The Federal Reserve Cartel: The Eight Families

Jan 27, 2012 | Central Banking Elite

(Part one of a four-part series)

The Four Horsemen of Banking (Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup and Wells Fargo) own the Four Horsemen of Oil (Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch/Shell, BP and Chevron Texaco); in tandem with Deutsche Bank, BNP, Barclays and other European old money behemoths. But their monopoly over the global economy does not end at the edge of the oil patch.

According to company 10K filings to the SEC, the Four Horsemen of Banking are among the top ten stock holders of virtually every Fortune 500 corporation.[1]

So who then are the stockholders in these money center banks?

This information is guarded much more closely. My queries to bank regulatory agencies regarding stock ownership in the top 25 US bank holding companies were given Freedom of Information Act status, before being denied on “national security” grounds. This is rather ironic, since many of the bank’s stockholders reside in Europe.

One important repository for the wealth of the global oligarchy that owns these bank holding companies is US Trust Corporation – founded in 1853 and now owned by Bank of America. A recent US Trust Corporate Director and Honorary Trustee was Walter Rothschild. Other directors included Daniel Davison of JP Morgan Chase, Richard Tucker of Exxon Mobil, Daniel Roberts of Citigroup and Marshall Schwartz of Morgan Stanley. [2]

J. W. McCallister, an oil industry insider with House of Saud connections, wrote in The Grim Reaper that information he acquired from Saudi bankers cited 80% ownership of the New York Federal Reserve Bank- by far the most powerful Fed branch- by just eight families, four of which reside in the US. They are the Goldman Sachs, Rockefellers, Lehmans and Kuhn Loebs of New York; the Rothschilds of Paris and London; the Warburgs of Hamburg; the Lazards of Paris; and the Israel Moses Seifs of Rome.

CPA Thomas D. Schauf corroborates McCallister’s claims, adding that ten banks control all twelve Federal Reserve Bank branches. He names N.M. Rothschild of London, Rothschild Bank of Berlin, Warburg Bank of Hamburg, Warburg Bank of Amsterdam, Lehman Brothers of New York, Lazard Brothers of Paris, Kuhn Loeb Bank of New York, Israel Moses Seif Bank of Italy, Goldman Sachs of New York and JP Morgan Chase Bank of New York. Schauf lists William Rockefeller, Paul Warburg, Jacob Schiff and James Stillman as individuals who own large shares of the Fed. [3] The Schiffs are insiders at Kuhn Loeb. The Stillmans are Citigroup insiders, who married into the Rockefeller clan at the turn of the century.

Eustace Mullins came to the same conclusions in his book The Secrets of the Federal Reserve, in which he displays charts connecting the Fed and its member banks to the families of Rothschild, Warburg, Rockefeller and the others. [4]

The control that these banking families exert over the global economy cannot be overstated and is quite intentionally shrouded in secrecy. Their corporate media arm is quick to discredit any information exposing this private central banking cartel as “conspiracy theory”. Yet the facts remain.

The House of Morgan

The Federal Reserve Bank was born in 1913, the same year US banking scion J. Pierpont Morgan died and the Rockefeller Foundation was formed. The House of Morgan presided over American finance from the corner of Wall Street and Broad, acting as quasi-US central bank since 1838, when George Peabody founded it in London.

Peabody was a business associate of the Rothschilds. In 1952 Fed researcher Eustace Mullins put forth the supposition that the Morgans were nothing more than Rothschild agents. Mullins wrote that the Rothschilds, “…preferred to operate anonymously in the US behind the facade of J.P. Morgan & Company”. [5]

Author Gabriel Kolko stated, “Morgan’s activities in 1895-1896 in selling US gold bonds in Europe were based on an alliance with the House of Rothschild.” [6]

The Morgan financial octopus wrapped its tentacles quickly around the globe. Morgan Grenfell operated in London. Morgan et Ce ruled Paris. The Rothschild’s Lambert cousins set up Drexel & Company in Philadelphia.

The House of Morgan catered to the Astors, DuPonts, Guggenheims, Vanderbilts and Rockefellers. It financed the launch of AT&T, General Motors, General Electric and DuPont. Like the London-based Rothschild and Barings banks, Morgan became part of the power structure in many countries.

By 1890 the House of Morgan was lending to Egypt’s central bank, financing Russian railroads, floating Brazilian provincial government bonds and funding Argentine public works projects. A recession in 1893 enhanced Morgan’s power. That year Morgan saved the US government from a bank panic, forming a syndicate to prop up government reserves with a shipment of $62 million worth of Rothschild gold. [7]

Morgan was the driving force behind Western expansion in the US, financing and controlling West-bound railroads through voting trusts. In 1879 Cornelius Vanderbilt’s Morgan-financed New York Central Railroad gave preferential shipping rates to John D. Rockefeller’s budding Standard Oil monopoly, cementing the Rockefeller/Morgan relationship.

The House of Morgan now fell under Rothschild and Rockefeller family control. A New York Herald headline read, “Railroad Kings Form Gigantic Trust”. J. Pierpont Morgan, who once stated, “Competition is a sin”, now opined gleefully, “Think of it. All competing railroad traffic west of St. Louis placed in the control of about thirty men.”[8]

Morgan and Edward Harriman’s banker Kuhn Loeb held a monopoly over the railroads, while banking dynasties Lehman, Goldman Sachs and Lazard joined the Rockefellers in controlling the US industrial base. [9]

In 1903 Banker’s Trust was set up by the Eight Families. Benjamin Strong of Banker’s Trust was the first Governor of the New York Federal Reserve Bank. The 1913 creation of the Fed fused the power of the Eight Families to the military and diplomatic might of the US government. If their overseas loans went unpaid, the oligarchs could now deploy US Marines to collect the debts. Morgan, Chase and Citibank formed an international lending syndicate.

The House of Morgan was cozy with the British House of Windsor and the Italian House of Savoy. The Kuhn Loebs, Warburgs, Lehmans, Lazards, Israel Moses Seifs and Goldman Sachs also had close ties to European royalty. By 1895 Morgan controlled the flow of gold in and out of the US. The first American wave of mergers was in its infancy and was being promoted by the bankers. In 1897 there were sixty-nine industrial mergers. By 1899 there were twelve-hundred. In 1904 John Moody – founder of Moody’s Investor Services – said it was impossible to talk of Rockefeller and Morgan interests as separate. [10]

Public distrust of the combine spread. Many considered them traitors working for European old money. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, Andrew Carnegie’s US Steel and Edward Harriman’s railroads were all financed by banker Jacob Schiff at Kuhn Loeb, who worked closely with the European Rothschilds.

Several Western states banned the bankers. Populist preacher William Jennings Bryan was thrice the Democratic nominee for President from 1896 -1908. The central theme of his anti-imperialist campaign was that America was falling into a trap of “financial servitude to British capital”. Teddy Roosevelt defeated Bryan in 1908, but was forced by this spreading populist wildfire to enact the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. He then went after the Standard Oil Trust.

In 1912 the Pujo hearings were held, addressing concentration of power on Wall Street. That same year Mrs. Edward Harriman sold her substantial shares in New York’s Guaranty Trust Bank to J.P. Morgan, creating Morgan Guaranty Trust. Judge Louis Brandeis convinced President Woodrow Wilson to call for an end to interlocking board directorates. In 1914 the Clayton Anti-Trust Act was passed.

Jack Morgan – J. Pierpont’s son and successor – responded by calling on Morgan clients Remington and Winchester to increase arms production. He argued that the US needed to enter WWI. Goaded by the Carnegie Foundation and other oligarchy fronts, Wilson accommodated. As Charles Tansill wrote in America Goes to War, “Even before the clash of arms, the French firm of Rothschild Freres cabled to Morgan & Company in New York suggesting the flotation of a loan of $100 million, a substantial part of which was to be left in the US to pay for French purchases of American goods.”

The House of Morgan financed half the US war effort, while receiving commissions for lining up contractors like GE, Du Pont, US Steel, Kennecott and ASARCO. All were Morgan clients. Morgan also financed the British Boer War in South Africa and the Franco-Prussian War. The 1919 Paris Peace Conference was presided over by Morgan, which led both German and Allied reconstruction efforts. [11]

In the 1930’s populism resurfaced in America after Goldman Sachs, Lehman Bank and others profited from the Crash of 1929. [12] House Banking Committee Chairman Louis McFadden (D-NY) said of the Great Depression, “It was no accident. It was a carefully contrived occurrence…The international bankers sought to bring about a condition of despair here so they might emerge as rulers of us all”.

Sen. Gerald Nye (D-ND) chaired a munitions investigation in 1936. Nye concluded that the House of Morgan had plunged the US into WWI to protect loans and create a booming arms industry. Nye later produced a document titled The Next War, which cynically referred to “the old goddess of democracy trick”, through which Japan could be used to lure the US into WWII.

In 1937 Interior Secretary Harold Ickes warned of the influence of “America’s 60 Families”. Historian Ferdinand Lundberg later penned a book of the exact same title. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas decried, “Morgan influence…the most pernicious one in industry and finance today.”

Jack Morgan responded by nudging the US towards WWII. Morgan had close relations with the Iwasaki and Dan families – Japan’s two wealthiest clans – who have owned Mitsubishi and Mitsui, respectively, since the companies emerged from 17th Century shogunates. When Japan invaded Manchuria, slaughtering Chinese peasants at Nanking, Morgan downplayed the incident. Morgan also had close relations with Italian fascist Benito Mussolini, while German Nazi Dr. Hjalmer Schacht was a Morgan Bank liaison during WWII. After the war Morgan representatives met with Schacht at the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) in Basel, Switzerland. [13]

The House of Rockefeller

BIS is the most powerful bank in the world, a global central bank for the Eight Families who control the private central banks of almost all Western and developing nations. The first President of BIS was Rockefeller banker Gates McGarrah- an official at Chase Manhattan and the Federal Reserve. McGarrah was the grandfather of former CIA director Richard Helms. The Rockefellers- like the Morgans- had close ties to London. David Icke writes in Children of the Matrix, that the Rockefellers and Morgans were just “gofers” for the European Rothschilds. [14]

BIS is owned by the Federal Reserve, Bank of England, Bank of Italy, Bank of Canada, Swiss National Bank, Nederlandsche Bank, Bundesbank and Bank of France.

Historian Carroll Quigley wrote in his epic book Tragedy and Hope that BIS was part of a plan, “to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole…to be controlled in a feudalistic fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert by secret agreements.”

The US government had a historical distrust of BIS, lobbying unsuccessfully for its demise at the 1944 post-WWII Bretton Woods Conference. Instead the Eight Families’ power was exacerbated, with the Bretton Woods creation of the IMF and the World Bank. The US Federal Reserve only took shares in BIS in September 1994. [15]

BIS holds at least 10% of monetary reserves for at least 80 of the world’s central banks, the IMF and other multilateral institutions. It serves as financial agent for international agreements, collects information on the global economy and serves as lender of last resort to prevent global financial collapse.

BIS promotes an agenda of monopoly capitalist fascism. It gave a bridge loan to Hungary in the 1990’s to ensure privatization of that country’s economy. It served as conduit for Eight Families funding of Adolf Hitler- led by the Warburg’s J. Henry Schroeder and Mendelsohn Bank of Amsterdam. Many researchers assert that BIS is at the nadir of global drug money laundering. [16]

It is no coincidence that BIS is headquartered in Switzerland, favorite hiding place for the wealth of the global aristocracy and headquarters for the P-2 Italian Freemason’s Alpina Lodge and Nazi International. Other institutions which the Eight Families control include the World Economic Forum, the International Monetary Conference and the World Trade Organization.

Bretton Woods was a boon to the Eight Families. The IMF and World Bank were central to this “new world order”. In 1944 the first World Bank bonds were floated by Morgan Stanley and First Boston. The French Lazard family became more involved in House of Morgan interests. Lazard Freres- France’s biggest investment bank- is owned by the Lazard and David-Weill families- old Genoese banking scions represented by Michelle Davive. A recent Chairman and CEO of Citigroup was Sanford Weill.

In 1968 Morgan Guaranty launched Euro-Clear, a Brussels-based bank clearing system for Eurodollar securities. It was the first such automated endeavor. Some took to calling Euro-Clear “The Beast”. Brussels serves as headquarters for the new European Central Bank and for NATO. In 1973 Morgan officials met secretly in Bermuda to illegally resurrect the old House of Morgan, twenty years before Glass Steagal Act was repealed. Morgan and the Rockefellers provided the financial backing for Merrill Lynch, boosting it into the Big 5 of US investment banking. Merrill is now part of Bank of America.

