Collaborations and partnerships are gradually forming nation-wide to combat money in politics, specifically against the Citizens United supreme court ruling in 2010. A directory of many of them can be found at United4thePeople.org (not all listed have the same agenda).

Independent offshoots pertaining to the pursuit of money out of politics have involved stamping money with custom-made designs with messages:

• “get money out of politic$!”
•  ”the system isn’t broken, it’s fixed”
• “corporations are not people, and money is not free speech”
• “not to be used for bribing politicians”
• “money as speech silences us all”

July 4: $5,000 of stamped money dropped from Seattle building (courtesy of “mic check wall st“)

“Stamp Stampede” website for stamping money out of politic$ (great photo here showing Obama “system is fixed” which he responds with Secret Service ‘joke’)

Ben & Jerry’s Co-founder to Occupy Your Wallet

Speech bubble stamp showing George Washington and Abe Lincoln exclaiming “Get Money Out of Politic$!”

Phi Beta Iota:  Defacing currency is a crime in the USA.  An excellent summary with applicable passages from the law can be found at Google Answers, here (for “coin” but not cotton currency). While this is an important demonstration of public loss of faith in government (and promoting a 28th Amendment to the Constitution), getting money out of politics is not the problem.  There is nothing wrong with the USA that cannot be fixed simply by restoring the integrity of the electoral process and hence of the government.  Complete information on how to do this is at We the People Reform Coalition.  With respect to money itself, local communities should be doing everything they can to eliminate landlords using eminent domain as needed, and moving all money from all local stakeholders into local banks.

Paul Craig Roberts

Collapse At Hand

Ever since the beginning of the financial crisis and quantitative easing, the question has been before us: How can the Federal Reserve maintain zero interest rates for banks and negative real interest rates for savers and bond holders when the US government is adding $1.5 trillion to the national debt every year via its budget deficits? Not long ago the Fed announced that it was going to continue this policy for another 2 or 3 years. Indeed, the Fed is locked into the policy. Without the artificially low interest rates, the debt service on the national debt would be so large that it would raise questions about the US Treasury’s credit rating and the viability of the dollar, and the trillions of dollars in Interest Rate Swaps and other derivatives would come unglued.

In other words, financial deregulation leading to Wall Street’s gambles, the US government’s decision to bail out the banks and to keep them afloat, and the Federal Reserve’s zero interest rate policy have put the economic future of the US and its currency in an untenable and dangerous position. It will not be possible to continue to flood the bond markets with $1.5 trillion in new issues each year when the interest rate on the bonds is less than the rate of inflation. Everyone who purchases a Treasury bond is purchasing a depreciating asset. Moreover, the capital risk of investing in Treasuries is very high. The low interest rate means that the price paid for the bond is very high. A rise in interest rates, which must come sooner or later, will collapse the price of the bonds and inflict capital losses on bond holders, both domestic and foreign.

The question is: when is sooner or later? The purpose of this article is to examine that question.

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Source and More Data

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Berto Jongman

Economic Consequences of War

New report released by the Institute for Economics & Peace analyses the macroeconomic effects of US government spending on wars and the military since World War II.

The IEP’s latest report,  Economic Consequences of War on the US Economy,  analyses the macroeconomic effects of US government spending on wars and the military.

The report studies five periods – World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, and the Afghanistan/Iraq wars – exposing the effect of war financing on debt, consumption, investment, jobs, taxes, government deficits, and inflation.

The findings of the report show devastating trends for US tax, debt and deficit debates.

Download the report here

Key findings

The U.S. has paid for its wars either through debt [World War II, Cold War, Afghanistan/Iraq], taxation [Korean War] or inflation [Vietnam]. In each case, taxpayers have been burdened, and private sector consumption and investment have been constrained as a result.

Report highlights

The report shows the following economic indicators experiencing negative effects either during or after the conflicts:

• Public debt and levels of taxation increased during most conflicts

• Consumption as a percent of GDP decreased during most conflicts

• Investment as a percent of GDP decreased during most conflicts

• Inflation increased during or as a direct consequence of these conflicts

The higher levels of government spending associated with war tends to generate some positive economic benefits in the short-term, specifically through increases in economic growth occurring during conflict spending booms. However, negative unintended consequences occur either concurrently with the war or develop as residual effects afterwards thereby harming the economy over the longer term.

Phi Beta Iota:  There appears to be a continued reluctance to address the real causes of our terrible situation: corruption across the board.  No amount of intellectual posturing, whether in a book or in a conference, is a substitute for full transparency and the truth — the whole truth.  The lack of integrity across all eight tribes — academia, civil society, commerce, government, law enforcement, media, military, and non-government/non-profit — is the ROOT CAUSE of our collapse.

See Also:

Journal: Politics & Intelligence–Partners Only When Integrity is Central to Both

2012 THE OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING MANIFESTO: Transparency, Truth & Trust

2010 The Ultimate Hack Re-Inventing Intelligence to Re-Engineer Earth (Chapter for Counter-Terrorism Book Out of Denmark)

Chuck Spinney

The Koch Brothers, The Cato Institute, And Why Nations Fail

Who? Mini-Me?

Robert Steele has for some time been saying that “The truth at any cost lowers all others costs.”  He has also been focusing on the importance of intelligence with integrity.  Among all governments, only Iceland appears to be serious about dealing with the financial crisis as it should be dealt with: as a criminal conspiracy enabled by all of the parties in both public and private sectors who sacrificed their integrity and betrayed the public trust.

