.

Years Have Passed Since Twain Outlined, History Rhymes. The Return of the Robber Barons

So, obviously, the richest are getting much, much richer and luxuriating in a modern Gilded Age. With a cesspool of corruption as its core, a cartel of western financial institutions and the much documented military industrial complex—especially in the United States, United Kingdom and France—have formed a “black hole” alliance, out of which nothing seems to escape. Think “bailout.” Passed under the guise of stimulating a zombie economy, it seems we’ve been left with zombie banks and bankers, preying on the blood of its victim, humanity. Unemployment in the U.S. remains over 22 percent, and an economy dissembled by outsourcing—by way of agreements such as NAFTA and GATT—still wavers due to a grave lack of industrial export capacity and uncertainty surrounding the Federal Reserve Note as the world’s reserve currency. In the interim, a global market correction leaves domesticated populations—dependent upon the most voluminous investments made, typically, by demise-of-the-state globalists—fearful of the precarious present and future. For the global brain, the fear is cognitively and physically paralyzing.

As the economic union that, ultimately, became known as the European Union passes into its second phase—continental austerity—the world watches as guinea pig economies such as Iceland and Greece are forced to restructure their economies based on the new model, a lower and less-free standard of living. Iceland, God bless them, is putting up a fight against their banking masters. Resistance in Greece is mounting. Many other countries, such as the U.S. and Britain, are “putty in the hands of the police state,” as former assistant secretary to the treasury under Ronald Regan, Paul Craig Roberts, put it. Alongside a burgeoning multinational, coordinated police state apparatus, global institutions—such as the International Monetary Fund—take the reign of sovereign nations in the newfangled post-democratic era, directing their futures while anticipating dissent and riots.

While the “unwashed masses” bemoan a coincidental and inevitable banking collapse and depression, more astute minds understand the true nature of the ominous and indicative era-defining downturn. Last week, it was announced, the investment bank Goldman Sachs is to face civil charges for fraud. This is but one case among many against financial institutions around the world. As the Guardian UK reports, “Big Finance in the 21st century turns out to have been Big Fraud.” The paper reports, also, that Britain—the epicenter of the world financial system at present—has, as of yet, not brought a single bank up on charges. “We have to live with the fiction that our banks and bankers are whiter than white, and any attempt to investigate them and their institutions will lead to a mass exodus to the mountains of Switzerland. The politicians of the Labour and Tory party alike are Bambis amid the wolves.” (1)

In Ireland, Sean FitzPatrick, the ex-chair of the Anglo Irish bank was arrested last month and interrogated over—more likely nicely requested to provide some fuzzy details—alleged fraud. Last week, the parliament of Iceland handed a dossier on the Icelandic banks to its public prosecution service. Lehman, a court-appointed examiner discovered, consciously manipulated its balance sheets to appear stronger than it was. UBS, in Switzerland, has had to defend itself from the U.S.’s Internal Revenue Service for allegedly running 17,000 offshore accounts to evade tax.

Deception by banks and bankers, says the Guardian, is the root of the charges. According to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Goldman Sachs created financial instruments that were designed to transfer wealth to one favored client from other, less favored ones. The charge indicts Goldman’s vice-president, Fabrice Tourre, as having designed financial instruments composed of valueless sub-prime mortgages at the instruction of a hedge fund client. The exotic instrument, known by the higher echelons of Goldman Sachs to be valueless, was sold to ignorant investors. Goldman says the buyers were “among the most sophisticated investors” in the world. Goldman Sachs was the top campaign contributor to Brand Obama.

Hope and Change, Hope and Change, Hope and Change, Hope and Change.

