Evidence That The New York Fed Serves The Interests Of Goldman Sachs

For years, many people have suspected that the New York Fed is more or less controlled by the "too big to fail" banks.  Well, now we have smoking gun evidence that this is indeed the case.  A very brave lawyer named Carmen Segarra made a series of audio recordings while she was working for the New York Fed.  The 46 hours of meetings and conversations that she recorded are being called "the Ray Rice video for the financial sector" because of the explosive content that they contain.  What these recordings reveal are regulators that are deeply afraid to do anything that may harm or embarrass Goldman Sachs.  And it is quite understandable why Segarra's colleagues at the New York Fed would feel this way.  As a recent Bloomberg article explained, it has become "common practice" for regulators to leave "their government jobs for much higher paying jobs at the very banks they were once meant to regulate."  If you think that there is going to be a cushy, high paying banking job for you at the end of the rainbow, you are unlikely to do anything that will mess that up.

To say that the culture at the New York Fed is "deferential" to big banks such as Goldman Sachs would be a massive understatement.

When Carmen Segarra was first embedded at Goldman Sachs, she was absolutely horrified by what she was seeing and hearing.  But her superiors were so obsessed with covering up for Goldman that they actually pressured her to alter the notes that she took during meetings...

The job right from the start seems to have been different from what she had imagined: In meetings, Fed employees would defer to the Goldman people; if one of the Goldman people said something revealing or even alarming, the other Fed employees in the meeting would either ignore or downplay it. For instance, in one meeting a Goldman employee expressed the view that "once clients are wealthy enough certain consumer laws don't apply to them." After that meeting, Segarra turned to a fellow Fed regulator and said how surprised she was by that statement -- to which the regulator replied, "You didn't hear that."

This sort of thing occurred often enough -- Fed regulators denying what had been said in meetings, Fed managers asking her to alter minutes of meetings after the fact -- that Segarra decided she needed to record what actually had been said.

Needless to say, someone like Segarra that did not "go along with the program" was not going to last long at the New York Fed.

After only seven months, she was fired...

In 2012, Goldman was rebuked by a Delaware judge for its behaviour during a corporate acquisition. Goldman had advised one energy company, El Paso Corp., as it sold itself to another energy company, Kinder Morgan, in which Goldman actually owned a $4-billion stake. Segarrra asked questions and was told by a Goldman executive that the bank did not have a conflict of interest policy. The Fed found some divisions of the bank did have a policy, though not a comprehensive one. The Fed pressured Segarra not to mention the inadequate conflict of interest policy at Goldman in her reports and, she alleges, fired her after she refused to recant.

If Segarra had not made the recordings that she did, we would have probably never heard much from her ever again.

After all, who is going to believe her over Goldman Sachs and the New York Fed?  A minority would, of course, but the general public would have probably dismissed her accusations as the bitter ramblings of an ex-employee.

But she did make those recordings, and they are causing chaos on Wall Street right now.

The following is how Michael Lewis summarized the importance of this audio...

But once you have listened to it -- as when you were faced with the newly unignorable truth of what actually happened to that NFL running back's fiancee in that elevator -- consider the following:

1. You sort of knew that the regulators were more or less controlled by the banks. Now you know.

2. The only reason you know is that one woman, Carmen Segarra, has been brave enough to fight the system. She has paid a great price to inform us all of the obvious. She has lost her job, undermined her career, and will no doubt also endure a lifetime of lawsuits and slander.

The New York Fed says that it "categorically rejects" all of the allegations made by Carmen Segarra.

Of course they do.

But what is there to deny?  The evidence is right there in the audio recordings.

The New York Fed has been caught red-handed serving the interests of Goldman Sachs, and no number of strongly-worded denials is going to change that.

Sadly, this is not likely to change any time soon.  Employees of the New York Fed are going to continue to want to get hired by the big banks, and the big banks are going to continue to hire them.  So the incestuous relationship between the New York Fed and Goldman Sachs is probably not going to change in any meaningful way despite this bad publicity.

What this means is that Goldman Sachs is going to continue to do pretty much whatever it wants to do, and nobody is going to stop them.

But someone should be doing something.

As I wrote about the other day, Goldman Sachs has less than a trillion dollars in total assets, but it has more than 54 trillion dollars in exposure to derivatives.

When the derivatives crisis strikes, some of these "too big to fail" banks are going to go down very hard.

Goldman might be one of them.

And when Wall Street starts collapsing, it is going to plunge the entire U.S. economy into a complete and utter nightmare.

Much of this could have been avoided if we had good rules in place and we had regulators that were honestly trying to enforce those good rules.

But instead, the wolves are guarding the hen house and the big banks are going absolutely wild.

Ultimately, this is all going to end very, very badly.

