Economy – TheBreakAway

Of Bunkers & Bitcoin…& CERN Switzerland And…

Source: GizaDeathStar.com
Dr. Joseph P. Farrell
February 6, 2017

Believe it or not, today’s blog may be related to the two previous days’ blogs. But what possible relationship could Bitcoin and for that matter, crypto-currencies in general have to CERN or to Argentina and the recent visits of Mr. Tillerson and Mr. Bezos there, to check out the “nature”.

Well, when Mr. M.A. sent the following article to me, he did so with some very suggestive high octane speculation of his own. He suggested that, perhaps, there might be a connection between CERN and crypto-currency mining. Why? Well, because there is a bunker in Switzerland which was built by the Swiss military as a command headquarters during the Cold War, and which now functions as a private corporate facility, surrounded by intense security, to guard crypto-currency encryption keys, the very things that drive blockchain:

Switzerland’s bitcoin bunker

The article itself points out the reason for all the security:

It’s odd to think of a virtual currency needing physical storage, but just like your most precious photos, cryptocurrencies need some kind of material container. A bitcoin vault doesn’t store actual bitcoin units. Technically, what’s being stored are private, cryptographic keys. These keys form a pair with public-facing keys and provide access to the balance of coins stored on the bitcoin network. Gaining unauthorized access to someone’s private key is akin to stealing their gold bar. The security protocol in the bunker is designed to ward off attacks from “well-funded terrorist groups or hackers.”

Stories of hackers finding their way through even the best-secured bitcoin accounts are legion, and—given that bitcoin was designed to make banks obsolete—it’s ironic that bank-like methods have to be used to keep cryptocurrencies safe.

If someone gets hold of your private key, there’s no way to claw the funds back or demand a refund. That’s why firms that store bitcoin like this one, called Xapo, are a juicy target—and why the bunker requires paranoiac levels of security.

But why would Mr. M.A. suggest a potential link to CERN? While his email was rather sketchy in details, I had to admit, as I allowed my own penchant for high octane speculation to run amok, he may have a point, for three basic reasons: (1) mining crypt-currencies requires a lot of electricity, something which CERN has in abundance; (2) mining crypto-currencies also requires a lot of computing power, something which CERN also has in an abundance rivaled probably only by the vast computing power of intelligence and signals-intercept agencies; and the real kicker is (3) CERN may be engaged in secret data analysis and correlation experiments, as I have speculated on numerous occasions. But it is also a sovereign entity, and could equally use that power as a means of very covert funding. Enter crypto-currencies, for as I’ve also pointed out on this site, stories have recently emerged that some very nefarious groups are using crypt-currencies to fund their operations and activities. So Mr. M.A.’s speculation may not be all that much of a stretch. (Hmmm… Switzerland, Templars, lots of money, Templar space satellites…. hmmm….)

But then, squatting in the middle of this article, something else caught my attention, and my jaw hit the floor. Recall that yesterday I blogged about the appearance of Mr. Jeff Bezos in Patagonia, tweeting about glaciers and saving the planet and space. Mr. Bezos, as most people know, is a billionaire, the founder of Amazon, owner of the Washington Post, and Amazon and the CIA are in turn related (and not just indirectly through the Post). Amazon is a huge database, if one wants to look at it a certain way, sitting on top of mountains of raw data of inestimable value to intelligence.

Mr. Bezos’ presence in Argentina is coincident with U.S. Secretary of State Tillerson’s, and again, Mr. Tillerson’s Argentinian junket began, not in Buenos Aires with a meeting with President Macri, but in San Carlos di Bariloche where, ostensibly, he was to give a speech to a nature preserve and meet with a Fullbright scholar.

Uh huh. Sure. Glaciers, Fullbright scholars, and nature preserves.

So what was squatting in the middle of the article?

Sit down, and have a couple of fingers of Jack Daniels, because this one is a stunner, and full of implications:

Xapo’s founder is the Argentinian entrepreneur Wences Casares, the “patient zero” of bitcoin among Silicon Valley’s elite. It was Casares who gave tech luminaries like Bill Gates and Reid Hoffman their first bitcoins. Carlos Rienzi, Xapo’s head of security, chose the vault, and he designed the private suite and its security protocols.(Emphasis added)

That’s right: the owner of this bunker, and one of the “founders” of Bitcoin, according to this article, and therefore, someone who sits on top of the Bitcoin op, is an Argentine “entrepreneur”.

Now let’s search for Senor Cesares. Wikipedia says this about him:

He is the founder and CEO of Xapo, a bitcoin wallet startup based in Palo Alto, California.^[2] Xapo is said to be the largest custodian of bitcoin in the world.^[3]Xapo has raised $40 million from leading Silicon Valley venture capital firms.^[4]

Casares sits on the board of PayPal and, as part of his non-profit activities, he serves on the board of Endeavor,^[5] a non-profit organization that promotes high-impact entrepreneurship in emerging markets and that was instrumental in his early success. He also served on the board of Kiva,^[6] a non-profit organization with a mission to connect people through lending to alleviate poverty worldwide.

Originally from Patagonia, Argentina, Casares launched that country’s first Internet Service Provider, Internet Argentina S.A. in 1994, a company he would go on to sell in order to found the Argentine online brokerage Patagon in 1997. Patagon established itself as Latin America’s first comprehensive Internet financial services portal and expanded its online banking services to the United States, Spain, and Germany. Patagon was acquired by the Spanish bank, Banco Santander for $750 million which became Santader Online worldwide.

Oh… gee… look! He’s from Patagonia in Argentina!

And oh… gee…look: he has online banking services connected to Spain, the USA, and Germany!

And… wow… look again! It’s all being coordinated from a bunker!

Now the question is, who else, and what else, is he connected with?

