What The Fucks Going On Blog

ROLLING STONE ARTICLE: "Quantitative Easing"

The Fed's Magic Money-Printing Machine, Act 2

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.

Brendan Smialowski/Getty

It’s amazing, given the attention the Tea Party allegedly is paying to government waste and government spending, that there hasn’t been more controversy about the now-seemingly-inevitable arrival of “QE2” – a second massive round of money-printing cooked up by the Fed to prop up both the government and certain sectors of the economy. A more overtly anticapitalist and oligarchical pattern of behavior than the Fed’s “Quantitative Easing” program could not possibly be imagined, but the country is strangely silent on the issue.

 

What is “QE”? The first round of “quantitative easing” was a program announced by Ben Bernanke last March in response to the financial crisis, ending in March of this year. In what will soon be known as “QE1”(i.e. once QE2 is announced), Bernanke printed over a trillion dollars out of thin air, then used that money to buy, among other things, mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and Treasury Bonds. In other words, the government was printing money to a) lend to itself and b) prop up the housing market, with Wall Street stepping in to take a big cut.

Matt Taibbi

http://readersupportednews.org/off-site-opinion-section/83-83/3561-the-feds-magic-money-printing-machine-act-2

"Cowboy English" for HAPPY HORSESHIT ECONOMIC terms

EARL  NASH

>>>>> “ It’s news to YOU ! "  <<<<<

HAPPY HORSESHIT ECONOMICS

In "Cowboy English" the phrase "quantitative easing" means that the purchasing power of your dollar will go DOWN; you will be paying MORE dollars for the same amount of food and stuff that you buy.  It is the same as reducing your salary; unless you get a raise, "quantitative easing" means the bond investors are making MORE profits and you are LOSING and falling further behind.

When you hear some MSM Market Anal-ist say "quantitative easing"--just think "the Fed is printing more copies of paper dollars and my salary will buy less stuff."

You may also hear them say "fiat currency" and that means that your paper money is backed up by NOTHING.  Before Richard Nixon took the paper money off the "gold standard," a person could, legally, take his collection paper bills and drive on up to Fort Knox and ask to exchange the pieces of paper for gold.

The "fiat", or decree, part means that you cannot trade your paper for metal anymore; its only value is what somebody will give you for it.  Say you could get a pound of X for $5.99 last month.  Then the Fed (which is NOT connected to the Federal government, but is a PRIVATE bank that is the ONLY one that can print United States' paper currency) turns the Bernanke Cranky and floods the economy with more paper bills of varying denominations.  Pretty soon, that pound of X will cost you $5.49 or $6.99.

See, you're making the same number of dollars each month, but they are buying less stuff.

That is the simple definition of "inflation"--your salary stays the same, but the price of the stuff that you buy goes up.

So, when the voice dummies on MSM cable start chuckling about "old Ben Bernanke cranking up the Fed printing press," say to yourself: "Hey, that's not funny; that pig-fucker Bernanke with the assistance of all the "representatives" in Congress, also pig-fuckers, are lowering my salary, my purchasing power.

 

                        'Got  ANGER ?'                    

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Glen Beck Stricken by "Rumsfeld Plague" - aspartame damage to optic nerve

Glenn Beck may not know it, but it is almost certain he is another victim of Rumsfeld Plague. On September 29, the New York Times published a long article about Beck. “His Mormonism forbids coffee, but he consumes a lot of Diet Coke and chocolate,” writes Mark Leibovich.

                                Coke addict

Coca-Cola began putting the “sugar substitute” aspartame in Diet Coke in 1982. According to the Department of Health and Human Services, aspartame accounts for over 75 percent of the adverse reactions to food additives reported to the FDA. Many of these reactions are very serious including seizures and death.

In 1999, the Independent on Sunday discovered that the maker of aspartame, Monsanto, uses genetically engineered bacteria to produce the “sweetener” at its U.S. production plants. Aspartame is made by combining phenylalanine, which is naturally produced by bacteria, with another amino acid. To make the bacteria produce more phenylalanine, Monsanto has genetically engineered them. “Increasingly, chemical companies are using genetically engineered bacteria in their manufacturing process without telling the public,” said Dr. Erik Millstone, of the Science Policy Research Unit at Sussex University, and a member of the National Food Alliance, told the newspaper.

Here’s what Glenn Beck needs to know — aspartame is linked to blindness. It is made up of 50% phenylalanine, 40% aspartic acid and 10% methyl alcohol. Methyl alcohol inevitably affects vision. Back when the government imposed prohibition on the country, thousands of people went blind due to the use of wood alcohol/methanol in spirits.

• A D V E R T I S E M E N T
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The late Dr. Morgan Raiford, a specialist in methanol toxicity, warned about the danger of blindness associated with the consumption of aspartame. “This product [NutraSweet] has some highly toxic reactions in the human visual pathway and we are beginning to observe the tragic damage to the optic nerve, such as blindness, partial to total optic nerve atrophy. Once this destructive process has developed there is no return of visual restoration,” Raiford wrote in anaspartame factsheet. “When this drug enters the digestive tract, largely the upper portion [the] aspartame molecule spins off a by product known as methanol or methyl-alcohol.”

Methanol “is an extremely powerful neurotoxin. It can produce blindness, it can produce cellular destruction in the brain and spinal cord in particular the optic nerves that has to do with our vision,” the neurosurgeon Dr. Russell Blaylock explained during a radio interview. In his book, Health and Nutrition Secrets That Can Save Your Life, Dr. Blaylock discusses a study explaining why diabetics who drink large amounts of aspartame drinks are more likely to go blind. Diabetic retinopathy is a leading cause of blindness.

Fresh food that lasts from eFoods Direct (Ad)

In addition to blindness, a report produced by the Department of Health and Human Serviceslists over 90 symptoms related to aspartame, including: migraine headaches, dizziness, seizures, nausea, numbness, muscle spasms, weight gain, rashes, depression, fatigue, irritability, tachycardia, insomnia, vision problems, hearing loss, heart palpitations, breathing difficulties, anxiety attacks, slurred speech, loss of taste, tinnitus, vertigo, memory loss, and joint pain. The following chronic illnesses are triggered or worsened by ingesting aspartame: Brain tumors, multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, chronic fatigue syndrome, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s, mental retardation, lymphoma, birth defects, fibromyalgia, and diabetes.

It is now estimated that over 6,000 food and drink products worldwide contain aspartame. “You might be surprised to learn about some of the foods you consume that contain aspartame. Besides the obvious products like diet sodas, there are many brands of chewing gum that contain aspartame. Most non-fat diet foods contain an amount of aspartame and the same goes for most sugar-free candy,” reports the FoodFacts website. Many brands of cereal, ice cream, yogurt, iced tea, powdered power drinks, nutritional bars, pudding, vegetable drinks, and many more food products contain aspartame.

In addition to neurologic, psychologic, eye, endocrine, and metabolic problems associated with aspartame consumption, there is another problem — addiction. “Persons consuming large amounts not only may suffer aspartame disease, but also have difficulty stopping them because of violent and prolonged withdrawal reactions… the hallmark of addiction,” writes H. J. Roberts, M.D., of St. Mary’s Hospital and Good Samaritan Hospital in West Palm Beach. “Recovered alcoholic patients repeatedly stated that they felt worse after avoiding aspartame than alcohol, and asserted that they had traded one addiction for another.”

