FLOTILLA JOURNALIST: IDF USED MY CREDIT CARD!

AN ITALIAN JOURNALIST FROM THE FLOTILLA :

MY CREDIT CARD WAS USED
AFTER THE IDF CONFISCATED IT!

Journalist Manolo Luppichini has written Netanyahu, Peres, Barak, Lieberman and Israel's ambassador in Italy over the matter.

By Dimi Reider
Ha'aretz
June 11, 2010

An Italian journalist who was detained by the Israel Defense Forces following the raid on the Gaza-bound flotilla says his credit card was used to purchase items after it was confiscated by the Israeli authorities. Manolo Luppichini was aboard the Sfintoni-8000, one of the smaller boats in the flotilla, when the naval commandos took it over. "Nobody was killed on our boat," Luppichini said in a telephone call from Italy. "We tried a little passive resistance around the boat's bridge. The soldiers fired paint balls and two people were hurt by stun [taser] guns."

After the Israel Navy took over the boat, he said, the soldiers searched every passenger and confiscated everything they found. "They took two cameras, microphones, a stand and other equipment from me and my photographer. They took one of the cameras as I was taking photographs," says Luppichini, who was working for Italy's RAI-3 television and an Italian-Swiss television channel when he was detained.

"Afterward they took my wallet, passport, bag and all personal effects on the boat," he says.

Not one of the people on the flotilla got anything back, a lot of theft when you consider the number of them. Clothing, photography and media equipment, clothing, nothing back but empty suitcases according to several accounts.

Luppichini was taken to Ashdod port and then transferred to a Be'er Sheva prison compound, where he says he received a form saying his passport had been impounded.

I am sure his passport has joined those stolen by Mossad and kept for future use as need be.

On June 2 he was taken to an Immigration Authority compound and on the following day was deported. Although he showed the document proving Israel had confiscated his passport, he says he was deported without receiving any of his property or identification papers back.

A few days ago Luppichini discovered that while he was confined in Be'er Sheva and after he was back in Italy ~ a day after his deportation ~ purchases were made with his credit card, which the Israeli authorities had confiscated.

One purchase was from a vending machine in Tel Aviv for about NIS 10 on June 2, he says. Another purchase, for NIS 240, was made in Gedera's Village Market ~ while Luppichini himself was in Bologna, Italy.

"The sums were not large," he says, "among other things because it's a rechargeable credit card that had only 80 euros on it. But in principle it's theft, for all intents and purposes." Luppichini has written a letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Shimon Peres, the foreign and defense ministers and to Israel's ambassador and consuls in Italy on the matter.

Luppichini says he wants to know who used his credit card, along with why and how. He is also demanding that all of his equipment be returned to him immediately.

The IDF spokesman released a statement saying that the flotilla passengers' personal belongings had been loaded onto the Turkish planes on which they were flown out of the country. All the magnetic media was confiscated for security reasons and the IDF is considering whether these items will be returned. If a Foreign Ministry and police inquiry leads to the suspicion that anyone has stolen Luppichini's credit card, the matter will be dealt with severely.

Are we holding our collective breath in anticipation?

THE BIGGEST HEIST IN U.S. HISTORY:FLASH STOCK MARKET CRASH

As someone completely impoverished, I pay little attention to the actual doings on the stock market other than past events. I stumbled on this little piece a few moments ago and, dammit, if this does not make perfect sense considering what we know about the greed and insatiable hunger of the beast of Wall Street, not to mention thieving nature and complete lack of conscience and ethics when there is a penny to be taken off your dead grandmother's eyes.

Totally diabolical this little scheme, and guess who lost their shirts? Not the Feds!

From THE MARKET ORACLE

May 17, 2010

Stock-Markets

Market Manipulation

VernontheGerman writes:

I wanted to bring to your attention the events that transpired Thursday 6th May between 2:41pm and 2:57pm.

In those 16 min one of the largest heists in American history occurred. It was said that up to one trillion dollars was lost and regained in that time.

What took place was a transferring of wealth from the people to the organizations that conspired this.

So what really happened during those 16 min on Thursday.

The Dow dropped to over 1000 points down.

Some stocks fell over 99%.
Stocks that were $65 a share fell to .01!

At the end of the "16 min heist"
these stocks were back to their previous levels or more.

Most newspapers are reporting an "error" occurred but no harm no foul as the market quickly resumed back to their "pre crash" levels

But here is what transpired which no one seems to be talking about.

Say you own 1000 shares of ABC in your portfolio and ABC is $65. 1000 x $65 = $65,000

Now say you want to protect yourself in case of a "terrorist act" or if a company issue comes out.

Most prudent investors will place a protective stop as "insurance".

There are several types of stop loss orders but the most common are Stop loss limit or Stop loss market.

The difference is that one will be sold at whatever price the market is when it is triggered (Stop loss market) and the other is a fixed price when it is triggered.

An example would be on the $65 ABC stock, say you placed a protective stop 20% below or $52. As the market fell on Thursday your stop was triggered at $52 and placed a market order. Because the market was falling so fast the order could not find a bid, it could have been $52, $42, $32 or .01 whatever the bid was at. Let's say it hit at $26.75 for a 59% loss.

After the so called 16 min "glitch" ABC was back at $65. No harm no foul right?

Wrong! You lost your shares and "somebody" bought them at $26.75.

It was not available for the average person to buy these shares as most brokerage platforms were frozen during this time including mine. It was like being "handcuffed" during the heist!

So 16 minutes (or less) later the one who purchased these ABC shares made about 145%!

The reason I used the 59% loss example is that the exchanges decided that anything over a 60% loss was too much and reversed trades greater than 60% loss.

This was an orchestrated event
as they knew that no circuit breakers
were in place after 2:30pm.

Also no news or other events took place during this typically slow time in the market.

NEW YORK STOCK EXCHANGE CIRCUIT BREAKERS

http://www.nyse.com/press/circuit_breakers.html

Thank you for reading this.

This heist works only once and probably scared off most anyone left with any skin in the market.

What remains at this point are only the machines and real 'investors' are going to dump into treasuries en masse.

And who does that benefit?

Exactly ~ the FEDs who needs to raise hundreds of Billions a week at this point.

Finally, there is this 'audit the Fed clause that's getting kicked around and gaining momentum in Congress right now.

I believe this was not only a profitable move but also a warning shot.

I think it's pretty easy to see who might have instigated this little maneuver.

God Bless

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" .

THE FINANCIAL MELTDOWN WAS A CON

Now we know the truth.
The financial meltdown wasn't a mistake
~ it was a con

Goldman Sachs was in the spotlight last November when demonstrators protested outside its Washington offices against executive bonuses. Photograph: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images

You know this. Maybe. I knew this ages ago. In the US Greenspan set the wheels in motion under the Reagan Reign. But it has taken far too long for the media to start giving details. Granted this is hardly a blip of a blip considering the overall picture, but it is a start.