And gee, this all sort of makes me wonder, with blockchain encryption, if crypto-currencies aren’t a perfect way to launder all sorts of missing money, and while doing so, manipulating their prices as well, kill two birds with one stone, so to speak…

See you on the flip side…

We Need A Social Revolution

Source: PeakProsperity.com
Charles Hugh Smith
August 18, 2017

In the conventional view, there are two kinds of revolutions: political and technological. Political revolutions may be peaceful or violent, and technological revolutions may transform civilizations gradually or rather abruptly—for example, revolutionary advances in the technology of warfare.

In this view, the engines of revolution are the state—government in all its layers and manifestations—and the corporate economy.

In a political revolution, a new political party or faction gains converts to its narrative, and this new force replaces the existing political order, either via peaceful means or violent revolution.

Technological revolutions arise from many sources but end up being managed by the state and private sector, which each influence and control the other in varying degrees.

Conventional history focuses on top-down political revolutions of the violent “regime change” variety: the American Revolution (1776), the French Revolution (1789), the Russian Revolution (1917), the Chinese Revolution (1949), and so on.

Technology has its own revolutionary hierarchy; the advances of the Industrial Revolutions I, II, III and now IV, have typically originated with inventors and proto-industrialists who relied on private capital and banking to fund large-scale buildouts of new industries: rail, steel manufacturing, shipbuilding, the Internet, etc.

The state may direct and fund technological revolutions as politically motivated projects, for example the Manhattan project to develop nuclear weapons and the Space race to the Moon in the 1960s.

These revolutions share a similar structure: a small cadre leads a large-scale project based on a strict hierarchy in which the revolution is pushed down the social pyramid by the few at the top to the many below. Even when political and industrial advances are accepted voluntarily by the masses, the leadership and structure of the controlling mechanisms are hierarchical: political power, elected or not, is concentrated in the hands of a few at the top. Corporations are commercial autocracies; leadership is highly concentrated and orders are imposed on the bottom 99% of employees with military-like authority.

Social Revolutions Are Not Top-Down

But there is another class of revolution that does not share this hierarchical structure, nor does it manifest in the large-scale, top-down power-pyramids of the state and private corporations: social revolutions are bottoms-up affairs, lacking centralized leadership and hierarchical control mechanisms.

Social revolutions eventually influence the state and private sector, but they do not require the permission, funding or leadership of these hierarchies; as a rule, social revolutions drag the state and corporate sectors forward, kicking and screaming, as the social fabric and values of the populace change and the state and corporate sector cling to the status quo.

Examples of recent social revolutions include the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s, the Counterculture of the 1960s, and the gay rights movement. The leadership of the state resisted each revolution, and was essentially forced to adapt to the new social order as it became mainstream.

Once corporations figured out ways to profit from the transformed social order, they quickly introduced new products and fresh marketing: all-Caucasian advertising, for example, gave way to targeted ethnic advertising and mixed-race national advert campaigns.

When social revolutions are suppressed by the state, they may spark a political revolution as the socially oppressed come to see the overthrow of the autocratic political order as a necessary step towards liberation.

In other cases, social revolutions may have little immediate impact on the political stage. Faith-based social secular movements–for example, the Second Great Awakening in the early 19^th century– were not overtly political; their eventual political impact (temperance, woman’s rights and support for the abolition of slavery) may manifest decades later.

In summary: social revolutions may generate political waves, but they need not be overtly political to do so, nor do they rely on political, financial or technological hierarchies to transform society.

The Decline of Social Groups and the Erosion of the Social Order

Robert Putman’s 2000 book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, documented the decline of social connections and what we might calling belonging in American society with reams of data. This erosion of social bonds is not limited to social groups such as bowling leagues; it is secular, spanning every social type of connection from family picnics to community and neighborhood groups.

If we extend Putnam’s findings to the core human bonds of family and friendships, we find the same fraying of social ties; people have fewer close friends, are more isolated and lonely, and family relationships are increasingly superficial or characterized by alienation.

The factors feeding this broad-based decline of connectedness and social capital are many: the nation’s economic mode of production has changed, requiring two incomes where one once sufficed, and globalization has increased both the demands on those with jobs and the number of adults who have fallen out of the work force.

This winner-takes-most economy has been accompanied by the rise of political divisiveness, a brand of politics that fosters us-versus-them disunity and the erosion of common ground in favor of demonized opponents and all-or-nothing loyalty to one party or cause.

The technological revolutions of broadcast television and radio homogenized the mainstream media even as they provided superficial substitutes for social engagement. The technologies of social media, mobile telephony and narrowcast echo-chambers of uniform opinion have created even more addictive forms of distraction that are not just shredding social connectedness—they’re destroying our ability to form and nurture social bonds, even within the family.

This dynamic was explored in a recent essay in The Atlantic, Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?

Any careful observer of present-day family life would add that the addictive draw of mobile telephony has also damaged the parents’ generation and the family unit itself.

Cui Bono: To Whose Benefit?

Longtime readers know I often begin an inquiry with the time-tested question: cui bono, to whose benefit? Who has benefited from the erosion of the social fabric and social capital, from the politics of divisiveness and the mass addiction to the technologies of superficial connectedness?

While we can take note of soaring corporate profits, and draw a causal connection between these profits and the modern-day “always connected to work” lifestyle of high-productivity corporate employees, it’s difficult to argue that corporations have benefited directly from the loss of social capital that characterizes American life.

Rather, it seems that the corporation’s relentless pursuit of narrowly defined self-interest, i.e. maximizing profits by whatever means are available, has laid waste to boundaries between work and home life as collateral damage.

In a similar fashion, purveyors of smartphones and the software and content that render them so addictive don’t necessarily benefit directly from the destruction of intimate, authentic social bonds, but they certainly have prospered from the feeding of the smartphone addiction. Once again, the loss of authentic social connectedness is collateral damage.

While it seems quite clear that political groups have fueled divisiveness to their own benefit, does the state (government in all its forms) benefit from the fraying of the social order? It’s difficult to discern a direct benefit to the state, though it might be argued that a fractured populace is easier to control.