It is dangerous to kick aspartame addiction cold turkey. Doctors and nutritionists recommend a 30 day regime of slowly eliminating the toxin from the body.

Earlier this year, Glenn Beck talked about eugenics on his show, but he only scratched the surface. There is a mountain of evidence confirming that the globalists are cynical eugenicists. They are now using food as a soft kill weapon to reduce the population of the planet.

“People the world over, but especially in the United States are under chemical attack,” Alex Jones and Aaron Dykes wrote in July. “Deadly and dangerous toxins ranging from aspartame to fluoride, GMO, mercury-tainting, pesticides, cross-species chimeras, plastic compounds in chicken, high fructose corn syrup, cloned meat, rBGH and new aggressive GM species of salmon have all entered into our diets and environments — whether we want it or not.”

http://www.infowars.com/warning-to-glenn-beck-dont-drink-diet-coke/

11 Long-Term Trends That Are Absolutely Destroying The U.S. Economy

The Economic Collapse

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The U.S. economy is being slowly but surely destroyed and many Americans have no idea that it is happening.  That is at least partially due to the fact that most financial news is entirely focused on the short-term.  Whenever a key economic statistic goes up the financial markets surge and analysts rejoice.  Whenever a key economic statistic goes down the financial markets decline and analysts speak of the potential for a "double-dip" recession.  You could literally get whiplash as you watch the financial ping pong ball bounce back and forth between good news and bad news.  But focusing on short-term statistics is not the correct way to analyze the U.S. economy.  It is the long-term trends that reveal the truth.  The reality is that there are certain underlying foundational problems that are destroying the U.S. economy a little bit more every single day. 11 of those foundational problems are discussed below.  They are undeniable and they are constantly getting worse.  If they are not corrected (and there is no indication that they will be) they will destroy not only our economy but also our entire way of life.  The sad truth is that it would be hard to understate just how desperate the situation is for the U.S. economy.  Long-Term Trend #1: The Deindustrialization Of America The United States is being deindustrialized at a pace that is almost impossible to believe.  But now that millions upon millions of people have lost their jobs, more Americans than ever are starting to wake up and believe it. A recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that 69 percent of Americans now believe that free trade agreements have cost America jobs.  Ten years ago the majority of Americans had great faith in the new "global economy" that we were all being merged into, but now the tide has turned. So why have Americans lost faith in "free trade"? Well, it turns out that the current system is neither "free trade" nor "fair trade".  Many other nations impose extremely high tariffs on U.S. goods and put up ridiculous barriers to American products and yet the United States has generally let everyone else openly manipulate currency rates and flood our shores with whatever cheap products they want. The results have been disastrous.  Jobs and factories have been leaving the United States at a blinding pace. The United States has lost approximately 42,400 factories since 2001.  Approximately 75 percent of those factories employed over 500 workers while they were still in operation. An economy without a manufacturing base does not have a bright long-term future.  Yet our politicians have allowed our manufacturing base to be systematically dismantled. As of the end of 2009, less than 12 million Americans worked in manufacturing.  The last time that less than 12 million Americans were employed in manufacturing was in 1941. How is the United States supposed to have a bright economic future if it consumes everything in sight and yet makes very little? Something needs to be done. In 1959, manufacturing represented 28 percent of all U.S. economic output.  In 2008, it represented only 11.5 percent and it continues to fall. Needless to say, millions of blue collar workers now find themselves unable to find jobs.  Today, 28% of all U.S. households have at least one person that is looking for a full-time job and there is no sign that things are going to improve much any time soon. Long-Term Trend #2: The Exploding U.S. Trade Deficit Each month, tens of billions more dollars go out of the United States than come into it.  In other words, every single month the United States gets poorer. Recently, the U.S. trade deficit has been coming in at around 40 to 50 billion dollars a month.  About half of that is with communist China. Between 2000 and 2009, America's trade deficit with China increased nearly 300 percent. Sadly, things are getting even worse. As of the end of July, the U.S. trade deficit with China had risen 18 percent compared to the same time period a year ago. There is a reason why China has been able to loan the U.S. government nearly a trillion dollars.  They have literally been bleeding us dry. The United States spends approximately $3.90 on Chinese goods for every $1 that the Chinese spend on goods from the United States. Does that sound like "fair trade" to you? According to a new study conducted by the Economic Policy Institute, if the U.S. trade deficit with China continues to increase at its current rate, the U.S. economy will lose over half a million jobs this year alone. Half a million jobs in just one year? And that doesn't even take into account the trade deficit that we have with all the other nations around the world. We have literally built China into a superpower. One prominent economist is now projecting that the Chinese economy will be three times larger than the U.S. economy by the year 2040. But it isn't just China that is a problem. Since the implementation of NAFTA in 1994, 300,000 U.S. farms have gone out of business. Globalism has forced U.S. workers to directly compete with the cheapest labor in the world for jobs.  That is not good for American workers and it is not good for America. Long-Term Trend #3: The Shrinking Middle Class As jobs continue to flee the United States and as wages continue to be depressed, America's middle class is shrinking at an alarming rate. According to a poll taken in 2009, 61 percent of Americans "always or usually" live paycheck to paycheck.  That was up substantially from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007. Unfortunately, a growing number of Americans have found it impossible to make it from month to month without direct financial assistance from the federal government. 41 million Americans are now on food stamps.  One out of every six Americans is now enrolled in at least one anti-poverty program run by the federal government.  Economic pain is everywhere. Tens of millions of Americans now live in poverty.  The U.S. Census Bureau says that 43.6 million Americans are now living in poverty and according to them that is the highest number of poor Americans that they have ever recorded in 51 years of record-keeping. Long-Term Trend #4: The Growing Size Of The U.S. Government No matter whether it is a Republican or a Democrat in the White House, the size of the U.S. government has continued to grow by leaps and bounds in recent years. This is a tremendous drain on the U.S. economy.  The government produces very little value for the economy and yet costs a colossal amount to maintain. In addition, multiplying government regulations have caused the United States to be a very difficult environment to operate a business in.  The Federal Register is the main source of regulations for U.S. government agencies.  In 1936, the number of pages in the Federal Register was about 2,600.  Today, the Federal Register is over 80,000 pages long. Long-Term Trend #5: The Constantly Growing U.S. National Debt The United States has accumulated the biggest mountain of debt in the history of the world and every single month it gets worse. According to an official U.S. Treasury Department report to Congress, the U.S. national debt will top $13.6 trillion this year and will climb to an estimated $19.6 trillion by 2015. Do we really want to pass on a 20 trillion dollar debt to our children and grandchildren? But the truth is that the situation is actually a lot worse than that. If the U.S. government was forced to use GAAP accounting principles (like all publicly-traded corporations must), the U.S. government budget deficit would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $4 trillion to $5 trillion each and every year. Needless to say, that is not anywhere close to sustainable.  We are literally destroying our economic future with all of this debt. Long-Term Trend #6: The Ongoing Devaluation Of The U.S. Dollar The Federal Reserve constantly destroys the value of the U.S. dollar.  Since the Federal Reserve was created in 1913, the U.S. dollar has lost over 95 percent of its purchasing power. An item that cost $20.00 in 1970 would cost you $112.35 today.  An item that cost $20.00 in 1913 would cost you $440.33 today. Inflation is like a hidden tax.  The value of the dollars you are holding right now will decline a little bit more each and every month.  And now that the Federal Reserve is threatening to unleash another round of quantitative easing, it appears that the value of our dollars will soon be declining even more rapidly. Long-Term Trend #7: The Derivatives Bubble The one thing that the "Wall Street reform bill" should have done was that it should have done something about the horrific abuses in the derivatives markets.  Instead, the Wall Street reform bill did next to nothing about derivatives and instead imposed hundreds of other useless regulations on Wall Street. Most Americans don't even know what derivatives are.  Basically, they are side bets.  They have no underlying value of their own.  But today derivatives have taken center stage on Wall Street.  Our financial markets have become a gigantic casino. The total value of all derivatives worldwide is estimated to be somewhere between 600 trillion and 1.5 quadrillion dollars.  And thanks to the U.S. Congress, the derivatives bubble is still growing. It would be hard to understate the danger that the derivatives bubble represents.  The danger from derivatives is so great that Warren Buffet once called them "financial weapons of mass destruction".   When the derivatives bubble finally pops, there will not be enough money in the entire world to fix it. Long-Term Trend #8: The Health Care Industry The United States health care system is completely and totally broken.  It has become a gigantic money making machine for health insurance companies, pharmaceutical corporations and greedy lawyers. Americans pay more for health care than anyone else in the world and yet they get shockingly little in return. Health care expenses are the number one reason why people file for personal bankrupty in the United States.  Surprisingly, most of those who get bankrupted by health care expenses actually have health insurance. The health insurance system in the United States is a complete and total mess.  Health insurance premiums are busting the budgets of tens of millions of American families and yet they are getting ready to go up yet once again.  Already, large numbers of health insurance companies across the United States have announced that they plan to increase health insurance premiums in response to the new health care law. But do health insurance companies actually need more money?  Even as the rest of the U.S. economy deeply struggles, America's health insurance companies increased their profits by 56 percent in 2009. At least someone is doing well in this economy. The truth is that the U.S. health care system needs to be totally and completely reinvented.  The system we had before did not work.  Barack Obama's new health care system will be far worse.  Meanwhile, the health care industry is literally choking the life out of the U.S. economy. Long-Term Trend #9: Financial Power Is Becoming Concentrated In Fewer And Fewer Hands Once upon a time, the United States had a very diverse financial system.  But today financial power is becoming concentrated in fewer and fewer hands with each passing year. More U.S. banks fail every single week.  In fact, the number of bank failures is on pace to far surpass the total of 140 U.S. banks that failed last year. There are now nearly 900 banks (well over 10 percent of all U.S. banks) on the FDIC list of problem banks. Meanwhile, the "too big to fail" banks continue to pick up market share.  The "big four" U.S. banks (Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo) had approximately 22 percent of all deposits in FDIC-insured institutions back in 2000.  As of June 30th of last year that figure was up to 39 percent. Putting an increasing amount of financial power into the hands of just a few elite banks is a recipe for disaster any way you want to cut it. Long-Term Trend #10: Rampant Corruption On Wall Street Our financial system has become an absolute cesspool of corruption.  In the past I have written extensively about all of the corruption that Goldman Sachs has been involved in, but they are far from alone. In fact, it seems like new stories of financial corruption emerge almost daily now. For example, just recently Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and GMAC Mortgage have all suspended foreclosures in many U.S. states due to serious concerns about foreclosure procedures. But there is a lot of corruption that is a lot worse than that.  The rampant manipulation of the gold and silver markets was completely blown open by an industry insider earlier this year, but the U.S. government had to be publicly shamed before they would even agree to look into it.  The truth is that corruption on Wall Street has become so common that it is almost impossible to keep up with it all.  It seems like no matter what stone you turn over on Wall Street these days you find yet more corruption. But if the core of our financial system is so incredibly corrupt, how long will it be before it collapses in on itself? Long-Term Trend #11: The Growing Retirement Crisis That Threatens To Bankrupt America The Baby Boomers may end up bankrupting America after all.  A retirement tsunami is coming that threatens to drown our nation in a sea of red ink. The truth is that Americans have not been preparing for retirement on their own.  One shocking new study indicates that Americans are $6.6 trillion short of what they need to retire comfortably. In fact, approximately half of all workers in the United States have less than $2000 saved up for retirement. So what about corporate pension plans? Are they in good shape? No. One recent study found that America's 100 largest corporate pension plans were underfunded by $217 billion as of the end of 2008. But sadly, the pension plans run by U.S. state governments are in even worse shape. Robert Novy-Marx of the University of Chicago and Joshua D. Rauh of Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management recently calculated the combined pension liability of all 50 U.S. states.  What they found was that the 50 states are collectively facing $5.17 trillion in pension obligations, but they only have $1.94 trillion set aside in state pension funds.  That means that collectively, the 50 U.S. state governments are 3.2 trillion dollars short of what they need to meet their pension obligations. But the biggest mess of all may be the U.S. Social Security system. The sad reality is that anyone that has studied it closely knows that it is nothing more than a Ponzi scheme, and the scam has just about run its course. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the Social Security system will pay out more in benefits than it receives in payroll taxes in 2010.  That was not supposed to happen until at least 2016. Oops. But things get really hairy when you start looking down the road. The present value of projected scheduled benefits surpasses earmarked revenues for entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare by about 46 trillion dollars over the next 75 years. Ouch. It is time to face facts people. We are in deep, deep, deep trouble. An increasing number of Americans are starting to realize this.  They may not always know the specifics of what is going wrong, but more people than ever realize that something is broken.  According to one recent survey, 63 percent of Americans believe that the United States is on the wrong track. And we are very much on the wrong track.  We have squandered the great wealth that our parents and grandparents left us and we are wrecking the greatest economic machine that the world has ever seen. If we do not get our act together, someday people will look back and will curse this generation for how incredibly stupid we were.

