Category: MK

Or take the right to vote. In principle, it is a great privilege. In practice, as recent history has repeatedly shown, the right to vote, by itself, is no guarantee of liberty. Therefore, if you wish to avoid dictatorship by referendum, break up modern society’s merely functional collectives into self-governing, voluntarily co-operating groups, capable of functioning outside the bureaucratic systems of Big Business and Big Government.

-Aldous Huxley, in Brave New World Revisited (1958) 

Until recent years, the struggle between the forces of “centralization” and “decentralization” was more of a full on slaughter-fest than an actually battle or war. As Americans sat there blissfully asleep for decades, every facet of our lives has been carefully consolidated into the hands of a smaller and smaller group of corporations, and hence individual executives. This trend is undeniable in everything from food, banking, media and everything in between.

Myself and many others saw the financial crisis of 2008 as a gigantic wakeup call. The disasters caused by powerful financial institutions and the greedy people that ran them should have been used as a rallying cry to break these institutions up. To recognize the dangers of too much power in one particular place. This is especially important in something as crucial as banking. However, as we are all painfully aware, this is not what happened. Rather, the institutions were bailed out, the industry consolidated even more than it was before, and the perpetrators of the crisis emerged from it even more wealthy and powerful.

My personal focus on this website has been to expose the unique dangers presented by centralization in the financial industry and the monetary system. However, many others are dedicated to the equally important and disturbing trends in other industries. Consumer goods is one of these areas, and a very telling diagram went around late last year showing how 10 companies basically control everything you buy. Take a look below:

Dangerous consolidation of the media is a trend that has also been discussed by many people on many occasions, and many of us by now have heard the stat that in the U.S. just six media giants control 90% of all TV, news, radio and film. Now that Comcast is set to buy Time Warner, the situation is about to get that much worse. The International Business Times made some poignant points:

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In what is probably the single most important positive headline since Overstock’s announcement that it would accept Bitcoin, Wedbush Securities has just announced it has become the first U.S institutional brokerage to accept bitcoin as payment for its research coverage. They will be partnering with Coinbase.

So while JP Morgan has its head up its ass writing idiotic reports bashing BTC, the smaller players are making moves.

Read Coinbase’s press release here.

In Liberty,
Michael Krieger

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Wall Street Gets Bitcoin Fever – Wedbush Securities to Accept BTC for Research originally appeared on A Lightning War for Liberty on February 14, 2014.

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Readers of this website know that I am no fan of Mt. Gox, something I outlined last weekend in my post: My Thoughts on Mt. Gox.

Reports of freaked out customers flying long distances to Japan to complain about the exchange are nothing new. In fact, an Australian man’s journey was the first to go viral over the past week or so via a reddit post.

Now we have video of a London man, Kolin Burges, camped outside Mt. Gox headquarters and confronting face-to-face Mark Karpeles, CEO of the exchange.

Enjoy.

In Liberty,
Michael Krieger

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Video of the Day – Man Flies from London to Tokyo to Confront Mt. Gox CEO originally appeared on A Lightning War for Liberty on February 14, 2014.

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With interest rates up sharply from the lows and Blackstone and other private equity firms holding billions of dollars with of properties with no one to sell to, the time is ripe for a little muppet fleecing. Leading the charge to find new tax-payer backed subprime loans to take some properties off the hands of Mr. Schwarzman is none other than Wells Fargo. I previously forecasted this in my piece: Stage Two of the Housing Bubble Begins: Blackstone to Lend to Others for “Buy to Rent.”

They aren’t the only ones though. Citadel Servicing Corp, the country’s biggest subprime lender, is also getting in the action. The best and worst part of this story is the way these new loans are being marketed. Specifically, as ”Low Credit Score Debt Consolidation Program” as well as a “Second Chance Purchase Program.”

Time to chop up up the muppets again. Thank you Wells Fargo.

From Reuters:

So far few other big banks seem poised to follow Wells Fargo’s lead, but some smaller companies outside the banking system, such as Citadel Servicing Corp, are already ramping up their subprime lending. To avoid the taint associated with the word “subprime,” lenders are calling their loans “another chance mortgages” or “alternative mortgage programs.”

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Pam Martens of Wall Street on Parade does some excellent work, and I have featured her articles several times on this site. Most recently, I highlighted her article: New York is Drowning in Bribes and Corruption, which was a particularly popular post. In the article I have chosen today, she dives into a topic frequently discussed on the Wall Street on Parade site. Namely, the incestuous and entirely inappropriate relationship between JP Morgan and law enforcement, including the CIA itself. No wonder no one ever gets in trouble or goes to jail…

Here are some excerpts from her latest:

The nonstop crime news swirling around JPMorgan Chase for a solid 18 months has started to feel a little spooky – they do lots of crime but never any time; and with each closed case, a trail of unanswered questions remains in the public’s mind.