John D. Rockefeller used his oil wealth to acquire Equitable Trust, which had gobbled up several large banks and corporations by the 1920’s. The Great Depression helped consolidate Rockefeller’s power. His Chase Bank merged with Kuhn Loeb’s Manhattan Bank to form Chase Manhattan, cementing a long-time family relationship. The Kuhn-Loeb’s had financed – along with Rothschilds – Rockefeller’s quest to become king of the oil patch. National City Bank of Cleveland provided John D. with the money needed to embark upon his monopolization of the US oil industry. The bank was identified in Congressional hearings as being one of three Rothschild-owned banks in the US during the 1870’s, when Rockefeller first incorporated as Standard Oil of Ohio. [17]

One Rockefeller Standard Oil partner was Edward Harkness, whose family came to control Chemical Bank. Another was James Stillman, whose family controlled Manufacturers Hanover Trust. Both banks have merged under the JP Morgan Chase umbrella. Two of James Stillman’s daughters married two of William Rockefeller’s sons. The two families control a big chunk of Citigroup as well. [18]

In the insurance business, the Rockefellers control Metropolitan Life, Equitable Life, Prudential and New York Life. Rockefeller banks control 25% of all assets of the 50 largest US commercial banks and 30% of all assets of the 50 largest insurance companies. [19] Insurance companies- the first in the US was launched by Freemasons through their Woodman’s of America- play a key role in the Bermuda drug money shuffle.

Companies under Rockefeller control include Exxon Mobil, Chevron Texaco, BP Amoco, Marathon Oil, Freeport McMoran, Quaker Oats, ASARCO, United, Delta, Northwest, ITT, International Harvester, Xerox, Boeing, Westinghouse, Hewlett-Packard, Honeywell, International Paper, Pfizer, Motorola, Monsanto, Union Carbide and General Foods.

The Rockefeller Foundation has close financial ties to both Ford and Carnegie Foundations. Other family philanthropic endeavors include Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, General Education Board, Rockefeller University and the University of Chicago- which churns out a steady stream of far right economists as apologists for international capital, including Milton Friedman.

The family owns 30 Rockefeller Plaza, where the national Christmas tree is lighted every year, and Rockefeller Center. David Rockefeller was instrumental in the construction of the World Trade Center towers. The main Rockefeller family home is a hulking complex in upstate New York known as Pocantico Hills. They also own a 32-room 5th Avenue duplex in Manhattan, a mansion in Washington, DC, Monte Sacro Ranch in Venezuela, coffee plantations in Ecuador, several farms in Brazil, an estate at Seal Harbor, Maine and resorts in the Caribbean, Hawaii and Puerto Rico. [20]

The Dulles and Rockefeller families are cousins. Allen Dulles created the CIA, assisted the Nazis, covered up the Kennedy hit from his Warren Commission perch and struck a deal with the Muslim Brotherhood to create mind-controlled assassins. [21]

Brother John Foster Dulles presided over the phony Goldman Sachs trusts before the 1929 stock market crash and helped his brother overthrow governments in Iran and Guatemala. Both were Skull & Bones, Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) insiders and 33rd Degree Masons. [22]

The Rockefellers were instrumental in forming the depopulation-oriented Club of Rome at their family estate in Bellagio, Italy. Their Pocantico Hills estate gave birth to the Trilateral Commission. The family is a major funder of the eugenics movement which spawned Hitler, human cloning and the current DNA obsession in US scientific circles.

John Rockefeller Jr. headed the Population Council until his death. [23] His namesake son is a Senator from West Virginia. Brother Winthrop Rockefeller was Lieutenant Governor of Arkansas and remains the most powerful man in that state. In an October 1975 interview with Playboy magazine, Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller- who was also Governor of New York- articulated his family’s patronizing worldview, “I am a great believer in planning- economic, social, political, military, total world planning.”

But of all the Rockefeller brothers, it is Trilateral Commission (TC) founder and Chase Manhattan Chairman David who has spearheaded the family’s fascist agenda on a global scale. He defended the Shah of Iran, the South African apartheid regime and the Chilean Pinochet junta. He was the biggest financier of the CFR, the TC and (during the Vietnam War) the Committee for an Effective and Durable Peace in Asia- a contract bonanza for those who made their living off the conflict.

Nixon asked him to be Secretary of Treasury, but Rockefeller declined the job, knowing his power was much greater at the helm of the Chase. Author Gary Allen writes in The Rockefeller File that in 1973, “David Rockefeller met with twenty-seven heads of state, including the rulers of Russia and Red China.”

Following the 1975 Nugan Hand Bank/CIA coup against Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, his British Crown-appointed successor Malcolm Fraser sped to the US, where he met with President Gerald Ford after conferring with David Rockefeller. [24]

Next Week: Part II: Freemasons & The Bank of the United States

Notes

[1] 10K Filings of Fortune 500 Corporations to SEC. 3-91

[2] 10K Filing of US Trust Corporation to SEC. 6-28-95

[3] “The Federal Reserve ‘Fed Up’. Thomas Schauf. www.davidicke.com 1-02

[4] The Secrets of the Federal Reserve. Eustace Mullins. Bankers Research Institute. Staunton, VA. 1983. p.179

[5] Ibid. p.53

[6] The Triumph of Conservatism. Gabriel Kolko. MacMillan and Company New York. 1963. p.142

[7] Rule by Secrecy: The Hidden History that Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons and the Great Pyramids. Jim Marrs. HarperCollins Publishers. New York. 2000. p.57

[8] The House of Morgan. Ron Chernow. Atlantic Monthly Press NewYork 1990

[9] Marrs. p.57

[10] Democracy for the Few. Michael Parenti. St. Martin’s Press. New York. 1977. p.178

[11] Chernow

[12] The Great Crash of 1929. John Kenneth Galbraith. Houghton, Mifflin Company. Boston. 1979. p.148

[13] Chernow

[14] Children of the Matrix. David Icke. Bridge of Love. Scottsdale, AZ. 2000

[15] The Confidence Game: How Un-Elected Central Bankers are Governing the Changed World Economy. Steven Solomon. Simon & Schuster. New York. 1995. p.112

[16] Marrs. p.180

[17] Ibid. p.45

[18] The Money Lenders: The People and Politics of the World Banking Crisis. Anthony Sampson. Penguin Books. New York. 1981

[19] The Rockefeller File. Gary Allen. ’76 Press. Seal Beach, CA. 1977

[20] Ibid

[21] Dope Inc.: The Book That Drove Kissinger Crazy. Editors of Executive Intelligence Review. Washington, DC. 1992

[22] Marrs.

[23] The Rockefeller Syndrome. Ferdinand Lundberg. Lyle Stuart Inc. Secaucus, NJ. 1975. p.296

[24] Marrs. p.53

Dean Henderson is the author of Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families & Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics & Terror Network and The Grateful Unrich: Revolution in 50 Countries. His Left Hook blog is at www.deanhenderson.wordpress.com

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=25080

Largest Banks Likely Profited By Borrowing From Federal Reserve, Lending To Federal Government

Jan 27, 2012 | Central Banking Elite

Largest Banks Likely Profited By Borrowing From Federal Reserve, Lending To Federal Government

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A newly-released study from the Congressional Research Service bolsters claims that the nation’s largest banks profited off the Federal Reserve’s financial crisis-era programs by borrowing cash for next to nothing, then lending it back to the federal government at substantially higher rates.

The report reinforces long-held beliefs that the banking system in essence engaged in taxpayer-financed arbitrage: They got money for free, then lent it back to Uncle Sam while collecting juicy returns. Left out of the equation are the millions of everyday borrowers, like households and small businesses, who were unable to secure loans needed to tide them over until the crisis ended.

The Fed released records under pressure in December and March that showed the extent of its largesse. The CRS study shows for the first time how some of the most sophisticated financial firms could have taken the Fed’s money and flipped easy profits simply by lending it back to another arm of the government.

The report was requested by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who likened the crisis-era emergency loans to “direct corporate welfare to big banks,” in a statement. The cash likely was lent back to Uncle Sam in the form of Treasuries and other debt “instead of using the Fed loans to reinvest in the economy,” Sanders added.

In all, more than $3 trillion was lent to financial institutions from the Fed, and terms were generous. Junk-rated securities were pledged as collateral for taxpayer-backed loans. The Fed did not provide conditions for how the money was to be used.

As part of one Fed program, on 33 separate occasions, nine firms were able to borrow between $5.2 billion and $6.2 billion in U.S. government securities for four-week intervals, paying one-time fees that amounted to the minuscule rate of 0.0078 percent.

In another, financial firms pledged more than $1.3 trillion in junk-rated securities to the Fed for cheap overnight loans. The rates were as low as 0.5 percent.

During one three-month period in 2009, Bank of America borrowed more than $48 billion at rates ranging from 0.25 to 0.5 percent. Meanwhile, the largest U.S. lender tripled its holdings of Treasuries and other taxpayer-backed debt to about $15 billion — securities that yielded 3.5 percent.

During the third quarter of 2009, the bank borrowed $2.9 billion from the Fed through a program that charged 0.25 percent interest. In that same period, Bank of America increased its holdings of taxpayer-backed federal debt by $12 billion, according to the Congressional Research Service. Those securities yielded an average of 3.2 percent.

“Bank of America provided vital support to the economy throughout the financial crisis and we continue to support businesses and individuals today through our lending and capital raising activities,” spokesman Jerry Dubrowski said in an email.

In another period, JPMorgan Chase, the second-largest bank, swelled its holdings of taxpayer-backed federal debt by $20 billion, which yielded 2.1 percent, while at the same time borrowing $29 billion from the Fed at a rate of 0.3 percent.

JPMorgan did not respond to a request for comment.

In contrast, during the first year of the Obama administration, small businesses shuttered due to lackluster sales and a lack of credit, foreclosures surged, and credit contracted at one of the quickest rates on record.

“Why wasn’t the Fed providing these same sweetheart deals to the American people?” asked Warren Gunnels, senior policy adviser to Sanders. “The Fed was practicing socialism for the rich, powerful and the connected, while the federal government was promoting rugged individualism to everyone else.”

At the time, Fed officials said its bailout programs were necessary to restart the flow of credit. If money couldn’t flow to lenders, households and businesses would be next. Even more layoffs and foreclosures could have ensued, officials argued.

Lending, however, decreased, according to Fed and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation data. Mortgage rates dropped, but mortgages were harder to come by. Credit card lines were slashed. Loans were called in. New financing plunged. In 2009, outstanding credit to U.S. households declined by $234.5 billion. For non-corporate businesses, credit plunged $296.1 billion, Fed data show.

Sanders said the spread between firms’ borrowing rates and their lending rates to Uncle Sam amounted to “free money.” For Bank of America during the third quarter of 2009, the spread was nearly 3 percent.

Dubrowski countered by pointing out that Bank of America “extended $184 billion in credit to individuals and businesses” during that time.

The author of the CRS report, Marc Labonte, cautioned that “correlation does not prove causation.”

“There is no information available on how banks used specific funds borrowed from the Federal Reserve,” he wrote.

The Federal Reserve declined to comment.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/26/fed-lending-helped-wall-street_n_853884.html

J.P. Morgan’s hunt for Afghan gold

Jan 27, 2012 | Central Banking Elite

A team of bankers starts to tap the country’s vast mineral riches, with help from the Pentagon.

By James Bandler, editor-at-large

Villagers assembled for a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the gold mine in Qara Zaghan. The U.S. government estimates that minerals worth nearly $1 trillion lie beneath Afghanistan’s soil.

FORTUNE — Qara Zaghan, Afghanistan: The four Black Hawk helicopters sweep down on this remote river valley, flying fast and single file. Snow covers the mountains’ peaks, but the lower slopes look like rust — dry, rocky, and bare. As we bank around the river bend, we see our first flash of green in the fields below and then the rectangular mud huts of the village, where hundreds of Afghans mass to greet us.

“That’s the mine over there,” one of my companions says, pointing to the cliffs rising above the village.

That’s it? That’s the gold mine? It doesn’t look all that different from the forbidding country we’ve been traversing: just another pile of rocks and scree. The jet-lagged man in the seat across from me knows better. His sleepy eyes are suddenly alert. If anyone can wrest a fortune from Afghanistan’s rubble, it is this man, Ian Hannam.