Credit to Economic Collapse

International crowdfunding campaign to build Third Temple raises over $100,000

A 60-day international crowdfunding campaign to finance the construction of a modern Third Temple on the Temple Mount garnered $105,000 worth of donations from over 900 donors around the globe by Rosh Hashana, the Temple Institute said Sunday.

According to a statement from the right-wing organization – dedicated to educating world Jewry about the centrality of the Temple Mount to Jewish life and “recreating every aspect of the Holy Temple” – its crowdfunding campaign received the donations from 30 countries.

“The funds raised from the campaign will be used to continue the research of the Institute and to commission additional architectural plans,” the statement said. “The architects will fuse Jewish law with modern technology to prepare for a fully modern Third Temple, Kosher to the letter of the law...”

Featuring a website with a three-minute promotional video depicting a digital incarnation of the planned Third Temple, the institute said the site was viewed by over 160,000 people and received over 10,000 shares on Facebook.

Rabbi Chaim Richman, the international director of the institute, said the organization utilized the crowdfunding campaign after initially finding success with YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

“We are constantly looking for ways to include as many people as possible in our mission to rebuild the Holy Temple,” said Richman. “This is not about one group or organization – it’s about bringing about a spiritual reunification of mankind. Today, with the help of the Internet, our message is resonating across the globe.”

Richman said the Temple Institute’s plan to design, fund and build a new temple began three years ago.




Credit to Jerusalem Post

Apocalypse soon: the scientists preparing for the end times

The men were too absorbed in their work to notice my arrival at first. Three walls of the conference room held whiteboards densely filled with algebra and scribbled diagrams. One man jumped up to sketch another graph, and three colleagues crowded around to examine it more closely. Their urgency surprised me, though it probably shouldn’t have. These academics were debating what they believe could be one of the greatest threats to mankind – could superintelligent computers wipe us all out?

I was visiting the Future of Humanity Institute, a research department at Oxford University founded in 2005 to study the “big-picture questions” of human life. One of its main areas of research is existential risk. The physicists, philosophers, biologists, economists, computer scientists and mathematicians of the institute are students of the apocalypse.

Predictions of the end of history are as old as history itself, but the 21st century poses new threats. The development of nuclear weapons marked the first time that we had the technology to end all human life. Since then, advances in synthetic biology and nanotechnology have increased the potential for human beings to do catastrophic harm by accident or through deliberate, criminal intent.

In July this year, long-forgotten vials of smallpox – a virus believed to be “dead” – were discovered at a research centre near Washington, DC. Now imagine some similar incident in the future, but involving an artificially generated killer virus or nanoweapons. Some of these dangers are closer than we might care to imagine. When Syrian hackers sent a message from the Associated Press Twitter account that there had been an attack on the White House, the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock market briefly fell by $136bn. What unthinkable chaos would be unleashed if someone found a way to empty people’s bank accounts?

While previous doomsayers have relied on religion or superstition, the researchers at the Future of Humanity Institute want to apply scientific rigour to understanding apocalyptic outcomes. How likely are they? Can the risks be mitigated? And how should we weigh up the needs of future generations against our own?

The FHI was founded nine years ago by Nick Bostrom, a Swedish philosopher, when he was 32. Bostrom is one of the leading figures in this small but expanding field of study. It was the first organisation of its kind in the UK, and Bostrom is also an adviser on the country’s second: the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge University, which was launched in 2012. There are a few similar research bodies in the US, too: in May, the Future of Life Institute opened in Boston at MIT, joining the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in Berkeley, California.

“We’re getting these more and more powerful technologies that we can use to have more and more wide-ranging impacts on the world and ourselves, and our level of wisdom seems to be growing more slowly. It’s a bit like a child who’s getting their hands on a loaded pistol – they should be playing with rattles or toy soldiers,” Bostrom tells me when we meet in his sunlit office at the FHI, surrounded by yet more whiteboards. “As a species, we’re giving ourselves access to technologies that should really have a higher maturity level. We don’t have an option – we’re going to get these technologies. So we just have to mature more rapidly.”

I’d first met Bostrom in London a month earlier, at the launch of his most recent book, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. He had arrived late. “Our speaker on superintelligence has got lost,” the chair joked. It was a Thursday lunchtime but the auditorium at the RSA on the Strand was full. I was sitting next to a man in his early twenties with a thick beard who had lent in to ask, “Have you seen him argue that we’re almost certainly brains in vats? It sounds so out-there, but when he does it it’s so cool!” He looked star-struck when Bostrom eventually bounded on stage.