But the erosion of the social order has gone beyond fracture into disintegration, and it’s hard to see how class wars and social disunity benefit the state, which ultimately relies on some measure of social unity for its authority, which flows from the consent of the governed.

It’s Time To Take Our Future Back

In Part 2: Rescuing Our Future, we focus on the self-evident truth that governments and corporations cannot restore social connectedness and balance to our lives. Only a social revolution that is self-organizing from the bottom-up can do that.

And we detail out the specific steps each of us can and should take to develop the values and skills required to form and maintain authentic social wealth—the wealth of friendship, of social gatherings, of belonging.

It takes courage and independence to swim against the toxic tides of our economy and society. The good news is that true wealth is within reach of everyone. The steps we each need take are clear; it’s just a matter of having the will to invest the time and effort.

Do you have it?

JP Morgan Launches New High Frequency Trading Algorithm

Source: GizaDeathStar.com
Dr. Joseph P. Farrell Ph.D.
August 9, 2017

The disconnect between genuine human market activity and that created by machines proceeds apace, for JP Morgan has just launched a new algorithmic high frequency trading algorithm, as this article from Zero Hedge, spotted and shared by Mr. B.H., states:

JPM Develops A.I. Robot To Execute High Speed Trades, Put Humans Out Of Work

The motivation, as usual, is the “bottom line,” and maximizing profits while minimizing costly (human) labor overhead:

In the latest victory for robot kind over humans, LOXM’s job will be to execute client orders with maximum speed at the best price, “using lessons it has learnt from billions of past trades — both real and simulated — to tackle problems such as how best to offload big equity stakes without moving market prices.”

In other words, one giant “big data” aggregator, using historical precedent to guide future decisions, which coming in a time when “this time it’s certainly different” for the broader stock market, could be a big mistake.

“Such customisation was previously implemented by humans, but now the AI machine is able to do it on a much larger and more efficient scale,” said David Fellah, of JPMorgan’s European Equity Quant Research team. Mr Ciment said that, so far, the European trials showed that the pricing achieved by LOXM was “significantly better” than its benchmark.

The development guarantees another round of downsizing among bank front offices as increasingly inefficient human traders are removes from the equation… and payroll. As the FT notes, investment banks have been increasingly using AI, automation and robotics to help cut costs and eliminate time-consuming routine work. “For example, UBS’s recent deployment of AI to deal with client post-trade allocation requests, which saves as much as 45 minutes of human labour per task. UBS has also brought in AI to help clients trade volatility.” (Italicized emphasis added)

It’s precisely that italicized phrase (which I have emphasized) that caught my attention in this article, as the reader might well imagine, for “tackling problems such as how best to offload big equity stakes without moving market prices” has been, I submit, one of the major problems with high frequency trading algorithms, as exemplified by the various “flash crashes” that occur from time to time, beginning with the infamous May 2010 flash crash. The problem, of course, has been that these algorithms can, and have, “run amok”, and caused market value of certain equities or commodities either to dramatically rise, or fall, within mere seconds, forcing shut downs of markets and price “resets,” as I have blogged here before. The problem, as I saw it then, and still see it, is that these “resets” are costly, and will inevitably involve humans and human activity, and that, of course, adds to overhead costs.

But now, supposedly, JP Morgan has waved a magic wand of code, and one can now “offload big equity stakes without moving market prices.” Let that one sink in for a moment… “big equity stakes” can be “offloaded” without any effect on market prices!?!? Since when?!? The sentence, I submit, is a stunning admission of just how artificial, and unreal, these markets have become under trading algorithms. If prices are not affected by “offloading big equity stakes,” then one of the key mechanisms by which humans determine their investment decisions – the price of an equity itself within market movement – no longer is reflective of anything humanly real. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to invest my paltry $100 in a share of Twisted Trading Algorithm Partners, Inc. when the price itself is being determined in part by an algorithm that will allow JP Morgan to dump, or buy, vast blocks of Twisted Trading (NASQUACK symbol, TT) without “moving market prices.” Yes, that means I’d personally really rather have human traders on a floor waving papers and shouting hysterically at each other to conclude trades. And yes, I’ll take a physical copy of that 1 share of Twisted Trading’s stock, thank you very much.

Thank goodness sanity reigns somewhere, for Zero Hedge captures my own concerns with the vast expansion of “dark pools” and high frequency trading algorithms:

PM also said it had no risk management issues with the technology. “The machine is restricted in its trading behaviour, as it learns under, and operates within, our general electronic trading risk framework, which is overseen by internal control groups and validated by regulators,” Mr Fellah said.

Of course, with such rapid propagation of technology among both stock investing and trade processing, it is only a matter of time before a “black hat” hack takes place, and sends trading – and markets – haywire. Which, incidentally, may be among the reasons for the concerted push: after all what better way to avoid blame for what is coming than to blame it on, who else, Russian hackers.(Italicized emphasis added)

There you have the problem clearly stated. And I cannot improve on it.

See you on the flip side…

Read More At: GizaDeathStar.com
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About Dr. Joseph P. Farrell

Joseph P. Farrell has a doctorate in patristics from the University of Oxford, and pursues research in physics, alternative history and science, and “strange stuff”. His book The Giza DeathStar, for which the Giza Community is named, was published in the spring of 2002, and was his first venture into “alternative history and science”.

Arizona Legalizes Gold & Silver As Currency

Source: GizaDeathStar.com
Dr. Joseph P. Farrell Ph.D.
August 1, 2017

Yesterday, you’ll recall, I blogged about my high octane speculation, or perhaps one might even call it a high octane suspicion, that the human trafficking scandals that have erupted in almost every country of the west and which have spilled over into other countries, might be a large component of what I have been calling a hidden system of finance. And as China, Russia, and other nations of the BRICSA bloc have been buying up bullion, and negotiated bi-lateral currency and trading agreements, something else has been happening, quietly, and far from the attentions of the lamestream presstitutes of the corporate controlled globaloney media. And no, I’m not talking about the efforts of Germany or other countries to repatriate, and get an accurate audit, of their gold reserves on deposit in foreign central banks.

