Alex Jones: The Pied Piper of Extremism Who Brands “Truth-Seeking” as Mental Illness

Excellent article on Alex Jones from the editors of the “Signs of the Times” site. I left out the pictures and embedded YouTube videos.

There is a disinformation program literally for everyone. No matter who you are – what your interests are, what your beliefs are, which way you’re focusing – there is a website set up just for you to take you in and to vector your thinking and your attention into thinking the way that they want you to think. – Laura Knight-Jadczyk

A recent article in The Salon is another in a series of pieces that draws attention to the rantings of Alex Jones, through his web TV show and websites, infowars and prisionplanet. Psychology Today’s September edition (pictured left) also fans the flames, it is entitled Dark Minds: When does incredulity become paranoia. With Alex Jones the centerpiece, it makes the case that those seeking the truth are essentially a product of mental instability, by elevating him to ‘Conspiracy King’ status and associating his readers as mentally ill.

In a similar vein, The Salon article presents a parental concern that their son had become sucked into “the Internet conspiracy black hole created by some guy named Alex Jones.” The request for help to guide their nephew “away from this cultish fear-monger” is met with this advice:

“I do not want to conclude without making explicit that if he has dyslexia or some kind of attention-deficit disorder, those are things that should be diagnosed and treated on their own. If his mother’s coddling has prevented him from facing up to these possible problems, that could be adding to his anxiety. So I would definitely, in addition to the camping trip, or wilderness expedition, do what you can to bring to light any organic, diagnosable and treatable conditions he may have.”

In both of these articles we have the suggestion that: Alternative views to the mainstream media found on the internet have been created and led by Alex Jones; and people who are attracted to these views have some form of learning difficulty or psychological disorder.

At the same time there has also been a great deal of recent press coverage on Charlie Sheen’s recent partnership questioning the official 9/11 story. The Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail reported an almost identical article:

Sheen, who appears in the hit comedy series Two And A Half Men, made his claims in the transcript of a fictional encounter with Mr Obama, called Twenty Minutes With The President. It was published on the website of radio show host Alex Jones, two days ahead of Sheen’s appearance on Jones’s show today. Most of his observations make up the basis of all the conspiracy theories surrounding the terror attack. Those who support the theories in the U.S. are known as Truthers.

Both are considered right wing newspapers supporting a conservative/Republican agenda. They normally shy away from reporting any stories that question the official conspiracy that the government is complicit.

Why now is Alex Jones getting so much media attention?
Why Is Alex Jones being portrayed as THE spokesman for alternative views?
Why are readers of his material being linked to mental health disorders?

Is it because he has become the pied piper of extremist truth seeking that brands all the rest as a mental illness?

A false champion of truth

Alex Jones is, in the opinion of Sott.net, part of a limited hang out campaign whereby the attention and energies of those people who have the capacity to realise that something is very wrong with our world are directed towards issues that are either dead ends or which, if pursued, will lead to their own destruction. Jones’ “take back the government” shtick is one such issue. If Jones were worthy of his position as a leading figure in the 9/11 etc. truth community he would be directing people’s attention towards reading between the lines of current world events. He would not be encouraging a survivalist and revolutionary attitude which ultimately plays directly into the hands of the powers that be and facilitates the ramping up of police brutality.

As a reader of this article, you will be aware that America now has all the hallmarks of a Police State, as recent harassment of protesters at the G20 Summit in Pittsburg clearly show. Waving a protest flag at a CS-gas-wielding military personnel is (pardon the pun) likely to end in tears, but this confrontational behaviour is the proposed AJ solution.

Secret Support

Websites such as SOTT.net routinely encounter discriminatory censorship at the hands of the market-leading search engine Google (The Disappeared: SOTT.net and Google’s conspicuous omissions). Other sites that do their best to present an objective picture of the orchestration of world events also suffer. See: Google censors pro-Palestinian news sites and Google’s censors: The cat is out of the bag: Uruknet.info. As Orwell said, lies of omission are the worst and by contrast, Prisonplanet, which avoids mentioning the negative influence of the Israeli lobby and Zionist atrocities, manages to have its ‘news’ articles appear in Google News listings. [Just search one of their favourite topics 'Bilderberg' to see for yourself]. Since it is so easy for Google to decide which information will receive the most attention, doesn’t it make you wonder why the censorship toolbox isn’t switched on for Jones’ views? Instead his presence is inflated across the alternative spectrum. His talent for self-promotion plays a part in this, but the propaganda matrix against which he rails provides him the stage.

Other red flags include the subtle references to infowars on mainstream TV channels, which suspiciously seem aimed to encourage attention. The following news clip is a good example. From around a minute in the report becomes a subtle infomercial – almost like a Guerrilla marketing campaign.

The fact that Jones is now being given significant exposure and airtime by the mainstream media – specifically by disinformation-central Fox News – also does not seem to have raised any question marks among his faithful followers.

Fundamentalist Revolution

Jones’ message is one of fear and revolutionary reaction. ‘Revolt and take your government back’ would be his mantra. However, ‘The government’ cannot be ‘taken back’. ‘The government’ is not what Americans were told it is in grade school. Things have changed. Or rather, they were never the old way to begin with. America’s history is a myth, like all national histories are a myth generated to control people through their belief centers. The American myth revolves around two documents: the American Constitution and the Bible. Jones’ constitutional brigade is right to remind people that laws meant to regulate everyone’s behaviour are being ignored by the few who regard themselves above the rule of law. But his stance as an “aggressive constitutionalist” is akin to the zealous worship with which his fundamentalist Christian neighbours treat the Bible. While these documents have educational value for understanding history, they have long been turned into tools of propaganda. The indoctrination surrounding them has transformed them into idols of worship for people whose moral exo-skeleton requires they place faith in an order of values that lies outside of them. Just as monothesitic religions offer a pseudo-morality to those who need to be told by society to keep on the straight and narrow path, so a cult of ignorance has grown up around the US Constitution as the fount of American civic wisdom.

Our point is not to demean the value of having a social charter by which all can abide, but to highlight the inherent flaw of rallying around a document that means nothing to psychopaths whose worldview lies entirely beyond its boundaries. People can agree that there are minimal rights granted them by nature. But if they do not take into account the existence of their intra-species predator and fast recognise how their emotional investment in a moral order that is not their own disempowers them, their good intentions will be rendered into their opposite by the laws of ponerogenesis – the infection and spread of evil.

As noted, Jones is a gun enthusiast and has spent a lot of energy whipping up support for the maintenance of the right to bear arms in the USA. While he may not have (yet) explicitly said so, it is quite clear that his message is that “Obama’s socialist dictatorship” must be resisted by US citizens by force of arms.

What’s implied here is the dangerous notion that by remaining armed they present a strategic problem to the powers that be, who could never subvert them against their will so long as they remain armed. It’s the kind of MAD paranoia that emanated from the Military-Industrial Complex down throughout society in the Cold War era: so long as we maintain a stockpile of nuclear weapons, the Soviets will never attack us because we would react and everybody could be certain of only one thing: mutually assured destruction (MAD).

The suggestive threat of violence is ever present in both Jones’ manner and words. He hints of bloody revolution at the beginning of one of his blockbusters (appropriately called Endgame), with a quote from HG Wells:

Countless people will hate the New World Order and will die protesting against it.

This is precisely where paranoid characters come in. Standing in front of the Bilderberg meeting in Canada in 2006, Jones grandstands the following through his customary bullhorn:

God is on our side. I stand before the creator of the universe and I ask the creator of the universe, as our founding fathers did in 1776 to lead, guide and direct us and to give us the power and the foresight and the understanding and the will to stand against your entire agenda, including your final plan of world population reduction of 80% that Henry Kissinger penned in 1973. Why do you put mercury in the vaccines? [inaudible] sodium fluoride in the water? Why? Why do you put cancer viruses in the vaccines? Why have you used depleted uranium now in four separate nations? You’re arrogant. You have the sickness that elites have had throughout history in their figurative and in some cases literal ivory towers. You believe that you’re invincible. You will and you are failing now. Your New World Order will fall. Humanity will defeat you. The answer to 1984 is 1776.

1776. What happened in 1776? There was violent revolution in the soon-to-be USA.

Jones has got a deep religious fundamentalist connection – not least with one Texe Marrs, who sees in every event the prophecy of biblical Revelations – he’s a gun totin’ “survivalist”. Do people actually think that he’s going to rant lies to attract followers? Of course not! He’s going to hit every emotional button he can in a whole lot of people who are disenfranchised, downwardly adjusted, and frustrated as heck.

The “9/11 Truth Movement” – vested in the flag, the constitution, guns and Christianity – is being married with the “Moral Majority” – also vested in the flag, guns and Sarah Palin, whose Army of God is bent on establishing a totalitarian theocracy before the coming of their messiah – to form a front of revved up avengers on a crusade to defend their beliefs from crumbling as history brings us closer to reality. It’s an impossible challenge of course, but their determination to hold onto their idols is unyielding and threatening to corral their followers into the trap set for the American people.

Alex Jones and Sarah Palin; now there’s a marriage made in heaven! An interesting footnote to this is Jones’ alleged membership of a fundamentalist Christian church (now disbanded) called Remnant Saints Inter-Continental Congress. Its motto was: Toward the Establishment of the Government of God on Earth. Jones denied ever being a member, although the church disputed this.