By William Hutton
The Observer
April 18, 2010

Hiding behind the complexities of our financial system, banks and other institutions are being accused of fraud and deception, with Goldman Sachs just the latest in the spotlight. This has become the most pressing election issue of all

The global financial crisis, it is now clear, was caused not just by the bankers' colossal mismanagement. No, it was due also to the new financial complexity offering up the opportunity for widespread, systemic fraud. Friday's announcement that the world's most famous investment bank, Goldman Sachs, is to face civil charges for fraud brought by the American regulator is but the latest of a series of investigations that have been launched, arrests made and charges made against financial institutions around the world.

Big Finance in the 21st century turns out to have been Big Fraud.

Yet Britain, centre of the world financial system, has not yet leveled charges against any bank; all that we've seen is the allegation of a high-level insider dealing ring which, embarrassingly, involves a banker advising the government. 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.

Just consider the roll call beyond Goldman Sachs.

In Ireland Sean FitzPatrick, the ex-chair of the Anglo Irish bank ~ a bank which looks after the Post Office's financial services ~ was arrested last month and questioned over alleged fraud.

In Iceland last week a dossier assembled by its parliament on the Icelandic banks ~ huge lenders in Britain ~ was handed to its public prosecution service. A court-appointed examiner found that collapsed investment bank Lehman knowingly manipulated its balance sheet to make it look stronger than it was ~ accounts originally audited by the British firm Ernst and Young and given the legal green light by the British firm Linklaters.

In Switzerland UBS has been defending itself from the US's Inland Revenue Service for allegedly running 17,000 offshore accounts to evade tax. Be sure there are more revelations to come ~ except in saintly Britain.

Beneath the complexity, the charges are all rooted in the same phenomenon ~ deception.

Somebody, somewhere, was knowingly fooled by banks and bankers ~ sometimes governments over tax, sometimes regulators and investors over the probity of balance sheets and profits and sometimes, as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) says in Goldman's case, by creating a scheme to enrich one favoured investor at the expense of others ~ including, via RBS, the British taxpayer.

Along the way there is a long list of so-called "entrepreneurs" and "innovators" who were offered loans that should never have been made. Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman's CEO, remarked only semi-ironically that his bank was doing God's work. He must wake up every day bitterly regretting the words ever emerged from his mouth.

For the Goldmans case is in some ways the most damaging. The Icelandic banks, Anglo Irish bank and Lehman were all involved in opaque deals and rank bad lending decisions ~ but Goldman allegedly went one step further, according to the SEC actively creating a financial instrument that transferred wealth to one favoured client from others less favoured.

If the Securities and Exchange Commission's case is proved ~ and it is aggressively rebutted by Goldman ~ the charge is that Goldman's vice-president Fabrice Tourre created a dud financial instrument packed with valueless sub-prime mortgages at the instruction of hedge fund client Paulson, sold it to investors knowing it was valueless, and then allowed Paulson to profit from the dud financial instrument.

Goldman says the buyers were "among the most sophisticated mortgage investors" in the world. But this is a used car salesman flogging a broken car he's got from some wide-boy pal to some driver who can't get access to the log-book. Except it was lionized as financial innovation.

The investors who bought the collateralized debt obligation (CDO) were not complete innocents. They had asked for the bond to be validated by an independent expert into residential mortgage-backed securities ~ a company called ACA management. ACA gave the bond the thumbs-up on the understanding from Fabrice Tourre that the hedge fund Paulson were investing in it.

But the SEC says Tourre misled them, a pivotal claim that Goldman denies. The reality was that Paulson was frantically buying credit default swaps in the CDO that would go up in price the more valueless it became ~ a trade that would make more than $1 billion. Worse, Paulson had identified some of the dud sub-prime mortgages that he wanted Tourre to put into the CDO. If the SEC case is true, this was a scam ~ nothing more, nothing less.

Tourre could see what was coming. In one email in January 2007 he wrote: "More and more leverage in the system. The whole building is about to collapse anytime now… only potential survivor, the fabulous Fab[rice Tourre] .. standing in the middle of all these complex highly leveraged exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all of the implications of those monstrosities". Fabulous Fab, like his boss, will not be feeling very fab today.

The cases not only have a lot in common ~ using financial complexity allegedly to deceive and then using so-called independent experts to validate the deception (lawyers, accountants, credit rating agencies, "portfolio selection agents," etc etc ) ~ but they also show how interconnected the financial system is.

In Iceland Citigroup and Deutsche Bank covered the margin calls of distressed Icelandic business borrowers, deepening the crisis. Lehman uses the lightly regulated London markets and two independent British experts to validate that their "Repo 105s" were "genuine" trades and not their own in-house liability. The American authorities pursued a Swiss bank over aiding and abetting US nationals to evade tax.

Bankers will complain these cases all involve one or two misguided individuals, but that most banking is above board and was just the victim of irrational exuberance, misguided belief in free market economics and faulty risk management techniques.

Obviously that is true ~ but, sadly, there is much more to the crisis.

Andrew Haldane, executive director of the Bank of England, highlights the remarkable reduction in the risk weighting of bank assets between 1997 and 2007. Put simply, Europe's and the US's large banks exploited the weak international agreement on bank capital requirements in the so-called Basel agreement in 2004 to reclassify the risk of their loans and trading instruments.

They did not just reduce the risk by 5 or 10%. Breathtakingly, they claimed their new risk management techniques were so wonderful that the riskiness of their assets was up to half of what it had been ~ despite property and share prices cresting to new all-time highs.

Brutally, the banks knowingly gamed the system to grow their balance sheets ever faster and with even less capital underpinning them in the full knowledge that everything rested on the bogus claim that their lending was now much less risky. That was not all they were doing.

As Michael Lewis describes in The Big Short, credit default swaps had been deliberately created as an asset class by the big investment banks to allow hedge funds to speculate against collateralised debt obligations.

The banks were gaming the regulators and investors alike ~ and they knew full well what they were doing.

Simon Johnson's 13 Bankers shows how the major American banks deployed vast political lobbying power and money to create the relaxed regulatory environment in which all this could take place. In Britain no money changed hands. Gordon Brown offered light-touch regulation for free ~ egged on by the Tories, who wanted to go further.

This was the context in which Goldman's Fabulous Fab created the disputed CDOs, Sean FitzPatrick allegedly moved loans between banks and Lehman created its Repo 105s along with the entire "debt mule" structure revealed this weekend of inter-related companies to shuffle debt around its empire.

London and New York had become the centre of an international financial system in which the purpose of banking became making money from money ~ and where the complexity of the "innovations" allowed extensive fraud and deception.

Now it has all collapsed, to be bailed out by western taxpayers. The banks are resisting reform ~ and want to cling on to the business practices and business model that has so appallingly failed.