Arriving in a developing nation with his iPad and his enigmatic smile, Hannam personifies the soft side of Western power. He doesn’t bend people to his will with weapons or threats. But there is no mistaking the dealmaker’s impact: In his wake, mountains are razed, villages electrified, schools built, and fortunes made.

To Hannam, chairman of J.P. Morgan Capital Markets, Afghanistan represents a gigantic, untapped opportunity — one of the last great natural-resource frontiers. Landlocked and pinioned by imperial invaders, Afghanistan has been cursed by its geography for thousands of years. Now, for the first time, Hannam believes, that geography could be an asset. The two most resource-starved nations on the planet, China and India, sit next door to Afghanistan, where, according to Pentagon estimates, minerals worth nearly $1 trillion lie buried. True, there is a war under way. And it’s unclear how the death of Osama bin Laden will impact the country’s political and economic environment. But Hannam is not your usual investment banker: A former soldier, he has done business in plenty of strife-torn countries. So have all the members of his team, two of them former special forces soldiers who have fought here.

Attending the ribbon cutting were (from left) mine owner Sadat Naderi; Mining Minister Wahidullah Shahrani; J.P. Morgan’s Ian Hannam; and (behind Hannam) investor Pairoj Piempongsant.

As he flies to the mine for the ribbon-cutting ceremony, Hannam thinks back over the past 12 months. This little mine, where operations have yet to commence, is puny by J.P. Morgan’s (JPM) standards, but he knows it might be the project for which he is remembered. A lot of powerful people, including the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Gen. David Petraeus, are counting on him to demonstrate that the country is safe for foreign investors. Hannam has chafed at times under the pressure from the Pentagon, and the cold-eyed realist in him wonders whether unrealistic expectations are being placed on this business venture.

Hannam ducks his head and climbs out of the chopper, necktie flapping in the prop wash. As he trudges up the hill, even the jaded, 55-year-old banker seems swept away by the pageantry of the moment: the village elder in a ceremonial robe, the silhouettes of women watching from the ridges, the saluting Afghan soldier. Hannam is enveloped in a crush of local tribesmen chattering excitedly in Dari. One of them puts a garland around his neck. Another hands him a Ziploc bag containing a chunk of Afghan gold. A mullah utters prayers. Afghanistan’s minister of mining gives a long speech.

Hannam and his local partner, Sadat Naderi, walk up the hill to pose for photographs. Naderi points to a narrow band of quartz that runs in an east-west line across the cliff side. It shimmers in the sun. That is the treasure, he says.

“Unless,” Hannam mutters, “it’s fool’s gold.”

Absurd risks vs. amazing rewards

Investing in conflict zones is often thrilling, but the great commodities rush that J.P. Morgan and the Pentagon are trying to spark in Afghanistan creates a risk/reward equation of a different magnitude. It’s extreme at both ends.

When J.P. Morgan launched its Afghan initiative in 2010, violence was at its worst since the American-led occupation began in 2001. The Taliban have made a point of killing Westerners and have specifically said they would attack any companies involved in mining. Before our trip to the mine was done, our group would get a taste of the insurgents’ ability to strike violently and unpredictably.

Then there’s the Afghan infrastructure — or rather, there isn’t. Big mines need power, lots of it. Outside of cities, only 15% of Afghanistan is electrified. The mountain roads — ungraded and often without guardrails — are perilous, I learned the hard way, particularly in winter. Seat belts? No one bothers. You crash, you die.

If the brutal war and roads don’t give a businessperson pause, the country’s governance and corruption problems should. Massive fraud marred recent elections. Transparency International rates Afghanistan as the second most corrupt country on earth after Somalia. The last minister of mining was identified in a Washington Post report as the recipient of a massive bribe, an allegation he denied to Fortune. The current minister, who had been widely described as an honest reformer, has recently had his integrity questioned in State Department cables released by WikiLeaks. He, too, told Fortune he has done nothing improper.

But if the risks are absurd, the potential rewards are off the charts. Hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of iron, copper, rare earth metals, and, yes, gold are buried beneath Afghanistan’s deserts and mountains. This wealth has lain there mainly undisturbed for thousands of years as armies of Persians, Greeks, Mongols, Britons, Russians, and now Americans tramped above. Invaders have dreamed of exploiting it since the time of Alexander the Great, but no one has yet succeeded on a large scale.

A Chinese company is trying to start a copper operation in strife-torn Logar province, but actual mining is years away.

In an 1841 article in a journal of Asiatic studies, Capt. Henry Drummond, a member of the British 3rd Bengal Light Cavalry, described his rambles through the wildest parts of Afghanistan to conduct the first Western mineral survey of the country. He found “abundant green stains” of copper, some of which rivaled the deposits of Chile, and veins of iron ore that “might no doubt be obtained equal to the Swedish.” While many of his countrymen viewed Afghanistan as an untamable place, where a man could not stray many yards from his home or tent without risk of being murdered, Drummond was smitten. Mining, he felt — not the gun — offered the best hope to pacify the territory and win over Afghans.

“Give them, however, but constant employment, with good wages and regular payment; encourage a spirit of industry, both by precept and example; let strict justice be dealt out to them without respect of persons; and we shall shortly see their swords changed into plowshares, industry take place of licentiousness, and these people be converted into peaceable and useful subjects,” Drummond wrote. But the Afghans weren’t keen on the idea of handing over their minerals to occupiers, or on the British occupation itself, for that matter. A year later they massacred the entire British army, save one English survivor, at Gandamak.

During the Cold War, both Soviet and U.S. geologists conducted surveys. The Russians bored thousands of test holes and identified big deposits of copper, zinc, mercury, tin, fluorite, potash, talc, asbestos, and magnesium. But instability in the countryside put an end to serious mining exploration.

After the toppling of the Taliban by the U.S.-led coalition, the Afghan government, with financial assistance from the U.S. Agency for International Development, commissioned new, high-tech aerial surveys of Afghanistan. The results were stunning: The U.S. Geological Survey identified huge veins of copper, iron, lithium, gold, and silver. The Afghan government solicited bids for one of the biggest of the copper deposits, a site south of Kabul that had been identified by both Drummond and the Soviets. China, offering a rich price, won the bid in 2007, beating out four other mining companies. But the Chinese mining company has yet to extract any copper from the site because of delays clearing land mines from the area, and the discovery of archeological relics.

Then, in 2009, mining in Afghanistan got the push it needed — from the U.S. military. Petraeus had been appointed commander of U.S. Central Command, which had ultimate authority over Afghanistan. He realized that a U.S. exit from Afghanistan depended on getting the country’s economy running. Up to 60% of Afghanistan’s $15 billion GDP comes from foreign aid, according to Pentagon estimates, and another 20% comes from the illicit drug trade — poppies. What Afghanistan needed was the real hope that it might achieve economic sovereignty. “I’m an old economist,” the general says in an interview at his headquarters in Kabul. “And at the end of the day this is about progress for the [Afghan] people and giving them the prospect for a much brighter future for them and their families. That’s what persuades the citizenry to support the government rather than support the Taliban.”

Realizing that conventional foreign-aid organizations weren’t getting the job done, Petraeus moved a crack economic stabilization team from Iraq into Afghanistan. That team quickly realized that mining would be key.

Enter Ian Hannam.

“This is the time in Afghanistan for the adventure venture capitalists — for those who can do business in tough places in the world,” Petraeus says.

From special forces to making billionaires

Villagers at Qara Zaghan hope mining will bring jobs, electricity, schools, and a health clinic.

Ian Charles Hannam seemed bound for a swashbuckling career at an early age. Raised in a working-class neighborhood in South London, the son of a council worker who oversaw a housing and street-repair crew, Hannam grew up knowing that nothing would ever be handed to him. He joined the Territorial Special Air Service at age 17, one of the younger men to pass the service’s grueling selection process.

Hannam’s unit, the Artists Rifles, was a part-time regiment akin to a U.S. National Guard special forces unit. The Artists Rifles had a storied past and a reputation for attracting adventure seekers from all social classes. Since then, Hannam has counted his old SAS cronies as his closest friends, often calling on them to help him in the world’s tougher places.

While serving in the Artists Rifles, Hannam pursued a degree in civil engineering from England’s top school in that field, Imperial College. Upon graduation in 1977, he took a job with Taylor Woodrow, a large British construction firm. His first assignment was to build roads, radar stations, and airstrips in Oman for the SAS, which was in the final stages of crushing a Marxist-led insurgency that had been boiling in the Dhofar region for more than a decade. The experience convinced Hannam that revolts could be beaten with a counterinsurgency program that emphasized developing a country’s infrastructure and natural resources.

Still working for Taylor Woodrow, Hannam went to Nigeria and then back to Oman. Living in a tent, he could not help noticing how well oil-company executives lived. That’s when he decided to go to business school and become rich.

After graduating from the London Business School, Hannam got a job in 1984 in the training program at Salomon Brothers in New York. At the airport on his way home to London for Christmas that year, he was detained by immigration officials because he had no U.S. entry stamp on his passport. The reason: He had parachuted into the U.S. with an SAS unit that was training with American special forces, and then traveled to New York to start the training program.

With a work ethic that former colleagues describe as ferocious and an engineer’s taste for understanding complex financial mechanisms, Hannam was fast-tracked to the bank’s vaunted debt syndicate desk. “His embrace of complexity and change, his indifference to organizational hierarchy and abundant self-confidence born of experience set him apart,” recalls Terry Fitzgerald, founder of Longbow Capital Partners, who was at Salomon with Hannam.

When Salomon was hired to advise media baron Robert Maxwell’s Mirror Group during its public offering, Hannam was one of Salomon’s lead bankers charged with marketing the IPO. Salomon lost money on the deal. Months later Maxwell died and Mirror Group collapsed amid investigations into accounting fraud and raids on its pension fund.

Hannam left Salomon soon after the fiasco and was hired by merchant bank Robert Fleming, a Scottish firm founded by the grandfather of James Bond creator Ian Fleming. By 2000, Hannam was the highest-paid employee at Fleming, making more than the CEO. After the bank was acquired by J.P. Morgan, much of Fleming’s staff was laid off. Not Hannam. He helped engineer a joint venture with, and eventual takeover of, venerated British banking house Cazenove.

Among the old guard at Cazenove — which was subsumed by J.P. Morgan, though the British franchise still bears its name — Hannam was regarded as a bit of a barbarian. He bragged about his wealth. He had appalling table manners. “I’ve got more degrees than I can count, but I still talk like I’m illiterate, and my colleagues hate me for it,” he’d say.

From Congo to Colombia, from Iraq to Sierra Leone, Hannam and his small team of soldiers-turned-bankers and advisers did business with oligarchs, gem dealers, and former mercenaries. He could be bracingly direct. When he landed in Baghdad for a meeting with Iraq’s oil minister, the minister asked, “What are you here for?”

“I’m here to make five new Iraqi billionaires every year for the next 10 years,” Hannam said with a twinkle in his eyes. It was an effective icebreaker, recalled his friend Richard Williams, a former SAS commander who is now CEO of the Afghan gold mine. “They’re all thinking, ‘How can I be one of those?’ Which is not a question that a minister should be thinking.” However crude, Hannam’s point — it would be Iraqis, not Westerners, who were getting rich — worked.

At an emerald mine high above the Panjshir Valley, work is done by kerosene lantern.

Over the years Hannam had starring roles in a string of huge deals, including the combination of BHP and Billiton (BHP) and its listing on the London exchange, the creation of mining group Xstrata, and the formation of Kazakh commodities giant Kazakhmys. In 2007, Hannam’s appetite for risk and intrigue nearly sank him. A group of Omani investors had hired him to explore the possibility of a leveraged buyout and breakup of Dow Chemical. Hannam and another top J.P. Morgan executive held clandestine meetings with two Dow Chemical executives at the Compleat Angler, a luxury hotel on the bank of the Thames.

The only problem: Dow’s CEO had no idea that the meeting was taking place. The scandal attracted front-page notice around the world.

In 2008, Hannam was passed over for the top job at Cazenove in favor of an outsider. Hannam flew to New Zealand for two weeks, turned off the phone, and brooded. But he decided to stay at the bank, and soon he was doing multibillion-dollar deals again, including lead work on the recapitalization of HSBC. With a job that paid bonuses as high as 10 million pounds, Hannam had come a long way from his boyhood in Bermondsey. He had a wife and three children, a townhouse in Notting Hill, a wild game preserve in the Stormberg mountains of South Africa, and a 230-acre estate in Vermont. But the council worker’s son was hungry for something bigger.