Ponerization

From his earliest days ranting on Austin’s public access tv network, Jones has understood the importance of ratings. It doesn’t matter what people say about you, so long as the camera is on you.

The attention fostered on Jones creates the impression in those amenable to his material that he is The Messenger, where in fact he becomes the pied piper of extremist truth-seeking that brands all those who seek to understand the societal re-ordering humanity is undergoing as suffering from mental illness.

There is in fact a psychological disorder at play here. Political Ponerology has this to say about the young angry white males that laud Jones’ pathological behaviour and purchase his DVDs because it’s more in line with their TV culture where reading was never worth the effort:

If various circumstances combine, including a given society’s deficient psychological worldview, individuals are forced to exercise functions which do not make full use of his or her talents. When this happens, said person’s productivity is no better, and often even worse, than that of a worker with satisfactory talents. Such an individual then feels cheated and inunndated by duties which prevent him from achieving self-realization. His thoughts wander from his duties into a world of fantasy, or into matters which are of greater interest to him; in his daydream world, he is what he should and deserves to be. Such a person always knows if his social and professional adjustment has taken a downward direction; at the same time, however, if he fails to develop a healthy critical faculty concerning the upper limits of his own talents, his daydreams may “fix on” an unfair world where “all you need is power”. Revolutionary and radical ideas find fertile soil among such people in downward social adaptations. It is in society’s best interests to correct such conditions not only for better productivity, but to avoid tragedies. [...]

Development or involution in all areas of cultural, economic and political life depend on the extent to which this talent pool is properly ultilized. In the final analysis, it also determines whether there will be evolution or revolution.

Jones’ “truth movement” bears many of the symptoms of what Lobaczewski and his fellow researchers so accurately described as a ponerogenic union:

One phenomenon all ponerogenic groups and associations have in common is the fact that their members lose (or have already lost) the capacity to perceive pathological individuals as such, interpreting their behavior in a fascinated, heroic, or melodramatic way. The opinions, ideas, and judgments of people carrying various psychological deficits are endowed with an importance at least equal to that of outstanding individuals among normal people. The atrophy of natural critical faculties with respect to pathological individuals becomes an opening to their activities, and, at the same time, a criterion for recognizing the association in concern as ponerogenic. Let us call this the first criterion of ponerogenesis.

The American people are in danger of being taken over by the process of ponerization even more than they already have because of the unravelling of safety nets and institutions. Pensions are disappearing, unemployment is increasing, the financial system may collapse, the housing market is falling apart and cities are crumbling as public utilities are sold off and disaster capitalism devours what’s left of the public domain.

Conditions are certainly ripe in the US for a pied piper to vector all that rage generated by the psychopaths in power in a way that ultimately endangers all who work to educate their fellow countrymen and women.

The earlier phase of the union’s activity is usually dominated by characteropathic, particularly paranoid, individuals, who often play an inspirational or spellbinding role in the ponerization process.

Any human group affected by the process [of ponerization] is characterized by its increasing regression as regards natural common sense and the ability to perceive psychological reality. Someone treating this in traditional categories could consider it an instance of “turning into half-wittedness” or the growing of intellectual deficiencies and moral failings.

Once a group has inhaled a sufficient dose of pathological material to give birth to the conviction that these not-quite-normal people are unique geniuses, it starts subjecting its more normal members to pressure characterized by corresponding paralogical and paramoral elements, as expected.

In other words, the group begins to behave no differently than the establishment against which it rails – in this case, the US government.

Paranoid character disorders:

It is characteristic of paranoid behavior for people to be capable of relatively correct reasoning and discussion as long as the conversation involves minor differences of opinion. This stops abruptly when the partner’s arguments begin to undermine their overvalued ideas, crush their long-held stereotypes of reasoning, or force them to accept a conclusion they had subconsciously rejected before.

Such a stimulus unleashes upon the partner a torrent of pseudo-logical, largely paramoralistic, often insulting utterances which always contain some degree of suggestion.

Utterances like these inspire aversion among cultivated and logical people, but they enslave less critical minds, e.g. people with other kinds of psychological deficiencies, who were earlier the objects of the egotistical influence of individuals with character disorders, and in particular a large part of the young.

A [working class person] may perceive this to be a kind of victory over higher-class people and thus take the paranoid person’s side. However, this is not the normal reaction among the common people, where perception of psychological reality occurs no less often than among intellectuals.

In sum then, the response of accepting paranoid argumentation is qualitatively more frequent in reverse proportion to the civilization level of the community in question, although it never approaches the majority.

Nevertheless, paranoid individuals become aware of their enslaving influence through experience and attempt to take advantage thereof in a pathologically egotistic manner.

Political Ponerology – Andrej Lobaczewski

Does that remind you of anyone?

The Secret Team and COINTELPRO

In order to shield themselves from humanity seeing how their pathological influence has coloured everything, the powers that be have manoeuvered voices like Jones into positions of visibility. In doing so, they effectively ordained him “Minister of Truth” over a flock of “Truthers”, and whose church is the “9/11 Truth Movement.” These terms of reference did not come out of nowhere. They were chosen for the dual purpose of vectoring genuine truth seekers to dead ends, where anger hype and paranoia endlessly stress the seeker and those around him or her, and to facilitate the mainstream media’s task of branding those who ask questions of authority and the true nature of reality as insane.

We find it interesting that Jones is now lambasting his “attackers” as “George Soros funded”. There’s no reason to think Jones was aware that this smear tactic has already been used to defame people when he recently employed it in his defense, but it is suggestive of some kind of meme floating around that certain pathological types readily absorb and use to their advantage.

The way Alex Jones presents himself has a great deal to do with his inflated ego. However, that is not the only factor. The media attention he is getting is in many ways quite bewildering until one digs deeper and understands that this doesn’t happen for no reason. Sites and individuals that legitimately seek the truth are ignored and suppressed. Sites and individuals that serve a useful purpose are supported and championed.

The strategy of supporting sides that at first glance appear to be in direct opposition is similar to the way things are staged by the “Secret Team”. L Fletcher Prouty described in great detail how the flow of information is successfully managed by few hands to produce precisely the reaction the powers that be require from their unwitting targets. The best minds running government departments and the best journalists reporting events can be supplied information in a fashion and style tailored specifically for them because the Secret Team knows they will respond to specific information. They know each response because they know every detail about a public person’s life and thus have psychological profiles that tell them exactly how that person is programmed to think. Now consider that if they can manoeuver presidents, generals and technocrats – men and women at the top of their game in public office – to function just how they want them to function, how difficult would it be for them to micromanage someone as brash as Alex Jones?

We cannot emphasise enough that people read Prouty’s works in order to guage the sophistication of a system of information control that is always several steps ahead of the players. The Secret Team now sits atop a gargantuan reaction machine, developed over decades of counter-intelligence programs. It is our experience that cool heads are required to counter some of the negative effects of its mind games. Reactionary individuals only contribute to improving the machine’s efficiency.

Over the years we have made clear our opinion that there is good reason to suspect that Alex Jones is part of a COINTELPRO operation. What people fail to understand however is that serious COINTELPRO operations are never obviously COINTELPRO. They are by definition very closely aligned with that which they seek to subvert and destroy because they would not get very far at infiltration and subversion if they were not. The fact that Alex Jones is an outspoken critic of government and that he exposes all manner of hidden government agendas cannot be taken as evidence that he is not COINTELPRO. In fact, in the crazy world of government agents and agencies, when taken along with other evidence, the fact that Jones exposes government schemes – and extraordinarily loudly at that – becomes evidence that he may well be COINTELPRO. Please note that the important part of that last sentence is “when taken along with other evidence”, some of which we outlined above. To come to a decision on the honest intentions (or otherwise) of Jones and his ilk, we must look for more subtle clues and one of the most useful barometers are the fruits of his labor.

Alex Jones’ infowars.com bio awards him the mantle of “grandfather of the 9/11 Truth movement”. Watch the following clips and decide for yourself whether Alex Jones is a man who seeks Truth or an agent of hate:

Still undecided? Wait, there’s more:

The fact of the matter is that the current economic crisis in the US and the continuing imposition of a global police state, led by the forces of the American empire, are but two of the very serious problems that face humanity today, and Jones and most other alleged truth-seekers seem content to focus only on the superficial aspects of those problems. We will have to wait and see the fate of those hooked on the alternative-media-pied-pipers’ tune. In the meantime, Sott.net has, and always will, play our own tune as we look deeper to uncover the many layers that lie beneath the surface. We ask that those of you who have ears… to listen.

Article on CDC’s swine flu jab PR machine

The Public Relations Machine for the Vaccine Complex, by Richard Gale and Gary Null

One hard lesson we should have learned after Wall Street’s collapse and the government’s handling of the bailout is that there is no reason, whatsoever, for us to sacrifice our good faith and trust in former bankers who now run the Treasury and Federal Reserve. And now as the flu season gets ready to kick off amidst much fanfare and predictions of doom due to a new H1N1 influenza virus, there is emerging sufficient information to raise very serious doubts whether our nation’s health authorities are truly serving the public health instead of commercial interests.