It is obvious why:

it makes them very rich.

The politicians tread carefully, only proposing what the bankers say is congruent with their definition of what banking should be. Labour and Tories alike are united in opposing improved EU regulation of hedge funds, buying the propaganda those operations had nothing to do with the crisis. Perhaps Paulson's trades at Goldman, and the hedge funds' appetite for speculating in credit default swaps, may disabuse them.

It is time to reframe the question.

Banks and financial institutions should do what economy and society want them to do ~ support enterprise, direct credit to where it is needed and be part of the system that generates investment and innovation.

Andrew Haldane ~ and the governor of the Bank of England ~ are right. We need to break up our banks, limit their capacity to speculate and bring them back to earth.

Britain should also launch an official investigation into what went wrong ~ and hand the findings to the Serious Fraud Office. This needs to become this election campaign's number one issue ~ not one which either a compromised Labour party or a temporizing Conservative party will relish. The Lib Dems, the fiercest critics of the banks, have begun to get very lucky.

CRISIS TIMETABLE

September 2007 Funding problems at Northern Rock triggers the first run on a British bank. It is nationalized in February 2008.

April 2008 Bear Stern faces bankruptcy after a run on the company wipes out cash reserves in less than two days. Backed by the Federal Reserve, JPMorgan buys up shares at far below market value.

September 2008 Lehman Brothers files for bankruptcy protection, becoming the first major bank to collapse since the start of the credit crisis.

December 2008 Bernard Madoff arrested for operating the largest Ponzi scheme in history.

January 2009 The Bank of England launches £200bn quantitative easing.

March 2010 Former chairman of Anglo Irish bank Sean Fitzpatrick is arrested in Dublin after failing to disclose details of loans worth millions from the bank.

April 2010 Northern Rock former directors, David Baker and Richard Barclay, are fined £504,000 and £140,000 for deliberately misleading analysts prior to nationalization.

April 2010 The US Securities and Exchange Commission accuses Goldman Sachs of "defrauding investors by misstating and omitting key facts".

Joanna Aniel Bidar

MIND CONTROL ~ OPTIMISM ~ INVISIBLE ENTRAPMENT

The lessons of optimism begin very early. There is nothing wrong with optimism, it is the stuff of life, but somewhere along the line things have gone out of whack and optimism has replaced thought and common sense. To question it is "to bring everybody down" these days. But we all loved the little engine that could.

THAT'S OPRAH-ESSIVE ~ A BOOK REVIEW

I promised you more on the topic of mind control a few weeks ago. This is another aspect of how we are influenced. Here we have one of the insidious ways subliminal social manipulation is slipped into our culture ~ exposed by the book under review.

I remember when I truly admired Oprah, bought into her life story, yada yada yada. But I revised my opinions awhile back. I stopped being an admirer when I realized what her "role" in the NWO was.

Part of it is selling new age pap to middle class white American women. This does damage to mainstream religion no end. And also she promotes the horrific oppression and killer of freedom of speech we call "political correctness" by introducing agendas of cultural change that many people would otherwise reject from common sense.

OK work this blech out of your system before you read on.

Had enough? Keep reading....

To slick peddlers of 'power of positive thinking' pap,

Barbara Ehrenreich says bleh.

By Shannon Rupp,

21 Jan 2010,

TheTyee.ca

Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion
of Positive Thinking has Undermined America

By Barbara Ehrenreich

Holt and Company (2009)

Barbara Ehrenreich's latest masterful book, Bright-Sided, opens with the most hopeful frontpiece I've seen in decades. "To complainers everywhere: Turn up the volume!"

Ehrenreich subtitles the book How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking has Undermined America, and she investigates how the

19th century's faith-healing movement

developed into today's

pop culture tool for social control.

Ehrenreich begins with the history of Christian Science and the other think-yourself-well religions that thrive in the American culture of individualism. Those faiths are the obvious forerunners of things like The Secret.

The latter's New Age Wingnuttery claims you can control the world with your wishes and the universe is just one big mail-order catalogue. Of course the corollary of The Secret is that if you're poor, uneducated, or unhealthy it's your own damn fault for not wishing hard enough. (It's just so terribly Ayn Rand, despite its Australian author, Rhonda Byrne.)

Got cancer and lost your house to Big Pharma? Return from war with PTSD? Parents just killed by a drunk driver? You child is born with a severe disability? It is ALL YOUR fault for not wishing hard enough! Might I add that this attitude also coincides very nicely with Max Friedman's philosophy of Disaster Economics which is an extremely jaded and harsh capitalist form of oppression and theft.

A movement with potential

But before the law of attraction, there was Protestant minister Norman Vincent Peale's 1952 book, The Power of Positive Thinking, which infected the business world via his proselytizing with sales people. That thinking inspired the money-making "human potential movement" of the ‘70s, which spawned all sorts of revenue streams in the form of cults delivering self-empowerment workshops and motivational speakers. (Remember EST? Have you heard of the contemporary Landmark Forum?)

Many of these cults, especially from ESALEN, where they pioneered, were products of graduates of the Frankfurt School as a means of wiggling into the American psyche to begin their insidious destruction of America in preparation for the arrival of Marxism, to destroy and conquer without firing a shot.

Ehrenreich traces how combining religious notions with health-care led to the self-help movement, including the 12-Steppers, who demanded we all acknowledge a higher power. (As an aside, I had long wondered why reiki practitioners and other energy healers demand their patients have some sort of "spiritual belief," which makes them sound like faith-healers from another era. Ehrenreich's history confirms this is exactly what they are, albeit under a new label.)

The words to this Bobby McFerrin hit song say it all.

Get happy? Get real

She takes unseemly pleasure in skewering popular but academically-dubious "happiness" psychology. In a particularly funny chapter, she fences with University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman, the author of pop psych books with titles like Authentic Happiness. She tries to pin down what he's really saying with his meaningless equations and vague terms. But this isn't science-based psychology; it's the armchair version that brainwashes people into thinking whatever serves authorities best.

Seligman is expressly opposed to changing the external circumstances that cause misery, which he writes can be can be "impractical and expensive," preferring to get people to adjust their attitude. One can only imagine what Seligman and his colleagues might have said about slavery...

Ehrenreich doesn't mention it, but it's worth noting that in the 1960s Seligman was influential in developing "aversion therapy" for curing homosexuals ~ which reveals the sinister underpinnings of his optimism training, and much of what passes for positive psychology.

Remember that the tie uses the hangman's knot when done properly.

More Oprah-essive thinking

Surprisingly, Ehrenreich was blissfully unaware of much of this delusional thinking when she got breast cancer in 2000. She was exhorted to be cheerful or die, which just piqued her curiosity and led to this book. The woman has a PhD in cell biology, so she knows the difference between knowledge and belief.