Mark Twain’s Gilded Age doesn’t compare to todays, although many of the elite players remain the same. Robert Frank dubbed the world of this rising superclass “Richistan.” In Richistan Rolex watches are junk, akin to cheap watches worn by patrons of Wal Mart. Instead, Richistanians wear proudly $736,000 Franck Muller timepieces, and write with $700,000 Mont Blank jewel-encrusted pens, while their bodyguards carry $42,000 Louis Vuitton handbags for wives and mistresses. Their social lives take place at clubs open only to those with $100 million and more, they play golf on $650,000 gold club memberships, eat $50 hamburgers and $1,000 dollar omelettes, drink $90 bottle Bling mineral water and drink $10,000 “martinis on a rock.” Not sure what that last delicacy is? Oh, nothing other than gin or vodka poured over a diamond at New York’s Algonquin Hotel.(2)

The Richistanians are the CEOs who have outsourced their companies and exchanged American wages for $100 million bonuses for none other than themselves. They are investment bankers and hedge fund managers, the creators of subprime mortgage derivatives that threaten to collapse the economic foundation of western civilization. These proprietors—the self-proclaimed fittest, the elitists, illuminists, masters of the universe, slave owners; whatever you wish to call them—are the owners of wealth unimaginable to the average person; and their values and morals equally unimaginable to most, the inverse of the honest person.

The real wages and salaries of American workers are plummeting. Their debts are at all time highs, while the prices of their main asset—the home—falls due to overbuilding and fraud-based financed. For investment bankers, life is good. These persons let their “invisible trade” do their work for them. They collect fees for creating financing packages for debt. Many officials across the board have outright admitted that, in fact, the real values of repackaged debt instruments are unbeknownst to both buyer and seller. Most derivatives are never priced by the market. Never before in the history of the United States has an elite exercised such control over the state and, therefore, people. Without millions of dollars, ones hope of even running for public office is decimated early on.

The Gilded Age of old does offer us some perspective. Those thirty five-years, from the Civil War’s end until the end of the First World War, saw the United States race from a war torn nation to a global power broker. Not only was the U.S. recovering from a bloody war, but, also, from the loss of a divisive, but respected President in Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln had foreseen what the future had in store: (3)

“I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. . . . corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.”

The hyper-industrialization that took place after the war emphasized the development of railroads, steel mills, and oil fields. In fact, at the turn of the twentieth century, Los Angeles was a huge oil producing region—a la Saudi Arabia—and would give rise to “car culture” at the turn of the twentieth century, in which we all drive by feel, usually solo, to our offices in the sky—or the unemployment office. (4)

Like today, the period from 1865-1900 was one of very rapid change. Efforts to circumvent the rights gained for blacks during the preceding decades were quite successful, and the country was to be segregated for another one-hundred years. Further, the Fourteenth Amendment, originally drafted to give blacks more rights, was eventually used by a paid-off Supreme Court to imbue corporations with personhood and, therefore, rights under the Constitution. This period represents the time when corporations began expanding their activities across state lines—and eventually across national borders—with the help of robber barons such as John D. Rockefeller and J.P Morgan.

As United States society figured how what to do with newly freed slaves, big business was on the rise. To many of these corporations, the Fourteenth Amendment—drafted to free slaves—offered an opportunity to expand their power. Of the 150 cases regarding the Fourteenth Amendment leading up to the end of the nineteenth century, 15 involved blacks and 135 involved firms. Blacks won only one case of those 15. Corporations, on the other hand, succeeded in utilizing the Fourteenth Amendment to shield them from governmental regulation. (5) In an 1886 tax dispute between the Southern Pacific Railroad and the state of California, Chief Justice Morrison Waite evidently advised attorneys to skip testimony regarding whether the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal-protection clause included corporations, for “we are all of the opinion that it does.” (6)

It was The Gilded Age: a booming exterior only covered the devastated undertow. The industrial and political elites in both the north and south had organized the largest streak of economic growth in human history, albeit amidst a familiar and fantastic culture of corruption. Extraordinary wealth laid in the hands of very few individuals, who drove, not only the policy of major industries and finance, but, also, politics itself. The laborers of these men came from a number of different backgrounds: black, white, Chinese, European immigrants, as well as women. Despite a laboring “masses,” no longer was human muscle the keystone of production. Rather, steam and electricity dominated, as iron replaced wood, and steel replaced iron. Between 1870 and 1910, due to new farming techniques and agricultural mechanization, the number of Americans who farmed fell by a third. Cities grew and grew up on through to the present day, when 75% of men live in the overcrowded “human habitats.” In the years between 1860 and 1914, New York’s population boomed from 850,000 to 4 million; Chicago’s from 110,000 to 2 million; Philadelphia’s from 650,000 to 1.5 million. (7)