If the flu season goes according to schedule, the vaccine industrial complex will be poised to join Wall Street for record year rip-off profits. We will also likely witness huge Pharma executive bonuses and perhaps gold-plated toilets. Even if the CDC statisticians’ crystal ball used to forecast rampant swine flu infections turns into a complete bust—which would only be one more added to many other failed flu predictions back to 1976—it will nevertheless be a very profitable failure as was the economic collapse for the banking cartel. The vaccine industry has now received orders in the range of 3 billion doses during the course of the coming flu season. The World Health Organization would like to vaccinate two thirds (4 billion) of the global community, and the US alone is spending $2 billion to stockpile the nation with upwards to 250 million doses.

In the US, such profits could never be accomplished without a dynamic, marketing initiative to convince Americans that vaccines will keep them protected and alive. And what better public relations machine for the vaccine complex, and all its supporters in health insurance and professional medical institutions, than our very own Centers for Disease Control and the Department of Health and Human Services. Even better, our tax dollars are there to pay for it all. We pay for the comfort in knowing that the CDC’s disinformation campaign will continue to scare us over the major networks and the New York Times. We can also assure vaccine makers that once and for all they are protected from liability in the event of serious flu vaccine injuries.

Nevertheless, the government has a lot of vaccine vials to distribute, therefore, the CDC needs to sustain the fiction of numerous elderly dying in nursing homes, unvaccinated pregnant moms and children facing life threatening complications, and scores of sick and dead burnt into our national subconscious. It is all part of the CDC’s script to get citizens rushing to their doctors and Wal-Marts to be vaccinated.

Peter Doshi, while at Harvard in the mid-2000s, published a devastating study in the British Medical Journal that systematically unveils the flawed predictive science used to publicize our health agencies’ influenza statistics and mortality rates. His analysis shook up enough health authorities to warrant twelve scientists from the CDC and National Institutes of Health to unsuccessfully take him on. Now at MIT, Doshi continues his analysis of a century’s worth of influenza mortality data and government manipulation of influenza data, such as the annual figure of 36,000 influenza deaths we hear and read repeatedly.[1] Although this magical number was for all practical purposes alchemically conjured up via mathematical modeling back in 2003, it continues to be the most holy number in the CDC’s PR vocabulary every flu season. Doshi draws the conclusion, published in the American Journal of Public Health, that commercial interests are playing the role of science in both industry and government.[2]

Deconstruction of the CDC’s cherry-picked science and a growing anti-vaccination community are just some of the obstacles health authorities face. Therefore, no public relations strategy can have a solid multimedia punch on American citizens without opinion leaders serving as the gnomes for the vaccine complex and our heavily invested government health agencies, which are about to be buried in millions of purchased vaccine vials eager for distribution. This effort requires shock troopers, such as the pro-vaccine prophet Dr. Paul Offit, the creator of the rotavirus vaccine and a staunch critic against any scientist who discovers an association between vaccines and severe neurological disorders. Dr. Offit is on record for an audacious comment that children can tolerate 100,000 vaccinations (yes, you read that number correctly).[3]

However, during this particular flu season, government health officials’ may have a more difficult time convincing Americans to be vaccinated for swine flu if recent polls are reliable indicators. The latest Consumers Union poll released on September 30 shows almost two-thirds of parents will withhold vaccinating their children; fifty percent of respondents’ rationale is that the vaccine has not been tested thoroughly for safety.[4] A poll of pregnant mothers conducted by the internet parent support group Mumsnet.com indicates women are turning more suspicious about the flu vaccine’s true efficacy and safety. The survey of 1500 respondents found only 6 percent of pregnant women “definitely” taking the shot, while 48 percent said they “definitely” wouldn’t. A parallel poll revealed only 5 percent would definitely vaccinate their children.[5] A more recent San Francisco Chronicle survey finds 54 percent saying the H1N1 flu is nothing to be worried about.[6]

A separate study conducted by Harvard’s School of Public Health showed that among the 41 percent who would not get the shot, 44 percent of parents are uncertain they would allow their children to receive it. Aside from many who expressed a fear of the vaccine’s side effects, the poll found 31 percent expressing a distrust in our public health officials providing accurate information on vaccine safety.[7] Therefore, expect an aggressive government public relations campaign during the coming weeks and even months, while our tax dollars are spent on 250 million shots that independent epidemiological evidence is showing may be ineffective at best, and dangerous at worst.

European polls indicate that our neighbors on the other side of the great pond are less nervous about the H1N1 strain’s severity and far more suspicious towards health officials’ rationale for hyping dire warnings of swine flu’s dangers. In France, Le Figaro conducted a poll of 12,050 people showing 69 percent will refuse the vaccination. In a separate French survey, one third of 4,752 doctors, nurses and healthcare workers surveyed would not be inoculated.[8] Twenty-nine percent of Germans surveyed said they would refuse it “under any circumstance” and an additional 33 percent would likely refuse it. In the region of Bavaria and Baden Wurttemburg, only 10 percent of those polled said they would submit their arms to injection. In the UK, a couple polls reported in the Daily Mail last August, showed half of family physicians and a third of UK nurses do not want the swine flu vaccination. Seventy-one percent do not believe the vaccine has been tested enough for safety and the swine flu is much milder than health authorities are saying.

During the course of the CDC’s media war to push forward the vaccine industry’s greed for profit, science and reflective caution are being sacrificed. An important peer-reviewed study appearing in the June 2009 issue of Toxicological and Environmental Chemistry shows a causal relationship between the amounts of ethylmercury (thimerosal) found in inoculations for infants, when administered to monkeys, and cellular toxicity resulting in mitochondrial dysfunction, impaired oxidative reduction activity and degeneration and death in neuronal and fetal cells.[9] These are all indicative signs found in some ASD. But health officials prefer to ignore such results. For the future health of American children, the study’s findings arrive at a bad time when a recent Harvard study now reports autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) has risen to 1 in 91 people compared to the earlier 1 in 150 estimate. But since the study was sponsored by the CDC, the press release makes no indication that just maybe the over-vaccination of children with dozens of injections by the age of 5 years might be a causal factor behind this national epidemic of ASD and other neurological disorders.

During the course of interviewing many parents of autistic children for our documentaries Vaccine Nation and Autism: Made in the USA, the personal stories we filmed repeatedly were that of a once perfectly healthy and joyful child who, shortly after a vaccination or a series of injections, simply vanished from normality. However, national health policy today seems to have almost legislated by divine decree that there is no relationship between vaccine ingredients and autism. Besides, further independent research and first-hand personal stories would only interfere with the propaganda machine and the CDC’s “Seven Step Recipe for Generating Interest In, and Demand for, Flu Vaccination.”

Peter Doshi first brought public attention to the CDC’s PR influenza strategy known as the Seven Step Recipe. Glen Nowak, now the Director of the CDC’s Media Relations, outlined a concise public relations template while serving as the communications spokesperson for the National Immunization Program. Speaking at the 2004 National Influenza Vaccine Summit, he presented the CDC’s seven steps. After a careful review of Nowak’s Powerpoint presentation we discover a very detailed and concerted PR and multimedia campaign that includes the following (quotes are from CDC’s materials):

• To encourage the belief that influenza infection can “occur among people for whom influenza is not generally perceived to cause serious complications (e.g., children, healthy adults, healthy seniors).” In other words, promote flu vaccination to those who don’t really need it.

• In order to “foster the demand for flu vaccinations” the CDC should target “medical experts and public health authorities publicly (e.g., via media) [to] state concern and alarm (and predict dire outcomes)—and urge influenza vaccination.”

• By focusing on the message of dire health threats and human casualties upon those who don’t really need to be vaccinated, the CDC will reach its milestone of “framing of the flu season in terms that motivate behavior (e.g., as “very severe,” “more severe than last or past years,” “deadly”).”

• Throughout the flu season, the campaign would continue issuing reports “from health officials and media” to emphasize that “influenza is causing severe illness and/or affecting lots of people—helping foster the perception that many people are susceptible to a bad case of influenza.”

• Of course, no marketing strategy is thorough without images. Ergo another ingredient in the recipe is to use “visible/tangible examples of the seriousness of the illness (e.g., pictures of children, families of those affected coming forward) and people getting vaccinated (the first to motivate, the latter to reinforce).”

The CDC’s “key points” indicate we are now in that critical timeframe for the CDC to distribute materials to “a variety of partners.” This includes aggressively disseminating all medical reports, studies and PR spins to the soporific media and corporate-funded medical associations to support the government’s mass vaccination efforts. Come November, we will begin to see reports on “pediatric deaths” due to influenza—although Dr. Martin Meltzer, a CDC expert in health economics, has stated “almost nobody dies of the flu” and “deaths [are] associated with flu, but not necessarily caused by flu.”[10] Apparently, the folks over in the various CDC departments and our different federal health agencies don’t communicate with each other very well.

