WHITE HOUSE TO RUN SHADOW GOVERNMENT
May 11th, 2007Would you like any freedom fries with that?
Via: Washington Post:
President Bush issued a formal national security directive yesterday ordering agencies to prepare contingency plans for a surprise, “decapitating” attack on the federal government, and assigned responsibility for coordinating such plans to the White House.
Wal-Mart Posts Worst Sales Ever as U.S. Retail Figures Slump
May 11th, 2007What’s the matter?
America’s Re-Fi ATM is closed, that’s what’s the matter.
Have a nice day!
Via: Guardian:
Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, yesterday posted its worst monthly sales figures since its records began in 1980.
The company said same store sales fell 3.5% in April on the same month a year ago. Same store sales measure the performance of stores that have been open for at least 12 months.
But Wal-Mart was not the only US retailer turning in a poor performance in April, triggering fears that the housing slump in the US might be spilling over into consumer spending and that the economy might be taking a decided turn for the worse.
Federated Department Stores, the company behind Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s, reported a 2.2% fall in April sales. The Gap continued to underperform, posting a 16% drop in sales – the retailer’s long-running difficulties led to the departure of its chief executive in January. Abercrombie & Fitch, the clothing brand that recently opened in London, said April sales were down by 15%.
The discounter Target, Wal-Mart’s biggest rival, reported a 6.1% decline in same store April sales.
The UBS International Council of Shopping Centres tallies the results of more than 50 of the leading retailers in the US and said combined sales in April had declined by 2.3%, the biggest drop since the index was first started in 1970. “The slowdown is at hand,” said chief economist at the council Michael Niemira.
Liberty Dollar Defies U.S. Mint Warning
May 10th, 2007You’re allowed to have these coins, just don’t use them to buy anything from someone who’s willing to accept them as payment. That’s illegal.
Via: PR Newswire / Yahoo:
Liberty Dollar announced today that it has issued a new $1 Copper Liberty that defies the U.S. Mint’s previous warning that only the use, not possession, of the new currency was illegal.
The new one dollar Copper Liberty is the latest effort to defend the consumer’s right to use gold, silver or anything of choice in commerce. The new one dollar Copper is silver dollar size and contains one ounce of pure copper. Each Copper Liberty will feature the same Liberty Head and Torch designs as on its popular $20 Silver Liberty.
Liberty Dollar reports that over 10,000 Copper Libertys were ordered in the first 24 hours. The U.S. Mint’s warning that only using, not possession, was illegal has drawn an increasing number of people to the Liberty Dollar and its underdog’s stance for individual liberty and real money.
Bernard von NotHaus, the free market advocate behind the Liberty Dollar, explains that his overnight success with the Liberty Dollar is as easy to understand as the Copper Liberty itself. “Hey, it is one ounce of pure copper for a buck. It is simple. It represents real value. It isn’t anything like the U.S. dollar.”
Von NotHaus said the popularity of the new Copper Liberty Dollar speaks for itself. “The Liberty Dollar is larger, heavier, more metal content and larger bullion value than the U.S. Mint dollar. The only thing lacking is government approval.” Of course that is one thing von NotHaus abhors. He thinks money should be the domain of the people who use it and its value derived in the marketplace, not by the Federal Reserve.
Von NotHaus dismisses physical comparisons to the U.S. Mint’s new Presidential Dollar. “How could there be any similarity?” von NotHaus asks, “Just compare the size, weight, color, material, face value, and metal value of each. The Copper Liberty is 100% pure metal. Not an alloy from the U.S. Mint!”
Von NotHaus says, “The new $1 Copper Liberty says a lot about our country and its money … and how they have changed. People have the right to collect any kind of medallion and use anything they mutually choose as barter.”
Research Credit: Eileen
UK: Spy Plane Searches for Energy Wasters
May 10th, 2007People are cracking up.
Via: Muswell Hill Journal:
EVERY home in the borough has been photographed from a “spy plane” – to help Haringey Council wage a war against householders wasting energy.
The council has compiled a “heat map” which can identify how much energy is escaping from each property.