Dressed in a checked shirt, stripy socks and tortoiseshell glasses, Bostrom rushed through his presentation, guided by some incongruously retro-looking PowerPoint slides. The consensus among experts in artificial intelligence (AI) is that they will develop a computer with human-level intelligence in the next 50 years, he said. Once they have succeeded in doing this, it might not take so long to develop machines smarter than we are. This new superintelligence would be extremely powerful, and may be hard to control. It would, for instance, be better at computer programming than human beings, and so could improve its own capabilities faster than scientists could. We may witness a “superintelligence explosion”
as computers begin improving themselves at an alarming rate.

If we handle it well, the development of superintelligence might be one of the best things ever to happen to humanity. These smart machines could tackle all the problems we are too stupid to solve. But it could also go horribly wrong. Computers may not share our values and social understanding. Few human beings set out to harm gorillas deliberately, Bostrom pointed out, but because we are cleverer, society is organised around our needs, not those of gorillas. In a future controlled by ultra-smart machines, we could well be the gorillas.

After the book launch, the publishers invited me to join them and Bostrom for a drink. We drank white wine, and Bostrom asked for green tea. Over a bowl of wasabi peanuts, he mentioned casually that he likes to download lectures and listen to them at three times the normal speed while he exercises. “I have an app that adjusts the pitch so it’s not like a Mickey Mouse voice,” he explained, assuming perhaps that this was the reason for my surprised expression. I sensed that he was quite keen to leave us to our wine. “Nick is the most focused person I know,” a colleague later told me.

****

Bostrom hated school when he was growing up in Helsingborg, a coastal town in Sweden. Then, when he was 15, he stumbled on the philosophy section of his local library and began reading the great German philosophers: Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kant. “I discovered there was this wider life of the mind I had been oblivious to before then, and those big gates flung open and I had this sense of having lost time, because I had lost the first 15 years of my life,” he told me. “I had this sense of urgency that meant I knew I couldn’t lose more years, or it could be too late to amount to anything.”

There was no real “concept” of existential risk when Bostrom was a graduate student in London in the mid-1990s. He completed a PhD in philosophy at the London School of Economics while also studying computational neuroscience and astrophysics at King’s College London. “People were talking about human extinction but not about ways of thinking about permanently destroying our future,” he says.

Yet he began to meet people through the mailing lists of early websites who were also drawn to the ideas that were increasingly preoccupying him. They often called themselves “transhumanists” – referring to an intellectual movement interested in the transformation of the human condition through technology – and they were, he concedes, “mainly crackpots”.

In 2000 he became a lecturer in philosophy at Yale and then, two years later, he returned to the UK as a postdoctoral fellow at the British Academy. He planned to pursue his study of existential risk in tandem with a philosophy teaching post, until he met the futurologist and multibillionaire computer scientist James Martin, who was interested in his work. In 2005 Martin donated $150m to the University of Oxford to set up the Oxford Martin School, and the FHI was one of the first research bodies to receive funding through the school. It can be a challenge to be taken seriously in a field that brushes so close to science fiction. “The danger is it can deter serious researchers from the field for fear of being mistaken or associated with crackpots,” Bostrom explained. A “univer­sity with a more marginal reputation” might have been less confident about funding such radical work.

Nevertheless, the FHI has expanded since then to include 18 full-time research staff, drawn from a wide range of disciplines. I spoke to Daniel Dewey, a 27-year-old who last year left his job as a software engineer at Google to join the FHI as a research fellow studying machine superintelligence. A few of his colleagues at Google had introduced him to research on the emerging risks of AI, and he began reading about the subject in his spare time. He came across a problem related to the safety of AIs that he couldn’t solve, and it became the hook. “I was thinking about it all the time,” Dewey recalled.

One of the concerns expressed by those studying artificial intelligence is that machines – because they lack our cultural, emotional and social intuition – might adopt dangerous methods to pursue their goals. Bostrom sometimes uses the example of a superintelligent paper-clip maker which works out that it could create more paper clips by extracting carbon atoms from human bodies. “You at least want to be able to say, ‘I want you to achieve this simple goal and not do anything else that would have a dramatic impact on the world,’ ” Dewey explained.

Unfortunately, it turns out that it is very difficult to meet this simple request in practice. Dewey emailed Toby Ord, an Australian philosopher who also works at the FHI, who replied that he didn’t know the answer, either, but if Dewey came to Oxford they could discuss it. He did, and he soon decided that he might be able to “make a difference” at the institute. So he quit Google.

Many of the FHI researchers seem motivated by a strong sense of moral purpose. Ord is also a founder of Giving What We Can, an organisation whose members pledge 10 per cent of their income to help tackle poverty. Ord gives more than this: anything he earns above £20,000, he donates to charity. Despite his modest salary, he plans to give away £1m over his lifetime.