I’m talking about the quiet “revolt of the states” taking place in the USSA.

The Empire of the United States is in a bit of an economic quandry, for it doesn’t make much that other people want to buy any more. Agriculture remains one of the USSA’s primary non-military exports, but much of that food supply is now tainted with GMO products, and the growing revolt against them around the world might conceivably dent that in the future. Other than this, America doesn’t export much that other people want to buy. If one has a few billion dollars of pocket change laying around, then one might want to buy an aircraft carrier, but increasingly, with new and much less expensive Russian missile technologies about to come into operational use, these big behemoths might end up being nothing but “missile magnets,” as a US Navy friend of mine put it to me once during a recent conversation. Tanks? Well, Germany has an equivalent one, so why feed your hard earned defense dollars to the American beast when you can feed it to the smaller German beast? And for that matter, Russia has a better tank than either the USSA or Germany. They probably aren’t selling, but at least you can try.

What about energy? Natural gas and such? Well, the USSA’s sanctions game with Russia has as its unstated and hidden goal the sale of energy to Europe, a nice way to keep those pesky Frenchmen and Germans under the American thumb. The problem there is, it’s more expensive than getting it from Russia, and the Germans are, understandably, not too happy about that. Even Frau Merkel woke up from her multicultural slumber long enough to tell her lackey, Mr. Junker, to express some profound displeasure. Go back to sleep now, Angela. All is well, Europe continues to crumble.

Aircraft? Well, sure, for a few tens of millions, one might want to buy an F-35. Trouble is, its performance is far below what was touted making it an expensive waste. How about a very expensive Aegis class missile frigate? The problem there is, obsolescent Russian Sukhoi fighters appear to be able to turn them off, completely. What about a nice Patriot anti-missile system? The problem there is, the new class of Russian ICBMs can defeat it, since they can change flight paths even in the descent stage, as can their 24 MIRVed warheads. But fortunately, the never-to-be-trusted-always-Byzantinely-scheming-Russians aren’t selling that on the open market. (“Park it in my back yard, guys. Thanks!”)

As all this is happening, I recently blogged about the Pentagram study that acknowledged that, yes, since 9/11, everyone in the world has pretty much had it with the USSA’s unipolarism. Their solution? Double down: more arms, more militarization of the American economy, and, of course, more surveillance of Americans.

Perhaps the Pentagram’s study was motivated by the growing revolt of American states against the cultural and political swamp of psychopathy that Washington, District of Cesspool, has become. It’s a story we’ve covered here before: more and more state legislatures are passing resolutions recognizing bullion as legal Constitutional tender. Texas took an even bigger, bolder step, by creating a state bullion depository, a move which was followed by discussions of similar measures in Utah.

Now, Arizona joins, according to this article shared by Mr. B.H. (copy and paste into your browser):

Victory: Arizona Officially Rejects Rothschild, Legalizes Gold & Silver as Currency

http://www.alternativenewsnetwork.net/victory-arizona-officially-rejects-rothschild-legalizes-gold-silver-currency/embed/#?secret=3sPD2Ti6z7

The backing of the USSA’s Federal Reserve notes is, of course, nothing but American military power. And if that military power is increasingly looking like a “risky” investment to foreign nations, then the dollar’s days as a reserve currency are numbered. And some American states are seeing this, and acting. Hence, the Pentagram’s recent study might be casting a nervous glance, not on foreign violence, or even random domestic violence, but at the growing movement of quiet revolt in the states themselves.

… it makes one think, just for a moment, that it was a shame General Beauregard didn’t march into Washington, as some of his subordinate commanders urged him to do after the First Battle of Bull Run, but in any case, with all the new and abhorrent human trafficking going on, one wonders if, in fact, the South really did win…

Read More At: GizaDeathStar.com
________________________________________________

About Dr. Joseph P. Farrell

HUD Secretary Dr. Carson Finds A Mere Half A Trillion In Errors…

Source: GizaDeathStar.com
Dr. Joseph P. Farrell Ph.D.
July 17, 2017

When then-President-elect Trump appointed former neurosurgeon and presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson to be Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, I had to turn to my friend and colleague Catherine Austin Fitts, and exchange the “knowing wink.” Seriously, folks, we weren’t even in the same room when the announcement came. We were, in fact, hundreds of miles away, but nonetheless, I strongly suspect we both turned in that “metaphorical higher-dimensional imaged-space” that we all create when such things happen, and winked at each other. Indeed, later, during a phone call as we were discussing the various cabinet appointments that were rolling out, we both had to speculate on just how long it would take Dr. Carson to find major financial problems. I forget who said what, but one of use gave it about “six months.”

Well, it’s been about six months, and here we are, with the following story shared by Ms. S.H.:

BREAKING: Ben Carson Finds $516.4 BILLION Of Mismanaged Funds… Media SILENT

And here’s the actual PDF put out by HUD:

U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Washington, DC HUD’s Fiscal Years 2016 and 2015 (Restated) Consolidated Financial Statements Audit (Reissued)

Much of the latter is, of course, the usual government boiler-plate. So I direct your attention to page 3 of the PDF file, where we read this:

What We Audited and Why

In accordance with the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990, as amended, we are required to annually audit the consolidated financial statements of the U.S. Department of Housing and

Urban Development (HUD). HUD reissued its fiscal year s 2016 and 2015 (restated) consolidated financial statements due to pervasive material errors that we identified. Our objective was to express an opinion on the fairness of HUD’s consolidated financial statements in accordance with U.S. generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) applicable to the Federal Government. This report presents our reissued independent auditor’s report on HUD’s fiscal year s 2016 and 2015 (restated) consolidated financial statements, including an update to our report on HUD’s internal controls.