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Global Economic Collapse: Countdown to Meltdown - 30-60 days

#1 Corporate insiders are getting out of the U.S. stock market at an absolutely blinding pace.  It is being reported that the ratio of corporate insider selling to corporate insider buying last week was 1,411 to 1, and this week the ratio has soared even higher and is at 2,341 to 1.

#2 Many of the world's wealthiest people are buying absolutely massive quantities of gold right now.

#3 It is being reported that J.P. Morgan is gobbling up the rights to as much physical gold as it possibly can.

#4 The United States Mint has announced that it has run out of 1-ounce, 24-karat American Buffalo gold bullion coins and that it will not be selling any more of them in 2010.

#5 It is becoming increasingly difficult to explain the unusually high option volume that we are witnessing right now.

#6 Some very large investors are making massive bets that the S&P 500 is going to take a serious tumble during the month of October.

#7 On Tuesday, the Bank of Japan shocked world financial markets by cutting interest rates even closer to zero and by setting up a 5 trillion yen quantitative easing fund.

#8 The president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago are both publicly urging the Fed to do much more to stimulate the U.S. economy, including beginning a new round of quantitative easing, even if it means a significant rise in the U.S. inflation rate.

#9 Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz told reporters on Tuesday that the loose monetary policies of the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank are throwing the world into "chaos".

#10 At the end of September, federal regulators announced a $30 billion bailout of the U.S. wholesale credit union system.

#11 Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and GMAC Mortgage have all suspended foreclosures in many U.S. states due to serious concerns about foreclosure procedures.  Now, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott is actually demanding that all mortgage servicing companies in the state of Texas immediately suspend all foreclosures, the selling of foreclosed properties and the eviction of people living in foreclosed properties until they have completed a review of their foreclosure procedures.