She also knows that the so-called research

these people cite about how

happy thoughts affect your health

is just so much superstition.

But faced with surgery, chemo, and other medical horrors, she needed a distraction. So she began looking at exactly why otherwise sensible people were embracing the notion that you must pretend to be "positive" to get well. She found that constant demand to be cheerful for the convenience of others, downright oppressive.

Or would that be Oprah-essive since,

as she notes,

many of the silliest

positive thinking ideas are touted by Lady O.

Ehrenreich is now well, despite being angry about both her cancer and the health-care system. Her insurance company tried to get out of paying for her tumour biopsy arguing that it was "elective."

In the self-help tradition, she offers an anecdote in support of her enthusiasm for negativity: Apparently the prospect of bringing that greedy private insurer to heel gave her the will to live.

Eat the rich

But the most chilling chapters look at how the mania for magical thinking has destroyed the economy by infecting the business world with self-deluding views. Her 2006 book Bait and Switch: On the (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream documented the growing gap between rich and poor and the disappearing middle class.

Unlike previous eras, there's no threat of revolutionary rage in sight. That's because positive thinking gurus keep the masses mollified with books like Harvey Mackay's We Got Fired: And it's the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Us!

It's astounding that people aren't angry:

Between 1965 and 2000 the ratio of CEO pay compared to the average worker went from 24:1 to 300:1. Yes, on average, American CEOs make 300 times more than the people who actually do the work.

Doesn't it make you want to eat the rich, as they used to say?

Probably not if you're enrolled in any "leadership" courses that deliver motivational platitudes in lieu of facts and education.

'Blame God'

Positive thinking has also reinvigorated the opiate of the masses. The so-called prosperity preachers like Joel Osteen (Your Best Life Now) advise their flocks to embrace a lavish lifestyle because, essentially, God wants you live large. So be positive and go buy that house with a mortgage you can't afford, assured that your higher power will help you out.

OHHHH the Wall Street bankers LOVE that one! How else did they peddle mortgages to millions of people who could not afford houses in the first place? By convincing them that things were good and the "suckers" bought it, exposing their financial underbelly to the beasts of greed and acquisition. But, read on.....

Even a conservative magazine like Time has traced the U.S.-led financial collapse to the American obsession with "spirituality" in all its variations. "Maybe we should blame God for the subprime mortgage mess," was the headline on a 2008 article.

Ehrenreich also documents how economists and government officials who warned of the impending financial meltdown were ignored or even fired for being "negative" ~ they pointed out the facts. In fact, the term negative seems to have become code-speak for knowledgeable and realistic.

It's obvious to anyone with RRSP that those leadership coaches that advise purging negative employees from the body corporate were ~ and still are ~ in the depths of denial. In effect, they're claiming that if you deny the Doppler snow forecast it will guarantee sunny weather. And yet, most of us believe it.

But then, the alternative to spouting upbeat slogans is being labeled with "a bad attitude," and as Ehrenreich records that's a career-limiting move.

No room for realism that might lead you to take matters into your own hands!

Besides, there's no arguing with people who believe the Emperor actually has new clothes. Bright-Sided might be funny, if it weren't for the fact that this Dark Age anti-thinking is destroying our economy, threatening our health, and undermining our quality of life.

Rational comforts

But the book is at least comforting for rational thinkers.

Apparently, I'm not the only one

who is tired of being polite to people

who blather on about such idiocy as

The Secret.

I realize the Canadian ideal is tolerance,

but at what point are the rest of us

enabling fools to foster social breakdown?

Reading Ehrenreich, I suspect that point came and went at least two decades ago.

She makes a bid to persuade her audience to embrace reality, but it reads as if she knows she's only preaching to the converted. She notes in the final pages, that Western economic elites have long flattered themselves with the idea that poverty is a voluntary condition ~ the result of personal failings such as laziness.

In the past week since the earthquake in Haiti, all I hear from some people is that these lazy Haitians deserve it because they have no work ethics etc. They pay no attention to history and why a once functioning country is full of poverty. They do not understand that the American government, as it has done in many places, pushed out true leaders of the people because the US wanted to rule, even if by proxy.

I run across this every day. I am told that I "just don't try hard enough" to find meaningful employment to raise my dastardly economic status. My age and physical limitations are just not taken into consideration, nor is the current job market and a few other matters taken into consideration.

The positive thinkers just offer a variation on that theme, blaming victims for refusing to embrace abundance, or think themselves well. That religious tradition of blaming the victim fits nicely into the economic conservatism of the last two decades.

"The threats we face are real and can be vanquished only by shaking off self-absorption and taking action in the world. Build up the levees, get food to the hungry, find the cure...," Ehrenreich writes.

To that I'd like add one more practical action. Stand up and tell people who spout this drivel to prove it or shut up. Politely, of course ~ we are Canadian, after all.

And don't slap them, no matter how tempting. HAHA

Magical thinking is a lot like smoking: what self-destructive twits do in the privacy of their own homes is their business, but they don't have the right expose the rest of us to their life-threatening habits.

That last comment makes me realize how we have had this blather shoved at us for thousands of years. What is the difference here from lighting a candle in the local church with a wish and a prayer for some boon from above? It is no different really than the self visualization of the pagans except that there is a candle to focus the wish and energy upon, that is then sent out into the universe to find the source of your problem and bring you the desired results.


Read this short article Writing: Positive Thinking Kills Writer’s Block Dead for a perfect example of everything written above. This is how such silliness is passed on. But the writer does make a valid point about negative thinking as well.

However, please realize I would not even be working and writing if I did not have hope. It is only by work and coming together that positive things can be achieved ~ or not. It is this striving that makes us strong. It is dealing with failure that makes us stronger. It is the knowledge that a few strong and good willed people have a chance to bring about change and we cannot give into defeatism. Or we are lost. It is a fine line to draw but it can be drawn.

Being pro active is the most realistic thing possible. And publishing this, spreading the word around, is being pro active. Grins widely. Now get out there and stop being positive, eat a dose of realism and learn to cope. There is NO PRESSURE to smile through hell.

AHA!! I just stumbled across this blog offering AGAINST OPTIMISM (EXPANDED) and am posting it here because the writer takes the above theories and applies it very thoroughly to America and offers concrete examples of how this blind optimism has changed the nation forever, and not for the best. The blog is called ARRANOLOGY and worth a read.

AGAINST OPTIMISM

Look. Sometime around the Industrial Revolution business discovered the power of optimism and began to exploit it. From the bleariest, drunkest, shotgun-in-the-pickup-truck redneck Southern white trash to the snobbiest, most coked-up, Armani-only Upper East Side corporate-raider/investment banker dildo, Americans one and all believe in being optimistic.