Ord lives in Oxford with his wife, a medical doctor who has also signed up to the giving pledge, and baby daughter. “I’m living off the median income in the UK, so I can’t complain,” he told me, but they live frugally. The couple dine out no more than once a month, and he treats himself to one coffee a week. Ord sees a natural connection between this and his work at the FHI. “I was focusing on how to think carefully and apply academic scholarship to how I give in my life and helping others to give, too. So when it comes to existential risk I’m interested in the idea that another way of helping people is to figure out how to help future generations,” he said.

Ord is working on a report for the government’s chief scientific adviser on risk and emerging technology. Most researchers at the FHI and at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk hope that such analysis will gradually be integrated into national policymaking. But, for now, both institutions are surviving on donations from individual philanthropists.

****

One of the most generous donors to scientists working in the discipline is Jaan Tallinn, the 42-year-old Estonian computer whizz and co-founder of Skype and Kazaa, a file-sharing program. He estimates that he has donated “a couple of million dollars” to five research groups in the US and three in the UK (the FHI, the CSER and 80,000 Hours, an organisation promoting effective philanthropy, which also has a close interest in existential risk). This year he has given away $800,000 (£480,000).

His involvement in the founding of the CSER came after a chance encounter in a taxi in Copenhagen with Huw Price, professor of philosophy at Cambridge. Tallinn told Price that he thought the chances of him dying in an artificial-intelligence-related disaster were higher than those of him dying of cancer or a heart attack. Tallinn has since said that he was feeling particularly pessimistic that day, but Price was nevertheless intrigued. The computer whizz reminded him of another professional pessimist: Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal.

In 2003, Rees published Our Final Century, in which he outlined his view that mankind has only a 50/50 chance of surviving to 2100. (In the US the book was published as Our Final Hour – because, Rees likes to joke, “Americans like instant gratification”.) A Ted talk that Rees gave on the same subject in July 2005 has been viewed almost 1.6 million times online. In it, he appears hunched over his lectern, but when he begins to speak, his fluency and energy are electrifying. “If you take 10,000 people at random, 9,999 have something in common: their business and interests lie on or near the earth’s surface. The odd one out is an astronomer and I am one of that strange breed,” he begins.

Studying the distant reaches of the universe has not only given Rees an appreciation of humanity’s precious, fleeting existence – if you imagine Planet Earth’s lifetime as a single year, the 21st century would be a quarter of a second, he says – but also allowed him an insight into the “extreme future”. In six billion years the sun will run out of fuel. “There’s an unthinking tendency to imagine that humans will be there, experiencing the sun’s demise, but any life and intelligence that exists then will be as different from us as we are from bacteria.”

Even when you consider these vast timescales and events that have changed the earth dramatically, such as asteroid impacts and huge volcanic eruptions, something extraordinary has happened in recent decades. Never before have human beings been so able to alter our surroundings – through global warming or nuclear war – or to alter ourselves, as advances in biology and computer science open up possibilities of transforming the way we think and live. So it is understandable that Price immediately saw a connection with Tallinn’s interests.

Price invited him to Cambridge and took Tallinn on a tour of what he describes as the “two birthplaces of existential risk”. First they went for dinner at King’s College, where the pioneering computer scientist Alan Turing was a fellow from 1935 to 1945. Then they went for drinks at the Eagle pub, where in 1953 Francis Crick and James Watson announced that they had cracked the double-helix structure of DNA. When I came to the city to interview Price, he took me on a mini-existential risk tour to echo Tallinn’s, inviting me for a pint of DNA ale one evening with a few CSER researchers. For the second time in several weeks I found myself drinking with people I sensed would rather be in the library.

Tallinn’s first trip to Cambridge was successful. With Price and Rees, he co-founded the CSER, providing the seed funding. The centre already has several high-profile advisers, including the physicist Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk (the multibillionaire behind PayPal and SpaceX) and the ethicist Peter Singer. They are hoping to find funding for a couple of postdoctoral positions in the next year or so. “I see it as part of our role to act as a kind of virus, spreading interest and concern about this issue [existential risk] into other academic disciplines,” Price explained. He hopes that eventually institutions studying potentially dangerous fields will develop a risk-awareness culture. Tallinn is trying to change mindsets in other ways, too. He says he sometimes invests in tech companies as an excuse to “hang around in the kitchen, just so I get a feel of what they are doing and can try and influence the culture”.

I met Price and Tallinn for a coffee in the senior common room at Trinity College. At one point a man ran up to us to slap Tallinn on the back and say: “Hey, Jaan. Remember me? Remember our crazy Caribbean days?”

Tallinn looked confused, and the man seemed to sway from side to side, as if dancing with an imaginary hula girl. It turned out they had met at a conference in 2013 and the dancer was a renowned mathematician (I will spare him any blushes). Price said that when he first arrived at Cambridge Tallinn was a minor celebrity; several dons approached him to thank him for making it easier to speak to their children and grandchildren overseas.

