Friday, March 14, 2008

Jim Rogers: “Abolish the Fed”

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars
March 13, 2008








Somebody at CNBC, billed as “America’s business channel,” made a mistake. They allowed Jim Rogers, investor and buddy to George Soros, to get on and slam the Federal Reserve.

Not only slam the Fed, but call for it to be abolished.

Somebody at CNBC was asleep at the switch, or the kill button anyway. Because you never hear such talk over the corporate media, an entity owned by the same banking and financial interests that prop op the Fed and the funny money system.

“How much money does the Federal Reserve have?” Rogers asks. “I know they can run their printing presses forever, but that is not good for the world, inflation is not good for the world, a collapsing currency is not good for the world. It means worse recession in the end.”

Of course, recession — or, depending where you are situated in the funny money system, depression — will be a good deal for the bankers, as it will wipe the board clean and allow them to consolidate and at the same time destroy the once heralded middle class, a necessary task as our rulers move toward their plan to impose serfdom on the masses, or that is to say those who are not already serfs and peons, working for a dollar or two per day.

“I will ask you this,” one of CNBC’s talking heads asks Mr. Rogers, “what would be the first two things you would do if you were in Mr. Bernanke’s seat tomorrow morning?”

“I would abolish the Federal Reserve,” avers Rogers, “and I would resign,” a response that brings nervous laughter all around at the CNBC studios.


Rogers then declares Bernanke and the Fed are debasing the currency in an effort to “revive America… it has never worked in the long term or medium term.”

I am not an economist or a stock market investment guru like Rogers, but it seems Bernanke and the Federal Reserve, as in Federal Express, in that there is nothing “federal” about it, are not attempting to prevent a recession but are in effect adding nitro to the process of destroying the economy and thus the middle class. Call me paranoid, but if we are to believe Mr. Rogers, Bernanke is a blithering idiot that has no idea what he is doing. Of course he knows what he is doing, or rather what he was told to do.

“We are witnessing the unfolding of a crash exactly as predicted by Former World Bank Vice President, Chief Economist and Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz [in late 2006],” write Steve Watson and Alex Jones.

Stiglitz agreed that the process of hijacking and looting key infrastructure on the part of the IMF and World Bank, as an offshoot of predatory globalization, has now moved from the third world to Europe, the United States and Canada.

Stiglitz warned that the signs were there with plummeting real estate prices in the U.S., stating that a global economic depression could only be avoided if a correction was made.

But no correction will be made because the World Bank/IMF/Globalist doctrine betrays a focused agenda to deliberately foment economic turmoil, riots, and then enforced bondage to eternal debt. We have witnessed this time and time again, their own documents even confirm this as the chosen method of social control.

No doubt Mr. Rogers, as an insider, would disagree with this analysis and insist Helicopter Ben is simply a bungling fool. Even so, his solution is correct — in order to get out from under, the Federal Reserve must be dismantled. I’d add that Bernanke and crew should be arrested, same as a common criminal is arrested for holding up a liquor store, as they are facilitating the theft of trillions of dollars by the bankers.

As Daniel Estulin and Jim Tucker reported in 2005, the elite, in the guise of the Bilderbergers, want to usher in a “post-industrial revolution,” as Jose Barroso, president of the European Commission and a Bilderberg member described it. It seems they are on schedule, as we are looking at yet another “Great Depression,” a good chance worse than the last one. Bernanke is simply continuing the process initiated by his predecessor, Alan Greenspan, who was recently “lauded for doing the job of publicly destroying confidence in the dollar, publicly trying to destroy confidence in the banks, and publicly trying to destroy the economy, enabling a consolidation during a recession as set out exactly in globalist blueprints,” as Watson and Jones write.

Of course, we shouldn’t expect to hear a word about this on CNBC, “America’s business channel.” Instead, we will hear about how the “irrational exuberance” of the stock market is good for yuppies, never mind, with each passing day, their funny money is all the more worthless.

In the meantime, Jim Rogers may not be invited back to chat with CNBC’s talking heads.

JPMorgan Chase, Fed to aid Bear Stearns

Wall Street firm hit by liquidity crunch
The Associated Press
updated 10:55 a.m. ET March 14, 2008

NEW YORK - The Federal Reserve said Friday that it has voted to endorse an arrangement to bolster troubled Bear Stearns Cos. and stands ready to provide extra resources to combat a serious credit crisis.

The Fed announcement came in a brief two-sentence statement that was issued as stocks were plunging on Wall Street over worries that a plan to ease a liquidity crisis at Bear Stearns Cos. might not work.

“The Federal Reserve is monitoring market developments closely and will continue to provide liquidity as necessary to promote the orderly functioning of the financial system,” the board said.