What We Found

The total amounts of errors corrected in HUD’s notes and consolidated financial statements were $516.4 billion and $3.4 billion, respectively. There were several other unresolved audit matters, which restricted our ability to obtain sufficient, appropriate evidence to express an opinion.These unresolved audit matters relate to (1) the Office of General Counsel’s refusal to sign the management representation letter , (2) HUD’s improper use of cumulative and first-in, first-out budgetary accounting methods of disbursing community planning and development program funds, (3) the $4.2 billion in nonpooled loan assets from Ginnie Mae’s stand-alone financial statements that we could not audit due to inadequate support, (4) the improper accounting for certain HUD assets and liabilities, and (5) material differences between HUD’s subledger and general ledger accounts. This audit report contains 11 material weaknesses, 7 significant deficiencies, and 5 instances of noncompliance with applicable laws and regulations.

(Emphases added).

Now, let’s translate that from Governmentese to English:

1) “…pervasive material errors we identified,” = “we identified pervasive material errors” = We couldn’t make much sense of the way HUD keeps its books, but…
2) …nonetheless we found “amounts of errors” totaling $516,400,000,000 = in spite of the deplorable state of HUD’s books, we were able to identify half a trillion dollars of errors.

Now, you’re probably wondering, given the title of the first article, whether or not this money is actually missing, or if these were simply “accounting errors.” (Let the magnitude of those two possibilities to sink in for a moment!) Johnny and Susie can’t read, write, add or subtract any more, so it probably should not come as a surprise that HUD can’t add or subtract either. But, tempted as I am to indulge my penchant for rants on Amairikuhn edgykayshun, I will resist, because in the very next sentence we read:

3) “There were several other unresolved audit matters, which restricted our ability to obtain sufficient, appropriate evidence to express and opinion” = “we did the best audit that we could, but in spite of the fact that we were able to identify half a trillion dollars of errors, we we’re able to get any further because there’s ‘something funny’ about the books.”

And let you think I’m reading too much into that statement, we are then told that

4) “We ran into ‘improper accounting’ of ‘certain HUD assets and liabilities,'” = “we don’t even know what HUD owns or is liable for”…

…and yes, folks, I’d call that an “accounting problem. It’s beginning to look an awful lot like we’re not just looking at poor addition and subtraction skills from Johnny and Susie Hudd, but an actual missing half a trillion dollars.

But wait. There’s more:

“Why,” you might be asking yourself, “don’t they even know what they own or are liable for?”

And the answer is:

5) There were “material differences between HUD’s subledger and general ledger accounts,” which is a nice Clinton-Obama-Bush-esque way of saying “we don’t know what we own or are liable for because we’re keeping two sets of books!”

Ponder that statement for a moment: they acknowledge the existence of something called a “subledger”. Now, obviously, I’ve never served at any high level of the Federal Cesspool, nor would I want to. So perhaps “subledger” is a professional term of art for Federal Accounting.

But to my hack-from-South-Dakota ears, it sounds like “two sets of books”. And hey, if we can have subledgers, then why not sub-subledgers, and so on, and several sets of books, all the way from the local to the state to the regional to the federal level. Would that confusion allow the looting of the agency? You bet. And why would one loot any federal agency?

To keep their covert operations, drug running, and secret research going.

And that’s a fancy way of saying that, while there is a problem in HUD, the problem doesn’t originate there.

See you on the flip side…

Read More At: GizaDeathStar.com
________________________________________________

About Dr. Joseph P. Farrell

And Another Thing: Chase Was Hit Before July 4th Too…

Source: GizaDeathStar.com
Dr. Joseph P. Farrell Ph.D.
July 14, 2017

Yesterday, I blogged about the silver “flash crash” of July 7, and earlier this week, about the NASDAQ flash crash, but, just in case you might have thought these were nothing but accidental “glitches” from the “coincidence” side of the glitch family, rather from the esteemed branch of the family of deliberately planned glitches, it looks as if things might be leaning definitely to the “deliberate action” side of the equation, according to this article shared, once again, by Mr. G.B.:

Nationwide outage hits Chase bank customers before 4th of July

Chase’s system went down coast to coast, but what’s very intriguing here is the suggestion that Chase might have been dealing with its own glitches, which it was calling “improvements”:

A message on the Chase website explained to customers that the outages were due to the bank “making a few improvements”according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

The bank said customers would not be able to access their information or schedule bill payments or transfers.

However, customers reported that entire branches had been shut down Monday, while others complained they were unable to pay their rent and bills, withdraw money from ATM’s, or even access their information over the phone or in person.

Now, as you might have guessed, I have all sorts of wild and crazy high octane speculations running through my head reading this, not the least of which is the thought that “two is coincidence, three is a conspiracy.” On my view that these types of events are the results of some systematic probing of financial cyber-architecture vulnerabilities, then targeting the NASDAQ, a commodities market, and Chase Manhattan, a large international bank, makes a lot of sense.

But that’s not the only thing running through my head, so let’s speculate on the very end of the twig, where the weight of speculation far exceeds the amount of evidence to prop it up.

Let’s posit a hypothetical bank, say, Deutsche-Manhattan-Cheese Banco dei Flaschi di Cesspool, and let’s say that, just before the beginning of August, when the entire country of France goes on vacation holiday, Deutsche-Manhattan-Cheese Banco dei Flaschi di Cesspool announces in the Toulouse Daily Whistle, that it is going to shut down its systems to make improvements just before the next holiday, stranding thousands of Frenchmen at their ATMs and keeping Paris unusually populated for the month of August. That’s quite an improvement, for during this period of being “down,” one might – just as a kind of hypothetical high octane speculation – be able to access the funds that its depositors could not access, and via a variety of cutouts, fronts, and so on, be able to place gobs of trades, make huge amounts of money, keep it all off the books (remember, the system is down – just before the holidays – to make “improvements”), trigger various flash crashes in various markets, and perhaps even target specific equities to be re-evaluated because of the reset when the circuit breakers kick in and halt all the trading.

But of course, nothing like that could ever happen, because we all know that big international mega-banks like Deutsche-Manhattan-Cheese Banco dei Flaschi di Cesspool are cleaner than a Wall Street toilet.