Most of the large donors funding existen­tial risk research work in finance or technology. Neither the CSER nor the FHI publishes details of individual donors, but the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (Miri) in Berkeley does. The three biggest donors to Miri are Peter Thiel of PayPal ($1.38m), the founder of Mt Gox (once the main exchange platform for bitcoins), Jed McCaleb ($631,137) and Tallinn. Tech billionaires, like bankers, are more likely to have money to spare – but are they also more acutely aware of the dangers emerging in their industry? Tallinn speaks of Silicon Valley’s “culture of heroism”. “The traditional way of having a big impact in the world is taking something that the public thinks is big and trying to back it, like space travel or eradicating diseases,” he said. “Because I don’t have nearly enough resources for backing something like that, I’ve taken an area that’s massively underappreciated and not that well understood by the public.”

I wondered, when I spoke to Price and Tallinn, how big a difference they believed their work can make. It would be naive to imagine that one could ever convince scientists to stop working in a specific field – whether artificial intelligence or the mani­pulation of viruses – simply because it is dangerous. The best you could hope for would be a greater awareness of the risks posed by new technologies, and improved safety measures. You might want to control access to technology (just as we try to limit access to the enriched uranium needed to make nuclear bombs), but couldn’t this turn science into an increasingly elite occupation? Besides, it is hard to control access to technology for ever, and we know that in the modern, interconnected world small hacks can have catastrophic effects. So how great an impact can a few dozen passionate researchers make, spread across a handful of organisations?

“I’m not supremely confident it’s going to make a big difference, but I’m very confident it will make a small difference,” Price said. “And, given that we’re dealing with huge potential costs, I think it’s worth making a small difference because it’s like putting on a seat belt: it’s worth making a small effort because there’s a lot at stake.”

Tallinn was more upbeat. “There’s a saying in the community: ‘Shut up and multiply’ – just do the calculations,” he said. “Sometimes I joke when there’s particularly good news in this ecosystem, like when I’ve had a good phone call with someone, that ‘OK, that’s another billion saved’.

“Being born into a moment when the fate of the universe is at stake is a lot of fun.”

Sophie McBain is an assistant editor of the New Statesman
Credit to Newstatesman.com

Turkish Flotilla “Peace Activist” Killed in US Airstrike in Syria

“They have healed also the hurt of My people lightly, saying: ‘Peace, peace’, when there is no peace.” (Jeremiah 6:14)



The MV Mavi Marmara (Photo: Wiki Commons)


A Turkish participant in the infamous 2010 flotilla to Gaza was killed in a US airstrike on an ISIS target in Syria, Turkish news outlets have reported. 40-year-old Yakup Bulent Alniak, who was aboard the Mavi Marmara when passengers attacked Israeli naval commandos enforcing a blockade on Gaza, was killed in Idlib, Syria over the weekend.

According to the Turkish World Bulletin, Alniak was in Syria doing charity work ahead of the Islamic holiday of Eid el-Adha, but other sources, including Turkey’s T24, claim he was in fact fighting alongside al-Qaeda splinter group the Al-Nusra Front. Although at odds with IS, Nusra Front is also vehemently anti-West, and both are considered extremely dangerous.

The Turkish humanitarian group behind the 2010 flotilla, the Humanitarian Relief Foundation (IHH), has been investigated for ties to both Hamas and al-Qaeda. “Recent reports of the Turkish military intercepting an alleged IHH weapons truck on the Syrian border was an indication that the flotilla charity was being targeted,” Jonathan Schanzer, vice president for research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told The Jerusalem Post in January, when 23 people were arrested by Turkish police.

“There has long been ample reason to believe the group was tied to Hamas, al-Qaeda, and other terror groups in Syria,” he said.

In 2010, 87 US senators asked President Barack Obama to designate IHH as a terrorist organization, but that did not happen, despite US court documents tying the group to al-Qaeda.Mavi Marmara Activists Prepare to Attack IDF Soldiers. (Photo: IDF)

The Mavi Marmara was only one of six ships in the flotilla, and the only one aboard which violence broke out. Israeli naval commandos were enforcing a blockade on Gaza to stem the flow of weapons to Hamas, something the UN determined was legitimate and legal.

Nine activists were killed in the incident, and a tenth succumbed this year to wounds suffered at the time. Alniak escaped unharmed from the incident.

The airstrike which killed Alniak was one of several aimed at pushing back Islamic forces from the Kurdish town of Kobani, Syria, near the border with Turkey. Some 15,000 Kurds have fled to Turkey as a result of the ISIS siege on the town.