#12 Not only that, but Nancy Pelosi and 30 other members of Congress are requesting a federal investigation of the foreclosure practices of U.S. mortgage lenders.  Needless to say, this controversy has the potential to turn the entire U.S. mortgage industry into an absolute quagmire.

So are dark days ahead for world financial markets?

Well, yeah, but it is incredibly hard to predict exactly when things are going to fall apart.

The truth is that there are going to be a whole lot more "crashes" and "collapses" in the years ahead.

The important thing, as discussed yesterday, is to keep your eye on the long-term trends.

The U.S. economy is undeniably in decline.  The only thing keeping the economy going at this point is a rapidly growing sea of red ink.  Debt is literally everywhere.  It is what our entire financial system is based on in 2010. 

In the months and years to come, the major players are going to try very hard to keep all the balls in the air and to continue the massive shell game that is going on, but in the end the whole thing is going to collapse like a house of cards.

Unfortunately, we have been destroying the U.S. economy for decades and there is simply not going to be a happy ending to this story.

Can anyone explain the very strange behavior that we are seeing in world financial markets right now?  Corporate insiders are bailing out of the U.S. stock market at a very alarming rate.  Investors are moving mountains of money into gold and other commodities.  In fact, there is such a rush towards gold that shortages are starting to be reported in some areas.  Meanwhile, some very, very unusual option activity has started to show up.  In particular, someone is making some incredibly large bets that the S&P 500 is going to absolutely tank during the month of October.  Central banks around the world have caught a case of "loose money fever" and are apparently hoping that a new flood of paper money will shock the global economy back to life.  Meanwhile, the furor over the foreclosure procedure abuses of the major U.S mortgage companies threatens to bring even more turmoil to the U.S. housing industry.

There are some very ominous signs that something is just not right in world financial markets right now.  Some of the signs listed below may be related.  Others may not be.  That is for you to decide.

Often, just before something really bad happens, you can actually see the rats leaving a sinking ship if you know where to look.  The truth is that if things are going to go south it is the insiders who know before anyone else.

So are some of the signs below actually clues for what we should expect in the months ahead?

Maybe.

Maybe not.

You make your own call.

But it is becoming hard to deny that there are some serious danger signs out there at this point....   

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/12-ominous-signs-for-world-financial-markets

 

Food Prices Begin their Increases: Top Rich 1% Own 84% of US wealth - 'Got FOOD?'

 

Do you believe that you will always be able to run out to Wal-Mart or to the local supermarket and buy massive amounts of inexpensive food? 

If so, you might want to think again.  During 2010, agricultural commodity prices have absolutely exploded.  Nearly every single important agricultural commodity has seen a double digit percentage price increase.  In fact, the S&P GSCI Agriculture Index recently surged to a fresh two year high.  Now food producers and retailers are starting to pass those commodity price increases on to consumers.  Today when I went to the supermarket I was absolutely startled by some of the price increases that I witnessed.  On some of the items that I most commonly purchase, prices were up 20 or 30 percent.  So just what in the world is going on here?  Well, it turns out that there was a lot of bad weather around the world this year, so many harvests were worse than projected.  In addition, the growing population of the world has an increasingly voracious appetite for food.  When supply gets tighter as demand continues to go up that means that prices are going to increase.   

On a recent article on our sister site entitled "Rampant Inflation In 2011? The Monetary Base Is Exploding, Commodity Prices Are Skyrocketing And The Fed Wants To Print Lots More Money" a reader named Erica left a comment describing the food prices that she is seeing in her area....

Food inflation is real, and it is here. Just yesterday I compared my receipt from a grocery run to prices I have from the same exact store from September 15, 2009. Bacon? Up 52% to $13.69 from $8.99 for 4 lbs. Butter? Up 73% to $9.99 from $5.79 for 4 lbs. Pure vanilla extract up 14% to $6.79 from $5.95. Chopped dried onions up a mere 2% but minced garlic (wet) was up 32%.

These price increases are not a coincidence.  This is happening all over the United States.

Food inflation is here and it is not going away any time soon.

In fact, food inflation is hitting consumers hard all over the globe this fall....

*According to the United Nations, international wheat prices have soared 60 to 80 percent since July.

*Since the beginning of 2010, the price of bread has gone up 17 percent and the price of meat has gone up 15 percent in European Union countries.

*The inflation rate in Russia rose to 7 percent in September primarily because of rising food costs.

*Turkey’s inflation rate accelerated to 9.2 percent in September, and authorities there are primarily blaming rising food prices for the increase.

*Food riots have already erupted in the poverty-stricken country of Mozambique and the government there is desperately trying to maintain order.

*Food prices have doubled in Afghanistan and authorities are warning that there could be an outbreak of famine unless the nation quickly receives more humanitarian aid.

So is there hope that things are going to get better in the years ahead?

No, not really.

In fact, global demand for food is only going to increase in the years to come.

Global demand for meat and poultry is forecasted to increase 25 percent by 2015.

Overall, it is being projected that global demand for food will more than double over the next 50 years.

So where in the world will all of that extra food come from?

That is a very good question.

Meanwhile, rising food prices threaten to send a new wave of inflation sweeping across the globe.

Mark O’Byrne, the executive director of GoldCore in Dublin, was recently quoted in Bloomberg as saying that the Federal Reserve "continues to be worried about low inflation, but the rising prices seen in agricultural commodities such as wheat would suggest that they may be looking in the rear-view mirror and should be more concerned about inflation, especially in the medium and long term."

As mentioned earlier, wheat prices have soared 60 to 80 percent this year, but wheat is not the only agricultural commodity that is going up big time.

In a recent article entitled "An Inflationary Cocktail In The Making", Richard Benson listed many of the other agricultural commodities that have spiked in price in 2010....

*Coffee: 45%

*Barley: 32%

*Oranges: 35%

*Beef: 23%

*Pork: 68%

*Salmon: 30%

*Sugar: 24%

So are American families seeing large increases in pay to keep up with all of this food inflation?

No, actually incomes are going down.

Median household income in the United States fell from $51,726 in 2008 to $50,221 in 2009.

In fact, of the 52 largest metro areas in the nation, only the city of San Antonio did not see a decline in median household income in 2009.

American families are being squeezed like never before, and the last thing that they need is for the price of food to start moving up substantially.

But it isn't just the price of food that is going up.

Health insurance companies across the United States are announcing that health insurance premiums are going to go up substantially this year because of the new health care law.

American consumers can only be stretched so far.

Eventually something has got to give.

In fact, we are already seeing more Americans beginning to fall into poverty than ever before.  Today, one out of every six Americans is now enrolled in at least one anti-poverty program run by the federal government.

Unfortunately, there is every indication that the Federal Reserve wants to make inflation every worse.

It seems like almost every single day now a different official from the Federal Reserve makes public comments about how another round of quantitative easing is going to be necessary in order to stimulate the U.S. economy.

But if the Federal Reserve pumps even more paper money into the financial system isn't that going to put inflationary pressure on the economy?

Of course.

It is time to wake up.

Your dollars are never going to stretch farther than they do today.

The price of food is going to continue to go up.

http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/this-is-starting-to-get-very-real-agricultural-commodity-prices-have-exploded-and-now-the-price-of-food-is-beginning-to-rise-substantially-in-the-united-states-and-all-over-the-world

Ohio Republican Senate Candidate - Outed - VIDEO: plays NAZI soldier in the wood with boys

ED. NOTE:  THIS IS NOT A PRANK  OR  A HOAX             

                     AFTER THE NOV. ELECTION                         

                 THIS  IS   WHAT COULD BE IN YOUR FUTURE!