So why should our tax dollars go towards fabricating and/or ignoring science in order to vaccinate Americans? Nowak publicly stated the CDC’s reasons on National Public Radio, “… the manufacturers were telling us that they weren’t receiving a lot of orders for vaccine for use in November or even December … It really did look like we [CDC] needed to do something to encourage people to get a flu shot.[11]

At this moment, we are witnessing a steady flow press releases and articles in the media to convert Americans to the wisdom of national health vaccination policy. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) has issued preliminary positive results from an uncompleted clinical trial testing the H1N1 vaccine on children and young people between 6 months and 17 years of age. The fact that the entire study only enrolled 70 individuals covering this age range should alone raise red flags about any reliable conclusions after the study is completed. Moreover, the study is specifically designed for measuring the necessary immune response to protect youth from the swine flu. It is not a safety study. We usually expect that sound scientific ethics demand clinical trials to be reported after a final analysis of research data, however, the CDC’s Seven Step Recipe is not concerned with scientific facts, or rigorous research protocol. It is simply part of the PR game plan to get people vaccinated and to do it fast.

Donald McNeil, a shill for the vaccine complex writing for the New York Times has printed two recent articles aligned with CDC propaganda. He quotes Dr. Jay Butler, chief of the swine flu vaccine task force at the CDC in order to relieve fears about flu vaccine adverse effects, especially to pregnant women. Dr. Butler said, “There are about 2,400 miscarriages a day in the US. You’ll see things that would have happened anyway. But the vaccine doesn’t cause miscarriages. It also doesn’t cause auto accidents, but they happen.”[12] I hope that is reassuring to all those expectant mothers across the country, especially since none of the approved H1N1 vaccines have undergone rigorous clinical safety trials on pregnant women or the potential adverse effects of mercury-laced vaccines and other ingredients, such as spermacide, detergent and cosmetics, on the developing fetus. Germany on the other hand announced it is now taking preventative measures. Agreeing that the verdict on ethylmercury and squalene safety for children is unsettled, Germany is requiring the vaccine industry to return to their plants and provide adjuvant- and mercury preservative-free vaccine lots.

McNeil’s more recent article in October 7th’s New York Times should be read alongside the Seven Step Recipe for a clear visual unfolding of the CDC’s PR strategy in action. McNeil downplays the growing medical realization that the swine flu is in all likelihood much milder than seasonal flu in order to convince us to roll up our sleeves. Following the CDC script, we see the picture of little 3 year old Clayton being vaccinated, while McNeill compares the swine flu death of an 18 year old Tibetan woman in China with a story of joyful young Brandon and his 9 year old sister gleefully surrendering their nostrils for a blast of live-attenuated H1N1 virus.[13]

While finalizing this article, Peter Doshi replied to an email and drew attention to an event in his Harper’s article that should force us to pause before rolling up our sleeves. Briefly, the 2004 flu season was a debacle for the vaccine complex and federal health officials after 50 million doses of flu vaccine promised by Chiron Corporation were made unavailable, therefore, putting the health industry into a panic. In order to lessen the frenzy previously stirred by its public fear tactics, the CDC downgraded the flu’s urgency to “an annoying illness”, and “stressed the protective benefits of regular hand washing.”[14]

Now that is a national policy I can support. I would much prefer the CDC funding Americans’ soap bills to ward off an uncertain swine flu pandemic rather than using taxes for unsubstantiated threats from the CDC’s national vaccine marketing campaign.

Richard Gale is the Executive Producer of the Progressive Radio Network and a former Senior Research Analyst in the genomic industry. Dr. Gary Null is the host of the nation’s longest running public radio program on nutrition and natural health and a multi-award-winning director of progressive documentary films, including Vaccine Nation and Autism: Made in the USA.

Notes

[1] Doshi, Peter. “Viral Marketing: The Selling of the Flu Vaccine.” Harpers Magazine. March. 2006.
[2] “MIT grad student’s study challenges notions of pandemic flu” MIT Tech Talk. April 16, 2008.
[3] Kalb, Claudia. “Stomping through a medical minefield” Newsweek. October 25, 2008.
[4] “Majority of US parents wary of H1N1 vaccine: poll” Reuters Health. October 1, 2009.
[5] http://www.mumsnet.com
[6] Allday, Erin. “Swine flu draws a shrug, field poll shows.” SF Gate. October 6, 2009.
[7] “Just 40 percent of adults ‘absolutely certain’ they will get H1N1 vaccine, survey finds” Science Daily. October 2, 2009.
[8] “Grippe A: des blouses blanches anti-vaccin” SFR, France. September 18, 2009 info.sfr.fr/france/grippe-a-des-blouses-blanches-anti-vaccin,115335
[9] Geier D, King P, Geier M. “Mitochondrial dysfunction, impaired oxidative-reduction activity, degeneration, and death in human neuronal and fetal cells induced by low level exposure to thimerosal and other metal compounds.” Toxicology and Environmental Chemistry. Volume 91, Issue 4, June 2009.
[10] Manning, Anita. “Study: Annual flu death toll could be overstated.” USA Today. December 11, 2005.
[11] Doshi, Peter. “Are US flu death figures more PR than science?” BMJ 2005; 331:1412 (10 December)
[12] McNeil, Donald. “Don’t blame flu shots for all ills, officials say” New York Times. September 28, 2009.
[13] McNeil, Donald. “Swine flu vaccinations start as officials attack myths.” New York Times. October 7, 2009.
[14] Doshi, Peter. “Viral Marketing: The Selling of the Flu Vaccine.” Harpers Magazine. March. 2006.

Richard Cook on “The End of Money and the Future of Civilization,” credit clearing and setting up alternative currency and trading systems

This is long, so I’ve bolded the highlights of the essay. I’m glad to see that there may be a solution out of our current economic debacle.

Thomas Greco’s “The End of Money and the Future of Civilization”: A Review by Richard C. Cook

It’s too late for anyone to pretend that the U.S. government, whether under President Barack Obama or anyone else, can divert our nation from long-term economic decline. The U.S. is increasingly in a state of political, economic, and moral paralysis, caught as it were between the “rock” of protracted recession and the “hard place” of terminal government debt.

Even if the stock market can be shored up by more government borrowing for “stimulus” spending, it’s a temporary reprieve, because nothing can bring back the consumer purchasing power that was lost when the banks stopped pumping money into the economy through out-of-control mortgage lending. We simply no longer have the job base for people to earn the income they need to live.

The underlying cause of the crisis is in fact the debt-based monetary system, whereby the U.S. ruling class long ago sold out our nation and its people to the international banking cartel of which the Rockefeller and Morgan interests have been the chief representatives for over a century. It was lending on a previously unheard of scale for overpriced assets to people and businesses unable to repay that created the bubbles that burst in 2008, not only in the housing market but also in such areas as commercial real estate, equities, commodities, and derivatives. It was an explosion that reverberated throughout the world.

The Obama administration’s response to the crisis has been to print Treasury bonds both for the financial system bailouts and the sputtering Keynesian stimulus that so far has gone substantially into military infrastructure. This bond bubble is what I have referred to as “Obama’s Last Picture Show.” http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=12512

Government debt is fundamentally inflationary. For a generation, the U.S. dollar has been inflating at an increasing rate, with the economy being kept in a growth posture by selling our debt instruments abroad or allowing foreigners holding dollars to purchase property and other assets on our own soil. The website EconomyinCrisis.org reports that in 2007, the most recent year for which data are available, “foreign entities spent $267.8 billion to acquire or establish U.S. businesses.” http://www.economyincrisis.org/articles/show/2801

Foreigners are spending their dollars as fast as possible, because they are now plummeting in value. It’s increasingly clear that sooner rather than later, the dollar will be dumped by foreign purchasers of bonds, particularly China, and possibly even the oil-producing nations.

These nations know full well that bonds denominated in dollars can never be completely repaid, even if the bonds can be rolled over into fresh debt. It’s this dynamic that is dragging the U.S. economy to the cliff, because real economic growth stopped long ago when our manufacturing jobs were exported. This is because most of the growth since Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980 has been only on paper through financial bubbles. This included the dot.com bubble of the Clinton years that blew up in 2000-2001.

Now, after the Treasury bond bubble of 2009, there is nothing left in America to inflate. With so many jobs gone, the American family home was the last thing of value we owned.

So the air is going out of the tires. Americans who are struggling to work for a living are passive spectators as their jobs, savings, health insurance, pensions, and homes continue to erode in value or even disappear. Last Sunday the Washington Post reported a massive crisis in state and local government pensions. Reporter David Cho wrote, “The financial crisis has blown a hole in the rosy forecasts of pension funds that cover teachers, police officers and other government employees, casting into doubt as never before whether these public systems will be able to keep their promises to future generations of retirees.”

So what, if anything, can be done about it?

Well, the first thing an intelligent physician does is diagnose the disease. Thomas Greco, in his new book The End of Money and the Future of Civilization (Chelsea Green: 2009) , outlines the increasingly familiar story of how things got so bad, and he tells it as well as anyone has ever done. His style is precise and sometimes academic. Behind it, though, is a passion for truth and the type of rock-solid integrity that refuses to sugar-coat a very bitter pill.

More than that, Greco writes about how to change what has gone wrong. His credentials as an engineer, college professor, author, and consultant are impeccable. His book is among the most important written in this decade. It is truly a book that can alter the world and, if taken seriously, give large numbers of people a practical way to survive the gathering catastrophe.

But unlike most commentators, what Greco offers is not another phony prescription for what the financiers and government should do for us, whether through “restarting” lending or another round of stimulus spending. Rather it’s what we should do for ourselves, and could do much better, if we understood what to do and if big banking and big government just got out of the way.