• We voted for Nixon because he promised “Peace with Honor” even though we knew he was a man who wouldn’t know the sting of honor from the slap of a wet turd. We elected him not once but twice knowing full well ~ or at least with no excuse for NOT knowing full well ~ that he was a paranoid, belligerent, lying jackass and always had been.
• We voted for Ronnie Rayguns because he told us a fantasy about shining cities on hills and how it was “morning in America” because it suggested we had everything to look forward to and no history behind us that we needed to worry about. We elected him not once but twice despite knowing full well that he was incompetent, extremely ill-informed (trees pollute??!), and not so much a president as an actor playing one on tv.
• We voted for George W Bush because he was charming and upbeat and told us we could be millionaires if only he was in charge, a guy we’d like to have a beer with who was incidentally passing out slices of pie from the sky. We elected him not once but twice knowing full well ~ or with little excuse for not knowing full well – that he was a liar, a failure, a coward, and an arrogant pissant who thought God had elected him instead of us.

Behind all these incredibly bad decisions lay a miasma of denial and optimism, the first required by the second since optimism in the face of a blatantly negative reality is impossible without a fervent denial of what’s right before your eyes.

But to say all that is only to begin to enumerate the folly of unjustified optimism. For example, there’s the global economic crisis created by a handful of Wall Street manipulators and Main Street frauds. This ~

The bank’s [Goldman Sachs] unprecedented reach and power have enabled it to turn all of America into a giant pumpanddump scam, manipulating whole economic sectors for years at a time, moving the dice game as this or that market collapses, and all the time gorging itself on the unseen costs that are breaking families everywhere ~ high gas prices, rising consumer credit rates, half-eaten pension funds, mass layoffs, future taxes to pay off bailouts.

All that money that you’re losing, it’s going somewhere, and in both a literal and a figurative sense, Goldman Sachs is where it’s going: The bank is a huge, highly sophisticated engine for converting the useful, deployed wealth of society into the least useful, most wasteful and insoluble substance on Earth ~ pure profit for rich individuals.

They achieve this using the same play book over and over again. The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage.

Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased.

They’ve been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s ~ and now they’re preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet.

This one will make the Great Depression of the dirty thirties look like child's play. That was their second or third trial run.

None of this would not have been possible were it not for an America drowning in optimism, the belief that better days are right around the corner. Who but a zealot optimist could have possibly believed so fervently in the Reagan Paradox that the less the govt collected in taxes, the more it would collect in taxes?

Optimism is the weapon that Goldman and the other Wall Street manipulators use to make a strapped America overplay its already overstretched finances. “Better days are coming. We can take on all this extra debt because when the economy turns up we’ll be making more money, enough to cover this new house.” They had us convinced.

But the economy did get better and our wages still didn’t rise. We weren’t making more money. In many cases we were actually making less because the fear of inflation that infects the rich like typhoid and the power of a fascist-style govt kowtowing to the rich and incipient corporate panic meant that inflationary fears trumped every other concern.

And if we fought for higher wages, the rich moved their companies to low-wage low tax countries, dodged the taxes involved, and our jobs were gone. Forever. The optimism they fed us was gibberish, a lie, a con.

Holy Walmart led the exodus leaving total destruction in its wake. And it calls itself all American yet every single item they sell is made by slave labour in China.

To an extent, the entire economic meltdown could only have taken place in a country so besotted with optimism that it could deny the chasm under its feet even as it was tumbling down the slope to the rocks below. The bubble was built on optimism ~ not at the top where they knew better ~ but throughout the rest of the body right down to the very bottom.

We would never have tied ourselves into financial knots if we hadn’t persisted in being optimistic about the future, and if we hadn’t tied ourselves into financial knots with debt on top of debt, there would have been no imaginary profits to feed the bubble Goldman and others were blowing up.

And still we learn nothing. Taibbi points out in his Goldman take-down that they’re ginning up to do it all again, and we’re going to let them because we’re…what? You got it. Optimistic. Dig:

[I]nstead of credit derivatives or oil futures or mortgage-backed CDOs, the new game in town, the next bubble, is in carbon credits ~ a booming trillion dollar market that barely even exists yet, but will if the Democratic Party that [Goldman Sachs] gave $4,452,585 to in the last election manages to push into existence a groundbreaking new commodities bubble, disguised as an “environmental plan,” called cap-and-trade.

The new carboncredit market is a virtual repeat of the commodities-market casino that’s been kind to Goldman, except it has one delicious new wrinkle: If the plan goes forward as expected, the rise in prices will be government-mandated. Goldman won’t even have to rig the game. It will be rigged in advance.

Here’s how it works: If the bill passes, there will be limits for coal plants, utilities, natural-gas distributors and numerous other industries on the amount of carbon emissions (a.k.a. greenhouse gases) they can produce per year. If the companies go over their allotment, they will be able to buy “allocations” or credits from other companies that have managed to produce fewer emissions.

President Obama conservatively estimates that about $646 billion worth of carbon credits will be auctioned in the first seven years; one of his top economic aides speculates that the real number might be twice or even three times that amount.

The feature of this plan that has special appeal to speculators is that the “cap” on carbon will be continually lowered by the government, which means that carbon credits will become more and more scarce with each passing year. Which means that this is a brand new commodities market where the main commodity to be traded is guaranteed to rise in price over time. The volume of this new market will be upwards of a trillion dollars annually; for comparison’s sake, the annual combined revenues of all electricity suppliers in the U.S. total $320 billion.

Wall Street makes its money on suckers like us by selling us optimistic fairy tales. Got a pollution problem? We can fix it and you can get rich at the same time. This is America. We can do anything!

Optimism is largely responsible for our being so deep in denial that we could consistently vote against our own best interests and even help destroy our own country and yet insist we did no such thing.

Just take a look around and balance your optimism with common sense. Arm yourself with knowledge. THEN remember to enjoy the beauty around you. It is free.

Fuck optimism. Give me a little healthy skepticism any day. If you’re staring at pie-in-the-sky instead of the ground under your feet, it’s a lot easier to walk off a cliff.

Yet instead of finally letting go of our childish and dangerous dependency on Happy Endings, we build entire sociological and psychological structures defending Optimism as “necessary for survival“.

We humans tend to be an optimistic bunch. In fact, it’s long been established by psychologists that most people tend to be irrationally positive. The optimism bias, as it’s called, accounts for the fact that we expect to live longer and be more successful than the average and we tend to underestimate the likelihood of getting a serious disease or a divorce. This tendency is adaptive ~ many researchers have claimed that a positive outlook motivates us to plan for our future and may even have an effect on our long-term physical health.

Optimism may be so necessary to our survival that it’s hardwired in our brains. A new study published in the journal Nature further confirms the idea that having a rosy outlook is a personality trait with deep, neurological roots. Researchers found that the brains of optimistic people actually light up differently on a scan than those who tend to be more pessimistic when they think about future events.