The statement said that the board had voted unanimously to approve the arrangment announced by JP Morgan Chase and Bear Stearns earlier on Friday.

The plan will provide secured funding to Bear Stearns for an initial period of 28 days, seeking to provide short-term relief for Bear Stearns.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson praised the Fed’s leadership and said that the country’s financial system would be able to weather the problems.

“As we have been saying for some time, there are challenges in our financial markets and we continue to address them,” Paulson said in a statement. “This is another challenge that market participants and regulators are addressing. We are working closely with the Federal Reserve” and the Securities and Exchange Commission, he said.

Paulson also said that he appreciated the leadership of the Fed “in enhancing the stability and orderliness of our markets.”

While it was not clear exactly how much money Chase would pump into Bear, a person familiar with the bailout, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks are private, said Chase may end up buying Bear Stearns outright.

Bear Stearns said in a statement it is working with JPMorgan Chase to find permanent strategic alternatives to alleviate the liquidity problems, but could not guarantee they would be successful.

JPMorgan Chase is providing secured funding to Bear for 28 days, backstopped by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Bear Stearns and the Federal Reserve approached JPMorgan Chase about the financing and a potential deal, according to the source.

Rumors have persisted throughout the week that Bear Stearns was facing major liquidity problems, but the investment bank’s chief executive initially denied those rumors.

“Bear Stearns has been the subject of a multitude of market rumors regarding our liquidity,” Bear Stearns president and chief executive, Alan Schwartz, said in a statement. “Amidst this market chatter, our liquidity position in the last 24 hours had significantly deteriorated.”

In a memo sent to employees, Schwartz said the temporary financing would allow the company to “get back to business as usual.”

The company has struggled since the middle of 2007 due to the fallout in the mortgage and credit markets. Last summer, two hedge funds worth billions of dollars managed by Bear Stearns collapsed because of bad bets on securities backed by subprime mortgages — loans given to customers with poor credit history.

JPMorgan Chase said the financing would not expose its company to any material risk.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23630319/

NSA Rebuilds Total Information Awareness


Declan McCullagh
CNet News
March 13, 2008

The National Security Agency was once known for its skill in eavesdropping on the world's telephone calls through radio dishes in out-of-the-way places like England's Menwith Hill, Australia's Pine Gap, and Washington state's Yakima Training Center.

Today those massive installations, which listened in on phone conversations beamed over microwave links, are becoming something akin to relics of the Cold War. As more communications traffic travels through fiber links, and as e-mail and text messaging supplant phone calls, the spy agency that once intercepted telegrams is adapting yet again.

Recent evidence suggests that the NSA has been focusing on widespread monitoring of e-mail messages and text messages, recording of Web browsing, and other forms of electronic data-mining, all done without court supervision. Taken together, those activities raise unique privacy and oversight concerns greater than those posed by large-scale monitoring of voice communications.

Documents released last week by a security consultant (PDF) indicate that an unnamed major wireless provider has opened its network to the U.S. government, allowing customers' e-mail, text messaging, and Web use to be monitored. And Assistant Attorney General for National Security Kenneth Wainstein said last week that surveillance of e-mail was the real concern raised by the debate over amending the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

That led some high-ranking House Democrats, including Energy and Commerce Chairman John Dingell, to circulate a letter (PDF) advising their colleagues to look skeptically at a Republican proposal that would grant retroactive immunity to companies that illegally let the Feds plug into their networks. The Republicans' blanket of retroactive immunity would likely cover e-mail providers, search engines, Internet service providers, and instant-messaging services too.

On Monday, the Wall Street Journal published an article saying that the NSA can, "without a judicial warrant," obtain the Subject line and other header information from e-mail messages, plus information about Web sites visited and queries to search engines. Phone records, credit card usage information, and airline passenger data are also reportedly vacuumed up by the NSA.

"According to current and former intelligence officials, the spy agency now monitors huge volumes of records of domestic emails and Internet searches as well as bank transfers, credit-card transactions, travel and telephone records. The NSA receives this so-called 'transactional' data from other agencies or private companies, and its sophisticated software programs analyze the various transactions for suspicious patterns," the article said.

For its part, the NSA says that it abides by U.S. law. Last week, Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence, blamed critical reports on the NSA's culture of "stand-offishness" and said "we've lost something we never knew we needed until we didn't have it--the support of a grateful nation. The question we have to ask now, and this is something everyone here should help think about, is how do we get it back?"

If the reports are correct, what this transactional-data-dragnet amounts to is a rebuilding of the Defense Department's Total Information Awareness program, which promised to do extensive warrantless data-mining to identify "information signatures" that could identify criminals. After a public outcry, the department renamed it Terrorism Information Awareness; Congress zeroed funding for it in September 2003.