Clearly, despite the unparalleled wealth creation, it was a costly time for workers. For each mile of railroad built, each ton of coal or iron ore mined, thousands of them died, like so many laboring ants at the mercy of child’s play. Abundant were the tricks up the sleeves of the entrenched oligarchy. The Interstate Commerce Act of 1877 was intended to regulate the railroads on behalf of consumers. But, “from a railroad point of view,” one lawyer explained, “the [Act]…is or can be made of great use to the railroads. It satisfies the popular clamor for a government supervision of railroads, at the same time that supervision is almost entirely nominal…” It is this sort of dark brilliance for which Wall Street is known.

The Central Pacific railroad started on the West Coast headed east. $200,000 dollars in bribes to Washington were needed to acquire the nine million acres of free land and $24 million in government bonds. The construction was carried out, over four years, by three thousand Irish and ten thousand Chinese. The wages were one to two dollars a day. The Union Pacific had received, for free, 12 million acres and $27 million in bonds. Both railroads were built along longer, impractical routes, in order to gain subsidies from the towns through which they passed.

The fraud of the railroads meant more control of the railroad finances by bankers. By the 1890’s, the lion’s share of the railroad was concentrated into six large organizations. Four of these were under the partial or full control of the House of Morgan, and two other by the bankers Kuhn, Loeb, and Company. J.P Morgan linked railroads to railroads, the railroads to banks, and the banks to insurance companies, creating an intertwined network under his influence as a distributor of credit. By 1900, he held 100,000 miles of railroad; that is, half of the country’s mileage.
Another baron is John D. Rockefeller. Having started as a bookkeeper in Cleveland, John D. Rockefeller accumulated money while being a merchant, and then bought his first oil refinery in 1862. By 1870, he had started Standard Oil Company of Ohio. His secret agreements with railroads allowed him to ship his oil with rebates and discounts, thusly driving competitors out of business. By 1899, The Standard Oil Company, acting as a holding company, controlled the stock of many firms, with $110 million in capital, and $45 million in profit a year. John D. Rockefeller’s fortune was estimated at $200 million.

It was not and is not an unusual tale, the one in which clever businessmen builds empires by mercilessly defeating competition, keeping prices high and wages low, and using government subsidies. At the turn of the century, American Telephone and Telegraph had a monopoly over the nation’s telephone system, and International harvester made 85 percent of all farm machinery. The banks had interests tied up in many of these monopolies. This created an interwoven network with overlapping, and powerful, corporate directors, each of whom sat on the boards of many corporations other than their own. A Senate report in the early twentieth century revealed that Morgan, at his peak of power, sat on the board of forty-eight different corporations, and Rockefeller thirty-seven corporations.

While the government attempted to appear neutral, its policies greatly benefited the rich, whether it was passing legislation to enable corporations to exist in multiple states at once or in the form of massive land subsidies to few corporations for the railroad. The irrelevance of the fallacious two-party system was made obvious when, in 1877, the Democrats and Republicans arranged to elect Rutherford Hayes. No matter which party was elected, national policy would not change in any significant way.
In 1844, when Grover Cleveland was elected president, he assured industrialists: “No harm shall come to any business interest as the result of administrative policy so long as I am President…a transfer of executive control from one party to another does not mean any serious disturbance in existing conditions.” Despite past subsidies to corporations, Cleveland refused to provide relief to Texas farmers to help them purchase grain during a drought. In the same year, Cleveland used his surplus of gold to pay wealthy bondholders at $28 dollars above the $100 value of each bond, representing a gift of $45 million.

In the United States, political debate of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were largely defined by the tariff. Historically, protectionism and free trade have been central to the ways in which we scrutinize possible trade policies. At present, this remains similar, as controversies over NAFTA and GATT have proven. Following the Civil War, the single most lucid issue delineating the Democratic from the Republican Party was the tariff. “The controversy was a maze of rhetoric, greed, and statecraft befogged by myth,” one historian reflects. When we examine the jugular of the issue, the tariff debate turns out to be a clever deterrent from the real issues in the economic nation. Economic nationalism functioned as a smoke screen for divergent class interests, just as it had during the American Revolution.