The disparity between positive and pessimistic minds is especially prominent in areas of the brain that have been linked to depression. “The same areas that malfunction in depression are very active when people think about positive events,” says Tali Sharot, a post-doctorate fellow at University College London, who conducted the research at New York University.

And in skeptical France, say, their brains are hardwired to be pessimistic? Crap.

Only in America is optimism made into a religion that supersedes everything but death and where we protect our divine right to remain children with guns. Hope has become an American fetish. America without optimism would be Europe. Ugh. Oscar Wilde said that the basis of all optimism is sheer terror.

If that’s true, and it probably is, it makes us the most frightened country on Earth. Not good for an Imperial Superpower. It’s one thing to indulge your urge to defy growing up when all you can fuck up is yourself. It’s another to shove it down the throats of the rest of the world when you have the power to fuck up everything. At some point you need to become a responsible adult who considers reality instead of wetdreams to figure out policy.

What we are fighting now is a century-old training program. We have all been taught to believe and worse, act as if we have every right to ignore uncomfortable facts because, hey, somebody will figure it out and relieve us of the responsibility of fixing any of it. The Best Is Yet to Come! We’re No 1! Don’t Worry, Be Happy! Shop Til You Drop!

Enough already. Unjustified optimism has brought us to the brink of economic destruction. It’s time to put away childish things, y’all, and eat our damn green beans.

THE IMF HAS AMERICA IN ITS CROSSHAIRS

Last night, after putting up that post on the perilous financial situation in Iceland, I remembered this piece I wrote in my earliest blogging days, June 8, 2007, to be exact. I thought I would see just how accurate it was considering I wrote it with almost no understanding of the IMF at the time. No one read it and the few who did told me I was crazy. Now I realize I was ahead of the game.

"By the time the masses see the bars,
the door will have already slammed shut."
~ David Icke.

That, dear readers, is about where we are today!

Each Wall Street-created depression or recession is another PREPLANNED step in the bankers' agenda. Don't call it a conspiracy any more, it is an agenda being followed through with painstaking thoroughness. It is also nothing more than a huge land grab.

When they created the Federal Reserve ~ the beginning of the end in 1913 ~ the bankers wrote it so that they would NEVER be liable for the debts they created. These debts would ride solely on the shoulders of the people/peons/slaves/serfs/us. But on the way out, they want to own everything they can steal from us including, if the Carbon Tax and environmental movement has its way, the air that we breathe.

This is one reason Wall Street will always get the bail outs they ask for or demand and why, when on January 13, 2010, Obama made his speech about them paying back every penny with interest, I was rather skeptical. Now, years later and with much more insight, I feel it is only timely to re-post this piece. I am not going to change a word, just add a few more images for fun.

IMF takeovers have happened to many countries since I wrote this ~ almost all were countries with dark skinned folks so no one here paid much attention. One good example a few years ago was in South America. Enron bought up all the water supplies, every bit of it, throught the IMF. Within a year or two, yes everyone still had access to water. But if you wanted clean potable water you paid for it. Those who could not, got dirty water that needed to be boiled. Ah, privatization!

But Iceland is an isolated heartbreakingly beautiful country inhabited by fair skinned, fair haired people. The IMF would not do that would it? Money knows no nationality or race however. Wrong is wrong regardless of skin tone, but until now that basic premise is most likely why their actions did not blip on American radar screens for that reason.

But Iceland? One of the loveliest, pristine countries in the world? I imagine more people might wake up and make note because then it is easier for them to visualize it being done to THEM, the melanin-challenged members of humanity. Of course it will not be given prize billing in the main media either because this is another major step in the goal towards international communism so desired by the Zionist cause. Oooops, the NWO, you are not supposed to know that it is communism yet.

North America ~ Canada and the US ~ have our backs against the wall. The US is in horrid shape and Harper is doing his damnedest to put Canada into the red as well. Remember Bush was given a relatively healthy financial country when he stole the first presidency?

One of his entrusted tasks was to bring the US to its financial knees, something that Obama, trained and placed into power, therefore fully owned by the Chicago Jewish banking cartel and their thug cohorts on Wall Street, is working on ~ bringing the US to a complete kowtow before the banks.

Stephen Harper, bless his Star of David-studded little soul (if he has one) is hellbent on doing the same to Canada. This puts US seriously in the cross-hairs of the UNITED NATIONS INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND!

Read how they work below, and substitute YOUR country for the previous nations forced to acceptance as you read along. Consider the UN as the bank. And remember, only at the most desperate, do countries ask for help, knowing the end is already in sight.

But hey, folks, it's just business,right? Business attached to a vile agenda. In America, look to those sweet Wall Street bankers who work for the Rothschilds and a few other banking cartels, primarily Zion.

The World Bank and IMF are owned and controlled exclusively by rich nations, NM Rothschild, and 30 to 40 of the wealthiest people in the world. They previously worked exclusively on the poor nations or nations whom they have already robbed to the point of poverty.

They set economic policies for those poor nations and effectively frustrate and deny the governments of those nations from making serious attempts to settle their own economic policies ~ and therefore force these countries to accept the political prescriptions prescribed by the IMF. In the end you have the poor world being governed by the rich world, almost exactly as if we were still living in colonial times. Only now, the poor people are but chattel.

But wait! This IS colonialization! These are the same people who colonialized the world hundreds of years ago, only now the chessboard is very differently layout. These are the descendents of the same royal houses and banking empires that set out to conquer the world so long ago. Only today, the stakes are ever so much higher for all of humanity.

Think about this list and see where it ends. Imperialism carried out by the bankers of the wealthy nations, primarily Britain. They have their host supply the manpower for their goals whether it be land, wars, conquests. The banks are all headed by one or two families but primarily the Rothschild cabal. What is the goal of Zionism so heavily pushed by these people?Bingo! World Communism!

For centuries these groups, in one form or another, have planned to take the world over through money. A former chief economist of the World Bank, Joe Stiglitz, was fired in 2000. He pointed out to top executives that every country the IMF/World Bank got involved in ended up with a crashed economy, a destroyed government, and sometimes in flames with riots. Jim Wolfensen, the president of the World Bank at the time, would not comment on his dismissal.

Before Stiglitz was fired, he took a large stack of secret documents out of the World Bank. These secret documents from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund reveal that the IMF required nations:

1. To sign secret agreements of 111 items;

2. To agree to the selling off their key assets - water, electric, gas, etc;

3. To agree to take economic steps which are really devastating to the nations involved;

4. To pay off the politicians billions of dollars to Swiss bank accounts for signing this transfer of a country fixed assets. Of course the rights of the people are meaningless to these bankers.

If the leaders do not agree to these steps they are cut-off from all international borrowing. A nation that cannot borrow money in the international marketplace can survive; the point America is at now. She cannot borrow from anyone since China sliced her credit card a few weeks ago.