Credit to Breakingisraelnews.com

Read more at http://www.breakingisraelnews.com/22177/turkish-flotilla-peace-activist-killed-us-airstrike-syria/#ufTWeJsafxCHjDW5.99

Isis 'just one mile from Baghdad'

Isis 'just one mile from Baghdad' as al-Qaeda fighters join forces against Syria air strikes
Jabhat al-Nusra and Isis leaders are reportedly meeting to co-ordinate attacks


Isis fighters are reportedly just one mile away from Baghdad as reports emerge of al-Qaeda militants bolstering their ranks in Syria.

According to the Foundation for Relief and Reconciliation in the Middle East, Isis was approaching the Iraqi capital on Monday morning.

"The Islamic State are now less than 2km away from entering Baghdad," a spokesperson said.

"They said it could never happen and now it almost has. Obama says he overestimated what the Iraqi Army could do. Well you only need to be here a very short while to know they can do very very little."

Isis fighters were also battling Government forces in a key town 25 miles west of Baghdad - Amiriyat al-Fallujah.

According to a BBC correspondent, fighting had calmed by Monday afternoon but a standoff continued along the main road to nearby Fallujah, which is under Isis control.

The extremists had been advancing towards the capital but were held off by bombing and Iraqi ground forces.

Peshmerga fighters hold their position in the strategic Jalawla area, in Diyala province, which is a gateway to BaghdadUS air strikes overnight targeted other Isis positions in Anbar province, the Pentagon said, and in Syria four more oil fields controlled by militants near Raqqa were hit on Sunday.

American officials called the attacks “successful” but the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights claimed mostly civilians were hit and a grain silo was destroyed.

The news comes amid reports of an emerging alliance between Isis forces in Syria and Jabhat al-Nusra, also known as the Nusra Front.

The group is the Syrian offshoot of al-Qaeda and has been fighting against the Assad regime in the civil war.

Despite months of clashes between its forces and Isis (also known as Islamic State) militants, the two groups appear to be forming a loose coalition in parts of the country to fight increasing attacks by the US and its allies.

al-Nusra has called US airstrikes against Isis "a war against Islam"

Al-Nusra’s official spokesperson, Abu Firas al-Suri, threatened the coalition nations with retaliation on Saturday.

“These states have committed a horrible act that is going to put them on the list of jihadist targets throughout the world,” he said.

“This is not a war against al-Nusra, but a war against Islam.”

Al-Nusra and Isis leaders are now holding war planning meetings together, a source told the Guardian, although no formal alliance has been confirmed.

The reports follow growing defections from other Islamist groups to Isis, which is seen as better organised and equipped to create an “Islamic State” straddling Iraq and Syria.

A loyalty pledge was reportedly made by al-Nusra in June in the town of Al-Bukamal near the Iraqi border, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, and the two groups have fought together against Government forces.

 

A Tornado GR4 alongside a Voyager refuelling aircraft during the RAF’s first combat mission against Isis in northern Iraq

The report appeared to be confirmed on Twitter by a photograph showing an Egyptian al-Nusra Front commander shaking hands with an Isis leader of Chechen origin.

Although both Isis and al-Nusra are rooted in al-Qaeda, the two have been rivals since Isis started its involvement in Syria’s civil war in spring last year and have engaged in bloody battles killing more than 3,000 militants from both sides.

A merger had been declared by Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in 2013, when Isis was known as al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), but the alliance was rejected by al-Nusra and overruled by al-Qaeda leader al-Zawahiri.

But the international response to Isis’ bloody rampage through Iraq and Syria, and the beheadings of British and American hostages, is pushing the groups towards an alliance.

An al-Nusra source told Reuters: “There are hardline voices inside Nusra who are pushing for reconciliation with Islamic State.”

Credit to The independen
t

The Collapse of the American Economy Has Begun

Susan Duclos  and Stefan Stanford recently interviewed “V” the Guerrilla Economist and the following information was revealed in this landmark interview:

“The process of undermining the US dollar is well on schedule as well; more than 105 countries have decided that the dollar no longer works for them, joining Russia, China and other BRICS nations in leaving the dollar as the entire world comes to the realization that America’s leaders are insane. Their recklessness and evil ways have left tremendous shame upon our nation. Though there has been much manipulation and propping up, but that is only setting us up for the inevitable massive crash.

“V” begins by updating us on recent information that he has received from his 4-Star General source and warns that events are still on schedule, a schedule that he previously warned would leave the US dollar ‘undermined’ by 2015 and the US ceasing to exist as a nation by 2017“.

The interview can be accessed through the following link. I highly recommend listening to this interview.

On the surface, these claims appear to border on hysteria. However, as history has proven, time and time again, that Susan Duclos, Stefan Stanford and “V” are to always be taken seriously when revealing controversial information.