In 2009, at a dinner in Baghdad, he met the man who would give him his chance. The name of their meeting place was fitting for a rendezvous that would help touch off a 21st-century version of the Great Game: the Baghdad Hunting Club.

Hannam was at the banquet hall for a reception thrown by the Trade Bank of Iraq to honor J.P. Morgan. Also at the reception was Paul Brinkley, a deputy under secretary of defense charged with jump-starting Iraq’s stalled economy. A former tech company executive, Brinkley served as a matchmaker of sorts between Iraqi entrepreneurs and foreign businessmen. With the blessing of Defense Secretary Robert Gates, he operated outside normal bureaucratic channels, eschewing the bulletproof vests and helmets his civilian colleagues wore in combat zones. In three years he had secured some $8 billion in private investment contracts for Iraq, helping start textile mills, cement factories, and electronics companies. Hannam and Brinkley had heard about each other’s work. J.P. Morgan had been one of the first Western companies to plant the flag in Iraq, overseeing the country’s currency and setting up a big oil project in Iraqi Kurdistan. Hannam and Brinkley fell into conversation about Afghanistan, which was to be Brinkley’s next posting.

“I’ve got a problem in Afghanistan,” Hannam remembers Brinkley saying. Brinkley was talking to the right man.

Soon they were having more meetings, in New York and Washington. Brinkley wanted to know what it would take to get the big international mining companies into Afghanistan. Hannam said it was too early. The giants weren’t likely to leap into Afghanistan until smaller, wildcat operators went first. Copper and iron-ore mines were complicated and required huge infrastructure investments: railroads, roads, power plants, and smelters. Hannam said the first project should be less ambitious. A gold or lithium mine would be perfect. These materials could be transported by helicopter or trucked out by road. Hannam and Brinkley agreed that any such project should be led by an Afghan, lest it be seen as part of a resource grab by foreigners. Hannam pledged to bring entrepreneurial support, technical expertise, and capital. “And I’ll make some Afghans very rich, by the way,” he added.

In February 2010, Hannam flew to Kabul to see the situation on the ground. Brinkley took him to a reception at the American ambassador’s home. There, Hannam met an Afghan businessman named Sadat Naderi. British educated, smooth, and brimming with energy and ambition, Naderi ran a diversified company that included insurance, logistics, and supermarkets. There was one other thing, he said: “I’m one of the first Afghans that has actually won a gold license.”

Hannam’s eyes lit up. Naderi, it turned out, already had a little gold mine in Baghlan province. His family had run a tiny artisanal operation there, even minting some coins, for years. He had won the legal rights to it in formal bidding in 2008. To develop it, he needed technical advice, equipment, and capital.

Naderi was an Ismaili, a member of a Shiite sect. That was a good thing in Hannam’s eyes. Progressive in their views toward women and education, Ismailis are renowned businessmen. The Ismailis’ religious leader, the Aga Khan, presides over a vast charitable and business network that includes the Serena Hotel chain. The sect has a long-standing relationship with the British, dating back to the 1840s, when Ismailis provided British armies in Afghanistan with cavalry and intelligence.

Naderi’s father was the religious leader of all the Ismailis in Afghanistan. The family has several mansions and a palace in their home village, Kayan, which has athletic facilities and a train, and once had a zoo. Naderi’s brother Jafar had been a militia commander during the last days of Soviet occupation, with a 12,000-member private army. A documentary film titled The Warlord of Kayan had shown Jafar fishing with a grenade, riding his motorcycle, and blasting AC/DC. During the Taliban era, the Naderis had fled for their lives, and Osama bin Laden briefly occupied their palace in Kayan.

Sadat Naderi, not surprisingly, was happy to contemplate an investment of working capital raised by J.P. Morgan and backed up by the Pentagon. “The sooner we stand on our own feet, the better it is for us Afghans,” Naderi says. “You cannot be a beggar nation forever.”

“Don’t fall behind.”

Naderi’s gold mine, in Baghlan province, is only 50 miles from Kabul as the crow flies. During winter months it might as well be on the moon. To get there by road you must traverse the dangerous Salang Pass, which cuts through the towering Hindu Kush range. In 2010, in the same month that the J.P. Morgan team first arrived in Afghanistan, 180 travelers were killed on the pass in an avalanche.

I had my own taste of winter travel over the 11,000-foot-high pass when I set out with a convoy led by Richard Williams, the mining company’s CEO. Garrulous, self-deprecating, and brimming with insights about the Muslim world, Williams could be mistaken for an Oxford don. But he remains the hard-charging individual depicted in Mark Urban’s book Task Force Black, which describes Williams’ exploits in Iraq as the leader of an SAS team charged with capturing and killing Hussein loyalists and al Qaeda members. “Richard is a buccaneer, a pirate,” Urban quoted one of Williams’ former associates as saying. “He goes for the opportunities and adrenalin every time.”

Herding and farming are the main economic activities in Qara Zaghan.

It was snowing when we left Kabul early one morning, and by the time we reached the start of the climb, the weather had turned so nasty that police had halted traffic up the road. Nonetheless, our party of VIPs received permission to proceed with a police escort.

Williams and his group were in armored, four-wheel-drive vehicles. There was no room in the caravan for me, a translator, and a photographer, so we hired a driver and a Toyota Corolla. The front-wheel-drive car was soon laboring in the heavy snow. Our chains kept slipping off the tires. The radiator overheated, belching coolant into the snow. When it became apparent that we might not keep up, Williams’ group put a policeman in our car, and then proceeded on ahead without us. Visibility was terrible; the only way our driver could navigate was to crane his neck out a side window. After we passed the summit, the driver lost control of the car, which skidded and spun 180 degrees into a snowbank. Hands trembling, I lit my first cigarette in decades, wheezing on the first puff.

The next day, after spending the night in a hut, we set off on the return trip to Kabul. I begged Williams and his group not to abandon us. But when one of our party was stricken by a stomach ailment and we pulled over to let him relieve himself, the convoy swept on without us. We spun out again, narrowly missing a head-on collision with a truck.

When we caught up with Williams’ convoy near Kabul, we were too furious to wave. “I thought the SAS motto was similar to that of the U.S. Army [Rangers]: ‘Leave no man behind,’ ” I complained to one of Hannam’s soldiers-turned-bankers afterward.

“Leave no man behind?” He laughed. “Where did you get that idea? It’s ‘Don’t fall behind.’ And ‘Don’t forget your Imodium!’ ”

A deal too important to die

Of all the obtacles that could have wrecked the mining project — the murderous roads, the Taliban, the corrupt government — the one that nearly killed it was the most predictable: the profit margin.

In late September, J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon, Brinkley, and Mining Minister Wahidullah Shahrani met at J.P. Morgan’s headquarters in Manhattan. Dimon pledged J.P. Morgan’s support. On the way down in the elevator, Dimon told Shahrani, “You’re in good hands with Ian. He’s eccentric, but he gets things done.”

But soon Brinkley’s team was wondering. On the day the deal signing was to take place, Hannam’s team stopped acting like former warriors and began behaving like, well, nervous investment bankers. Hannam, after talking about how rich he was going to make his clients, suddenly began to complain that there was no way to make a profit. The 26% royalty rate for the mine, his team claimed, was way too high. Mining Minister Shahrani was bewildered — the rate had been agreed upon years before, when the Naderi family had first bid for the mine. Nothing had changed.

Brinkley’s Pentagon team was deeply frustrated. They felt the bankers had pulled a fast one. Had Hannam’s group not done its homework? Or were they just being bankers, trying to squeeze more money out of the deal with some 11th-hour brinkmanship?

Brinkley lit into the J.P. Morgan group: “When are you going to get this done? You’ve told people you’re going to do it!” The bankers, in turn, felt they were being unfairly pressured by the government, which seemed desperate to get the deal done even if it was uneconomical.

Villagers of Qara Zaghan have been digging for gold for decades.

Everyone recognized, though, that the deal was too important to die. Naderi and Hannam’s team worked out an arrangement with the Ministry of Mines in which the royalty would be deducted from the corporate tax, as it is in many other countries. Soon, helped by rising gold prices, the deal was back on track. J.P. Morgan says it is not charging its usual advisory fees. While Hannam has described his work on the mine as a charitable endeavor, he says he expects a big payoff down the road for clients who invest in it.

J.P. Morgan says it isn’t putting any of its own money into the project. Hannam secured $40 million from investors in the U.S., Asia, and Europe. They included Enso Capital founder Joshua Fink, son of BlackRock’s Larry Fink; British mining titan Peter Hambro; and Thai businessman Pairoj Piempongsant. Hannam created an investment vehicle, Central Asian Resources, to enter into a joint venture with Naderi’s new mining company, Afghan Gold. Sadat Naderi was made chairman of Afghan Gold, and Richard Williams CEO. Their goal is to pull 5.4 metric tons of gold from the mine during the first phase of operation. After that the plan is to go after five other gold sites, and then bid for the rights to other minerals, including copper and rare earths.

This past December, an ecstatic minister of mines announced the deal. Petraeus congratulated President Karzai on the news. “Wonderful,” Petraeus remembers Karzai saying.

“It’s big,” Petraeus told me of the gold mine deal. “It’s very big. I mean, everyone knows who J.P. Morgan is, and what that represents. That’s substantial. It gives real encouragement to our Afghan partners.”

A deceptive peace

After the ceremony to inaugurate the mine in Qara Zaghan, the barren valley rang with a merry hubbub. Hannam’s close friend, Murad Megalli, responsible for J.P. Morgan’s investment banking practice in Central Asia and the Middle East, made portraits of the villagers with a Leica film camera. The minister of mines was exultant. Naderi spoke optimistically of “partnership” with his new investors. Everything seemed to be going right.

Then it wasn’t. At a military base on our way back to Kabul, our BlackBerrys started buzzing with news of a Taliban attack in the capital. Militants had struck one of Naderi’s supermarkets, called Finest, with guns and a bomb, killing eight people. Naderi at first didn’t understand what I was saying when I told him the news of the attacks. “The Finest got hit,” I said. “Hit?” Naderi said. “Finest hit?” He turned ashen.

Megalli and Hannam sat on a bench trying to digest what had happened. Hannam was at first convinced the attack was linked to J.P. Morgan’s presence in the country. It wasn’t. (The Taliban later claimed they were trying to kill an American mercenary who they erroneously claimed was at the store.) Then, Hannam immediately put his banker hat back on. At least the deal was done, he said, and the money was in.

Megalli was struck by how fast things could spiral out of control. “The peace here is so deceptive,” Megalli said. “It is so fragile.”

A week later I returned to my Kabul hotel room to receive this e-mail from Hannam about his colleague and friend: “Murad died in plane in Kurdistan yesterday. Any good photos I can give family?”

Murad Megalli and Hannam had flown out of Afghanistan on a private plane, and then gone their separate ways. Megalli had taken the plane to Kurdistan. The plane crashed in a snowstorm, and Megalli and another J.P. Morgan banker were killed. Hannam was devastated. From the meeting with Brinkley at the Baghdad Hunting Club, Megalli had been a champion of the Afghan venture. He had believed mining could make a difference for the country. His death, and the attack on Naderi’s supermarket, were sobering reminders of the personal risks of frontier capitalism.

Baghlan Province has gold but few roads and no rail service, making it a challenging place to do business.

Other storm clouds hover over the enterprise. Corruption allegations swirl around several key backers of the mining project in the Karzai government. Paul Brinkley’s Pentagon team, which energized the Afghan mining sector and also put hundreds of Afghans to work in manufacturing technology and agriculture, is being disbanded, a casualty of interagency warfare. In April, after the burning of a Koran in Gainesville, Fla., mobs rioted in Afghanistan. The UN compound in Mazar-i-Sharif – a city that is to play a key role in the shipment of gold from the Baghlan mine — was attacked, and 12 people were killed.

The spark that Brinkley and Hannam struck, however, continues to burn. Six major minerals sites are due to be auctioned by the Afghan government over the next year. SRK, a major mining-consulting firm, will advise the Afghan government. Bankers from Morgan Stanley (MS) and executives from Chevron (CVX) have been scouting Afghan natural-resource prospects.

And next January the bulldozers and crushing machines are set to start working in the remote valley where Hannam’s investors have staked their claim. It remains to be seen whether the J.P. Morgan adventure will leave any more indelible a mark on Afghanistan than did Capt. Drummond of the Bengal Light Cavalry 170 years ago. But at least someone will have begun releasing the wealth trapped in Afghanistan’s stones.

http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2011/05/11/jp-morgan-hunt-afghan-gold/?section=magazines_fortune

Houston oil trader provided jet for ill-fated Congo gold mission

Jan 27, 2012 | Central Banking Elite

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  Kase and Eileen Lawal at the CAMAC 25th anniversary party at Hobby Center. / HC

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A private jet that flew four international businessmen to the Democratic Republic of the Congo where they are being held on gold-smuggling allegations was provided by CAMAC International, a Houston oil-trading company owned by one of the city’s richest men and a brother of one of the passengers.