Underneath the apparent difference of opinion regarding the tariff, their indeed existed a deep consensus: despite the quarreling, both sides by the 1870’s agreed the nation’s economy should be an economy beneficial to elite capital interests. Both sides, moreover, agreed in hyper-industrialization—no matter the cost to workers at that time. Reviewing the debate in the Journal of American History, James L. Huston stated: (8)

“Protectionists lauded property rights as the basis of civilization, urged the lower classes to climb the ladder of success,…and deprecated any attempt of laborers to form unions….The free trade position…was not different from that of the protectionists. They too were stout supporters of capitalism, and they envisaged greater wages for the employee arising from the expansion of business.”
Muckraker journalist Mathew Josephson exposed in a 1938 expose, called The Politicos, “There were coal and iron industrialists on both sides….In the case of Henry Havemeyer of the Sugar Trust, and the Standard Oil men, the practice of making contributions to both parties was…openly reported.”

The spread of education during this period meant the proliferation of literate workers, both skilled and semiskilled. In the middle and late nineteenth century, high schools aided the industrial system. History, for example, was used to encourage patriotism. The educational and political demeanor of the teachers was controlled by loyalty oaths, teacher certification, and the requirement of citizenship. School officials, furthermore, controlled what textbooks were used— not the teachers. It is during this period when the factory like nature of the classroom revealed itself fully. Many commentators of the time noticed how unenthusiastic were the schoolchildren, and stern were the teachers. By 1939, the students would be shepherded in school buses decorated in yellow jackets and black stripes, as if an allegory for their preparation's to be obedient future worker bees.

In U.S history classes—then and now—students learn “consensus history.” We are taught of a “them vs. us” paradigm in which the Democratic and Republican parties have always been, and by assumption always will be, at odds. The role of a relatively few men in the hyper-industrialization of the United States, hailing from finance and industry, demonstrates the deferential nature of historical change and innovation systems development.

Despite the rise of education system designed to stabilize the industrial system as it evolved, large workers movements, which typically interrupted the industrial system, swept the country in the 1880’s and 1890’s, at a time when European immigrants were coming to the country at rates higher than ever. A severe depression, in 1893, caused elites to look overseas to battle the problem of under-consumption at home. A populist movement at the time tried to forge a new and independent culture for the nation's farmers.


The Farmer is a man

The farmer is the man
lives on credit till the fall
with the interest rates so high
it is a wonder he don't die
and the mortgage man's the one who gets it all.

At the height of the 1877 depression, a "farmers alliance" began on a farm in Texas. It took only a few years for it to spread across the state, and by 1886, 100,000 farmers had joined in two thousand suiballiances. They had alternatives to the old way of doing things: join the alliance and form cooperatives; buy things together and get lower prices. In order to keep up with the pace of change, farmers had to borrow money, with the hope the prices of their harvest would stay high.

What they found was rising prices in transporation, for grain, and the price of their produce going down. A poor working-man in Philadelphia wrote a book about the times. A sampling: “It is true that wealth has been greatly increased, and that the average of comfort, leisure and refinement has been raised; but these gains are not general: In them the lowest class do not share.”

Farmers were up against more than the weather, as eastern banks controlled credit; manufacturing monopolies controlled the price of machines; eastern railroad trusts picked freight prices; depression destroyed asset values. But, farmers and city workers alike reached out to one another as a means of forming new political alliances. “We meet in the midst of a nation bourght to the verge of moral, poltical, and material ruin. Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the Legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench. The people are demoralized and the newspapers largely subsidized or muzzled, public opinion silenced.”