…
The colour coded map was created from footage taken by a plane fitted with a military thermal imaging camera.
Research Credit: Life After the Oil Crash
Cryptogon Reader Contributes $20
May 10th, 2007Thanks to long time Cryptogon reader and contributor MW.
Realtor to Residents Who Remain in Neighborhoods with Forclosed Properties: Protect Vacant Homes from Looters and Vandals
May 10th, 2007Via: Real Estate Journal:
For those homeowners fearing that the “low-ballers” and banks trying to unload foreclosed homes will sap the value of their own properties, Kent suggested that residents could band together to watch out for a property.
“They could try forming a little neighborhood watch where people watch over that house to make sure there’s no vandalism, no squatters trying to move in, and to avoid people from stealing the fixtures of the home,” he said.
Banks will board up houses that are vandalized or that people break into, Kent said. Making sure that doesn’t happen can keep banks from dumping problem homes at fire-sale prices, he said.
Council on Foreign Relations on U.S. Dollar: “An Absurdity… Supported Only by Faith”
May 9th, 2007The End of National Currency is the most astonishing thing that I have read since Zbigniew Brzezinski’s appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee earlier this year.
Foreign Affairs is the most important and influential journal of International Relations in the world. It is the mechanism by which the Council on Foreign Relations disseminates the game plan to people in polite circles. CFR’s positions on core issues represent the raw building blocks for most of the gibberish spewed by the corporate media and the maniac fascist policies of the “developed world.” Publications like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are dumbed down versions of Foreign Affairs that are published daily. Television news is the same thing, but dumbed down again. Foreign Affairs is also where politicians from several countries look to determine what’s safe to say, which policies are doable and what needs to be done. A degree in International Relations is largely a certification of a student’s ability to internalize CFR jargon and concepts.
Got the picture?
Now, what did the most important and influential journal of International Relations in the world just say about the U.S. Dollar and the global economy?
In summary: The U.S. dollar is an “absurdity” and the only way to stave off a global disaster is for most countries to join one of three global currencies, based loosely on: the dollar, the euro and a pan Asian currency.
I encourage everyone to read The End of National Currency in its entirety, but I’ll quote some of the more remarkable parts below:
The dollar’s privileged status as today’s global money is not heaven-bestowed. The dollar is ultimately just another money supported only by faith that others will willingly accept it in the future in return for the same sort of valuable things it bought in the past. This puts a great burden on the institutions of the U.S. government to validate that faith. And those institutions, unfortunately, are failing to shoulder that burden. Reckless U.S. fiscal policy is undermining the dollar’s position even as the currency’s role as a global money is expanding.
Four decades ago, the renowned French economist Jacques Rueff, writing just a few years before the collapse of the Bretton Woods dollar-based gold-exchange standard, argued that the system “attains such a degree of absurdity that no human brain having the power to reason can defend it.” The precariousness of the dollar’s position today is similar. The United States can run a chronic balance-of-payments deficit and never feel the effects. Dollars sent abroad immediately come home in the form of loans, as dollars are of no use abroad. “If I had an agreement with my tailor that whatever money I pay him he returns to me the very same day as a loan,” Rueff explained by way of analogy, “I would have no objection at all to ordering more suits from him.”
With the U.S. current account deficit running at an enormous 6.6 percent of GDP (about $2 billion a day must be imported to sustain it), the United States is in the fortunate position of the suit buyer with a Chinese tailor who instantaneously returns his payments in the form of loans — generally, in the U.S. case, as purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds. The current account deficit is partially fueled by the budget deficit (a dollar more of the latter yields about 20-50 cents more of the former), which will soar in the next decade in the absence of reforms to curtail federal “entitlement” spending on medical care and retirement benefits for a longer-living population. The United States — and, indeed, its Chinese tailor — must therefore be concerned with the sustainability of what Rueff called an “absurdity.” In the absence of long-term fiscal prudence, the United States risks undermining the faith foreigners have placed in its management of the dollar — that is, their belief that the U.S. government can continue to sustain low inflation without having to resort to growth-crushing interest-rate hikes as a means of ensuring continued high capital inflows
…
At the turn of the twentieth century — the height of the gold standard — Simmel commented, “Although money with no intrinsic value would be the best means of exchange in an ideal social order, until that point is reached the most satisfactory form of money may be that which is bound to a material substance.” Today, with money no longer bound to any material substance, it is worth asking whether the world even approximates the “ideal social order” that could sustain a fiat dollar as the foundation of the global financial system. There is no way effectively to insure against the unwinding of global imbalances should China, with over a trillion dollars of reserves, and other countries with dollar-rich central banks come to fear the unbearable lightness of their holdings.