And thank goodness too, because I was beginning to lose my faith in crony finance crapitalism.

See you on the slip side…

Read More At: GizaDeathStar.com
________________________________________________

About Dr. Joseph P. Farrell

Bank Bailout In Italy & A Problem Looming Between The…

Banksters
Source: GizaDeathStar.com
Dr. Joseph P. Farrell Ph.D.
July 10, 2017

Mr J.K. sent this article about the bailout of Banco Monte dei Paschi di Sienna in Italy and some other banks, to the tune of a mere twenty-five and a half billion dollars, mere pocket change. But there’s something else looming in this article and it provokes some high octane speculation of the day. Here’s the article:

Italy swoops in to save another bank leaving taxpayers on the hook for over $25 billion

In my opinion, the central story here is not the bailout of troubled Venetian banks (some stories never change, do they?) but Italy’s, and Europe’s, and one of the world’s oldest, banks in continual operation since the Renaissance, the Banco Monte dei Paschi di Sienna, and one statement in particular caught my interest, and I suspect behind its careful “un-detailed” words lies a huge story which one might summarize with the word “cover-up”:

Finance Minister Pier Carlo Padoan announced late Tuesday that the government had received approval from the European Commission to pump 5.4 billion euros into Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena (BMPS) in exchange for the lender undertaking a major restructuring overhaul. (Emphasis added)

And, one paragraph away, there’s this:

Toxic assets are at the heart of the bank’s demise and its plan includes the intention to sell down 28.6 billion euros of gross non-performing loans (NPLs), of which 26.1 billion euros will be securitized (converted into marketable securities).

Toxic assets, non-performing loans, in a major western bank!?!?

So it isn’t so!

Then, later, we read this:

Indeed, there could also be an opportunity for brave investors, suggests Surry, if Italy follows the path trodden by Spain which has seen its banking sector shrink from around 70 lenders to closer to a dozen since the financial crisis.

“Potentially BMPS is a consolidation play because ultimately the bank will be clean and definitely there is consolidation to take place in Italy from the 400-plus institutions down to probably 150,” he offered.

So we have:

1) The bailout of Banco dei Paschi di Sienna;

2) Which received approval for a bailout in exchange for “restructuring” from the European Commission, which is now, apparently, in charge of what banks the Italian government gets to bail out, and the conditions under which it can do so;

3) Which restructuring presages a consolidation of lenders throughout the Italian banking system, resulting in fewer “lenders/banks”.

I don’t know about you, but gee, this pattern looks a little familiar.

There’s a great big huge elephant in the room, however, that the article is not talking about. In fact, one might say there’s not only an elephant, but a rhinoceros in the room. The elephant? Deutsche Bank and its relation to the Banco dei Paschi di Sienna, as covered in previous blogs on this site. And the rhinoceros? Italian prosecutions of the elephant. Noteworthy here is the entire absence of any mention of either one throughout the entire article, and that raises my suspicion meter into the red zone, and with it, some unusual and very high octane speculations.

What disturbs me here is that any action by the European Commission in this matter should be viewed as a conflict of interest, since the EU is largely a Franco-German union, with everyone else along for the ride as Frau Merkel gets to play Charlemagne (or perhaps, Karlamagne, or Karlin or Kaiserin, or something), a role she clearly appears to be enjoying. But why would the European Commission have reason to step in? I suspect, strongly, that the real bank being protected here, and being bailed out, is Deutsche Bank and its own high exposure to “toxic assets”, some of them via its entanglement with the Banco dei Paschi, and that the “restructing” of the Banco dei Paschi di Sienna might, in reality, be an attempt to disguise things and prevent them from emerging into public light as Italy is openly debating leaving the European Union (Charlemagne, Inc., or perhaps better put, Charlemagne A.G.). If so, then a disturbing pattern is emerging here: using national banking crises, the European Commission is establishing the conditions to “restructure” national banking systems according to its own whims, and to make them subject to the European Central Bank in Frankfurt. In the process, more will be swept under the rug.

And that means the can is simply being kicked down the road, for they have no genuine solutions.

Let’s hope the Italians look at this whole thing much more closely.

See you on the flip side…

Read More At: GizaDeathStar.com
________________________________________________

About Dr. Joseph P. Farrell

Germany Has Had It, Consider Sanctions Against USA

alternative news
Source: GizaDeathStar.com
Dr. Joseph P. Farrell Ph.D.
July 6, 2017

A few days ago I blogged about a suspicion I’ve long entertained, namely, that there appears to be some sort of covert war taking place between Washington and Berlin, and that this covert war has been going on for a while, most recently entering an “economic warfare” guise. I’ve also advanced the hypothesis that American “rebasing” efforts in Eastern Europe were part of a very old geopolitical game, first played by King Edward VII, then by Clemenceau, Chamberlain and Daladier. Edward, of course, helped engineer the Triple Entente, the alliance of France, Russia, and Britain that was, of course, directed against Germany and eventually “lay siege” to the Central Powers for four years during World War One. Edward’s ploy, of course, was also to prevent the “geopolitically unthinkable”: an alliance of Russia and Germany, long the bug-a-boo of geopolitical thinking. After World War One, the formal alliance system was replaced by the idea of the cordon sanitaire, the “buffer zone” of small states created from the nationalities within the old Russian Empire: Poland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania became the “sanitary cordon” between Russia and Germany to prevent an alliance.

Of course, the Treaty of Rapallo side-stepped all of this. Then came the strengthening of that idea with the military guarantees given by Daladier and Chamberlain to Poland…

… an idea that didn’t work out too well for Poland, France, the UK, or ultimately, Germany.

The most recent version of this game has been the “let’s launch a coup in the Ukraine, and, just to keep Merkel out of it, launch sanctions on Russia (for its aggression in the affair, of course), which sanctions will keep Germany and Russia from building all those pipelines and cementing other lucrative deals). Part and parcel of my hypothesis about this covert warfare also deals with the war of fines and sanctions against German banks (Deutsche Bank) and German auto manufacturers.