Kase Lawal, a Nigerian-born immigrant who has overseen CAMAC’s rise to a $2.4 billion private company — said to be the second-largest black-owned business in the U.S. — and who was recently appointed to an advisory post in the Obama administration, is the half-brother of Mukaila Aderemi “Mickey” Lawal, who was detained along with fellow Houstonian Carlos St. Mary and two other businessmen as their plane was preparing to depart from Goma, a city in the mineral-laden eastern half of Congo.

The country recently banned the export of gold and other key minerals in an attempt to decriminalize its mining industries.

A CAMAC spokesman would not explain why Mickey Lawal, a 50-year-old company executive in charge of Nigerian operations, was on the plane or what his role in the transaction may have been.

He also did not say why CAMAC allowed the Gulfstream it leases from a Dallas company to be used in the mysterious mission, which ended on Feb. 3 when Congolese intelligence police arrested the men and flight crew, impounded the plane and seized almost $7 million in U.S. dollars, and gold bars valued at some $20 million.

Letter from attorney

“As long as the crew and passengers are still in the Congo, we don’t want to make any particular comments about the situation,” said spokesman Mike Androvett.

Androvett said St. Mary made the request for the jet.

“He asked for permission to use it,” Androvett said. “His family and the Lawal family are longtime friends.”

For additional background on the deal, Androvett referred to a letter purportedly written by a Kenyan lawyer on behalf of Axiom Trading, St. Mary’s company.

The lawyer, Punit Vadgama, wrote the letter dated Feb. 9 to the president of the Democratic Republic of Congo, claiming that Axiom contacted him in December to set up a Kenyan company to obtain licenses and permits for a legal gold transaction that supposedly began when “a person named David” approached St. Mary in the U.S.

According to Vadgama’s letter, “David” had agreed to sell Axiom 475 kilograms of gold at a certain price, with the deal to take place in Ken­ya and to be legally documented. When the group arrived in Kenya, St. Mary and his partners began to suspect they might be getting duped when they made partial payment and suddenly could no longer contact the Kenyan “owner” of the gold who was orchestrating the deal, E. Michelle D. Malonga.

After notifying Kenyan police of the possible swindle in January, Axiom was again contacted by Malonga and told the gold had been taken out of Kenya to Uganda, and that the deal would have to be done there, according to the letter. The purchasers refused. Then Malonga allegedly said the gold was in Congo and that the deal had to go down in Goma. They agreed, went to Goma, paid Malonga and his associates and had the gold loaded onto the aircraft.

Whose cash was it?

Congolese authorities stepped in before the various parties to the deal could leave. It is not clear from whom almost $7 million in cash was seized.

Early reports from Congo said it was in the possession of men taking it to the residence of Gen. Bosco Ntaganda, who was indicted for alleged war crimes by the International Criminal Court.

Ntaganda denied any involvement, however, and later official reports said the general was involved in stopping an attempt to smuggle Congolese gold out of the country.

Attorney Vadgama insists his clients were the victims of a fraud — not smugglers.

“Had they been smugglers, why would they alert a revenue authority and police body in Kenya to assist them in obtaining goods that they had paid for,” Vadgama wrote. “Our clients have acted within the law and have been victims of a fraud perpetrated upon them.”

Kase Lawal, 56, came to the U.S. in the 1970s and earned degrees from Texas Southern University and Prairie View A&M.

Well-connected politically to members of both major parties, he was named by President Barack Obama to the Advisory Committee on Trade Policy and Negotiations.

http://www.chron.com/business/article/Houston-oil-trader-provided-jet-for-ill-fated-1682988.php

Wells Fargo Meeting Today With Philly Homeowner Who “Foreclosed” On Them (Here’s How He Did It)

Jan 27, 2012 | Central Banking Elite

(Kyle Cassidy)

Wells Fargo is meeting today at noon with the Philadelphia homeowner who “foreclosed” on them, The Consumerist has exclusively learned. Patrick says he “received a call from upon high” late yesterday and that he now has an appointment, “with a very senior Wells Fargo person.” It will be interesting to see how this plays out. But how did Patrick go from embattled and ignored homeowner to seated across the negotiating table with leverage? I spoke with him to find out more about both how and why he did what he did. His story is an inspiration to anyone who’s dreamed of going toe-to-toe with the big banks and winning. Turns out that armed with persistence, and a little legal know-how, Davids can take down Goliaths.

BACKGROUND

All Patrick, pictured above along with his house, wanted was for someone from Wells Fargo to talk to him. A single, white, goth and industrial music event promoter who declines to give his age, he wanted someone to explain why they were doubling his premiums and requiring him to insure his century-old house for its full replacement value instead of the market value. Wells Fargo wanted him to take out almost a million dollars worth of insurance His broker told him full replacement value would cost about $1 million to insure in the event his house, a 6-bedroom, 3 bath Tudor he paid $180,000 for in 2002, was reduced to rubble and needed to be rebuilt stone by stone to standards from over a hundred years ago. Though he’s diligently paid his mortgage on time for the past seven years, he couldn’t afford the jack-up in premiums, nor did he see a reason why he should have to accept them.

Besides the increase in premiums, Wells Fargo was also tossing extra and inexplicable fees on his account. For instance, they charged him for two home inspections in one month, even though no inspectors had come out to house.

Throughout the process, Patrick admits there was “about 10% revenge” motivating him, but with each escalating step he took he really thought that okay, this is the one that will catch their attention and make them talk to me.

HOW IT STARTED

About two years ago, after Wells Fargo stopped responding to his letters requesting more information, Patrick boned up and learned about a law called the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act (RESPA). The law was enacted to safeguard homebuyers from anti-competitive and collusive behavior among the companies and agents involved with buying and selling real estate. One of the protections involves the “Qualified Written Request,” or QWR.

WHAT’S A QWR?

The Qualified Written Request is a specific kind of letter that you can send to your mortgage servicer when you believe there is an error on your mortgage account. You have to make sure to follow the rules for formatting it, but the servicer is bound by federal law to respond within a certain period of time. If they don’t, you can go after them for actual damages, costs and attorneys fees, plus $1000 of additional damages if there is a pattern of noncompliance.

This is a sample QWR as found on the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development site:

“

Attention Customer Service. It’s important to format it exactly like this and to send it in separately from your mortgage payment:Subject: [Your loan number]
[Names on loan documents]
[Property and/or mailing address]

This is a “qualified written request” under Section 6 of the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act (RESPA).

I am writing because:

Describe the issue or the question you have and/or what action you believe the lender should take.
Attach copies of any related written materials.
Describe any conversations with customer service regarding the issue and to whom you spoke.
Describe any previous steps you have taken or attempts to resolve the issue.
List a day time telephone number in case a customer service representative wishes to contact you.
I understand that under Section 6 of RESPA you are required to acknowledge my request within 20 business days and must try to resolve the issue within 60 business days.

Sincerely,

[Your name]

”

“Do your research,” says Patrick. When drafting it, besides getting tips on writing one from various consumer sites, he also went to bankingsites and saw how bankers were talking about ways they had rejected various QWRs. He made sure to craft his so it couldn’t get disqualified. “Use the internet as your law library,” says Patrick. With a little Googling, he was quickly about to find official resources and templates that guided him, step by step.More than any site, blog or message board, “Looking at the actual law was a big help,” he said. A lot of websites offered bits and pieces, or their (mis)-interpretation, of the law. The best resources came from going to the official US Government pages and looking at the actual statutes in full. “It took a little bit of time to sit and process the legalese,” but it was worth it.

Within 20 days, the company must say they got the QWR, and they have 60 to take action on it. That action must be to either correct the problem or to respond back with why they think they’re right. They must also give a name and phone number for the borrower to contact with questions about their account.

Wells Fargo did none of these, says Patrick. So he moved on to the next step provided by RESPA: statutory damages, aka, cash money.

DO NOT PASS GO

If a company fails to respond to a QWR, the borrower can take them to court and claim damages. Patrick contacted several attorneys but none wanted to take it on because of the low payout and what they said was the unlikelihood of him winning. So he became his own advocate.

Patrick filed his claim in local municipal court, also known as small claims court. Most of the time it costs less than $100 in filing fees. This post tells you how to get started with your small claims filing. Patrick admits he’s no legal genius. “I couldn’t pass the bar if my life depended on it,” he said, but he found the process wasn’t that hard and it helped that “the courts look kindly on plaintiffs representing themselves pro-se.” If you get in touch with the clerk’s office they can get you started with all the forms and filings you need.

At trial, Wells Fargo didn’t send anyone to represent themselves, so Patrick got a default judgment against them for $1,173. They eventually sent him the amount, but they had still had not responded to his letters or agreed to fix his premiums, as required by law. So he filed for a sheriff’s levy. This directs the sheriff to seize and sell the debtor’s property to pay up. In this case, it was the local branch office of Wells Fargo mortgage, the ones who had been ignoring him all these years.

To get the levy, he presented the court clerk with his default judgment and got the Writ of Execution and the Instructions for Levy which he delivered to the sheriff’s office. He paid them a $50 deposit to cover their administrative costs. A local sheriff then went into the Wells Fargo branch office and took an inventory and posted notice that nothing could be removed. The court also gave him several posters which he was expected to xerox and post around town.

As a music event promoter, he says he’s put up a lot of posters, but these were the most satisfying he’s ever hung. One is reprinted below.

USE THE MEDIA TO TELL YOUR STORY

But far more effective than hanging the posters was emailing the posters along with his press release to local media outlets. Within a day of doing that he had local tv stations and the Philadelphia Inquirer covering his story. Based on his “16 years as a promoter,” Patrick instantly knew the power of “working the PR angle to publicize the sale.”

WHERE IT STANDS

On Tuesday, the court put a temporary hold on the sale and has ordered a hearing on February 23 to figure out the final result. ABC and USA Today have also now picked up his story. Patrick says he’s still owed $50, the fee he paid to initiate the levy, and he’s still in disagreement with them about his premiums being doubled. Wells Fargo is meeting with Patrick today at noon to discuss his situation.

“It does seem to tentatively indicate that someone in the very high ranking position of authority” has finally taken an interest in his case, says Patrick.

“We could have handled Mr. Rodgers very unusual situation better,” said a Wells Fargo spokesperson when reached for comment. “We’re doing our best to resolve everything to everyone’s satisfaction.”

A message left with the Wells Fargo branch manager was not returned.

(Photo: Kyle Cassidy)

http://consumerist.com/2011/02/how-this-philly-homeowner-foreclosed-on-wells-fargo.html

Five Things That #OccupyWallStreet Has Done Right

Jan 27, 2012 | Central Banking Elite

#OccupyWallStreet protests are now well into their second week, and they are increasingly capturing the public spotlight. This is because, whatever limitations their occupation has, the protesters have done many things right.

I will admit that I was skeptical about the #OccupyWallStreet effort when it was getting started. My main concerns were the limited number of participants and the lack of coalition building. One of the things that was most exciting about the protests in Madison—and the global justice protests of old such as Seattle and A16—was that they brought together a wide range of constituencies, suggesting what a broad, inclusive progressive movement might look like. You had student activists and unaffiliated anarchists, sure; but you also had major institutional constituencies including the labor movement, environmentalists, faith-based organizations, and community groups. The solidarity was powerful. And, in the context of a broader coalition, the militancy, creativity, and artistic contributions of the autonomist factions made up for their lack of an organized membership base.

With #OccupyWallStreet the protest did not draw in any of the major institutional players on the left. Participants have come independently—mostly from anarchist and student activist circles—and turnout has been limited. Some of the higher estimates for the first day’s gathering suggest that a thousand people might have been there, and only a few hundred have been camping out.

That said, this relatively small group has been holding strong. As their message has gained traction—first in the alternative media, and then in mainstream news sources—they have drawn wider interest. On Tuesday night, Cornel West visited the occupied Zuccotti Park and spoke to an audience estimated at 2000. Rallies planned for later in the week will likely attract larger crowds. People will come because the occupation is now a hot story.