Ordo ab chao.
The CFR created this mess to begin with. Its fingerprints are on every policy, politician and corporation involved with the funneling of wealth up to the top of the pyramid.
Now what?
What do we do now, as we find ourselves gazing into oblivion, into the chaos that They created?
Seek order with fewer national currencies, my son. Trust us. We’ve gotten you this far. We have almost reached the promised land of a global federal government, with a single currency, with no dissent, no war, no crime, no hunger and no disease and…
But before we can move to the single currency, we need to move to three:
A future pan-Asian currency, managed according to the same principle of targeting low and stable inflation, would represent the most promising way for China to fully liberalize its financial and capital markets without fear of damaging renminbi speculation (the Chinese economy is only the size of California’s and Florida’s combined). Most of the world’s smaller and poorer countries would clearly be best off unilaterally adopting the dollar or the euro, which would enable their safe and rapid integration into global financial markets. Latin American countries should dollarize; eastern European countries and Turkey, euroize. Broadly speaking, this prescription follows from relative trade flows, but there are exceptions; Argentina, for example, does more eurozone than U.S. trade, but Argentines think and save in dollars.
But wait, there’s one more thing:
Gold.
This following paragraph is so weird, I had to read it several times. I still don’t know what to make of it:
So what about gold? A revived gold standard is out of the question. In the nineteenth century, governments spent less than ten percent of national income in a given year. Today, they routinely spend half or more, and so they would never subordinate spending to the stringent requirements of sustaining a commodity-based monetary system. But private gold banks already exist, allowing account holders to make international payments in the form of shares in actual gold bars. Although clearly a niche business at present, gold banking has grown dramatically in recent years, in tandem with the dollar’s decline. A new gold-based international monetary system surely sounds far-fetched. But so, in 1900, did a monetary system without gold. Modern technology makes a revival of gold money, through private gold banks, possible even without government support.
Woh. Hold on a second.
On the one hand, “A revived gold standard is out of the question,” but on the other hand, “private gold banks already exist, allowing account holders to make international payments in the form of shares in actual gold bars. Although clearly a niche business at present, gold banking has grown dramatically in recent years, in tandem with the dollar’s decline. A new gold-based international monetary system surely sounds far-fetched. But so, in 1900, did a monetary system without gold. Modern technology makes a revival of gold money, through private gold banks, possible even without government support.”
So, we’re going to have a few “absurd” fiat currencies and private gold banks that will be used to make international payments in the form of shares of actual gold bars? Did the CFR just transmit a veiled and obscure tipoff to the wealthy people who read their rag?
Or is it something else…
I don’t know what to make of it. That paragraph is such a non sequitur in the article that it practically slaps you right out of your chair as you read the thing. Steil points out that rape and plunder (Globalization) can’t happen with currencies that are tied to things. So… Why mention private gold banks that can facilitate international payments?
It gets weirder. This article was published within days of the U.S. Government’s shut down of eGold, the oldest private electronic gold bank. On the same day that the indictments came out against eGold, Brinks, a U.S. firm that provides bullion vaulting services, dropped BullionVault as a client. BullionVault allows individuals to easily and efficiently move their fiat currencies into physical gold, but it does not allow payments to other parties. [I am a satisfied client of BullionVault, by the way.]
Are factions of the Elite in open conflict? Do some of them want access to these gold services, while others, mainly U.S. dollar interested parties inside the U.S., view those same services as a threat? Is Steil warning governments to shut down these services, lest individuals abandon their “absurd” fiat currencies?
I don’t know what’s going on here, but I’d really like to find out.