               COWARDS' CLUB                          "Sieg Heil!" you pig-fuckers!  

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/10/ohio-republican-candidate-played-nazi-dressup-games-allegedly-bond-son/

 

UFOs arrviing Oct. 13th? "Qui bono?" Who benefits? New World Order production?

UFOs and extraterrestrials have long been treated as the ultimate conspiracy theory by the establishment. Therefore, the growing chatter of mainstream news stories about UFOs and aliens seems very peculiar. Why the attention all of a sudden? Is the establishment conditioning us for the arrival of extraterrestrials? Could they have an agenda for doing so?

Recent reporting of genuine events such as the multiple UFOs that forced the closing of separate airports in China; stories covering the release of new UFO books written by credible ex-military; UFOstampering with nuclear devices; the discovery of a "habitable" planet near Earth; a bizarre story about the Pope's astronomersaying he would gladly baptize an alien if asked; and the pending appointment of a U.N. space ambassador are bringing some legitimacy to the conspiracy.

I imagine that most rational people have considered the possibility of life beyond Earth, but are still waiting for concrete evidence before committing to that reality. An apparently undeniable event must occur for the masses to fully "believe" the new nature of reality. Should extraterrestrials actually exist, there is certainly enough motivation by the controllers to keep them under wraps, as their existence dramatically threatens their earthly power structure -- especially the integrity of powerful religious institutions -- unless of course they co-opt the event for their own gain.

The skeptic in me found one curious sign that this imminent arrival might indeed be orchestrated from this world: these "visitors" are apparently concerned primarily with CO2 levels. No matter which side you are on in the climate debate, I have to think that entities making such a long journey, and which presumably possess a higher intelligence, might look first at freeing Humanity of the global tyranny and war-like tendencies it lives under (and the tendency for our leaders to spread both), rather than arrive with the very mundane plan to address a political issue of non-galactic consequence. But that is exactly what a new book by a retired NORAD officer predicts for the grand arrival on October 13th of this year according to Yahoo News:

Author says the event to be the first in a series intended to avert a planetary catastrophe resulting from increasing levels of carbon-dioxide in the earth's atmosphere dangerously approaching a 'critical mass.'

A newly-published 352-page book (Challenges of Change) by a retired Air Force officer, Stanley A. Fulham, tentatively predicts October 13, 2010 as the date for a massive UFO display over the world’s principal cities. According to the author, the aliens will neither land nor communicate on that date; they are aware from eons of experience with other planets in similar conditions their sudden intervention would cause fear and panic.

This press release would have been absolutely laughed off by anything resembling mainstream media just a short time ago. 

Bill Cooper's 1991 book, Behold A Pale Horse, describes a different agenda: the Elite's plans to fake an alien invasion in order to unite humanity under a one world government against a common enemy. But he explains that the timing hasn't been right because:

A major finding of the alien study was that the public could not be told. It was believed that this would most certainly lead to economic collapse, collapse of the religious structure, and national panic, which could lead to anarchy. Secrecy thus continued. An offshoot of this finding was that if the public could not be told, Congress could not be told.

Cooper even issued an attempt at a life-saving disclaimer to this revelation: “If they kill me, you’ll know everything I said was true." Bill Cooper was murdered by a "SWAT raid" shortly after 9-11.

NASA's declassified Project Blue Beam proves that the Elite maintain highly developed plans to fabricate an alien invasion event for the end game of global control. "In principle, it will make use of the skies as a movie screen (on the sodium layer at about 60 miles) as space-based laser-generating satellites project simultaneous images to the four corners of the planet in every language and dialect according to the region. It deals with the religious aspect of the new world order and is deception and seduction on a massive scale." (Source) Advanced holographic technology now makes such a "movie" entirely plausible. In fact, it already has been researched by the U.S. Air Force to use in war, as was reported 11 years ago in The Washington Post.

The general public will likely be terrified and unite behind our leaders' manufactured storyline to confront and protect us from the aliens. Therein lies the motivation for the Globalists to engineer such an event. Simply by being aware that such a plan has been thought up by the controllers will make us less susceptible to potential fear tactics and propaganda should such an event occur.

POST SCRIPT:

Quick story: when I was a 21-year-old carefree hippie, a friend and I jumped in my Volkswagen Westfalia camper and headed west for a mountain-biking road trip. One of our destinations was Roswell, New Mexico to see what remained of the UFO hype from the famed encounter in the late '40s. We had a guidebook which mentioned a UFO museum that we were getting more excited to see by the mile marker.

We arrived in the seedy little town of Roswell in the morning, passing many buildings with alien and UFO likenesses painted on them. We found the museum without too much trouble and stretched our legs to the entrance. After I had paid my admission and walked in, I suddenly realized that there weren't going to be any artifacts there. I felt sort of like a fool for being excited in the first place. Instead, there were grainy photos blown up of famous UFO images and a recreation of the "alien autopsy" using mannequins. Needless to say, we left the museum disappointed -- mostly at ourselves.

We sought hard evidence to confirm our suspicions about the existence of intelligent alien life . . . and found none. In the bookProbability 1, mathematician Amir Aczel used all known data, such as similar stars to the sun, and similar planets, to calculate the probability of intelligent life outside our solar system. As the book title says, it is mathematically certain that we are not alone. However, this was just another theory, which is similar to government documents or photos about UFOs, in my view -- neither one has the credibility of an artifact that would prove alien life beyond the shadow of a doubt.

Source: activistpost.com

How Nixon had Lennon Assassinated - Calling Out the Killers of John on his birthday

EARL NASH                                   

 >>>>>  “ It’s news to YOU!"  <<<<<                                                   

If Richard Nixon had not ordered his assassination, John Lennon would have  been 70 years-old today.

Anyone who still believes that John was killed by a random act by a loser obsesseed with the Beatles still believes that Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray, and Sirhan-Sirhan were "lone nuts"--and they probably still believes that 9-11 had no connection to Cheney, his Neocon traitors, and the Israeli Mossad.

The film, The US vs John Lennon  makes the case clearly: 

John and Yoko had become a rallying point for the anti-war movement and also for the anti-Nixon campaign and, like LBJ, Nixon used his Presidential powers and his black ops assassins to kill John Lennon.

Q:  If Mark Chapman was  a such a fanatical Beatle/Lennon fan, who was obsessed with John, why didn't they find a single Beatle album in his apartment?  Instead they found "heavy metal" music, often used by black ops for brainwashing and hypnotic suggestion operations.

Imagine: a young man being triggered by the book  Catcher in The Rye, and who, like Oswald, wanted to travel to Russia as a representative of the US government, and a man who "visited Lebanon," where the CIA ran a training camp for assassins.

(SEE more below)

 
[www.heroturko.org/u/united-states--vs-johna-lennon-movie/]

The home front of Nixon's so-called Real War was the realm of ideals and ideas, and according to the perversity he actively promoted "we will have to compromise some of our cherished ideals" as long as the battle is waged "in the name of that supreme priority."²⁶ Having extolled the virtue of waging a covert, unethical war to support friends and destroy enemies, Nixon essentially justified his absolute commitment to do whatever was necessary, including the need to murder a "peacnik" like John Lennon, because in the words of Nixon's absolute delusion, "in World War III there is no substitute for victory."²⁷ Committed to contain communism through the methods and means that totalitarian states deploy, Richard Nixon was the sort who was even able to assert that "senseless terrorism is often not as senseless as it may seem. To the Soviets and their allies, [and to those who deploy their tactics] it is a calculated instrument of national policy."²⁸ This is the logic which made Richard Nixon believe that the calculation behind the Kent State massacre was legitimate, and that is what makes him and his cohorts the biggest terrorists in American history.