If the leader is obstinate and truly a man of the people, refusing to give in, they overthrow the government and plant lies about the former government and/or even rewrite history. The true history of the CIA overflows with such tragic histories. However in the case of America, the apathy of the people is allowing them to steal everything with nary a peep from anyone. Oh, peeps are made, there are always visionaries, but the people just don’t hear or see. They have been psychologically conditioned to blindness in certain avenues.

Stiglitz provided inside documents from Argentina show the secret Argentine plan. This was signed by Jim Wolfensen, the president of the World Bank at the time. Argentina had six presidents in five weeks because their economy was completely destroyed. This happened because they started out in the end of the 80's with orders from the IMF and World Bank to sell-off all assets, public assets, like their water system. Then they taxed the people. They created big government and big government handed it off to the private IMF/World Bank. They paid off the politicians billions in Swiss bank accounts.

This is why, time and again, we see decisions made which appear to favor not the interests of the poor world ~ which supposedly these two institutions are trying to help ~ but the interests of Wall Street brokers, foreign multinationals, big business is based in the rich world. The rich world has done very well out of World Bank and IMF decisions, while the poor and less developed world have done very badly. With what we know today, these horrific situations are completely avoidable, but avarice and lust for power devours all.

Stiglitz also brought information regarding the water system of Buenos Aires which was sold off for a song to a little company called Enron. A pipeline was sold off, that runs between Argentina and Chile, also sold off to a company called Enron. Then the globalists blew out Enron after transferring the assets to another dummy corporation. Insidious!

They come in to the foundering country, often due to their interfering, pay off politicians to transfer the water systems, the railways, the telephone companies, the nationalized oil companies, gas stations ~ the politicians then hand it over to the IMF for nothing or next to nothing. The Globalists pay them off individually, billions in Swiss bank accounts. The plan results in the total enslavement of the entire population in whose name the debt was create. Enron was a dummy corporation for money laundering, drug money, etc.

The IMF/World Bank systematically tears nations apart, whether in Ecuador, Haiti, Iraq, Sweden, Brazil, or the United States itself. They sell this insidious concept to the people as “privatization” as we have been seeing in Canada ever since the signing of NAFTA. This is outright theft from the people whose national assets are then handed over to the IMF/World Bank. They hand it over, generally to cronies, like Citibank who grabbed half the Argentine banks. British Petroleum grabbed pipelines in Ecuador. Enron grabbed water systems all over the place.

Currently there is a rush to privatize water services around the world. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) are pushing for the privatization of water services by European and U.S.-based companies. They are pushing privatization through stipulations in trade agreements and loan conditions to developing countries.

These privatization programs started in the early 1990’s and have since emerged in India, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Nigeria, Mexico, Malaysia, Australia, and the Philippines, to name a few. In Chile, the World Bank imposed a loan condition to guarantee a 33 percent profit margin to the French company Suez Lyonnaise des Eaux while the company insisted on a margin of 35 percent.

This privatization of services is only the first step toward the privatization of all aspects of water. Through this new globalization and privatization of water resources, there is an effort to replace collective ownership of water sources with corporate control. This effort is being met with increasing opposition. Supporters of privatization say that it has a great track record of success, increasing the efficiency, quality, reliability and affordability of services to the population.

The problem is that they destroy these systems through exploitation and mismanagement. You can't even get drinking water in Buenos Aires. It is not just a question of the theft. You can't turn on the tap. This is far more than someone getting rich at the public expense; this is control of life itself!

They control the most basic of human needs. If they could charge for air and sunshine, they would do that as well. And the IMF was just handed the Great Lakes. They have the sole control over the water supply for much of the North American populace now. The IMF and the World Bank is 51% owned by the United States Treasury.

Every country the IMF/World Bank meddles in ends up with a devastated economy and literally in flames. They even plan in the riots, infiltrating organizations and using agent provateurs to incite otherwise peaceful protests,giving the IMF justification to impose further reduction on citizens’ freedoms.

They know that when they squeeze a country and destroy its economy, the outraged citizens with their hungry children will protest and eventually there will be riots. They freely and publically admit that these are IMF riots.

When the people riot all the capital runs away from the country and that gives the opportunity for the IMF to then add more conditions. These are devious men with a large plan for the control of this entire planet and the people thereon. There are a great many heavy investors pulling out of America and many wealthy are investing in land far, far away from America. Do you really think Halliburton to Dubai is the only one to fly out of America recently?

What we have here is really an imperial economy war to implode countries and now they are doing it in America. Enron led the way. The chief investigators of Enron for the State of California said that that it's not just the stockholders that got ripped off. They sucked billions of dollars out of the public pocket in Texas and California in particular.

Where are the assets? See, everybody says there are no assets left since Enron was a dummy corporation ~ this from the experts who have proven that they transferred all those assets to other corporations and banks. Californians paid their own electric bills according to the investigations, which were pumped up unnecessarily by 9 to 12-billion dollars.

The men who designed the system in California for deregulation then went to work for Enron right after. Lord Wakeham, who was on the audit committee of Enron, is the head of NM Rothschild. There are no pies that this piece of work doesn't have his aristocratic fingers in. He's on something like fifty Boards. He was supposed to be head of the audit committee watching how Enron kept the books but was, in fact, being well compensated by high consulting fees on the side.

Wakeham was in Thatcher's government and he authorized Enron to come into Britain and take over power plants in Britain. Enron owned a water system in the middle of England. This is what Lord Wakeham approved and then they gave him a job on the board. He was also gifted with a very nicely padded absolutely huge consulting contract.

Lord Wakeham is supposed to be in charge of the audit committee to see how they handle their accounts, but he is also the head of the board to regulate the media. Lord Wakeham is trying to pass laws in England where you can't own your own water. He can't be touched because he regulates the media. Argentine, now America?

Burrow into NM Rothschild, you'll find it all there. The IMF/World Bank implosion, four points, how they bring down a country and destroy the resources of the people.

First you open up the capital markets and sell off all local banks to foreign banks. Each step of the way the media promotes these changes to the people under any number of false promises. Then you go to what's called market-based pricing. That's the stuff like in California where everything is free market and you end up with water bills no one can pay. Then open up your borders to trade ~ complete free marketeering. Does the little big word NAFTA ring a bell?

These are the same minds that conceived and brought about the Opium Wars a few centuries ago. History DOES repeat itself, by their design and some of them have been at this for thousands of years. The process is well recorded in Roman history. If a formula works, these people will use it again and again on an increasingly weakened, demoralized and polarized populace.

This is not free trade; this is coercion trade.
This is Economic warfare.

The thing is, it is so sleepy slow and insidious in some places, the people are completely unable to see the pattern until the door of slavery slams shut behind them. Other places, it seems to happen overnight. They have been taking apart entire economies this way, plunging nation after nation into chaos. Africa did not get to the condition it is now in without their help. It's to force all industry into a country that the globalists fully control, and they control China. Which leads us to Wal-Mart.