#OccupyWallStreet has accomplished a great deal in the past week and a half, with virtually no resources. The following are some of the things the participants have done that allowed what might have been a negligible and insignificant protest to achieve a remarkable level of success:

1. They chose the right target.

The #OccupyWallStreet protesters have been often criticized for not having clear demands. They endured a particularly annoying cheap shot from New York Times writer Ginia Bellafante, who (quoting a stockbroker sympathetically) resurrected the old canard that no one who uses an Apple computer can possibly say anything critical about capitalism. Such charges are as predictable as the tides. Media commentators love to condescend to protesters, and they endlessly recycle criticism of protests being naïve and unfocused.

I am among those who believe that the occupation would have benefited from having clearer demands at the outset—and that these would have been helpful in shaping the endgame that is to come. But protesters have largely overcome the lack of a particularly well-defined messaging strategy by doing something very important: choosing the right target.

Few institutions in our society are more in need of condemnation than the big banks and stockbrokers based where the critics are now camped. “Why are people protesting Wall Street?” For anyone who has lived through the recent economic collapse and the ongoing crises of foreclosure and unemployment, this question almost answers itself.

The protest’s initial call to action repeatedly stressed the need to get Wall Street money out of politics, demanding “Democracy not Corporatocracy.” Since then, many protesters have been emphasizing the idea that “We Are the 99 Percent” being screwed by the country’s wealthiest 1 percent. At Salon, Glenn Greenwald writes:

Does anyone really not know what the basic message is of this protest: that Wall Street is oozing corruption and criminality and its unrestrained political power—in the form of crony capitalism and ownership of political institutions—is destroying financial security for everyone else?
….
So, yes, the people willing to engage in protests like these at the start may lack (or reject the need for) media strategies, organizational hierarchies, and messaging theories.  But they’re among the very few people trying to channel widespread anger into activism rather than resignation, and thus deserve support and encouragement—and help—from anyone claiming to be sympathetic to their underlying message.

Notably, young protesters have been able to convey the idea that their generation, in particular, has been betrayed by our economy. This idea was picked up in remarkably hard-hitting commentary at MarketWatch.com, which reads like more like something you’d expect to find in the socialist press than on a business website:

[A]sk yourself how you might act if you were in school or fresh out of it or young and unemployed. What future has Wall Street, the heart and brain of our capitalist country, promised you? How does it feel to be the sons, daughters and grand kids of a “me” generation that’s run up the debt and run down the economy?Unemployment is between 13% and 25% for people under 25. Student loans are defaulting at about 15% at a time when more young people have no alternative but to borrow to pay for school.

Meanwhile, Wall Street bonuses continue to be paid at close to all-time highs. Lloyd Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (NYSE:GS), took home $13.2 million last year, including a $3.2 million raise.

Such a message resonates with many, and protesters did something important to attract them:

2. They made a great poster.

I write this partially in jest. There is a joke among labor organizers that if you are spending all your time obsessing over the quality of your posters or handouts, rather than going out to actually talk to people, you are in big trouble.

In this case, however, there’s some truth to the idea that posters matter. When you’re not mobilizing an established organizational membership, but rather trying to capture the imagination of unaffiliated activists, protest planning is more akin to promoting a concert than staging a workplace strike. And if you’re doing that kind of promotion, how cool your call to arms is makes a difference.

 #OccupyWallStreet has benefited from a series of great posters and promotional materials. Foremost among them is a lovely depiction of a ballerina dancing on top of Wall Street’s famous bull statue, created by the veteran leftist image-makers at Adbusters. The text below the bull reads simply: “#OccupyWallStreet. September 17th. Bring tent.”

The poster hinted that the event would be exciting and creative and audacious. It suggested that culture jamming and dissident art would be part of the adventure. And it pointed to another thing the protesters did right:

3. They gave their action time to build.

Most protests take place for one afternoon and then are finished. Had #OccupyWallStreet done the same, it would already have been forgotten.

Instead, planners told participants to get ready to camp out. The event operated on the premise that challenging Wall Street would take a while, and that things would build with time. In fact, this is exactly what has happened. It took a few days for alternative press sources to catch on, but now the occupation is a leading story at outlets such as Democracy Now.

The extended timeframe for the protest has allowed for the drama of direct action to deepen, which is my next point about the protesters:

4. They created a good scenario for conflict.

By claiming space in Zuccotti Park (also known as Liberty Plaza), #OccupyWallStreet set up an action scenario that has effectively created suspense and generated interest over time.

Participants there have invoked Tahrir Square. On the one hand, the comparison is silly, but on the other hand, the fact that occupations of public space have taken on a new significance in the past year is another thing that made #OccupyWallStreet a good idea. If the authorities allow them to continue camping out in lower Manhattan, the protesters can claim victory for their experiment in “liberated space.” Of course, everyone expects that police will eventually swoop in and clear the park. But, contrary to what some people think, civil disobedients have long known that arrests do not work against the movement. Rather, they illustrate that participants are willing to make real sacrifices to speak out against Wall Street’s evils.

The fact that police have used undue force (in one now-famous incident, pepper spraying women who were already detained in a mesh police pen and clearly doing nothing to resist arrest) only reinforces this message.

When will the police finally come and clear out the occupation’s encampment? We don’t know. And the very question creates further suspense and allows the protest to continue gaining momentum.

5. They are using their momentum to escalate.

Lastly, but probably most importantly, the #OccupyWallStreet effort is using its success at garnering attention in the past week and a half to go even bigger. Their action is creating offshoots, with solidarity protests (#OccupyBoston, #OccupyLA) now gathering in many other cities. Protesters in Liberty Plaza are encouraging more participants to join them. And they are preparing more people to risk arrest or other police reprisal.

It might seem obvious that a protest movement would treat a successful event as an occasion to escalate. But, in fact, it is quite rare. More established organizations are almost invariably afraid to do so: afraid of legal repercussions, afraid of the resources it would require to sustain involvement, afraid of bad press or other negative outcomes. Such timidity is anathema to strategies of nonviolent direct action.

In this respect, the fact that #OccupyWallStreet has not relied on established progressive organizations ends up being a strength. Its independent participants are inspired by the increasing attention their critique of Wall Street is getting, and they are willing to make greater sacrifices now that their action has begun to capture the public imagination.

This can only be regarded as a positive development. For the more that people in this country are talking about why outraged citizens would set up camp in the capital of our nation’s financial sector, the better off we will be. #OccupyWallStreet protesters have gotten that much right.

http://www.dissentmagazine.org/atw.php?id=563#.Ton_Sg3SZY4.twitter

Breaking down the Black Budget

Jan 27, 2012 | Central Banking Elite

Dwight Eisenhower

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” – quote from Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell address to the nation delivered on January 17, 1961

With those historic words, President Eisenhower warned the nation of the dangers associated with run-away programs within the military industrial complex. In this world of cloak-and dagger behind the scenes activity, the “Black Budget” has grown exponentially. Having little congressional oversight, and virtually no public scrutiny, programs developed within this black world enjoy almost unlimited access to financial backing regardless of their probability of success. However, what specific details on the black budget can be gleamed from publically available sources? In addition, can some of these programs be declassified without representing any threat to the national security of the United States? In this article, we will examine these questions in light of the public’s constitution right to question the activities of the elected government.

Article 1, Section 9 of the United States Constitution reads as follows: “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.” In other words, according to the Constitution, it is the law for the government to make available to the public (from time to time) an accounting of how much money is spent. Surprisingly, the government actually indeed does comply with this very important form of “checks and balances”. Every January, the Department of Defense submits its annual budget report for the concurrent fiscal year. The unclassified version of this report is available to the public at the Library of Congress. However, the Constitution never mentioned any details of exactly how the money should be tracked or mandated requirements which would reveal exactly what the money was spent on. Technically, the wording in the constitution is too vague which opens up the possibility for rampant fraud, waste, and abuse.

Budget report redrawn from the Detroit Free Press February 8, 1987

Ronald Reagan

Such abuses have led to the infamous accounts of $700 coffee pots, and $600 screws. By 1987, the Black budget had tripled under the Reagan administration. Procurement funding for the Pentagon’s Black budget for fiscal year 1988 was a staggering $35 billion dollars. During the 1980’s, secrecy appeared to be standard operating procedure, with billions disappearing on projects which may never see the light of day. Indeed, Reagan’s desire to “classify everything” was so prevalent that in 1982, he signed an executive order which essentially revised the procedure for holding on to military secrets. The order stated that in balancing the public’s right to know, against the government’s power to keep secrets, secrecy would carry more weight. However, according to Les Aspin (late House Armed Services Chairman) and ranking minority member William Dickinson, 70% of the Black budget could be declassified without impacting national security. Unfortunately, few federal investigators have the security clearance necessary to audit black programs. According to a statement by Thomas Amlie (Pentagon missile expert) published in the Detroit Free Press on February 8, 1987 there are three primary reasons for Black programs: 1) “you’re doing something that should genuinely be secret” 2) “you’re doing something so damn stupid that you don’t want anybody to know about it” 3) “you want to rip the money bag open and get out a shovel, because there is no accountability whatsoever.” A thirty-one year old systems engineer who was interviewed for the same Detroit Free Press article had this to say about classified programs: “In a black project, people don’t worry about money.” He continued by stating that “if you need more money, you got it, if you screw up and you still need more you got it, you just keep pouring more money into the thing until you get it right. The incentive isn’t there to do it right the first time. Who’s going to question it?” One can only imagine the catastrophic consequences which might occur if government agencies like the FAA, Department of Transportation, or ICBM missile silo contractors operated under the same work ethic.

Another technique employed to conceal black programs is to delete their overall costs from the unclassified budget. They are given vague and non-descript code names which are specifically designed to hide their true purpose. In addition, the Pentagon keeps many black programs secret from congress, from the General Accounting Office, and from its own auditing agencies. According to a report published in Aviation Week and Space Technology (August 17, 1992) the black budget burns through over $100 million dollars per day, every day of the year on intelligence gathering, covert operations, and weapons development with no civilian oversight. Could some of that funding go to support our nation’s faltering infrastructure, or to improving our educational system? Amazingly, a House Armed Services Committee study conducted in 1990, revealed that Congress reviews only 5-10% of programs that have a “Special Access Required” (SAR) designation. This lack of accountability further increases the risk of money hungry defense contractors who are eager to “influence” their high level political insiders within the Washington beltway.

Department of Defense Budget 1994

Department of Defense Budget 1994

When examining the annual unclassified Department of Defense budget report, it’s easy to see how some black programs can be concealed. For example, the RDT&E Programs (R-1) budget report for fiscal year 1994 (see above) contains multiple programs with no procurement funding listed. These include such innocuous listings such as: “SENIOR YEAR”, and “FOREST GREEN”. Classifying the name, function or cost of a particular black program automatically forces less privileged legislators to vote “in the dark”.

Monitoring of the black budget increased in 1980, when President Carter leaked information that the United States Air Force was developing a “Stealth Bomber”. Then in 1981, Northrop’s stock soared. During the Reagan administration, funding for the black budget increased to $22.4 billion for fiscal year 1987. Specifically six billion went to four black aircraft programs (three of which were owned by Northrop). These included the following: 1) Northrop B-2 Stealth Bomber, 2) YF-23 Advanced Tactical Fighter, 3) Advanced Tactical Aircraft, 4) Lockheed’s F-117A Stealth Fighter. Ultimately, Northrop lost out on the Advanced Tactical Fighter program, which went to Lockheed in the form of the F-22. They also lost the Advanced Tactical Aircraft (ATA) contract, which went to the ill fated McDonnell Douglas/General Dynamics A-12 Avenger II. In regards to the B-2, the Air Force originally proposed to buy 132 Stealth Bombers at a cost of $277 million apiece, for a total of $36 billion. In the end however, Northrop built only 21 stealth bombers at the staggering cost of $2.3 billion per aircraft.

According to Ben Rich (Lockheed Skunk Works director 1975-1991), keeping programs secret can add anywhere from 10 to 15% to the overall cost. This includes the construction of fortified buildings, extra guards, security clearance logistics, and shuttling works to and from classified facilities. Strangely, some programs are so secret that even our top military Generals may not know what “mystery aircraft” might be lurking inside dimly lighted hangars at Area 51, Edwards North base, or the Tonopah Test Range. Within the murky world of secret defense projects there are three main categories: SAP’s (Special Access Program), USAP (Unacknowledged Special Access Program), and so called “Waived SAPS”. In the case of waived SAP’s, their existence is not known by Congress or possibly the President. Aside from the defense contractors, spending within the intelligence community has also increased dramatically. For fiscal year 1988, the CIA’s budget was 2.5 billion. The secretive NRO (National Reconnaissance Office) consumed four billion. However, this pales into insignificance when compared to the spending by the NSA (National Security Agency) which spent an estimated ten billion. In fact, under a secret directive signed by Reagan, the NSA has access to the computer systems of the IRS, Social Security Administration, and every other civilian government agency. Indeed, no law or charter establishes limits on the power of the NSA since its secret formation by President Truman in 1952. It’s unbridled access to inter-agency documentation makes it a prime candidate for spying on American citizens, and side-stepping the Constitution.