This is not speculation or a conspiracy theory, it is his defined rules of engaging his enemies, clearly proclaimed through his stated, absolute determination to do whatever was necessary in the multi-fronted effort to win World War III, and sponsoring the murder of a so-called trendy like John Lennon, was par for the course. In his own words:

If America loses World War III, it will be because of the failure of its leadership class. In particular, it will be because of the attention, the celebrity, and the legitimacy given to the "trendies" -those overglamorized dilettantes who posture in the latest idea, fount the fashionable protests and are slobbered over by the news media, whose creation they essentially are. The attention given to them and their causes romanticizes the trivial and trivializes the serious. It reduces public discussion to the level of a cartoon strip.

Whatever the latest cause they embrace -whether antiwar, antinuclear, antimilitary, antibusiness -it is almost invariably one that works against the interest of the United States in the context of World War III.²⁹

Since Nixon believed that the murder of a "trendy" like John Lennon was absolutely vital to the successful prosecution of World War III, does anybody doubt his role in plotting the assassination of John lennon? Is anybody in fact that stupid? In Nixon's own terms, "in a less hazardous age we could afford to indulge the prancing of the trendies on the stage of public debate. But now our national survival depends on learning to distinguish between the meaningful and the meaningless."³⁰ Has Richard Nixon convinces the world that the murder of John Lennon was "meaningful"?"

The road to the murder of John Lennon had a long history of intrusive, illegal surveillance and harassment. In particular, the Nixon White House sought to "neutralize" Lennon's capacity to organize an antiwar movement and Hoover's FBI "policed" Lennon while the Immigration and Naturalization Service tried to deport him because of a 1968 conviction for possession of cannabis in London. The FBI surveillance of Lennon produced a stack of papers twenty-six pounds in weight, not to mention documents which remain classified or are "withheld in the interest of the national defense or foreign policy."³¹ In 1969, John Lennon protested the Vietnam war by organising bed-ins for peace. In his own words:

The point of the bed-in, in a nutshell, was a commercial for peace as opposed to war, which was on the news everyday in those days. Everyday there was dismembered bodies, napalm, and we thought, "Why don't they have something nice in the papers?"³²

A proposed bed-in in New York did not materialize, because, as Lennon recounted:

We tried to do it in New York but the American government wouldn't let us in. They didn't want any peaceniks, so we ended up doing it in Montreal and broadcasting back across the border.³³

Indeed, the effort to politically silence Lennon was less than accommodating and Lennon's lawyer exposed the full score when he told him that "if he did anything more along the lines of this anti-war rock and roll campaign he would almost certainly be immediately deported, but if he cooled it, through various legal manoeuvres, he might be able to stay."³⁴ John Lennon did what he had to do to avoid being deported. At the same time, even though he was politically silenced, FBI harassment persisted and he appeared on the Dick Cavett show to expose the fact that he was being followed by the FBI and that his phones were being tapped. The FBI had indeed mounted a major offensive operation against Lennon, but many thought he was crazy and Lennon related the common scepticism in the following terms: "Lennon, oh you big-headed maniac, who's going to follow you around?" Most people did not understand or fathom the fact that Hoover's FBI did not have anything better to do. It was not until after the resignation of Richard Nixon that Lennon's immigration case was thrown out of court and in 1976, his Green Card finally came through. For the next four years, Lennon retired from all forms of public life, and in 1980, the self-styled peace advocate came out of retirement and prepared to mount a crusade to "turn the world on to peace." At the same time. Richard Nixon and Bill Casey were setting the stage for the Reagan declaration of war against Communism in Central America, and peaceniks like Lennon were caught in the crossfire.

Reagan's foreign policy advocates prepared to satisfy the unfinished agenda of the Nixon White House and serious threats were promptly eliminated. The so-called lessons of the 1960's were very close to the hearts of "time warp patriots" who blamed the loss of the Vietnam war on the antiwar movement and they resented the influence of activists like Lennon to the point of paranoia. In short, Reagan's upcoming, anti-Communist crusade could simply not tolerate an invigorated John Lennon and "he had to be cut down before the reasons for his death became obvious: before Reagan took the oath of office on 20 January 1981, before the world realized that Lennon was coming back to being the old Lennon, the man who sang Give Peace A Chance.³⁵

In 1969, the Vietnam war had prompted the largest anti-war demonstrations in the history of the United States and young people who rallied around Lennon's protest songs had infuriated the Nixon White House. Kent State massacre was immediately followed by protesters who circled the White House and chanted "all we are saying is give peace a chance" and Richard Nixon was obviously prepared to do the exact opposite, in 1980.

when Nixon was President, Hoover had dispatched his political police to "initiate discreet efforts to locate subject [John Winston Lennon] and remain aware of his activities and movements." Hoover died less that a year after the Republican convention in 1972, and Lennon's murder in 1980 was merely a product of "unfinished business".

An obvious casualty of the Nixon navigated, Reagan revolution, the dominance of Richard Nixon's influence is not doubted by anybody. Even Reagan noticed the fact that Nixon's extraordinary White House authority practically exceeded that of the official President. 

  Nixon did not physically occupy the White House, but "the replica" was indeed the actual source of White House power. When Richard Reeves interviewed Richard Nixon in his "exile sanctum" in New York in 1980, his apartment was arranged like the Oval Office. "The flags, the couch, the chairs were just like it..." Indeed, Richard Nixon was so obsesses with his role-play, that when the interview was concluded, he escorted Reeves to the supplies closet "because the closet door in the faux Oval Office was in the same place as an exit in the real Oval Office."³⁷ It is therefore clear and obvious that the ultimate leader of the powerful, unaccountable, parallel government within-a-government that Oliver North operated was Richard Nixon himself -which probably explains the public controversy between Oliver North and Ronald Reagan. The secret government "was believed to have grown out of a group Mr. Casey set up during the final weeks of the 1980 presidential campaign, called the October Surprise Group.³⁸ Casey and Nixon were evidently full of surprises and on the very day that the press headlined the announcement that a "local screwball" murdered Lennon, the political backdrop was the innocuous headline, Reagan set to announce cabinet.

The claim that John Lennon was the target of a political assassination is not original. In 1989, Fenton Bresler, an intelligent British Barrister wrote a book called The Murder of Lennon, and he raises many of the serious questions about Lennon's murder that have been almost totally ignored. In particular, he convincingly argues that Mark Chapman, Lennon's assassin was brainwashed by the CIA. Indeed, all the "traditional" motivations that are ascribed to Mark Chapman are relatively absurd compared to Bresler's analysis.

On December 17, 1992, Chapman was interviewed on Larry King Live, and that was certainly an eye opener in terms of exposing the real Mark Chapman. In a nutshell, Chapman reflected the demeanour of a cold, dispassionate, methodical, cold blooded murderer. In particular, Chapman ascribed a phoney motivation to account for Lennon's murder, and that is certainly the mark of a cover up. On the one hand, Chapman claimed that he "was so bonded with Lennon" and on the other, he boldly asserted that he "struck out at something he perceived to be phoney, and that extraordinary contradiction, reflects duplicity, deception and the fact that Mark Chapman was not a "lone nut", he was a consensus fanatic like Richard Nixon.