Corporations operate under public charters.  It is difficult to police the corporations when the governments have themselves become criminalized, but the tide is turning — the public is beginning to recognize that governments  lack integrity and intelligence and cannot be trusted — in their present form — to manage the public interest.

When Goldman Sachs goes out of business the healing can begin.  Slamming PWC is a good start.

Old Landsbanki to sue PriceWaterhouseCoopers for ‘deliberate’ auditing errors

John Robb

You Don’t Need a Cyber Attack to Take Down The North American Power Grid

The Obama administration simulated a cyber attack on New York City’s power supply in a Senate demonstration aimed at winning support for legislation to boost the nation’s computer defenses. Senators from both parties gathered behind closed doors in the Capitol Wednesday for the classified briefing attended by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, FBI Director Robert Mueller and other administration officials. The mock attack on the city during a summer heat wave was “very compelling,” said Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who is co-sponsoring a cybersecurity bill supported by President Barack Obama. “It illustrated the problem and why legislation is desperately needed,” she said as she left the briefing. Bloomberg.

The US defense industry is in a full court press to get tens of billions in funding for cyberwarfare.

To get that funding, they need to dramatize the potential threat of cyberwarfare.  Here’s how.  The central method of attack in cyberwarfare is systems disruption.  Systems disruption is a way to break networks to achieve extremely high levels of damage (or, in financial terms, high ROIs).  One of the best ways to demonstrate that type of attack is through a disruption of the power supply (usually with NYC as a target).

Two John Robb posts, comment, and see also — university grants at risk.

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Who? Who?

What Would a “Good” Banking System Look Like? Banks Weren’t Meant to Be Like This

MICHAEL HUDSON

CounterPunch, Weekend Edition January 27-29, 2012

In medieval times, wealthy bankers lent to kings and princes as their major customers. But now it is the banks that are needy, relying on governments for funding – capped by the post-2008 bailouts to save them from going bankrupt from their bad private-sector loans and gambles.

Yet the banks now browbeat governments – not by having ready cash but by threatening to go bust and drag the economy down with them if they are not given control of public tax policy, spending and planning. The process has gone furthest in the United States. Joseph Stiglitz characterizes the Obama administration’s vast transfer of money and pubic debt to the banks as a “privatizing of gains and the socializing of losses. It is a ‘partnership’ in which one partner robs the other.” Prof. Bill Black describes banks as becoming criminogenic and innovating “control fraud.”  High finance has corrupted regulatory agencies, falsified account-keeping by “mark to model” trickery, and financed the campaigns of its supporters to disable public oversight. The effect is to leave banks in control of how the economy’s allocates its credit and resources.

If there is any silver lining to today’s debt crisis, it is that the present situation and trends cannot continue. So this is not only an opportunity to restructure banking; we have little choice. The urgent issue is who will control the economy: governments, or the financial sector and monopolies with which it has made an alliance.

Fortunately, it is not necessary to re-invent the wheel. Already a century ago the outlines of a productive industrial banking system were well understood. But recent bank lobbying has been remarkably successful in distracting attention away from classical analyses of how to shape the financial and tax system to best promote economic growth – by public checks on bank privileges.

How banks broke the social compact, promoting their own special interests

People used to know what banks did. Bankers took deposits and lent them out, paying short-term depositors less than they charged for risky or less liquid loans. The risk was borne by bankers, not depositors or the government. But today, bank loans are made increasingly to speculators in recklessly large amounts for quick in-and-out trading. Financial crashes have become deeper and affect a wider swath of the population as debt pyramiding has soared and credit quality plunged into the toxic category of “liars’ loans.”

The first step toward today’s mutual interdependence between high finance and government was for central banks to act as lenders of last resort to mitigate the liquidity crises that periodically resulted from the banks’ privilege of credit creation. In due course governments also provided public deposit insurance, recognizing the need to mobilize and recycle savings into capital investment as the industrial revolution gained momentum. In exchange for this support, they regulated banks as public utilities.

Over time, banks have sought to disable this regulatory oversight, even to the point of decriminalizing fraud.

Read full article.

Lord James of Blackheath, House of Lords [VIDEO 11:10] from 2010, now circulating

Breaking news Lord James of Blackheath has spoken in the House of Lords holding evidence of three transactions of 5 Trillion each and a transaction of 750,000 metric tonnes of gold and has called for an investigation.

I think there are three possible conclusions that may come from it. I think there may have been a massive piece of money laundering committed by a major government which ought to know better and that it has effectively undermined the integrity of the British bank the Royal Bank of Scotland, in doing so. The second alternative is that a major American department has an agency that has gone rogue on it because it has been wound up and has created a structure out of which they are seeking to get at least 50 billion Euros as a payoff. And the third possibility is that this is an extraordinarily elaborate fraud which has not been carried out but which has been prepared in order to provide a threat to one government or more if they don’t pay them off. So there are three possibilities and this all needs a very urgent review.

My Lords, it starts in April and May of 2009, with the alleged transfer to the United Kingdom, to HSBC of a sum of 5 trillion dollars and seven days later, in comes another 5 trillion dollars to HSBC, and then 3 weeks later another 5 trillion. 5 trillion in each case. Sorry. A total of 15 trillion dollars is alleged to have been passed into the hands of HSBC for onward transit to the Royal Bank of Scotland and we need to look at where this came from and what the history of this money is. And I have been trying to sort out the sequence by which this money has been created and from where it has come from for a long time.

http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/forum.cgi?read=230593

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201212/ldhansrd/text/120216-0002.h…