But that law referred only to "the program known either as Terrorism Information Awareness or Total Information Awareness, or any successor program"--leaving the door open, given sufficiently clever lawyering, to a similar program that wasn't quite close enough to be called a "successor" to TIA.

Elements of this data dragnet have been disclosed before. USA Today reported two years ago on how the NSA has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon, and BellSouth; the latter two have narrowly denied it. Qwest reportedly was approached but rejected the request.

A survey CNET News.com published in February 2006 asked the major telecommunications and Internet companies this question: "Have you turned over information or opened up your networks to the NSA without being compelled by law?" AT&T, Adelphia, Google, Level 3, Verizon, and Yahoo would not answer the question; the rest said they had not.

A subsequent article by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker said the NSA had returned to "intercepting large numbers of electronic communications made by Americans"--the same kind of legally dubious tactic that led to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act being enacted in 1978.

FISA reinforced the notion that the NSA could conduct widespread surveillance of foreigners, but specified that a court order (or authorization from the attorney general) was needed to spy on American citizens. That means the world's largest intelligence agency is, legally speaking, on very shaky ground when operating its e-mail/text-messaging/Web-site-visiting/search-term dragnet.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Kurt Opsahl posted a stinging critique of the data-dragnet's legality. Here are some excerpts from what Opsahl wrote, referring to the Journal article:

The infobox incorrectly asserts that the subject lines of email are not "content," and can be obtained without a warrant... But this is contradicted by the Department of Justice's own 2002 Searching and Seizing Computers and Obtaining Electronic Evidence in Criminal Investigations manual, which states that "the subject headers of e-mails are also contents."

The infobox incorrectly asserts that the NSA can review "[s]ites visited and searches conducted" without a warrant. "According to current and former intelligence officials, the spy agency now monitors huge volumes of records of ... Internet searches." "The [NSA's] haul can include ... records of Internet browsing." To the contrary, courts have held that search terms are "content" within the meaning of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.

The infobox asserts that the NSA can get cellphone location data without a warrant. "The information [obtained by the NSA] can give such transactional information as a cellphone's location..." The issue of obtaining cell phone location information has been contentious for some time, but the vast weight of judicial interpretation is that a probable cause warrant is required.

If you get the feeling that a lot of this depends on a set of legal definitions that the NSA would like to keep as fuzzy and ambiguous as possible, you're probably right.

One thing the recent disclosures are likely to do is put the Bush administration on the defensive, which will happen just as Congress is preparing to vote on extending retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies. It has looked likely to pass if the House Democratic leadership had held an up-or-down vote; the Senate already approved its version by a 68-29 margin.

Add in FBI Director Robert Mueller's acknowledgment last week of additional surveillance abuses, and his admission that retroactive immunity may not be all that necessary, and retroactive immunity looks a lot less compelling a prospect than it did a week ago. Then again, the NSA didn't need it to create an electronic dragnet in the first place.

Ron Paul warns of Worldwide Economic Collapse

Raw Story
Friday, March 14, 2008

Congressman Ron Paul (R-Texas) Warns of Worldwide Economic Collapse.

The following video is from C-SPAN’s Congress Coverage, broadcast on March 12, 2008


Clinton Admits He was a Bilderberg Tool

David Edwards and John Byrne
Raw Story
March 13, 2008







Campaigning for his wife in Erie, Pennsylvania, Bill Clinton returned fire at a heckler who began shouting about the former president’s attendance at a 1991 invitation- only conference of wealthy powerbrokers — "1991 Bilderberg" — implying that discussion there led to unfair trade policy such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

As the audience booed, Clinton replied: “Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait… This is the deal folks. All these folks that are paranoid at the world folks, come and scream at me everywhere. You said you would go if I answered the question, right? You said you would go if I answered the question…"

"All right, here’s the answer. I happened to be in Europe then on my way to Russia I was invited to go to Bilderberg by Vernon Jordan, a friend of mine and a genuine hero of the civil rights movement. And to the best of my knowledge NAFTA was not discussed by anybody in my presence. I happened to be on my way to Europe where people do not give a rip about NAFTA.

"Number two, okay. Number two. I tried to get labor and environmental standards in the agreement but I couldn’t because it was all negotiated when I got there.

"Number three. When I was president, we enforced our trade laws five times as much as the Bush Administration did… Family incomes went up $7,500 a year when I was president, they’re down $1,000 now. So I was not… I had a very good time talking to those Europeans about European affairs and what was going to happen to Russia but I was not somehow polluted by it into sacrificing America’s economic interests. America did a lot better when I was president than they did in this decade. And that’s the truth. Now. Goodbye. Thank you."

This video is from ABCNews.com, broadcast March 12, 2008.