The most striking, consistent element in the short adult life of Mark Chapman is his affiliation to the YMCA. Indeed, he had given serious consideration to applying himself to a career with the International Division of the YMCA. When he was arrested, one of the few items that Chapman left "on display" for the police to find was the following letter of recommendation from David Moore, then stationed at the Geneva office of the World Alliance of YMCAs:

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN

This is to introduce Mark Chapman, a staff member of the U.S. International Division of the National Council of YMCAs. Mark was an effective and dedicated worker at the refugee camp in Fort Chaffe Arkansas following the mass influx of refugees after the change in governments in Indo-China in the spring of 1975. Mark was also the youth representative to the Board of Directors of the YMCA in his home town in Georgia. Mark will be visiting YMCAs in Asia and Europe and we look forward to his visit here in Geneva. I can commend him to you as a sincere and intelligent young man. Any assistance that you can give Mark during his travels will be greatly appreciated by this office.³⁹

It is certainly not an exaggeration to assert that the YMCA was essentially Mark Chapman's surrogate family. But what is more significant however is the mysterious, troubling implications of the fact that Chapman was not a "lone nut." In 1967, Ramparts Magazine exposed the fact that the CIA used students to gather information from abroad and in the 1970's and 1980's, the CIA was evidently using YMCA patrons as spies.

Philip Agee, the first-known CIA defector blew the cover on the CIA/YMCA link, and Mark Chapman's YMCA link was evidently too substantial and too "political" to preclude a CIA link as well. In 1975, Mark Chapman, the vehemently anti-Communist Southerner applied to represent the YMCA as a counsellor in the Soviet Union, but that bid was denied because Chapman did not speak Russian. Instead, Mark visited Lebanon, where, according to radio commentator, Mae Brussell,  

the CIA maintained training camps for assassins at the time.⁴⁰

Whether Chapman was a trained CIA assassin or not, his Beirut experience had a profound impact on his life, and following narrative indicates that Mark's harrowing overseas experience produced a very deep, psychological impact which was ripe for exploitation:

June 1975 seems to have been the first time that Mark heard gunfire, the whizzing of bullets, bombs bursting nearby and the screams of people in pain and dying. It etched deep into his consciousness. This "gentle" man, who hated violence, came back from Beirut with a cassette recording that he had actually made of the barbarous sounds of warfare. He played it time and again to anyone in Atlanta who would listen. Says Harold Blankinship: "He played us this recording he had made in his hotel room at the YMCA in Beirut of all the fighting going on. You could hear the shooting, etc. That could have affected him. He was real up-tight about it, I know that." Whether intentional or otherwise, Lennon's future killer had indeed been "bloodied" in war-torn Beirut.⁴¹

The violence of war-torn Lebanon was Chapman's first, it wasn't his last firsthand look at the miserable dislocation that war produced. After Beirut, Chapman worked with Vietnamese refugees in Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, where the YMCA was setting up services to accommodate them. Since the fall of Saigon, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese fled to the United States and in the eyes of "time warp" patriots, antiwar activists [phonies] like John Lennon were directly responsible for that particular "mess." And so, Mark Chapman, who travelled the world at the behest of the CIA-linked YMCA, was ripe for exploitation -he was an ideal brainwash victim -he had witnessed firsthand the world disorder that so-called phonies like John Lennon were responsible for. Indeed, Mark Chapman dabbled in the philosophy of "time warp" patriots who blamed the 1960's for every ill in society, and that sort of mentality is transmitted from "patriot" to receptive ear, it did not develop in Chapman alone.

Since he murdered John Lennon, Mark Chapman boasted: "I murdered a man. I took a lot more with me than just myself. A whole era ended. It was the last nail in the coffin of the '60's."⁴² After killing his target and simultaneously satisfying the paranoia of "time warp patriots" who are in a perpetual war against the so-called 1960's, Chapman did not flee the murder scene, he calmly started to read his copy of The Catcher in the Rye when amazed New York City police officers arrested him. Chapman obviously wanted to get caught -the implication being that he would plead guilty and the Lennon case would close without investigation. Over the years, when asked why he murdered Lennon, Chapman would direct attention to the book The Catcher in the Rye. That in turn, directs attention towards patriots like George Herbert Walker Bush, who claim to have been most influenced by the books War and Peace and The Catcher in the Rye.⁴³ The Catcher in the Rye is about a "crusade against phoneyness" and Mark Chapman, who used the assassination of Lennon to promote the book, claimed that he was motivated by Holden Caulfield, the book's sixteen-year-old "crusader". In a nutshell, Holden Caulfield hated phonies and Mark Chapman's crusade against a "phoney" like Lennon was "ideologically" aligned with the agenda of overzealous "patriots" who were occupied by the obsession to neutralize the influence of popular antiwar activists. In the awkward words of Mark Chapman: "I have a small part in me that cannot understand the world and what goes on in it. I did not want to kill anybody... I fought against the small part for a long time. I'm sure the large part of me is Holden Caulfield. The small part of me must be the Devil."⁴⁴ Seeking to activate the "big part" of Mark Chapman, his "handlers" could have easily exploited his evident compassion for children and made him believe that "phonies" like John Lennon were ultimately responsible for the horror and the dislocation of war. Friends and associates made a point of having observed a very close bond between Mark Chapman and children, and that certainly provided the opportunity to exploit his Achilles heel. In the words of Mark Chapman: "I never wanted to hurt anybody my friends will tell you that. I have two parts in me the big part is very kind, the children I worked with will tell you that."⁴⁵ Chapman struggled to avoid hurting Lennon but his "big part won" and he took his gun out of his coat pocket and shot Lennon in the chest, in the left arm and in the head. Mark Chapman had evidently mustered up the courage he required to satisfy the agenda of patriots who considered themselves to be exempt from the normal restraint of the law, because in their eyes, the "big picture", the "big part", the national security interest or whatever else they chose to call it, was essentially a license to kill -and John Lennon was clearly a priority target.

In the final analysis, the terrifying reality is that the impressionable Mark Chapman is just one of hundreds of thousands of young people who are not appreciably distinct, in the absence of the "exposure" they receive. Under the circumstances, since Chapman travelled the world as a guest of the YMCA, it is reasonable to expect the organization that sponsored Chapman's psychologically harrowing adventures to assume at least some responsibility for the extraordinary mental transformation -from Mark Chapman, the compassionate young man, to Mark Chapman, the awkward, reluctant assassin who had to be prodded, to murder John Lennon.