As I said, at the root is the monetary system, whose failure cannot be understood without a history lesson. So Greco writes about the struggle between banking and democracy that took place in the 1790s when the ink on our new national constitution was barely dry.

It was Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the treasury, who compromised the new nation, through what he admitted was “corruption,” by giving the wealthy speculators in Revolutionary War bonds the benefit of federally-sponsored redemption and then by establishing the First Bank of the United States. This early drift toward elitist rule was opposed by Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and others who figured in the creation of what later became the Democratic Party.

Greco writes: “While Jefferson favored a stronger union than that which emerged under the Articles of Confederation, he was vehemently opposed to the reconstruction of monarchic government on the American continent.” Hamilton had said frankly that the British monarchy was the best system of government known to man. Part of the monarchic system was the Bank of England, which Hamilton copied when setting up the First Bank.

But Jefferson, who repudiated Hamilton’s elitist platform, was elected president in what was then called “The Revolution of 1800.” Congress refused to renew the Bank’s charter by a single vote when it was up for renewal in 1811.

But the Second Bank of the United States was chartered in 1816 due to the government debt left behind from the War of 1812 against Great Britain. Thus was set up what became known as the “Bank War.”

It was President Andrew Jackson who dethroned the bankers from power by pulling government funds out of the Second Bank in 1833. Greco writes that in Jackson’s view: “The ‘Bank War’ was a contest for rulership—would the United States be governed by the people through their elected president and representatives, or by an unelected financial elite through their central bank instrument?”

The modern takeover began in earnest during the Civil War when Congress passed the National Banking Acts in 1863-64 which mandated use of government bonds as bank lending reserves, thereby creating a direct linkage between bank profits and the debt the government was starting to load on the shoulders of taxpayers.

The nation’s fate was sealed with the passage of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913. The deal was that the bankers would control the currency, and thereby the nation’s economy, while the government would be provided with an unlimited amount of inflated dollars to fight its wars.

The bookkeeper’s trick of creating money out of thin air, charging interest for its use, then forcing it down the throats of weaker nations by threat of violence, is what has allowed the Anglo-American empire, since the founding of the Bank of England in 1696, gradually to conquer the world. Though President Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act into law, he saw what that action meant. Greco cites Wilson as writing: “There has come about an extraordinary and very sinister concentration in the control of business in the country….The great monopoly in this country is the monopoly of big credits.”

Among other ill effects, the system has ruined the value of the currency. The inflation caused by large issues of bank-created loans is seized upon by the government which goes along because inflation reduces the cost of its deficits. Investors buy Treasury bonds denominated in Federal Reserve Notes then watch their value evaporate over time. In fact Federal Reserve Notes have lost over 95 percent of their value since they were first introduced.

Moreover, it’s additional inflation caused by bank-generated interest that drives up the costs of goods and services, forcing everyone in the economy to try to defend themselves by raising their prices to the max. Greco spells this out too, which almost every economist in the world, with the exception perhaps of Australia’s James Cumes, overlooks.

Bank interest has other tragic effects. It was high interest rates, for instance, that destroyed the Idaho potato industry. A farmer from that region told me at a conference a few years ago that when interest rates skyrocketed in the early 1980s, he asked the president of one of the Federal Reserve Banks why they did it. The answer was they were “ordered” to raise interest rates by the international banking system.

Make no mistake, it’s the banking system, facilitated by the Fed, not unwary borrowers, who brought on the collapse of 2008.

Now, in 2009, the bankers, mainly those in the U.S., have so shattered the world economy by debt mounted on debt that there may be no reprieve except the creation of a slave society based on rule by the rich over the masses of whatever peons should happen to survive the downturn and its tragic effects on employment, health, the food and water supply, and even our ability to cope with climate change.

The political establishment, expressing itself in pronouncements by organizations like the Council on Foreign Relations, see a future, not of economic democracy or increased financial pluralism, but consolidation of world currencies into a small number overseen at the top by the world’s financial oligarchy. Citing the writings of Benn Steil, the CFR’s Director of International Economics, Greco writes: “The ostensible plan is to reduce global exchange media to three—one each for Europe, the Americas, and Asia. One might reasonably suppose that at a later stage, those three would be combined into one currency also under the control of the global banking elite.”

Greco concludes: “The New World Order is upon us.”

With ample justification, he even goes apocalyptic, citing The Book of Revelation in demonstrating the import on a spiritual plane of the elitist takeover: And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. (Revelation 13: 16-17)

But is it really the end, or is there a new world waiting to be born? Greco thinks so. He speaks of the end of an era when unlimited economic growth fed by massive influxes of debt-based money is no longer sustainable. He writes: “That our global civilization cannot continue on its current path seems evident….But I think our collective consciousness is beginning to change. We are becoming aware of limits and are reaching that part of our evolutionary program that says, ‘Stop!’”

Part of the awareness of how to stop must focus on the institutions responsible for the crisis. Greco praises Ron Paul for calling out the Federal Reserve in the 2008 presidential campaign. He cites a statement Paul made to Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan in a 2004 hearing where Paul told Greenspan that the power of the Fed “challenges the whole concept of freedom and liberty and sound money.” Thus Paul and other monetary reformers, though largely ignored by the mainstream media and political establishment, have made it clear that change must start with what really lies at the bottom of elite control: how money is made and who makes it.

Unfortunately, few progressive economists, including Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, and Robert Reich comprehend the monetary causes of today’s disasters. Instead of demanding reforms that would make money the proper servant of a sustainable economy, most call for more stimulus spending; i.e., more government debt, along with “reform” of a financial system that is corrupt down to its very DNA.

So do we really need the bankers’ fake currency, today backed by nothing but a federal deficit of $12 trillion and growing by the day?

Greco says we don’t, and this is what his book about. But it’s not about doing without the necessities of life, or heading for the hills with a gun and backpack. Nor is it about important efforts at macro-level monetary reform like those of the American Monetary Institute, Congressman Dennis Kucinich, or advocates for a basic income guarantee. Rather it’s about individuals, groups, and communities taking control of the monetary system at the grassroots level and creating an entirely new basis for trade than bank-owed debt.

Greco writes about “a new paradigm approach to the exchange function.” The solution, he says, “is to provide interest-free credit to producers within the process of mutual credit clearing. That is the process of offsetting purchases against sales within an association of merchants, manufacturers, and workers. It will eventually include everyone who buys and sells, or makes and receives disbursements of any kind.”

Greco is one of the world’s leading experts in describing alternative or complementary currencies. These are self-regulating systems that facilitate “reciprocal exchange,” not using government legal tender but which are still allowed under the currency laws so long as taxes are not evaded.

Greco discusses the large and growing worldwide “LETS” movement—Local Exchange Trading Systems, like the Ithaca HOURS system in Ithaca, New York.  He describes the Swiss WIR Bank, the longest-running credit clearing system in the world, with over 70,000 members. He writes about the national and international barter exchanges that involve over 400,000 businesses trading at an annual level of $10 billion.

Greco also describes the world-famous Mondragon Cooperatives from the Basque region of Northern Spain. Started by a Roman Catholic priest in 1941, the Mondragon system, he says, is “the hub of what is probably the most successful and progressive social cooperative economy in modern history.”

He also tells the inspiring story of the Argentine trading clubs—the trueques—which, when used with “provincial bonds” issued by regional governments, rescued that country during the 2001 economic collapse brought on by the collusion between the Argentine government and the International Monetary Fund.

Credit clearing is not new. Greco traces it to the medieval European fairs. These exchanges are like banking clearing houses. The world’s largest is the automated clearing house—ACH—operated by the Federal Reserve.

But as Greco points out: “The clearing process need not be restricted to banks; it can be applied directly to transactions between buyers and sellers of goods and services. The LETS systems that have proliferated in communities around the world use the credit clearing process, as do commercial trade exchanges. Credit clearing systems are, in essence, clearing houses—but their members are businesses and individuals instead of banks.”

Alternative currency and trading systems, says Greco, are the wave of the future. Even though most only mount up to partial local successes, they show what can be done. Greco likens these efforts to the Wright Brothers’ first flight that covered 120 feet. They show, he says, that the potential exists for local, regional, then national and international money-free exchanges that eventually could be joined by a single web-based trading platform. This could eventually get rid of the corruption of debt-money altogether.

Chapter 16 of the book is about “A Regional Economic Development Plan Based on Credit Clearing” that shows the potential. Greco writes, “The credit clearing exchange is the key element that enables a community to develop a sustainable economy under local control and to maintain a high standard of living and quality of life.”

This would be a real revolution. What can governments do to help? Perhaps only by removing, as Greco recommends, the privileged position of bank debt-money as legal tender. Instead, let bank money compete with market-based alternative currencies and credit exchanges, if it can.

Greco’s book is a how-to-do-it manual that updates and expands on his previous books, Money and Debt: A Solution to the Global Crisis, New Money for Healthy Communities, and Money: Understanding and Creating Alternatives to Legal Tender. Greco also operates a website that offers advice and support to worthwhile community initiatives. See http://circ2.home.mindspring.com/

My own view is that no one should wait to see who takes the lead in creating the monetary and credit-clearing systems of the future. The time is now. There is no more reason to delay. If the people of the world do not join together in this kind of action, they can likely kiss their economic future and perhaps their livelihoods good-bye. The controllers of the world, those with the big money, the ones who run the banking systems, who own the global corporations, and who finance politicians like Obama, the Bushes, and the Clintons, are now poised in their blindness to extinguish the light of democracy on the planet for good.