Subsequently, I proceeded to find confirming, or disconfirming evidence, that these claims are accurate and should taken seriously by all Americans. Both the direct and ancillary evidence serves as overwhelming in support of V’s claims and Susan’s reporting.

Halfway to Economic Armageddon

“V’s” claims notwithstanding, the American economy is already in severe danger as we consider the following facts.

There are 35 states in this country in which it is better to accept welfare than work at an entry level job. Much like crack cocaine or heroin addicts, much of our nation is hopelessly addicted to living in the welfare state or on unsustainable levels of credit.

From a micro perspective, the personal economic health of America is abysmal. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 146 million Americans are either “poor” or “low income”. Stunningly, more than 100 million Americans are enrolled in at least one welfare program run by the federal government, not including the massive entitlement programs of Social Security or Medicare. The number of people on food stamps has grown to 47.79 million Americans. In 2008, when Obama first took office, only 32 million Americans were on food stamps. Approximately, 20.2 million Americans spend more than half of their incomes on housing, which represents a 46% increase from 2001. Parents under the age of 30 experience poverty rates consisting of 37 percent. The number of Americans living in poverty has grown to one out of every six US citizens.

The above information could be considered to be the good news. What follows is grim.

Watch the Credit Swap Derivatives

In the United States, credit swap derivatives created national debt totals of over one quadrillion dollars. That is one thousand trillion dollars! The entire GDP of the planet is estimated at $66 trillion dollars. And somehow, in the infinite wisdom of Congress in 2008, we falsely and naively believed that a $750 billion transfer of wealth (i.e., Bailout #1) was magically going to save the economy and the collective futures of the American middle class. Please let me repeat that the most conservative estimate is that the derivatives debt is 10 times greater than the GDP of the entire world. Most economists estimate the number to be 16 times greater that the GDP of the planet!    

In short, the debt created by futures speculation is approximately 10-16 times greater than the sum total of the entire wealth on the planet! It would not matter if the debt was only two times the GDP of the planet, we do not have the capacity to pay down this debt. The interest on the debt is growing faster than the rise in national revenue. And we think we are going to climb out of this? Let’s take a moment and discuss the derivatives debt. 

Five of the “too big to fail” banks in the United States that have more than 40 trillion dollars in exposure to derivatives. The national debt is sitting at a grand total of almost 18 trillion dollars. The sum of 40 trillion dollars is almost unfathomable.

Credit swap derivatives trading is not too different from betting on baseball or football games. It is gambling, it is a Ponzi scheme and Wall Street bankers should be in jail. However, this is the new economic landscape of America. The name of the game is the “Last American Garage Sale” where these bankers are positioning to steal all the assets possible before the collapse.

Please note that under the category, in the above illustration, “Widgets “R” US Corp“, the banks loan the money. In other words, if this Ponzi scheme fails, the banks which underwrite and guarantee the entire process, will eventually fail!

The credit swap derivatives are bad enough, but when we carry over the economic implications to the health of the banking system, the banks are bordering on total collapse along with all of your saved earnings.

Most Americans Think That Their Deposits Are Safe

Some readers have written to me and have dutifully reminded me that the FDIC is at their bank standing guard over their deposits. How woefully and depressingly ignorant is that statement?

The FDIC does not have the money to cover your deposits as it has only $25 billion in its deposit insurance fund. By law, the FDIC is required to keep a balance equivalent to only 1.15% of insured deposits on hand. Yes, America, that means that less than 2% of your deposits are covered.

Others have pointed out to me that the Dodd-Frank Act (Section 716) now bans taxpayer bailouts of most speculative derivatives activities. You remember the derivatives don’t you? They were the imaginary wealth that was built upon more imaginary wealth but were guaranteed with hard assets backed by the banks. When this house of cards collapsed, it pulled the banks down and led to the series of bailouts which has devastated our economy.

Therefore, when your bank defaults, and it will, the depositors as well as the banks will turn to the FDIC for relief. The FDIC will have no choice but to draw upon its credit line in order to cover a BofA, Wells Fargo and JP Morgan derivatives bust which has been co-mingled with savings account funds. The resulting effect is that this will require a taxpayer bailout to cover the credit line.This will negate the safety from the bailouts that the public thought that they were receiving under the Dodd-Franks bill of no more bailouts.

What very few people are talking about, and as is the case with all credit lines, this money will have to be paid back. Therefore, the coming default of the FDIC, used to cover the derivatives debt, will become the excuse for another taxpayer bailout. And on and on it goes.

When the last instrument has been looted and then deflated, where do you think that will leave you and your computerized digits that represent the bulk of your self-built financial empire? All of your life, most of you have worked for banker backed interest in some capacity and now, these banksters are stealing back the pittance they paid you in the first place. Where’s Karl Marx when you need him? Bank depositors of the world, unite!