Many of the same dynamics are at work today. On 21 January 2009, the United States Supreme Court ruled in a 5-to-4 split decision “that labor unions and corporations can spend unlimited amounts to influence federal elections, throwing out a ban that had been in effect for 63 years and adding an explosive new element to this year’s midterm elections.” The courts current majority, therefore, sees corporations as “associations of citizens,” and therefore reserves for them the same free-speech rights as individuals. The line of reasoning sees all disseminated information as beneficial to the national debate. The ruling, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, No. 08-205, “dismayed lawmakers and public interest groups that fought for decades to limit the influence of wealth special interests in politics.” Those who favored the decision argued that the ban in stood in contraposition to the First Amendment, for it controlled free speech in election campaigns. The decision is destined to have wide scale political and practical consequences on American political ideology, as well as refashioning the way elections are carried out. (9)

According to David Million, a law professor at Washington and Lee University, “a positive way to put [constitutional rights for corporations] is that the economy is booming, American productions is leading the world and the courts want to promote that;” less apologetically, “it’s all about protecting corporate wealth” from taxes and other governmental initiatives. Later opinions worked to expand the rights of corporations, such as a 1928 court decision by which a Pennsylvania tax on transportation corporations was rejected because taxicab drivers were exempt. Corporations are afforded “the same protection and equal laws [as] natural persons.”

Anticipated popular movements and rioting have started. Legal measures have been taken to prosecute the appropriate players: those individuals with the wealth volume and information enough to crash global markets so as to enrich themselves and their cronies. These persons and their corporate associations influence a high enough percentage of the global economy that, in fact, they benefit on the way and way down. They influence the direction of economic society based on an agenda. History is a planned affair. Oftentimes, just as Rockefeller and Morgan of old, they sit on the Board of Director’s of multiple corporations, and intimately work with public servants to forward their agenda. Concerned police chiefs across the United States have recommended citizens arm themselves, for, due to cuts in public services (as a means of reallocated that wealth to private financial institutions), they do not have the resources enough to properly keep the public safe.

The pace of global change today far outpaces anything humanity has seen for the last few centuries, and the direction of this change is only minutely influenced by Democratic or Republican (based in law) traditions. Among the central motifs in the evolution of society, at present, is globalization: that complex of intertwining economic, political, cultural and social processes. It is this tool by which western leaders—the alpha males of the Uber Class—are able to influence the political and social climates in diverse nations across the globe. Influence upon the vector of globalization is, first and foremost, exercised in a top-down manner, whereby elite interests are pursued with scant public input.

When the public does go along with the agenda of technocrats and policy planners—valuable citizens in Richistan—public consensus is contrived through technology, where people tune into fictitious predictive “programming” on the television, false axiomatically newspaper reports, and movies. With the viewer’s guard down, a lifestyle insinuates itself into synaptic connections, priming them for future action in accordance with the desires of the self-declared “masters of the universe.” Despite psychological warfare campaigns on the public, according to a recent poll, four out of five American’s do not trust their government. Still, the program remains the same: crony capitalism is the rule, the power to manage a significantly decreased world population, packed into “human habitats”—overcrowded cities—the goal.

Nothing new here under the sun, and so the consensus history with which we are all indoctrinated implores us to resign: this is the way it’s always been, and, therefore, always will be. We have no agency, for we are objects—human capital—happy with a walk-on part of a background shot from a script we, in the near future, aren’t envisaged to be in.

1.Hutton, Will. Now we know the truth. The financial meltdown wasn’t a mistake—it was a con. Guardian UK, 18 April 2010.
Accessible at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/apr/18/goldman-sachs-regulators-civil-charges
2. Robert, Craig Paul. “In Richistan: Fantastic wealth for a few; steady decline for many: The Return of the Robber Barons.” CounterPunch, 2 August 2007.
Accessible at: http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts08022007.html

3. Renehan, Edward. (2005) The Dark Genius of Wall Street. New York: Basic Books
4. Davis, Mike. (1991) City of Quartz
5. Hammerstrom, Doug. (2002) The Hijacking of the Fourteenth Amendment, Reclaim Democracy. Online

6. Bravin, Jess. Sotomayor Issues Challenge to a Century of Corporate Law. Wall Street Journal, 17 September 2009.
Accessed at: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125314088285517643.html
7. Zinn, Howard. (1980) A People’s History of the United States. London: HarperCollins

8. Frank, Dana. (2003) “Buy American: The Untold Story of Economic Nationalism.” Boston: Beacon Press

9. Kirkpatrick, David. Lobbyists Get Potent Weapon in Campaign Ruling, New York Times, 21 January 2010.

Accessed at: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/us/politics/22donate.html?fta=y

Keiser