Since the beginning of the cold war, there was indeed a need to classified information, and to create secret programs. For example, the specific mathematical equations used in the formation of the Atomic bomb should always be kept under wraps. In more modern times, the electronic counter-measures used on American Stealth bombers should remain secret as well. In addition, the communication frequencies used by our armed forces in Afghanistan should be concealed. However, the total disregard for the constitution, and the “spending spree” mentality of some political leaders and defense contractors should be more aggressively monitored. Indeed, as reported by CNN, on September 10, 2001 (one day before 9/11), former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld testified before Congress that the Pentagon could not account for $2.3 Trillion dollars. Where did all that money go? The American public should demand a more proactive accounting of expenditures within Department of Defense. In the end, even our highest elected political leaders are not “above the law”, and additional public scrutiny would go a long way in increasing faith in both the Constitution, and the current administration.

http://www.openminds.tv/breaking-down-the-black-budget/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

Robin Hood Tax: Occupy Movement now marching straight into the globalist trap

Jan 27, 2012 | Central Banking Elite

It was inevitable that a movement which has struggled to agree on a manifesto, would in the end, do the bidding of the very elite globalist powers that they are demonstrating against to begin with.

The Robin Hood Tax is an identical transaction-tax scam to the one proposed by globalists at the 2009 UN COP15 Climate Summit in Copenhagen.

Instead of achieving freedom from Central Bank debt enslavement, naive Occupiers appear to have taken the bait, pulling the mob towards endorsing a global taxation system, and one to be administered… by a brand new global government body.

As the Occupy Movement sets its sights on the upcoming G20 Summit in France on November 3-4, its globalist handlers behind the scenes have succeeded in carefully directing its crowds towards the Holy Grail of all socialist super-states – the celebrity supported, trendy “Robin Hood Tax”, also known as a Tobin Tax, a financial transaction tax levied on all transactions involving shares, bonds and derivatives. It’s likely that such a blanket tax will eventually end up on the end of things like cash withdrawls and the like.

The resulting funds, they claim, counted in the hundreds of billions of dollars per year, would go toward popular Bono-led liberal heart-string fantasy causes like ‘reducing poverty in the third world’, social programs and surprise, surprise… “combating climate change” and perhaps even saving polar bears – a move that would surely please desperate men like Al Gore (but a complete waste of money seeing that man-made global warming has already been thoroughly discredited).

The rallying cry for this globalist wet dream is coming directly from the supposed brain-child of the Occupy Movement, the globalist foundation-funded organization, Ad Busters, quietly shepherding its flock towards one of the biggest revenue spinning and control scams ever conceived.

Reuters reported yesterday:

“Canada-based Adbusters wants the Occupy Wall Street protest movement against economic inequality to take to the streets to call for a 1 percent tax on such deals ahead of a November 3-4 summit of the Group of 20 leading economies in France.

“Let’s send them a clear message: We want you to slow down some of that $1.3 trillion easy money that’s sloshing around the global casino each day — enough cash to fund every social program and environmental initiative in the world,” the activist group said on its website, www.adbusters.org.

Adbusters put out the initial call for Occupy Wall Street and since protesters set up camp in a park in New York City’s financial district on September 17, they have inspired solidarity demonstrations and so-called occupations around the world.”

In many ways, the Robin Hood Tax is an identical transaction-tax scam to the one proposed by globalists at the 2009 UN COP15 Climate Summit in Copenhagen, where a number of new taxes on financial transactions and new carbon taxes would be put into a giant “slush fund” to be handled by none other than the World Bank.

Ultimately, any Robin Hood Tax will most likely end up in a giant fund to “ensure that banks are adequately capitalized”, and one which will be used to bailout, or insure big bank losses and trillions in gambling derivative bets gone bad.

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t
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In reality, a Robin Hood Tax does just the opposite of what its name represents. Rather than stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, it is designed to steal more money through taxation from working people- money which will end up directly in the hands of institutions like the US Federal Reserve and its cartel of Wall Street banks.

OWS losing the plot

It’s very easy for the throngs of young protesters to fall into an obvious socialist, or collectivist trap, as many naive young Americans are unable, or unwilling, to liberate themselves from the Hegelian dialectic which tells them that the government must raise taxes and spending in order  to achieve any social progress.

It’s obvious that the number one and two problems in America are a lack of jobs and creeping inflation, a duel plague which is fueling poverty- and ultimately dissent in the US. Occupiers are not asking why their government allowed US corporations to ship millions of American jobs off shore, and why it never bothered to offer incentives to foreign corporations to relocate in the US. Likewise Occupiers have not identified that their own Federal Reserve is robbing them every day by creating artificial scarcity, driving the kind of boom and bust cycles which ultimately rob Americans of their life saving and assets.

Rather than demand an additional new monster system of taxation, Occupiers should first be asking if any government can be trusted to spend their tax revenue responsibly. Certainly today it seems that pork rules in Washington and Obama’s Administration is presiding over the biggest budget deficit in the history of the US. This should be cause for alarm, yet, it’s hardly mentioned by the Occupy crowd.

They might also consider asking their beloved government in Washington – and elsewhere around the globe too, where all their tax revenue actually goes right now. If they understood that at present, their Federal Income Tax(in some cases, collected at gunpoint by the IRS) goes directly to paying off the debt which their government owes on each and every dollar printed by the privately owned Federal Reserve Bank… then Occupiers would surely be wary of allowing a Federal or global government to erect a new massive taxation system.

The OWS has, to their credit, urged protesters to close their bank accounts and transfer their money to credit unions with a bank transfer day on November 5th, certainly a step in a positive direction. But is it enough?

Disengage with the financial system

OWS protesters should be talking about taking steps to completely disengage from the system that enslaves them- this might include removing their hard-earned liquidity from the system by canceling all credit cards, not taking out student loans, or pointless car and electronic loans.

Another obvious trap of the Robin Hood Tax is that it would target all transactions – including pension funds. Occupiers should instead consider not paying in their pensions and 401K’s into stock market-indexed retirement funds. For older protesters, it might be a case of shifting their IRAs into gold and silver-backed retirement funds, disallowing the speculators and gamblers on Wall Street to decimate their life savings any further.

Has their been any call for a mass protest against the IRS, who continue to defy the US Constitution by robbing each and every working American of their labor and property in order to service their national debt to the Federal Reserve cartel? Certainly this would rock the establishment overnight. The Occupy Movement would have struck the most serious- and the most obvious blow imaginable, one which would finally call into question the legitimacy of a national income tax.

Or even better, Occupiers might consider taking the total expenditure of the US military- domestically and overseas , and divide by the number of working Americans, giving them an individual figure of money which each protester will refuse to hand over to the Federal government- a peace protest combined with an intelligent liberty move by free men and women.

Sadly, none of these kind of truly revolutionary ideas have come out of the Liberty Square protests. Instead, all they could manage in the end up with is to latch on to one of the most misleading and tyrannical ponzi schemes, the Robin Hood Tax, where the 99% end up giving the 1% even more of their hard earned cash over to the banks. Ironic, but this is the current direction which the angry, but naive mob is being led.

If any of the 99% truly believe that the top tier banks would happily give away trillions per year to the new Robin Hood Taxman, then think again. Their new tax will likely be imposed most stringently on small to medium size institutions and fund managers in an effort to drive out any competition to the mega banks- who already enjoy cuts to corporate income tax, and in some cases, pay no tax at all. Big banks are safe, but smaller competition will surely be hit hard by a Robin Hood Tax– ensuring the current hierarchy stays exactly as it is. This has always been the way when blanket government regulations and punitive taxes come into play.

In typically disingenuous fashion, when a mob has no clear objective it normally plays follow the leader. In this case, the leader is foundation-funded Ad Busters, who have supplied the directionless, vague OWS movement with the master plan to its own demise.

http://www.infowars.com/robin-hood-tax-occupy-movement-now-marching-straight-into-the-globalist-trap/

17 Quotes About The Coming Global Financial Collapse That Will Make Your Hair Stand Up

Jan 27, 2012 | Central Banking Elite

Is the world on the verge of another massive global financial collapse?  Yes.  The western world is drowning in an ocean of debt unlike anything the world has ever seen before, and our financial markets are gigantic casinos that are dependent on huge mountains of risk and leverage remaining very stable.  In the end, this house of cards that has been built on a foundation of sand is going to come crashing down in a horrifying manner.  Usually in this column I go on and on about why things will soon get much worse.  But today I am going to take a bit of a break.  Today, I am going to let some of the top financial professionals in the world tell you why things will soon get much worse.  Many of the quotes that you are about to read just might make the hair on the back of your neck stand up.  Most people out there have no idea what is about to happen.  Most people out there are working hard and are busy preparing for the holidays and they are hopeful that the economy will turn around soon.  But that is not going to happen.  We are heading for another major global financial collapse, and when it happens the U.S. economy is going to get even worse.

The epicenter for the coming global financial collapse is almost certainly going to be in Europe.  As you will see below, financial professionals all over the world are sounding the alarm about Europe.  It is a disaster that everyone can see coming but that nobody seems to be able to prevent.

Of course the failure of the “supercommittee” in the United States certainly is not helping matters.  There is already talk that we may soon see another downgrade for U.S. debt.  It is hard to even describe how incompetent the U.S. Congress is.

There is a tremendous lack of leadership both in the United States and in Europe right now.  The financial world is more interconnected than ever before, and when the financial dominoes start to fall it is going to take a miracle to keep a complete and total disaster from unfolding.

So when the time comes, who is going to step forward and provide that leadership?

That is a really, really good question.

Right now, panic and fear are spreading like wildfire in the financial world and nobody knows for sure what is going to happen next.

But one thing is for certain.  Pessimism is growing stronger by the day.

The following are 17 quotes about the coming global financial collapse that will make your hair stand up….

#1 Credit Suisse’s Fixed Income Research unit: “We seem to have entered the last days of the euro as we currently know it. That doesn’t make a break-up very likely, but it does mean some extraordinary things will almost certainly need to happen – probably by mid-January – to prevent the progressive closure of all the euro zone sovereign bond markets, potentially accompanied by escalating runs on even the strongest banks.”

#2 Willem Buiter, chief economist at Citigroup: “Time is running out fast.  I think we have maybe a few months — it could be weeks, it could be days — before there is a material risk of a fundamentally unnecessary default by a country like Spain or Italy which would be a financial catastrophe dragging the European banking system and North America with it.”

#3 Jim Reid of Deutsche Bank: “If you don’t think Merkel’s tone will change then our investment advice is to dig a hole in the ground and hide.”

#4 David Rosenberg, a senior economist at Gluskin Sheff in Toronto: “Lenders are finding it difficult to finance their day-to-day operations with short-term funding. This is a lot like 2008 but with more twists.”

#5 Christian Stracke, the head of credit research for Pimco: “This is just a repeat of what we saw in 2008, when everyone wanted to see toxic assets off the banks’ balance sheets”

#6 Paul Krugman of the New York Times: “At this point I’d guess soaring rates on Italian debt leading to a gigantic bank run, both because of solvency fears about Italian banks given a default and because of fear that Italy will end up leaving the euro. This then leads to emergency bank closing, and once that happens, a decision to drop the euro and install the new lira. Next stop, France.”

#7 Paul Hickey of Bespoke Investment Group: “More and more, we are hearing anecdotal comments from individual and professionals that this is the most difficult environment they have ever experienced as the market is like a fish flopping around after being taken out of the water.”

#8 Bob Janjuah of Nomura International: “Germany appears to be adamant that full political and fiscal integration over the next decade (nothing substantive will happen over the short term, in my view) is the only option, and ECB monetisation is no longer possible. I really think it is that clear and simple. And if I am wrong, and the ECB does a U-turn and agrees to unlimited monetisation, I will simply wait for the inevitable knee-jerk rally to fade before reloading my short risk positions. Even if Germany and the ECB somehow agree to unlimited monetisation I believe it will do nothing to fix the insolvency and lack of growth in the eurozone. It will just result in a major destruction of the ECB‟s balance sheet which will force an ECB recap. At that point, I think Germany and its northern partners would walk away. Markets always want short, sharp, simple solutions.”