One reason that JPMorgan may have such a spooky feel is that it has aligned itself in no small way with real-life spooks, the CIA kind.

Just when the public was numbing itself to the endless stream of financial malfeasance which cost JPMorgan over $30 billion in fines and settlements in just the past 13 months, we learned on January 28 of this year that a happy, healthy 39-year old technology Vice President, Gabriel Magee, was found dead on a 9th level rooftop of the bank’s 33-story European headquarters building in the Canary Wharf section of London.

The way the news of this tragic and sudden death was stage-managed by highly skilled but invisible hands, turning a demonstrably suspicious incident into a cut-and-dried suicide leap from the rooftop (devoid of eyewitnesses or  motivation) had all the hallmarks of a sophisticated covert operation or coverup.

The London Evening Standard newspaper reported the same day that “A man plunged to his death from a Canary Wharf tower in front of thousands of horrified commuters today.” Who gave that completely fabricated story to the press? Commuters on the street had no view of the body because it was 9 floors up on a rooftop – a rooftop that is accessible from a stairwell inside the building, not just via a fall from the roof. Adding to the suspicions, Magee had emailed his girlfriend the evening before telling her he was finishing up and would be home shortly.

If JPMorgan’s CEO, Jamie Dimon, needed a little crisis management help from operatives, he has no shortage of people to call upon. Thomas Higgins was, until a few months ago, a Managing Director and Global Head of Operational Control for JPMorgan. (A BusinessWeek profile shows Higgins still employed at JPMorgan while the New York Post reported that he left late last year.) What is not in question is that Higgins was previously the Senior Officer and Station Chief in the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, a component of which is the National Resources Division. (Higgins’ bio is printed in past brochures of the CIA Officers Memorial Foundation, where Higgins is listed with his JPMorgan job title, former CIA job title, and as a member of the Foundation’s Board of Directors for 2013.)

According to Jeff Stein, writing in Newsweek on November 14, the National Resources Division (NR) is the “biggest little CIA shop you’ve never heard of.” One good reason you’ve never heard of it until now is that the New York Times was asked not to name it in 2001. James Risen writes in a New York Times piece: [the CIA’s] “New York station was behind the false front of another federal organization, which intelligence officials requested that The Times not identify. The station was, among other things, a base of operations to spy on and recruit foreign diplomats stationed at the United Nations, while debriefing selected American business executives and others willing to talk to the C.I.A. after returning from overseas.”

Nice reporting work as usual New York Times.

Stein gets much of that out in the open in his piece for Newsweek, citing sources who say that “its intimate relations with top U.S. corporate executives willing to have their companies fronting for the CIA invites trouble at home and abroad.” Stein goes on to say that NR operatives “cultivate their own sources on Wall Street, especially looking for help keeping track of foreign money sloshing around in the global financial system, while recruiting companies to provide cover for CIA operations abroad. And once they’ve seen how the other 1 percent lives, CIA operatives, some say, are tempted to go over to the other side.”

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The following clip from CNBC of Nicole Miller’s CEO Bud Konheim is absolutely disgusting. Then again, this simply continues the recent trend of wealthy people coming on financial outlets and telling the poor how they are supposed to feel.

Rather than me rewriting what I already wrote on this topic, I encourage you to read my very well received post from last week:

An Open Letter to Sam Zell: Why Your Statements are Delusional and Dangerous.

This is how I ended that article:

I don’t think you’re a bad guy with evil intent. I think you are a money obsessed financier who hasn’t taken the time to actually understand what is really going on within your own country because you have your head so far up your own ass. It’s hard for anyone to actually look at themselves in the mirror and be honest about themselves and the myths they create. However, history shows us that when decadent plutocrats are unable to do so, we end up with disastrous situations. Situations which are often times violent and result in despotism. A situation I desperately hope to avoid, and I truly hope you and others like you recognize your error before it is too late.

While the CNBC clip below is priceless, equally disturbing are the results from CNBC readers to the poll question: 

Perhaps they could try asking poor people questions about themselves for a better perspective.

Now check out the video:

In Liberty,
Michael Krieger

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Video of the Day – Nicole Miller CEO Tells the Poor in the U.S. to Stop Whining originally appeared on A Lightning War for Liberty on February 12, 2014.

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The following incredible video was brought to my attention by Mish at his Global Economic
Trend Analysis website. As I read his post, I was blown away by the fact that his thought process on Facebook’s ad revenues and his experience in running a website was so incredibly similar to my own. He wrote:

I do not pay anyone to direct traffic to my blog and I do not ask people to click on ads they are not interested in. Nor do I want them too. 

On several occasions, I even reported myself to Google. 