Well, it’s beginning to look more and more like this hypothesis might have some traction, for the gloves are increasingly coming off. The most recent round of anti-Russia sanctions, I wrote a few days ago, was as much directed against Germany as they were against Russia.

And now Kanzlerin Merkel is making no bones about it, and pulling no punches: Germany is considering economic sanctions on the USA, this time, against imports of American energy, according to this Sputnik article shared by Ms. K.M.:

The Final Straw: Germany Mulling Over Sanctions… This Time Against the US

There are some important considerations and paragraphs here to note:

In a joint statement, Germany’s Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel and Austria’s Chancellor Christian Kern slammed the decision by the US Senate to impose new sanctions on Moscow over its alleged interference in the US presidential election as well as the ongoing situations in Ukraine and Syria.

“Threatening German, Austrian and other European enterprises with penalties on the US market only because they take part in the gas supply projects such as the Nord Stream 2 together with Russia or finance them, is adding an absolutely new and highly negative aspect in relations between the US and Europe,” the joint statement reads.

For his part, the leader of Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD), Martin Schulz, lambasted US senators’ move and called upon German Chancellor Angela Merkel to oppose it.

“We have seen that the US is pursuing a course in energy policy that is dangerous and is directed against Germany,” Schulz told the Federal Association of German Industry (BDI). (Emphasis added)

Now, in my previous blog on this subject, I only suggested that the perception of the new sanctions regime would backfire and be seen as sanctions against Germany (which I also argued was the real additional, though hidden, target of the sanctions). Here, the leader of the opposition party in Germany, Herr Schulz, is now saying openly what only a few days ago was mere suspicion. To put it country simple: the situation is deteriorating quickly.

But there’s more:

Germany and Austria suspect that Senate’s anti-Russian bill is an attempt to “occupy” the European energy market on the part of US corporations.

“Germany and Austria went one step further, too — accusing the US of looking to promote the role of US LNG in Europe at the expense of Russian gas,” the S&P Global Platts writer underscored, adding that the US apparently wants to kill two birds with one stone by exerting sanctions on Nord Stream 2: to “punish” Moscow and promote US LNG supplies in Europe, “which would have the knock-on effect of supporting domestic US gas industry.”

In this context, Danilov wrote, it is most likely that potential anti-American sanctions would be aimed not at inflicting any economic damage on the US but at sabotaging Washington’s attempts to seize the European energy market.

“A ban on the import of American LNG into the EU countries could have become a very effective tool to prevent America’s attempts to influence the European market,” Danilov assumed adding that this measure could potentially attract wide public support. (Emphasis added)

This, too, is a new admission in the growing and widening gulf between Berlin and Washington, and like it or not, where Berlin goes on this issue, Europe goes. That means we are fast approaching the point when Europe will have to choose between the USA and Russia, a choice that has been delayed for some decades, but which, now, with the USSA playing “world cop,” crawling into bed with radical Islamic terrorist organizations, and interfering in the internal policies of several nations, in the long term, I suspect that the choice will not be favorable to Washington, regardless what Europe does in the short term.

The reason: Washington has proven its growing instability and psychopathy since 9/11. The last sentence of the article reminds us of this point: “It appears that the US political elite have completely forgotten that the interest of its European partners should be taken into account, Danilov concluded.”

Precisely, the unipolar paradigm reigns in Washington, in the dominant party, and the fake opposition party. And that unipolar paradigm has, since 9/11, seen the following things be accomplished: (1) Japanese rearmament, (2) Growing Russo-Japanese cooperation, (3) A fed-up Philippines, (4) more bi-lateral currency-trade deals bypassing the US dollar, (5) an insane, banana-republic political culture in Washington, (6) arms sales to the (out)House of Saud, a prime contributor to Islamic terrorism, (7) growing radicalism in Indonesia, and now, (8) the growing estrangement between Washington and our most powerful ally in Europe.

Washington has repeatedly asked its European “allies” to step up to the plate and do more for its own defense. But I have to wonder, if that happened, and Europe then demanded removal of ALL American bases in Europe because they’re sick and tired of being under Washington’s thumb, what the response would be.

I suspect we all know.

In any case, I suspect we’ll find out, after a few years of Japanese rearmament, when they once again ask us to get rid of our bases there.

So, if we want our allies to continue to be allies, then we need to stop treating them as vassals and satraps, and we’d better do so quickly. The trouble is, the idiots in Washington have not existed in a multi-polar world since the beginning of World War Two. They no longer know how.

They’re stupid.

And because they’re stupid, everyone is in trouble.

See you on the flip side…

Read More At: GizaDeathStar.com
________________________________________________

About Dr. Joseph P. Farrell

The Real Cause of the Opioid Epidemic: Scarcity of Jobs and Positive Social Roles

TruthFact
Source: OfTwoMinds
Charles Hugh Smith
July 3, 2017

The employment rate for males ages 25-54 has been stairstepping down for 30 years, but it literally fell off a cliff in 2009.

We all know there is a scourge of addiction and premature death plaguing the nation, a scourge that is killing thousands and ruining millions of lives: the deaths resulting from the opioid epidemic (largely the result of “legal” synthetic narcotics) are mounting at an alarming rate:

We also know that the proximate cause of this epidemic is Big Pharma, which promised non-addictive painkillers that lasted for 12 hours but delivered addictive painkillers that did not last 12 hours.

The unsavory truth was reported by the Los Angeles Times last May (2016) in a scathing investigative series: ‘You Want a Description of Hell?’ Oxycontin’s 12-hour problem.

There are plenty of other participants who share responsibility for the public health and law-enforcement disaster: physicians who all too readily passed out prescriptions for powerful synthetic opioids like aspirin; the government agencies that approved the synthetic heroin as “safe” (heh) and paid for their distribution via Medicaid, the Veterans Administration, etc., and the patients who all too willingly accepted the false promises of synthetic opioids.