The future of corporations and their treatment of employees can be seen in the Illuminati owned Wal-Mart which has 700 plants in China. There is almost nothing in a Wal-Mart store that comes from the United States of America, despite all the eagles on the wall. They have big flags saying "Buy American" but hardly anything in their stores is from America. What's even worse is they will hire a factory and right next to it will be the sister factory which is inside a prison. Much of the goods for Walmart are produced by a prison slave trade or by young women paid pennies per hour.

In Asia, the IMF demanded the removal of all capital controls and financial controls, which exposed Asia to this incredible speculative flow of what’s called hot money ~ short-term funds ~ allowing the Wall Street brokers to launch ferocious speculative attacks on the currencies of the Asian countries and brought those countries to their knees.

The removal of all regulations, which the IMF demanded, had nothing whatsoever to do with the welfare of the nations concerned. The only possible reason for the stringency of its demands is that it was being lobbied to make those demands by Wall Street. The only beneficiaries of those policies were the brokers who made a very large amount of money after the East Asian collapse. Millions of Asians went hungry. They saved that sort of treatment for Africa !

There is also good old fashioned bribery. Sell off the water company that is worth, over ten years about 5 billion dollars, ten percent of that is 500 million. A Senator from Argentina said that he got a call from George W. Bush in 1988 saying give the gas pipeline in Argentina to Enron. Enron was going to pay one-fifth of the world's price for their gas and he said how can you make such an offer? The answer was that if they only pay one-fifth that leaves quit a little bit for you to go in your Swiss bank account. This is the same George W. Bush who said he didn't get to know Ken Lay of Enron until 1994.

There have not been any substantial bailouts at all for such essentials in the collapsing countries as health and education, the welfare of the poor who lose their job as a result of the crisis, the government institutions which can’t function anymore. Bailouts are aimed exclusively at securing the investments of these foreign speculators. More profoundly than that, many of the crises ~ and the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98 and the Argentine crisis are very good examples. Both were caused as a result of, principally, IMF policy that was aimed exclusively at pleasing the financial community in the United States.

Now we move on to the second step of the process. Argentina is a perfect example of step two of the IMF. A fifth of the population of Argentina was unemployed, and IMF said cut the unemployment benefits drastically, take away pension funds, and cut the education budgets. Basic common sense dictates that if you cut the economy in the middle of a recession that you, the IMF have created, you can absolutely demolish the nation.

Of course it makes no sense! If you are sincere about bringing about change, the governments should not start cutting the budget in a recession, they should be spending money to stimulate the economy. Taxes should be cut not raised. But they tell these countries you've got to cut, and cut, and cut. According to the inside documents, this is done so the country can make payments to foreign banks who are collecting 21% to 70% interest.

You really don’t want to know how much the interest on American loans is! Really, you don’t. This is loan-sharking! It got so bad that they required Argentina to get rid of the laws against loan-sharking because any bank would be a loan-shark under Argentine law. Say what you wish about Islam, but the fact that usury is against all that is holy, in the Muslim world there is no money lending.

The country is now ready for the last points of subjugation to their new masters. They open up the borders for trade, that's the new opium wars. The economy has been destroyed so that the people can produce nothing, let alone purchase. So then they open the borders to sell their own goods. They force nations to pay horrendous amounts for things like drugs ~ legal drugs.

That's how you end up with an illegal drug trade. What's there left to survive on except sell us smack and crack. Of course these drugs are supplied by government agencies to make sure things run smoothly, not to mention deal with other parts of their agenda not touched upon at this time. And so, drive the whole world down, blow out their economies and then buy the rest of it up for pennies on the dollar.

In Part 4, they take apart the government by the coup d’état and install their own corporate government. The CIA even has a college in which they train officers and men from the Latin countries in these matters from politics to torture.

In Venezuela where they had an elected president of the government, the IMF announced that they would support a transition government if the president were removed. They did not say that they would become involved in politics ~ they would just “support” a transition government. What this really meant was they would pay for the coup d’état, if the military overthrew the current president, because the he had the temerity and the courage to say “no” to the IMF. He told those guys to go packing. They brought their teams in and said you have to do this and that. He insisted that he did not have to do anything. He said he would double the taxes on oil corporations because there is a lot of oil in Venezuela. Then he would have all the money necessary for social programs and the government ~ and his would be a very rich nation. Well, as soon as he said these things they started fomenting trouble with the military and within a short time he was out of office. They would never allow him to raise taxes on the oil companies.

We see this pattern repeated time and again, and you have to ask after a while: "Who is driving this?" The only possible answer that comes to mind is that these very exclusive financial interests in the West are driving this. And they are systematically destroying economies all over the world.

Now here is how things stand today. With the American dollar on the international front. It is difficult to know where to begin but the news is not good. It affects ALL of us on the planet but especially the White nations, the States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand and of course the UK.

First on our list is China. They have announced that they are refusing to accept American Corporations purchasing into their stock market any longer as they did in the past. China also said that they are no longer going to be purchasing our securities as they have in the past, including bonds and T-bills. China's decisions and subsequent announcements at the beginning of the week have sent a panic across the World's markets.

OPEC met recently and they have also stated they will be diversifying into other currencies instead of just the American dollar. They will now begin accepting other currencies and limit the trade of oil via the American dollar.

As of March 21, 2007, Iran has outlawed the American dollar and will put anyone in jail that uses it in their country after that date. They have the ominous notoriety of being the first nation in the world to do such a thing. The real issue in Iran is NOT nuclear, but rather the decision to not use the American dollar for trade and the sale of oil. On the heels of Iran's decision, North Korea has followed suit and also outlawed the use of the American dollar in their country. Finally, Malaysia the next day did the same thing. This is huge, people.

Central banks around the world are increasingly diversifying their reserves, including cutting holdings of American dollars, according to a survey sponsored by Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC, the U.K.'s second-largest bank. Italy, Russia, Sweden and Switzerland have made "major adjustments" in foreign-exchange holdings favoring the Euro and the British pound, according to the poll conducted by Central Banking Publications Ltd. between September and December. "Central banks are open to saying they've been diversifying to improve returns and reduce exposure to any single currency," said Sean Callow, senior currency strategist at Westpac Banking Corp. in Singapore.

There's no doubt that when they say 'diversification' they mean selling dollars.Last week, through personal sources, a friend of mine called their bank president in Vancouver, BC and he agreed with everything I have been saying about the dollar. What amazed me the most was her comment that he told her his bank is currently making preparations for the crash of the American dollar!

AMERICA!! THIS IS WHAT IS BEING DONE TO YOU. PLEASE WAKE UP SOON! IF YOU DON'T SOON, YOUR PAPER BILLS WILL ONLY BE GOOD FOR ORIGAMI!