Greco is implying that the power of the elite is not only dated but illusory. Thus the way to proceed is not just to oppose them. If they are opposed, they’ll do what they always do, which is to roll out the SWAT teams, the military in the streets, the tear gas, the sound cannon, the concentration camps, the Patriot Acts, the torture chambers, because that is all they know, and it’s what they do best.

The money monopoly translates into a monopoly on violence on an ascending scale. We know that the U.S. sells more weapons abroad than any other nation, and we know that it is war above all that makes the bankers rich.

So let them have their weapons and wars. With all due respect to those brave enough to protest, it’s time for people simply to walk away and set up their own economic and monetary systems as a prelude to a rebirth of humanity as ethical beings in sustainable communities of choice.

The keys, says Greco, are simple: “Promote the establishment of private complementary exchange systems—and use them. Buy from your friends and neighbors wherever possible. Contribute your time, energy, and money to whatever moves things in the right direction.”

Greco also recommends that the unit of exchange for alternative currencies be based on the value of commodities—not necessarily gold or silver, which bankers and governments manipulate, but those commodities readily available within a trading system. State and local governments should do everything possible to protect, encourage, nourish, and participate in these systems.

The irony is that what may appear on the surface to be technical changes in how the exchange of goods and services takes place can have such profound effects. The answer is that systems of exchange reflect entirely different perceptions of the world. Bank-money exchange reflects and creates a system of elite control and human slavery. Reciprocal credit exchange reflects and creates a democratic system on a level monetary playing field.

The difference points to the fact that such reform is, above all, a spiritual endeavor. Thomas Greco has devoted decades to this quest and is one of its foremost visionaries. In an Epilogue he writes: “We will either learn to put aside sectarian differences, to recognize all life as one life, to cooperate in sharing earth’s bounty, and yield control to a higher power—or we will find ourselves embroiled in ever-more destructive conflicts that will leave the planet in ruins and avail only the meanest form of existence for the few, if any, who survive.”

It’s a vision we can all strive to embrace.

“Dress rehearsal for the last contango” The coming crisis in gold

By Antal E. Fekete, The Gold Standard Institute.

I have written about “the last contango in Washington” before. The phrase covers the gold crisis that has been brewing under the surface in the world for 60 years due to the insane gold policies of the U.S. Treasury. As a result all newly mined gold, surpassing the quantity of all gold ever mined prior to 1947, has gone into private hoards, from which it will be next to impossible to coax out. The measure of this act of disappearance of gold is the vanishing of the basis, or the last contango.

In the technical jargon of the futures markets, the basis is the spread between the nearest futures price and the cash price in the same location. The gold market has always been a carrying-charge market — a contango market — due to the monetary metal status of gold. This means that the gold spread has always reflected the carrying charge, the opportunity cost, of carrying gold, most of which is foregone interest.

But a strange phenomenon has been manifesting itself for 35 years, since the inception of gold futures trading. Rather than remaining constant, the basis as a percentage of the rate of interest has been vanishing and now has dropped to zero. At the same time gold holdings registered at the Comex-approved warehouses have been dwindling. Both indicators point toward a shortage of monetary gold that appears irreversible.

The support of the paper gold markets is at stake. Without cash gold backing it up, paper gold trading is not viable.

When the gold basis goes negative, that’s the end not only to contango but also to gold futures trading as we know it. Permanent backwardation in gold has never ever been experienced — unless we imagine that there is a gold futures market in Harare. Gold is not available at any price quoted in Zimbabwe dollars. In that sense the last contango has first occurred in Zimbabwe.

Whatever paper trading of gold is still going on in the United States, it is at best a dress rehearsal for the Last Contango in Washington, which will be followed by the regime of permanent backwardation.

The meaning of this is that physical gold cannot be purchased at any price quoted — this time, yes, in U.S. dollars.

The U.S. dollar rubbing shoulders with the Zimbabwe dollar?

Mainstream economists and financial journalists shrug: “So what? We are not watching the basis of frozen pork bellies trading either when we make monetary policy.” These gentlemen betray a lack of comprehension of the nature of the present financial and credit crisis. Whatever else it may be, this crisis, first and foremost, is a gold crisis with an incubation period measured in scores of years. It is about to reach its climax.

The world appears to be totally unprepared for it — witness the silence surrounding the gold nexus.

Even the so-called sound-money Internet sites misread the situation. They are talking about an imminent breakout of the dollar price of gold from its holding pattern below $1,000 per ounce. Such breakouts have occurred from time to time since 2001, when gold broke through the “resistance levels” of $300, $400, etc. The coming breakout is not distinguished by the fact that $1,000 is an even rounder figure than the previous round figures that have been surpassed. It is distinguished by the fact that we are confronting a world event the like of which has never happened.

It has never happened that gold was unobtainable at any price. It has never happened that all governments have defaulted on their debt obligations simultaneously.

Still, we have to explain the relevance of this to the credit crisis. It is no secret that the bonds, notes, bills, and other obligations of the U.S. government, or any other government, for that matter, are irredeemable. That is, they are redeemable in nothing but more of the same. For example, the bonds of the U.S. Treasury are redeemable in Federal Reserve credit, which is itself irredeemable and is “backed by” the self-same bonds of the U.S. Treasury. Why is it, then, that these Treasury obligations are in demand where one might think that redeemability is a sine-qua-non of issuing them? What makes people participate in this shell game? How can such a crude check-kiting scheme mesmerize the entire population?

Come to think of it, the sight of this Ponzi scheme would shudder the Founding Fathers of our great Republic.

This is not an easy question to answer. But going through all the alternative explanations one by one, we come to the conclusion that the debt of the U.S. government is still redeemable in a sense, however limited or restrictive it may be. The debt of the U.S. government has a liquid market in which it can be exchanged for Federal Reserve credit. In turn, Federal Reserve credit can still be exchanged in liquid markets for physical gold, the ultimate extinguisher of debt, albeit at a variable price.

But if you break that final link, when gold is no longer for sale at any price quoted in U.S. dollars, then the rug will have been pulled from underneath this house of cards, and the international monetary system will collapse like the twin towers of the World Trade Center. And this is the situation that we are confronted with.

Look at it this way. There is a casino where the lucky gamblers can gamble risk-free. Their bets are “on the house.” This casino is the U.S. bond market. There is only one catch. The pile of the winning chips in front of each gambler may become irredeemable at the exit when the hairy godfather waves his magic wand.

As the gold markets enter their phase of permanent backwardation, all rational basis for holding U.S. Treasury debt — or any debt, for that matter — will disappear. There will be a mad rush to the exits, and holders of debt will trample one another to death in trying to cash in on their winnings.

In July I attended the Santa Colomba Conference 2009 at the Palazzo Mundell near Siena, Italy. There were 50 people in attendance by invitation of Robert Mundell of Columbia University, recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics 10 years ago. They were mostly officials of various treasuries and central banks, ambassadors, bankers, professors of monetary economics, authors of monographs, and editors of financial journals. Paul Volcker, a former U.S. Treasury official and chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, was present.

Prior to the conference I circulated several papers among the participants. I was trying to show that the cataclysmic nature of the present credit crisis could not be understood without trying to understand gold, the ultimate extinguisher of debt. We are all passengers on a runaway train on a down-sloping track, the brakes of which (gold) have been dismantled at the top of the hill. The train is picking up speed beyond any safe limit, and a crash appears inevitable.

Our gracious host and the chairman, Professor Mundell, made two references to gold during the two days of the conference, asserting that, apart from wartime, the gold standard has been the most crisis-free monetary system in history. (Of course, all monetary system have a habit of breaking down during wars.) Yet not one participant picked up the ball dropped by Mundell. They kept talking about “green shoots,” the recovery of the stock markets, and coming bailouts and stimulation packages. As to my papers stating that this crisis is a gold crisis, I got just one bit of feedback, in private. Apparently the rest of the participants have been turned off by the four-letter word “gold.” It was not worth their while to read the ramblings of this loner on the problem of “putting spent toothpaste back into the tube.”

One of my papers was an open letter addressed to Volcker. In it I asked whether there were contingency plans in the Treasury or Federal Reserve to meet the coming crisis of permanent gold backwardation.

Volcker declined to answer my question, in public or in private. I am inclined to think that there are no such contingency plans other than “muddling through,” as they have in all previous monetary crises. None of the policy-makers sees the uniqueness of the coming and predictable crisis, or the need to confront it with a comprehensive plan. There is an overwhelming unwillingness to admit that the international monetary system as now constituted has been built on quicksand. It is a mere makeshift that took its origin in the last gold crisis of 1971. Cracks have been papered over as they appeared after every subsequent crisis. Every opportunity to sit down and work out a permanent solution was passed up. This seems to have worked well enough in the past. Policy makers see no reason why it would not work in the future.

Yet the Last Contango in Washington will be different from all previous crises. It will be elemental, devastating, and apocalyptic. It will destroy virtually all paper wealth and render virtually all physical capital idle. It will involve hordes of unemployed people roaming the streets, caring for no law and order, pillaging homes and institutions. It will destroy our freedoms. It may destroy our civilization unless we take protective action.