More Bad News

With the banks in debt to the tune of $40 trillion dollars, the pension system is also at risk because the banks and their related financial investment firms underwrote the Credit Swap Derivatives. Moody’s warns in its latest report on the state of public pension systems. As Bloomberg reports, “The 25 biggest systems by assets averaged a 7.45% return from 2004 to 2013, but liabilities tripled over the same period leaving them facing a $2 trillion shortfall as investment returns can’t keep up with ballooning obligations”. The top 25 funds account for 40% of the entire US public pension system. Bloomberg further reports that “The 25 largest U.S. public pensions face about $2 trillion in unfunded liabilities, showing that investment returns can’t keep up with ballooning obligations”, according to Moody’s Investors Service. Americans will be working until they drop dead because, very soon, there will be no such thing as a pension. Very soon, most of these Americans will not have any job to go to.

When this house of cards comes crashing down, how do you think the government will deal with the situation? If you have not listened to V’s interview, I would suggest you do so now.

When Will the Economic Collapse Happen?

The collapse has already started. With 105 nations running from the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency, there is nothing left to back up the dollar. Our currency will hyper-inflate and America’s economy will make the crash of the Weimar Republic look like a picnic.

A German woman in the 1923 Weimar Republic purchasing a loaf of bread. This time is almost upon the American people.

Certainly, even the most ardent sheep understand what the economic collapse of the Weimar Republic led to. What makes us think things are going to be any different?

The crash of the Weimar Republic led to this. Can America’s eventual outcome be any different?

Conclusion

Why did George H.W. Bush build a 100,000 acre ranch in Paraguay? Why is NORTHCOM, a combat organization, engaging in continuing the nonstop urban riot control training? Why are UN military vehicles on our soil? Why did FEMA and DHS schedule 10 disaster drills between September 25th and November 13th? Why are former FEMA and DHS agents, as well as many bankers going into hiding in prepared communities?

Are we to believe that all of these factors are unrelated? It is looking more and more like the bail-out money, which was no more than the private theft of public money, is actually doing what the name implies, it is bailing out corporate executives in advance of the coming crash. America is being forced to fund the getaway gifts for those that have stolen so much from the American people!

Factor in the coming Ebola outbreak and the possibility of an EMP attack, the misery factor immediately and exponentially compounds. The American economy is on fire and the only remnants of what once was is a few hollowed out and charred structures.

Once they have our hard assets,the absolute and final crash and burn of the economy will occur and it will be anarchy in the streets. And more of V’s dire predictions, regarding a post-collapse America will undoubtedly come to pass.

Credit to Common Sense

BILDERBERGER KISSINGER WANTS WORLD ARMY TO FIGHT TERRORISTS

Henry Kissinger, Bilderberg kingpin and architect of overthrowing democratically elected governments, is keen to establish a global mercenary army to fight terrorists, according to Fox News big mouth Bill O’Reilly, who has heartily endorsed such a notion on recent programming.

“I was with Henry Kissinger last night,” O’Reilly said Sunday on ABC News’ This Week.

“And he told me my idea of a worldwide anti-terror force paid for by the coalition of nations under the supervision of Congress — Kissinger has endorsed that for years.”

“Bill O’Reilly and Henry Kissinger on a mercenary force?” Stephanopoulos asked. “Simpatico,” O’Reilly answered.

O’Reilly was speaking in context of a new book he’s flogging regarding the life and death of General Patton. Asked how Patton would deal with the ISIS uprising in Syria and Iraq, O’Reilly stated “he would be saying to President Obama, ‘Give me the Third. I’ll go into Syria, and I’ll wipe ‘em all out,’”

It’s not surprising to hear that Kissinger heartily endorses the idea of a world mercenary army under the guise of fighting terrorism. He directly oversaw coups against elected governments in South America and elsewhere, as well as the slaughter in Vietnam and Cambodia, all under the justification of combating the rise of Communism.

Kissinger is a staunch globalist, intent on pushing for the dissolution of sovereign nations in favor of his vision of a New World Order. Even at the age of 91, he’s still churning out books, openly calling for global government – see ‘World Order’ his latest globalist diatribe in which he bemoans the fact that nation states still exist, suggesting that they are the root cause of modern upheaval in the world.

“The clash between the international economy and the political institutions that ostensibly govern it also weakens the sense of common purpose necessary for world order. The economic system has become global, while the political structure of the world remains based on the nation-state. Economic globalization, in its essence, ignores national frontiers. Foreign policy affirms them, even as it seeks to reconcile conflicting national aims or ideals of world order.”

Furthermore, he views soldiers as “dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns for foreign policy,” according to authors Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. The comments were made in front of Alexander Haig, newly appointed White House chief of staff, in 1973, and have never been denied by Kissinger.

Credit to Infowars