Research Credit: Jackanapes
Is This What the Army Thinks of Us?
May 9th, 2007Via: cjrdaily:
It looks like it’s official: the United States Army thinks that American reporters are a threat to national security. Thanks to some great sleuthing by Wired’s “Danger Room” blogger Noah Shachtman, the Army’s new operational security guidelines (OPSEC) hit the Web in a big way yesterday, and the implications they have for reporters — who are grouped in with drug cartels and Al Qaeda as security threats to be beaten back — are staggering.
Make no mistake, this is a very big deal, and every American citizen, not just reporters and soldiers, needs to understand the implications of the Army’s strict new policy, because it directly affects how citizens receive information about their armed forces: information that it has every right to get.
Shachtman reproduces a slide from the new “OPSEC in the Blogosphere,” document, which lists and ranks “Categories of Threat.” Under “traditional domestic threats” we find hackers and militia groups, while “non-traditional” threats include drug cartels, and — yes — the media. Just to put that into some perspective, the foreign “non-traditional threats” are listed as warlords, and Al Qaeda. In other words, the Army has figuratively and literally put the media in the same box as Al Qaeda, warlords, and drug cartels.
Related: U.S. Plans to ‘Fight the Net’
Senior Bush Adminstration Officials Jumping Ship
May 9th, 2007More victims of the DC Madam Black Book?
Via: Financial Times:
The Bush administration is facing growing difficulties in filling a rising number of high-level vacancies following a recent spate of senior departures.
In the last 10 days alone Mr Bush has lost four senior officials and more resignations are expected to follow. “I wouldn’t describe this as disintegration,†said one senior official. “But there are worrying large gaps opening up and it is very hard to recruit high-quality people from outside.â€
Recent departures include J.D. Crouch, the deputy head of the national security council, who wants to spend more time with his family, and Randall Tobias, the head of USAID, who resigned after it was revealed that he used a call girl agency for “legal†erotic services. Mr Bush has also lost Dina Habib Powell, the administration’s most senior Arab-American, who is leaving the State Department to join the private sector, and Timothy Adams, the number three at the Treasury department.
Officials say that the flurry of departures is not unusual during the latter part of a second term and deny there are common themes driving their exits. But they come at a time when Mr Bush is having difficulty filling the new position of “war czar†to oversee the administration’s prosecution of the war in Iraq.
Baby, You Can Fuel My Car
May 9th, 2007As you know, my wife and I don’t watch TV. We don’t have one in the house. But I remember somehow being exposed to those freaky pharmaceutical adds. Do you know the ones I mean? Pills hovering in purple fields with weird sunsets, and frightening, doped up women with Laura Bush smiles, etc…
The kind of commercials that make you think, “I don’t remember smoking crack this morning.”
Check out these BP commercials.
Via: Slate:
They’re spending about $35 million on this worldwide campaign for their service stations (or “retail network”). BP head of marketing Ann Hand acknowledges that the classic industry research says people choose stations mostly because of location or price, but adds that BP’s tracking studies show some brand awareness does exist. “This campaign is the next step,” she says. “Can we build more brand loyalty? Would you cut across traffic, or go a block out of your way?”
…
The look suggests a sparkling clean gas-station experience. And along with the babies, it adds a warmth that’s missing from most gas-station imagery. My favorite touches: 1) The cranky, anthropomorphic gas pump down the block is wearing an evil-looking eyepatch. 2) Next to the fuel gauge, the babies’ car also has gauges indicating bottle and diaper status.
Finally, BP hopes to cement itself as the most “green” of the massive oil companies. To this end, the ad shows little windmills in the background. Also, BP service stations (there are more than 11,000 in the United States alone) have switched from plastic to paper bags at their convenience stores, and hand out trading cards with environmentally sensitive tips for kids (for instance: Use both sides of the paper when you color).
…
Why do they need a pride boost? Well, there was that fatal refinery explosion. And then, last week, that thing where the BP CEO resigned amid a scandal involving a gay affair and lying to a judge. I’m sure the franchisees are stoked about the animated babies, though.
Research Credit: Life After the Oil Crash