On the positive side, it will sweep away the complacency of the managers of the regime of irredeemable currency and fundamentally weaken the sway of Keynesian and Friedmanite economics as it has a stranglehold on the teaching of economic science.

The Last Contango in Washington will eclipse the Great Depression of the 1930s. Be prepared.

Legal immunity set for swine flu vaccine makers

Now may be a good time to receive a medical exemption against vaccinations from a sympathetic doctor, in case the government makes life unbearable for those who claim a philosophical or religious exemption. The doctors are  out there—you just have to search around.

Source: Mike Stobbe.

“The last time the government embarked on a major vaccine campaign against a new swine flu, thousands filed claims contending they suffered side effects from the shots. This time, the government has already taken steps to head that off.

Vaccine makers and federal officials will be immune from lawsuits that result from any new swine flu vaccine, under a document signed by Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, government health officials said Friday.“

“The last time the government faced a new swine flu virus was in 1976. Cases of swine flu in soldiers at Fort Dix, N.J., including one death, made health officials worried they might be facing a deadly pandemic like the one that killed millions around the world in 1918 and 1919.

Federal officials vaccinated 40 million Americans during a national campaign. A pandemic never materialized, but thousands who got the shots filed injury claims, saying they suffered a paralyzing condition called Guillain-Barre Syndrome or other side effects.”

FDA Threatens to Seize All Natural Products that Dare to Mention H1N1 Swine Flu

I’ve been taking extra vitamin D3 with my daily dose of cod liver oil for almost a year with good results.

Source: Natural News.

In an effort to censor any online text that might inform consumers of the ability of natural products to protect consumers from H1N1 influenza A, the FDA is now sending out a round of warning letters, threatening to “take enforcement action… such as seizure or injunction for violations of the FFDC Act without further notice.”

“Firms that fail to take correction action,” the FDA warns, “may also be referred to the FDA’s Office of Criminal Investigations for possible criminal prosecution for violations of the FFDC Act and other federal laws.”

The message is crystal clear: No product may be described as protecting against or preventing H1N1 infections unless it is approved by the FDA. And which products has the FDA approved? Tamiflu (the anti-viral drug that most people will never have access to), and soon the new H1N1 vaccine that’s being manufactured at a cost of one billion dollars (paid to Big Pharma by the taxpayers). This vaccine, of course, will be utterly useless because H1N1 will undoubtedly mutate between now and the time the vaccine is ready, rendering the vaccine useless.

In other words, according to the tyrants at the FDA, the only products that may be marketed alongside the term “H1N1″ are those products that either don’t work or aren’t available to most people. Anything that really works to prevent influenza infections — such as natural anti-virals, medicinal herbs, etc. — is banned from even mentioning H1N1 without the threat of being criminally prosecuted.

Note: I reveal the five most powerful natural anti-viral remedies in a free report you can read here

Such are the operations of our U.S. Food and Drug Administration — a criminal organization that’s working hard to do what every criminal organization does: Eliminate the competition! As the defender of Big Pharma, the FDA is also the destroyer of knowledge that seeks to remove educational statements from the internet. Truth has nothing to do with it — it is verifiably true that anti-viral herbs, probiotics and other natural products help protect consumers from influenza — but the FDA cannot allow such statements to remain online for the simple fact that people might become informed. And that, it seems, would be a dangerous precedent.

If people were informed about the healing and protective powers of herbs, they would no longer remain enslaved by the medical establishment. Profits would be lost. Power would evaporate. This is why people can never be allowed to attain any real knowledge about herbs, superfoods or nutritional supplements. And the FDA will threaten people with imprisonment just to make sure they don’t dare publish knowledge that the FDA does not want the people to see.

Targeted by the FDA

Who is being attacked and threatened by the FDA? Lots of companies offering highly-effective natural remedies. You can see a list of some of the companies being targeted right here.

Byron Richards’ company Wellness Resources, a favorite target of the FDA (no doubt because Richards wrote a book attacking the FDA), is also targeted in this censorship campaign. You can see the FDA’s ridiculous complaint against his company here.

The FDA sends similar letters to other companies, invoking terrorizing language designed to scare companies into self-censorship. This is the FDA’s key strategy, and it largely works: Most companies are scared to death to take a stand against the FDA because the ones that do end up being shut down, with their owners arrested at gunpoint and thrown in prison.

This is how natural medicine advocates are treated in the United States of America, the “land of the free and the home of the brave.” (It is really the land of the enslaved and the home of the cowards who don’t even have the courage to protest in the streets anymore…)

This is how the FDA secretly intimidates the natural products industry: It sends threatening letters to anyone who dares tell the truth about a natural product they sell. While pharmaceuticals can openly and brazenly lie about their supposed benefits, natural product companies aren’t even allowed to state obvious truths about their products! (Like “Vitamin C helps prevent colds” or “Omega-3 oils improve moods.”)

Note, carefully, that the FDA openly brands the people promoting natural anti-viral products as “criminals.” The language from the FDA’s own website says it is listing “Web sites that are illegally marketing unapproved, uncleared, or unauthorized products in relation to the 2009 H1N1 Flu Virus.”

In reality, this FDA list is a really good list of highly effective natural products that can protect you from Swine Flu. Many of the companies on the list, in fact, offer products that are far more effective than any vaccine or Big Pharma anti-viral drug. And that, by the way, is precisely why the FDA must accuse these companies of being criminals: Products that effectively compete with Big Pharma’s drugs simply cannot be allowed to exist in the marketplace!

This is all about destroying the competition, limiting consumer options and censoring truthful health information on the internet.

And it’s all paid for by your tax dollars, by the way. This is a government operation taking place under the Obama Administration, which apparently continues in the Bush Administration’s footsteps when it comes to destroying the natural products industry and leaving consumers helpless in the next great pandemic.

Learn what the FDA hopes you never find out: Read my free report on the five most powerful anti-viral products for beating swine flu.

Sources:
FDA Fraudulent 2009 H1N1 Influenza Products List

Old “60 Minutes” Segment on 1976 Swine Flu Vaccine Debacle

Source: DailyMotion.com.

This must-see video with Mike Wallace aired on November 4th, 1979. It featured Swine Flu Vaccine victim Judy Roberts, who became paralyzed with Guillian-Barre Syndrome. Although a year later she was able to walk with braces, she didn’t make a full recovery from the vaccine damage.

To add insult to injury, the government dragged its feet in compensating the thousands of victims who contracted Guillian-Barre Syndrome from the vaccine.

This is a good lesson to keep in mind with the latest ManBirdPig Vaccine from Baxter that is coming soon to a school or clinic near you.

Children ’should sleep with parents until they’re five’

Nothing surprising here, except maybe for those selfish child-abusing parents who need their “space.” Really? Then get a cat, cuz unlike human offspring they like sleeping by themselves too.

By Sian Griffiths, Times Online.

Margot Sunderland, director of education at the Center for Child Mental Health in London, says the practice, known as “co-sleeping”, makes children more likely to grow up as calm, healthy adults.

Sunderland, author of 20 books, outlines her advice in The Science of Parenting, to be published later this month.

She is so sure of the findings in the new book, based on 800 scientific studies, that she is calling for health visitors to be issued with fact sheets to educate parents about co-sleeping.

“These studies should be widely disseminated to parents,” said Sunderland. “I am sympathetic to parenting gurus – why should they know the science? Ninety per cent of it is so new they bloody well need to know it now. There is absolutely no study saying it is good to let your child cry.”

She argues that the practice common in Britain of training children to sleep alone from a few weeks old is harmful because any separation from parents increases the flow of stress hormones such as cortisol.

Her findings are based on advances in scientific understanding over the past 20 years of how children’s brains develop, and on studies using scans to analyse how they react in particular circumstances.

For example, a neurological study three years ago showed that a child separated from a parent experienced similar brain activity to one in physical pain.

Sunderland also believes current practice is based on social attitudes that should be abandoned. “There is a taboo in this country about children sleeping with their parents,” she said.

“What I have done in this book is present the science. Studies from around the world show that co-sleeping until the age of five is an investment for the child. They can have separation anxiety up to the age of five and beyond, which can affect them in later life. This is calmed by co-sleeping.”

Symptoms can also be physical. Sunderland quotes one study that found some 70% of women who had not been comforted when they cried as children developed digestive difficulties as adults.

Sunderland’s book puts her at odds with widely read parenting gurus such as Gina Ford, whose advice is followed by thousands.

Ford advocates establishing sleep routines for babies from a very early age in cots “away from the rest of the house” and teaching babies to sleep “without the assistance of adults”.

In her book The Complete Sleep Guide for Contented Babies and Toddlers she writes that parents need time by themselves: “Bed sharing . . . more often than not ends up with parents sleeping in separate rooms” and exhausted mothers, a situation that “puts enormous pressure on the family as a whole”.

Annette Mountford, chief executive of the parenting organisation Family Links, confirmed that the norm for children in Britain was to be encouraged to sleep in cots and beds, often in separate bedrooms, from an early age. “Parents need their space,” she said. “There are definite benefits from encouraging children into their own sleep routine in their own space.”