If one looks at the foreign policy direction of the Reagan White House, it is glaringly obvious that "patriots" like Bill Casey and Richard Nixon were steering the course. Clearly, the "invisible prints" of the clandestine, foreign policy strategists who coordinated the entire intelligence apparatus of the government to mount a fierce, unprecedented war against dissent, belong to Casey and Nixon. Richard Nixon made that absolutely clear in The Real War, when he wrote: "I am confident that President Reagan and the members of his administration will have the vision to see what needs to be done and the courage to do it. Nixon's confidence obviously stemmed from the fact that Reagan's inclination to mount an anti-Communist crusade provided zealots like himself the opportunity to use the "acting President" to promote their vision. The Reagan/Bush years are certainly distinguished by the fact that "patriots" were routinely granted license to ignore the law as long as the intended consequence was to advance the President's anti-Communist crusade. The law was routinely violated in the process, and blatant, illegal acts of terror targeted domestic dissidents at home, and entire countries, abroad. Clearly, the CIA deployment of mines in the harbours of Nicaragua was an illegal act of war, and it is not possible to ignore the fact that the Reagan administration routinely disrespected and disregarded the law. Moreover, the paranoid, Nixon assertion that "we will do whatever is necessary" to win World War III, is a clear reflection of the violent, ominous assault that was deployed, to "neutralize" any influential activist who did not think like Richard Nixon's patriots. In the final analysis, the deaths of the people that Nixon targeted were as predictable, as they were tragic. Clearly, The Real War that Nixon waged produced Real Casualties, and "patriots" like Richard Nixon and Bill Casey were directly responsible for slaughter. One of the premises of The Real War was that the need to win on the battlefield was as vital as the need to control the public opinion arena, and the compromise of every worthy American ideal was deemed to be acceptable.

After Mark Chapman hammered the so-called final nail in "the coffin of the '60's", Richard Nixon had the audacity to write a book called The Real Peace, and he was so excited about it that he privately printed and distributed it to more than 100 government officials, journalists and friends, before it was published by Little, Brown & Co. Ronald Reagan was officially the President of the United States, but time evidently warped when Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger stood before a battery of microphones in Washington to brief reporters about their "brain-dead" vision for peace and democracy in Central America. Nixon had just finished testifying before Kissinger's National Bipartisan Commission on Central America (no, Kissinger was not Ronald Reagan's Secretary of State), and one can safely assume that like any predictable ideologue, Nixon simply disseminated propaganda. He certainly did not expose the inspiration behind The Real Peace: Did he get the idea to disparage the word "peace" before or after John Lennon was murdered?

In retrospect, one can confidently state that Richard Nixon always targeted his enemies and he always managed to cover up the entire truth about his covert schemes, and since he rose to national prominence through successfully framing Alger Hiss, his positive track record bodes an ominous threat to all of his political enemies.

 [SOURCE: http://surftofind.com/watergate]

In memory of you, your assassins are called out today. (Earl Nash)

 

By Jon Wiener

October 8, 2010

In 1972, John Lennon had a problem.

He and his wife, Yoko Ono, had been living in New York for a year, and they wanted to stay. But it happened also to be the year President Nixon was running for reelection. Opposition to the Vietnam War had reached a peak, and Lennon and Ono often showed up at antiwar rallies to sing "Give Peace a Chance" — and to tell their fans that the best way to give peace a chance was to vote against Nixon.

The Nixon White House responded by ordering Lennon deported.

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The administration said Lennon had been admitted to the country improperly. He had pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of cannabis possession in London in 1968, and immigration law at the time banned the admission of anyone convicted of any drug offense.

But unlike most migrants who have problems with their legal status, Lennon and Ono had powerful friends who petitioned the Immigration and Naturalization Service on their behalf.

In honor of what would have been Lennon's 70th birthday this month, I pulled a box from my garage containing documents I obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request about Lennon's deportation case. The government's response included copies of hundreds of letters sent to the INS, and they revealed the different and fascinating ways artists, writers and others tried to make the case that Lennon, a rock musician and an antiwar activist, should not be kicked out of the country.

The letters were not a spontaneous expression of enthusiasm. Rather, they were part of an organized campaign of the country's cultural elite to stop the Nixon administration from deporting the ex-Beatle. Joan Baez wrote a letter; Beat poet Gregory Corso wrote one. So did novelists John Updike and Joyce Carol Oates, painter Jasper Johns and composer John Cage, Leonard Bernstein of "West Side Story" and Joseph Heller of "Catch-22."

Bob Dylan's offering, written sometime in 1972, was in his own bold hand. "John and Yoko inspire and transcend and stimulate," he wrote, and thereby "help put an end to this mild dull taste of petty commercialism which is being passed off as artist art by the overpowering mass media." Then he added, "Let John and Yoko stay!"

Some of the letters couldn't help but preach: Baez's handwritten note informed the INS that "keeping people confined to certain areas of the world" was "one of the reasons we've had six thousand years of war instead of six thousand years of peace."

Others were more conciliatory: Oates, who had won the National Book Award in 1970 for "them," had never been part of the counterculture. She made that clear in a long letter that concluded, "I certainly don't endorse many of their publicly-expressed opinions, but I believe that they, and anyone else, have the right to those opinions."

Heller expressed "horror" at the deportation order, declaring: "The two of them are among our most valuable cultural assets."

Bernstein's telegram was brief: "John Lennon has been an important creative force in music and petry [sic]."

Dylan, Baez, Heller and Bernstein were well known as opponents of Nixon and the war, but Lennon's supporters included some surprising names. Updike in 1971 had just published a sequel to "Rabbit Run," titled "Rabbit Redux," which expressed some hostility toward "the sixties." Nevertheless, his typewritten letter declared his support for exemplary counterculture figures. Lennon and Ono "cannot do this great country any harm," he said, "and might do it some good."

Hollywood people were mostly missing from the list of supporters, with one notable exception: Tony Curtis, who had starred in more than 60 films by 1972, including "Some Like It Hot" with Marilyn Monroe and "The Defiant Ones," in which he played a racist convict chained to Sidney Poitier. His letter was brief: "The presence of John Lennon and Yoko Ono is of cultural advantage to our country."

Lennon also had some high-profile political support, including New York Mayor John Lindsay. Lennon and Ono's talent put them "among the greatest of our time," Lindsay wrote, and "a grave injustice is being perpetuated" by the deportation proceedings.

Finally there was Corso, the New York poet who was friends with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. He wrote 12 words: "Artisans and universal megagalactic entities — Ergo, let my people go — stay — etc." That must have helped.

The "Let them stay in the USA" campaign also included thousands of ordinary young people. The 1972 Lennon-Ono album "Sometime in New York City" included a petition for fans to send to the INS, and lots of them did.

The campaign didn't change Nixon's mind. The Lennon deportation proceedings continued even after Nixon's reelection in 1972, and then through the Watergate crisis. In the end, of course, Nixon left the White House, and Lennon — and Ono — stayed in the U.S.

In October 1975, 35 years ago this week, a three-judge federal panel ruled in Lennon's favor, declaring that his conviction in Britain didn't meet American standards of justice.

"We have always found a place for those committed to the spirit of liberty and willing to help implement it," the court added. "Lennon's four-year battle to remain in our country is testimony to his faith in the American dream."

But the resolution of Lennon and Ono's fight did little to loosen the way immigration officials handle the requests of cultural icons to visit or stay in the country. In the post- 9/11 world, things have gotten even tighter, with artists and musicians finding it difficult to get permission even to come to the United States. Award-winning Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami was denied entry in 2002, and Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki boycotted the New York Film Festival in protest. Cellist Yo-Yo Ma testified before Congress in 2006 about the difficulties foreign musicians face getting visas to perform in the U.S. Things seem to be better with President Obama in the White House, but it's not hard to imagine another moment in the not-too-distant future when leading artists will be petitioning the immigration service again.

Jon Wiener is a professor of history at UC Irvine and author of "Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files." Copies of the letters he obtained protesting Lennon's deportation order are posted online at lennonfbifiles.com.

Copyright © 2010, Los Angeles Times

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