I am in the exact same camp as him, and in fact, just last month I noticed some suspicious clicks coming to my site that made no sense and generated a massive amount of revenue. I emailed Google to report this.

I was stunned when I saw Facebook’s revenue for the last quarter. As someone that makes money off of online ads, I know what the trends with cost per click are. Facebook’s numbers made me scratch my head. I have been trying to understand what is going on, and thanks to the following video a lot of things are starting to make sense. Something is definitely fishy with Facebook. This is a must watch video on Facebook Fraud.

Someone please send this to Gundlach.

In Liberty,
Michael Krieger

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How Much of Facebook’s Ad Revenue is From Click Fraud? originally appeared on A Lightning War for Liberty on February 12, 2014.

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One of my most popular posts of 2013 highlighted the decline of America’s once large and enviable middle class. It was titled: How Does America’s Middle Class Rank Globally? #27, and it helped to dispel many myths Americans (particularly the mainstream propaganda media) continue to tell to themselves.

As you might expect, the economic decline of a nation into rule by a handful of corrupt oligarchs will have many other negative repercussions. One of these is a loss of civil rights and freedoms that many of us have taken for granted. Reporters Without Borders puts out their Press Freedom Index every year, and the 2014 ranking came out today. It was not a good showing for the USSA. Specifically, the U.S. registered one of the steepest falls of all nations, down 13 slots to the #46 position. As the screen shot shows, just above Haiti and just below Romania.

More coverage from the AFP:

Paris (AFP) – Conflicts continued to weigh heavily on the media last year but press freedom was also under increasing threat from abuses by democracies like the United States, Reporters Without Borders said Wednesday.

In its annual World Press Freedom Index, the Paris-based media rights watchdog warned of the “growing threat worldwide” from the “tendency to interpret national security needs in an overly broad and abusive manner”.

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I am typically hesitant to highlight foreign articles that have been translated by others from languages I can’t comprehend. That said, Koos Jansen of In Gold We Trust, is someone who does great work and so I am running with his latest blog post on German gold repatriation, or a lack thereof.

According to Peter Boehringer, Founder German Precious Metal Society, it appears that the German Bundesbank is backing away from a specific repatriation schedule for the nation’s gold. He sources this claim from a recent article written in the Handelsblatt, titled ”Silence is Golden.” So in other words, the Federal Reserve told them to get lost.

Here are excerpts from Koos’ translation of Peter’s piece:

Due to new developments, the initiators of the Repatriate Our Gold action today publish a small update. The print version of the German Handelsblatt today (02.06.2014) published a substantial three page feature exclusively on the German Gold Reserves, widely known to be stored by the German Bundesbank, the Fed, the Banque de France, and the Bank of England. Under the ambiguous title ”Silence is Golden,” no less than four Handelsblatt editors along with Norbert Häring, a senior and competent voice in matters of Gold vs Money, delivered a piece that is in parts pretty critical against the Bundesbank and addresses questions that are familiar to the readers of this blog.

 The German Gold, opaquely held in custody by the Fed & other central and currently worth more than 100 billion Euros, is not only the core component of BuBa’s balance sheet and the property of the German people, but it is also a geopolitical issue and an important founding stone of the suspected world fractional gold banking system. 

The Handelsblatt writes today: ”The policy makers are putting pressure on the Bundesbank.”

Handelsblatt: ”The repatriation falters – for enigmatic reasons.”

Handelsblatt: ”Due to ‘logistical challenges,’ the BuBa no longer feels bound to its promise to the Bundestag.”

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Now this is special. John Normand, JP Morgan’s head of global FX strategy has just issued a report on Bitcoin to educate his “sophisticated” clientele on why they must avoid the revolutionary payment protocol and currency Bitcoin. Coindesk has done some excellent reporting on the matter. They write:

Released on 11th February, a new report by US-based multinational financial services company JPMorgan issued a sharp critique of bitcoin and other digital currencies.

The eight-page report, authored by the company’s head of global FX strategy, John Normand, aimed to present the “risks and opportunities” posed by bitcoin.

Normand writes:

“As a medium of exchange, unit of account and store of value, it is vastly inferior to fiat currencies.

Since governments are quite unlikely to accord it the status of legal tender, bitcoin or other virtual currencies would not reach the scale and scope to render them worthwhile for widespread commerce, payments or investment.”

Normand explains:

“Recall that currencies don’t become widely used spontaneously or through a grassroots campaign. They become widely used nationally because a government declares them legal tender, and they become widely used internationally because they are legal tender in a significant economic area with large, unrestricted capital markets.”

Yes slaves, don’t try anything new. Sure, Bitcoin has gone from nothing to a $8 billion valuation in five years, nothing to see here. Obey. Your government loves you. Only politicians and Central Banksters are sophisticated enough to create money and handle it. Don’t get any big ideas. Think small, that’s where we want you serfs.

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