Sunderland says moving children to their own beds from a few weeks old, even if they cry in the night, has been shown to increase the flow of cortisol.

Studies of children under five have shown that for more than 90%, cortisol rises when they go to nursery. For 75%, it falls whenever they go home.

Professor Jaak Panksepp, a neuroscientist at Washington State University, who has written a foreword to the book, said Sunderland’s arguments were “a coherent story that is consistent with neuroscience. A wise society will take it to heart”.

Sunderland argues that putting children to sleep alone is a peculiarly western phenomenon that may increase the chance of cot death, also known as sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). This may be because the child misses the calming effect on breathing and heart function of lying next to its mother.

“In the UK, 500 children a year die of SIDS,” Sunderland writes. “In China, where it [co-sleeping] is taken for granted, SIDS is so rare it does not have a name.”

Proprietary Program Used To Manipulate Markets Stolen From Goldman Sachs

By Bill Lindner, American Chronicle.

A Russian immigrant living in New Jersey was reportedly being held on federal charges of stealing top-secret computer trading codes from a major New York-based financial institution — which it turns out, is none other than Goldman Sachs.

Sergey Aleynikov allegedly tried to steal the secret code to unlocking Goldman Sach’s automated stock and commodities trading business — computer codes and related-trading files that help this major financial institution generate millions of dollars in profits each year.

The software appears to give Goldman Sach’s an advantage over its competition when it comes to rapid-fire trading of stocks and commodities. It quickly processes rapid developments in the market and uses top-secret mathematical formulas that allow Goldman Sachs to make highly-profitable automated trades. The markets have been manipulated for some time.

Aleynikov, who has lived in the U.S. for 19 years, began working for Goldman Sachs in May 2007 as a computer programmer and left in early June according to the FBI.

Reuters reports that Aleynikov had a LinkedIn bio that says he joined Goldman Sachs in May 2007 and that he was the vice president for equity strategy for Goldman Sachs and that he was responsbile for ‘development of a distributed real-time co-located high-frequency trading platform,’ a platform that is decribed as ‘a very low latency (microseconds) event-driven market data processing, strategy and order submission engine.’

Someone Could Potentially Outswindle the Swindlers

Federal authorities believe Aleynikov may have had help. Aleynikov allegedly uploaded the stolen information to a German website that is registered to a person in London, leading to speculation that this may be a case of international espionage. It’s unknown how many people, if any, accessed the software that was uploaded to the German website but it is still out there.

A U.S. Attorney is quoted in Bloomberg News as saying that there is a danger that somebody who knew how to use this program could use it to manipulate markets in unfair ways and it could harm Goldman Sachs if the stolen software that is worth millions is disseminated. As noted by Ars Technica, when U.S. government prosecutors claim that the release of Goldman’s program could potentially expose markets to manipulation, what they’re really saying is that some unknown party could use it to out-manipulate Goldman Sachs, and possibly even do something more ambitious like frustrate Goldman’s platform so that it fails while at the same time finding some way to short it. In other words, someone could potentially outswindle the swindlers.

Time will tell what kind of fallout this will have for Goldman Sachs. We need to learn more about the software used by Goldman Sachs, and how it was used to manipulate the market, and if anyone was helping Aleynikov. As noted by Reuters, this case has the potential to shed a light on the inner workings of an important profit center for Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms. We also need to find out why the NYSE is helping keep trades made by Goldman Sachs covered up.

NYSE Changes Reporting Methodology for Goldman Sachs

Aleynikov’s case could explain why the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) decided to alter its methodology for reporting program stock trading — a move that appears to have been intentionally designed to keep stock market manipulation perpetrated by Goldman Sachs for their own gain covered up.

The new rule instituted by the NYSE removes the rule that required any company carrying out program trading — large computer-automated trades worth more than $1 million — to report the trades to the NYSE which made the information available to the public. The new rule makes it virtually impossible to track what’s going on in the NYSE, and appears to have been designed to shield Goldman Sachs in particular.

Goldman Sachs may have asked the NYSE to change its reporting methodology when it was discovered that someone might have cracked the proprietary computer codes used by Goldman Sachs to manipulate the stock market.

By making sure that there is no transparency, as noted by Zero Hedge, the NYSE will be able to cover up the complete dominance that Goldman Sachs exerts over the NYSE, ending the weekly Program Trading updates disclosed every Thursday indicating that Goldman Sachs has singlehandedly captured all of NYSE’s program trading. That’s not good since it means that the NYSE can manipulate the data and release it however they see fit. More on the NYSE’s new secrecy rule that highly benefits Goldman Sachs can be found from AlterNet.

Goldman Sachs Could Easily Manipulate the Market

Executive Order 12631 was signed on March 18, 1988 by then-President Ronald Reagan, after the biggest one-day market loss in history — also known as ‘Black Monday’ — when the Dow Jones Industrial average dropped 508 points on October 19, 1987. Executive Order 12631 created the “Plunge Protection Team,” a working group that was designed to keep the markets operating in the event of a sudden plunge in stock prices.

One of the ideas from the “Plunge Protection Team” was a ‘circuit breaker’ that would put an immediate halt to trading to give investors time to calm down before liquidating their assets in the stock market. A lot more detailed information about the “Plunge Protection Team” can be found in this article from Talking Points Memo.

The working group is an orchestrated mechanism that attempts to manipulate U.S. stock markets in the event of a market crash by using government funds to buy stocks, or other instruments such as stock index futures — acts which are forbidden by law. Adding more credibility to the fact that Goldman Sachs has been defrauding Americans out of billions of dollars for years — with the help of a corrupted, bought off U.S. government — is the fact that the permanent members of the “Plunge Protection Team” are Goldman Sachs alumni. Since 1988…

Goldman Sachs has also profited greatly from a deal with our Federal government regarding a new program instituted by the Feds called “The Supplemental Liquidity Provider” Program (SLP) that supposedly provides “market liquidity” for selected groups of 500 different NYSE stocks per SLP participant. Any guesses on who the only active participant in the SLP program is? Yep! It’s Goldman Sachs.

Again, Goldman Sachs alumni are at the helm of the “Plunge Protection Program,” also known as the “President’s Working Group On Financial Markets,” making it feasible that Goldman Sachs could have easily been frontrunning the rest of the market using their secret proprietary program, easily manipulating the market. Putting those in charge who are responsible for defrauding billions from Americans for the past several decades is both pointless and criminal, yet it continues unabated. A lot more regarding the information above can be found in the article from Talking Points Memo.

Time to End the Political-Economic Oligarchy That has Destroyed the U.S.

As Goldman Sachs’ fraudulent little world comes crashing down, some of their supporters are calling Matt Taibbi –the reporter who has broken several Goldman Sachs stories — anti-semitic. Cries of anti-semitism are nothing more than excuses used by those who perpetrated massive crimes against humanity, and those who support them, to try and hide the truth which needs to be exposed. More on the reality of idiots who constantly try to claim someone is anti-semitic can be found at AdamSolomon.org.

It remains to be seen how the case of the stolen proprietary software will unfold, but it’s painfully evident that our economy will not improve and the defrauding of American will not end until the enablers are finally dealt with and held accountable for their actions. It’s time to put an end to the political-economic oligarchy that has destroyed the U.S. at the expense of all who live here.

Federal Circuit Reverses Denial of Vaccine Injury Claim

Source: Sheri Qualters, The National Law Journal at Law.com, and

“Growing Divide Among Courts On Vaccines
CBS Investigates: Federal Court Decides Boy Vaccinated At 8 Weeks Eligible For Compensation“

The National Law Journal recently reported on a DPT (diphtheria, whole-cell pertussis, tetanus) vaccine case that was reversed on appeal, reports CBS News investigative correspondent Sharyl Attkisson.

The Federal Circuit Court decided that a boy vaccinated at 8 weeks is entitled to compensation, after all.

According to the claim, the vaccination caused a seizure disorder that led to the child, Enrique Andreu, developing a low IQ and language and developmental delays. The Appeals Court (Federal Circuit Court) decided the Special Master (Judge) in the original decision “erroneously… determined that the testimony of Petitioner’s physicians was insufficient to establish ‘a logical sequence of cause and effect’ leading to Petitioner’s vaccine-related injury; and (erroneously) imposed upon Petitioner an elevated evidentiary burden, requiring conclusive proof in the medical literature linking Petitioner’s symptoms to the vaccine at issue.”

In plain language, the Appeals Court sent a message to the Special Masters in Vaccine Court: that they are (at times) interpreting the evidence too harshly against the Plaintiff. In the words of the Plaintiff’s attorney: the Special Masters “require a burden of proof that’s just too high.” The government which defended the case has not made comment. It’s not the first time the Appeals Court has sent such a message to the Vaccine Court. Yet sources say the Appeals Court has not given blanket guidance to the Vaccine Court to help it come into synch with the Appeals Court interpretations and philosophy. If the Vaccine Court’s burden of proof is too high, then what should it be? Where is the bar set?

With those questions yet unanswered, some observers believe reversals such as in the Andreu case could have implications in the autism test cases currently on appeal. The plaintiffs lost three autism test cases soundly in Vaccine Court and all are under appeal. The same law firm that handled the Andreu DPT case is also handling two of the test cases.

Here’s the full article by the National Law Journal.