But what’s missing from the public conversation is the underlying cause of the epidemic: a structural scarcity of paid work and positive social roles for vast swaths of America’s workforce.

We all know what paid work means: jobs. Positive social roles include jobs–supporting oneself and one’s family provides purpose, meaning, identity and a source of pride, all atrributes of positive social roles–but the concept extends beyond work to any role in which the participant feels needed and that offers dignity: this includes volunteer, guardian, mentor, coach, etc., many of which are unpaid.

A significant essay in the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs describes The Dignity Deficit: Reclaiming Americans’ Sense of Purpose (subscription or registration required)

At its core, to be treated with dignity means being considered worthy of respect. Certain situations bring out a clear, conscious sense of our own dignity: when we receive praise or promotions at work, when we see our children succeed, when we see a volunteer effort pay off and change our neighborhood for the better. We feel a sense of dignity when our own lives produce value for ourselves and others. Put simply, to feel dignified, one must be needed by others.

Giving people welfare, cheap prescriptions for opioids and Universal Basic Income (UBI) does not make them feel needed–it makes them feel superfluous and worthless.

The recent decline in male employment in the peak earning years (ages 25-54) is striking: the employment rate for males ages 25-54 has been stairstepping down for 30 years, but it literally fell off a cliff in 2009. Is it coincidental that the opioid epidemic took off around 2010? I don’t think so.

How do you support a consumer economy with stagnant incomes for the bottom 90%, rising basic expenses and crashing employment for males ages 25-54? Answer: you don’t. The males working in two-income families in the top 10% of the work force are doing just fine. It’s the bottom 50% of households that earn a fraction of the top 10% that reflect the decline of paid work for males below the top 20% or so:

The labor force participation rate (percentage of the civilian populace that is in the labor force, i.e. either working or actively seeking employment) has been crashing since 2000.

The participation rate of males has been in structural decine for decades. The entire 30-year boom in employment from 1970 to 2000 bypassed much of the male labor force.

Faced with a scarcity of jobs and social roles that provide the dignity of being needed and productive, people slip into the toxic depths of the opioid epidemic. As I keep saying here, We Need A ‘Third’ Economy, a community economy that provides an abundance of both paid work and positive social roles. I outline such a system in my book A Radically Beneficial World.

It’s Never Been More Important to Support Independent Content Creators

Source: LibertyBlitzkrieg.com
Michael Krieger
June 30, 2017

When I first started this website I didn’t have a plan for monetization. While I certainly believe people should be compensated for hard, useful work, all I wanted to do was read, write and think. The “business side” of running a blog felt like a nuisance and wasn’t something I had much passion or energy for. That hasn’t changed.

What has changed is passively putting third party code like Google Adsense on your website doesn’t really earn someone like me any money. While it was never a significant amount of cash in the first place, it wasn’t totally worthless. At this point it has become basically worthless, but that’s ok. I’m not going to complain about Google. Google doesn’t owe me anything and neither do the corporations that use the network. It was never a smart way for writers, particularly anti-establishment type writers highly critical of our economic system based on cronyism and fraud, to earn money. It never really made any sense, but I went down that road anyway because it was easy and allowed me to focus on what I really cared about, my work. But things have changed.

Advertisers have begun to flex their muscles over the past year or so, with YouTube demonetizing videos with any sort of unconventional political bent. From the advertisers’ perspective this makes perfect sense and there’s no point in complaining about it. This has forced many content producers to shift to a more reader supported model, which I think is far more empowering and healthy in the long-term despite painful short-term hits to revenue. Indeed, we shouldn’t trust any media that relies on large corporate advertisers to fund their “journalism,” as the product will be more like public relations than any hard-hitting truth to power. We’ve already seen that advertisers are willing to flex their muscles when it comes to content they don’t like, and we can expect that to accelerate going forward.

The latest warning sign comes courtesy of a Washington Post policy that forbids employees from disparaging advertisers. The Washingtonian reports:

A new social-media policy at the Washington Post prohibits conduct on social media that “adversely affects The Post’s customers, advertisers, subscribers, vendors, suppliers or partners.” In such cases, Post management reserves the right to take disciplinary action “up to and including termination of employment.”

The Post‘s Guild sent out a bulletin Sunday night protesting the policy. “If you’re like most of us, you probably acknowledged its receipt without reading it,” says the note, which was written by Guild co-chair Fredrick Kunkle. “But what you don’t know could hurt you.”

The guild wants to jettison other parts of the policy, which the Post confirms to Washingtonian went into effect on May 1 and applies to the entire company:

A provision that prohibits employees from “Disparaging the products and services of The Post’s advertisers, subscribers, competitors, business partners or vendors.”
A demand that employees “Refrain from using social media while on your work time, unless using Social Media is an authorized part of your job.”
A clause that encourages employees to snitch on one another: “If you have any reason to believe that an employee may be in violation of The Post’s Social Media Policy … you should contact the Post’s Human Resources Department.”

I thought part of the appeal of a billionaire like Jeff Bezos owning a “paper of record” is that it might make it less beholden to large powerful interests than you might otherwise expect. Guess not.

One thing the last twelve months should make clear to everyone reading this is that billionaire-owned corporate media cannot and should not be trusted to provide honest information, and will definitely never challenge the true centers of power in society. This makes the need for independent publishers more crucial than ever, and since such publishers cannot and should not depend on corporate advertisers, readers need to step up and support them. I’m not talking about my work specifically, I’m talking about all of the independent content creators you enjoy. Support all of them.

On Friday, I plan to publish an article outlining my plan for turning Liberty Blitzkrieg into a reader-supported publication in the years ahead. I think that’s the only sustainable way to stay on point, refrain from the temptations of clickbait, and avoid the whims of corporate advertisers and Google.

Stay tuned for more.

Meanwhile, if you enjoyed this post, and want to contribute to genuine, independent media, consider visiting our Support Page.

In Liberty,
Michael Krieger

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