#9 Dan Akerson, CEO of General Motors: “The ’08 recession, which was a credit bubble that manifested itself through primarily the real estate market, that was a serious stress….This is much more serious.”

#10 Francesco Garzarelli of Goldman Sachs: “Pressures on Euro area sovereign bond markets have progressively intensified and spread like a wildfire.”

#11 Jim Rogers: “In 2002 it was bad, in 2008 it was worse and 2012 or 2013 is going to be worse still – be careful”

#12 Dr. Pippa Malmgren, the President and founder of Principalis Asset Management who once worked in the White House as an adviser to President Bush: “Market forces are increasingly determining what the options are and foreclosing on options policymakers thought they had. One option which is now under discussion involves permitting a country to temporarily leave the Euro, return to its native currency, devalue, commit to returning to the Euro at a better debt to GDP ratio, a better exchange rate and a better growth trajectory and yet not sacrifice its EU membership. I would like to say for the record that this is precisely the thought process that I expected to evolve,but when I proposed this possibility back in 2009, and again in September 2010, I had a 100% response from clients and others that this was “impossible” and many felt it was “ridiculous”. They may be right but this is the current state of the discussion. The Handelsblatt in Germany has reported this conversation, but wrongly assumes that the country that will exit is Germany. I think that Germany will have to exit if the Southern European states do not. Germany’s preference is to stay in the Euro and have the others drop out. The problem has been the Germans could not convince the others to walk away. But, now, market pressures are forcing someone to leave. Germany is pushing for that someone to be Italy. They hope that this would be a one off exception, not to be repeated by any other country. Obviously, though, if Italy leaves the Euro and reverts to Lira then the markets will immediately and forcefully attack Spain, Portugal and even whatever is left  of the already savaged Greeks. These countries will not be able to compete against a devalued Greece or Italy when it come to tourism or even infrastructure. But, the principal target will be France. The three largest French banks have roughly 450 billion Euros of exposure to Italian debt. So, further sovereign defaults are certainly inevitable, but that is true under any scenario. Growth and austerity will not do the trick, as ZeroHedge rightly points out. Ultimately, I will not be at all surprised to see Europe’s banking system shut for days while the losses and payments issues are worked out. People forget that the term “bank holiday” was invented in the 1930’s when the banks were shut for exactly the same reason.”

#13 Daniel Clifton, a policy strategist with Strategas Research Partners on the potential for more downgrades of U.S. debt: “We would expect further downgrades, a first downgrade from Moody’s and Fitch and possibly a second downgrade from S&P.”

#14 Warren Buffett on the problems in the eurozone: “The system as presently designed has revealed a major flaw. And that flaw won’t be corrected just by words. Europe will either have to come closer together or there will have to be some other rearrangement because this system is not working”

#15 David Kostin, equity strategist for Goldman Sachs: “The wide range of possible outcomes on both the super committee process and the unstable political economy in Europe drives our view that investors should assume the worst while hoping for the best.”

#16 Mark Mobius, the head of the emerging markets desk at Templeton Asset Management: “There is definitely going to be another financial crisis around the corner”

#17 Gerald Celente, founder of The Trends Research Institute: “The whole system is going down. Pull your money out your Fidelity account, your Scwhab accout, and your ETFs.”

Are you starting to get the picture?

When so many top financial professionals are freaking out like this, perhaps the rest of us should start paying attention.

They are telling us that “time is running out”.

They are telling us that “there is definitely going to be another financial crisis”.

They are telling us that this “is going to be worse” than 2008.

They are telling us that “the whole system is going down”.

Yes, a devastating financial collapse really is coming.  Just like in 2008, it will seem like the “end of the world” while it is happening, but it won’t be.  It will severely damage our financial system and our economy, but it will not finish us off.

Think of it this way.  When you build a sand castle at the beach, it doesn’t get totally wiped out by the first wave or the second wave that hits it.  Each wave does significant damage, but the destruction of your sand castle is a process.

It is the same thing with the U.S. economy.  We once had the most incredible economic machine that the world has ever seen.  It is constantly being guttedand the financial crisis of 2008 hit us really hard, but we are still doing okay.

After this next financial crisis we will be in even worse shape.  But we will still be breathing.

More “waves” will come after this next financial crisis.  If we continue on the road that we are on, our economy will progressively get worse and worse.

Not everyone will agree with this analysis, and that is okay.  In the end, time will reveal the truth to all of us.

Right now, we all need to get ready for the next wave that is about to hit us.  A lot of people are going to lose their jobs over the next few years.  Hopefully you are prepared for that.

http://www.infowars.com/17-quotes-about-the-coming-global-financial-collapse-that-will-make-your-hair-stand-up/

14 Reasons Why We Should Nationalize The Federal Reserve

Jan 27, 2012 | Central Banking Elite

One of the most important steps that we could take to bring prosperity back to America would be to nationalize the Federal Reserve.  Doing so would allow the federal government to quit borrowing money, dramatically reduce taxes and eventually pay off the entire U.S. national debt.  Instead of inheriting the largest debt in the history of the world, future generations would actually have a chance at economic prosperity because they would not be forced to pay off the horrific debt of previous generations.  The Federal Reserve is a perpetual debt machine, it has almost completely destroyed the value of the U.S. dollar and it has an absolutely nightmarish track record of incompetence.  There are no good reasons to keep the status quo.  Our current debt-based monetary system will inevitably lead to a complete and total economic collapse.  We desperately need to make a change while we still can.  As you will see below, there are a ton of good reasons why we should nationalize the Federal Reserve.

Right now, most Americans believe that the Federal Reserve is actually an agency of the federal government.  But that is simply not the case.  The truth is that the Federal Reserve is about as “federal” as Federal Express is.

The Federal Reserve openly admits as much.  For example, in defending itself against a Bloomberg request for information under the Freedom of Information Act, the Federal Reserve stated in court that it was “not an agency” of the U.S. government and therefore not subject to the Freedom of Information Act.

So who owns the Federal Reserve?

As the Federal Reserve’s own website describes, it is the member banks that own it….

The twelve regional Federal Reserve Banks, which were established by Congress as the operating arms of the nation’s central banking system, are organized much like private corporations–possibly leading to some confusion about “ownership.” For example, the Reserve Banks issue shares of stock to member banks. However, owning Reserve Bank stock is quite different from owning stock in a private company. The Reserve Banks are not operated for profit, and ownership of a certain amount of stock is, by law, a condition of membership in the System. The stock may not be sold, traded, or pledged as security for a loan; dividends are, by law, 6 percent per year.

The debt-based monetary system established by the Federal Reserve has greatly enriched the big banks and the people that own them.  This has been at the expense of the American people.

A private central bank should not issue our currency, set interest rates and run our economy.  Rather, we need to return control over the currency to the American people where it belongs.

The following are 14 reasons why we should nationalize the Federal Reserve….

#1 The U.S. Constitution says that the federal government is the one that should be issuing our money.

In particular, according to Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, it is the U.S. Congress that has been given the responsibility to “coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures”.

#2 Our current debt-based monetary system is a perpetual debt machine.  It is absolutely imperative that we nationalize the Federal Reserve and begin to issue debt-free money.

In a previous article about money and debt, I explained how more government debt is created whenever the U.S. government puts more money into circulation….

When the government wants more money, the U.S. government swaps U.S. Treasury bonds for “Federal Reserve notes”, thus creating more government debt.  Usually the money isn’t even printed up – most of the time it is just electronically credited to the government.  The Federal Reserve creates these “Federal Reserve notes” out of thin air.  These Federal Reserve notes are backed by nothing and have no intrinsic value of their own.

This process creates a huge problem.  When each new dollar is created, the interest owed by the federal government on that new dollar is not also created at the same time.

Therefore, more debt is actually created than the amount of money that the federal government receives from the Federal Reserve.

This is a Ponzi scheme that is designed to drain wealth from the American people and transfer it to the banking system.

This is why I call the Federal Reserve system a perpetual debt machine.  Today, the U.S. national debt is more than 5,000 times larger than it was 100 years ago.

Back in 1910, prior to the passage of the Federal Reserve Act, the national debt was only about $2.6 billion.

By going to a system of debt-free money, the U.S. government would never have to borrow a single dollar ever again.

#3 Our current debt-based monetary system requires very high personal income taxes to pay for it.  It is no accident that the personal income tax was introduced at about the same time that the Federal Reserve system came into existence.

If we nationalized the Federal Reserve and capped federal government spending at a reasonable percentage of GDP, it would be entirely possible to massively cut taxes and still keep our promises regarding Social Security and other important social programs at the same time.

I believe that eventually the entire personal income tax system could be completely wiped out and the IRS could be totally shut down.  This would save our economy billions upon billions of dollars in income tax compliance costs.

However, as an initial first step, I believe that we should eliminate all payroll taxes, all “self-employment taxes” and all taxes on the first $100,000 earned by every American.

This would provide much needed relief to the millions of poor and middle income families that have been hurt so badly by this economic downturn.

Also, I believe that we could instantly reduce the corporate tax rate to levels that would be competitive with the rest of the world, while closing corporate tax loopholes at the same time.  This would remove the temptation for companies to leave the United States in order to escape our brutally high corporate tax rates.

Yes, the proposals above would definitely cut taxes.

So where would we make up the difference?

Well, the U.S. Constitution provides one clue.  According to Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, the U.S. Congress has the right to impose “duties, imposts and excises” on goods sold in this country.

For way too long, big corporations have been taking advantage of sweatshops in the third world.  For way too long, other nations have used predatory trade practices to take unfair advantage of us.  For way too long, we have allowed nations with horrific human rights records to ship their goods into our country for free.

Well, we need to bring that to an end.  By raising tariffs we would raise money for the federal government and we could potentially start to reverse the flow of jobs and businesses that have been leaving this country.

Access to the U.S. market is a privilege, not a right.  High tariffs would be imposed on goods from any country that allows slave labor wages to be paid.  Very high tariffs would be imposed on goods from any country that is using predatory trade practices against us.  Extremely high tariffs would be imposed on any nation that does not respect basic human rights.

However, please keep in mind that none of this would work if we did not nationalize the Federal Reserve.  The tax cuts proposed above would be suicidal under our current debt-based monetary system.  But if we nationalize the Fed, we really could do this.  It may sound crazy, but it really would work.

#4 If we nationalize the Federal Reserve, there would be no more budget deficits.  If the federal government was a bit short one year, it would just print up a little bit of extra money in order to make up the difference.

It would also be very important to cap federal government spending as a percentage of GDP so that we don’t have crazy Congress critters creating a lot of inflation by spending us into oblivion.

Just because we would be adopting a debt-free monetary system does not mean that we could throw spending discipline out the window.  Rather, it would actually become more important than ever.

#5 If we nationalize the Federal Reserve, we would instantly reduce the national debt by 1.6 trillion dollars.  That is the amount that is currently on the balance sheet of the Federal Reserve.  The Federal Reserve just created this money out of thin air anyway, so it was never their money to begin with.  Some members of Congress have already proposed cancelling the debt held by the Federal Reserve, and it is a great idea.

#6 If we nationalize the Federal Reserve, we could eventually get rid of the entire national debt.

Under our current system, the U.S. national debt will never, ever be paid off.  We are 15 trillion dollars in debt, and at this point we add more than a trillion dollars to that number every year.

As I have written about previously, if the federal government began right at this moment to repay the U.S. national debt at a rate of one dollar per second, it would take over 440,000 years to pay off the national debt.

But under our current system we are not paying it off.  Rather we keep piling up more debt at an astounding pace.

In a system of debt-free money, there would be no more budget deficits, and we could actually start slowly paying off the national debt with newly issued “United States money”.

This would have to be done very slowly so as to not shock the financial system, but it could be done.  As U.S. debt becomes due, a small percentage of it could be retired each year.

It is entirely conceivable that within 30 to 40 years we could pay it off entirely without causing tremendous damage to the financial system.

#7 If we nationalize the Federal Reserve, we will eventually totally eliminate the interest on the national debt.  Most Americans don’t understand this, but each year we spend hundreds of billions of dollars just on interest on the national debt.  For example, the U.S. government spent over 454 billion dollars on interest on the national debt during fiscal year 2011.

Under a debt-free monetary system, that number would eventually go to zero.  That would save the federal government a ton of money.

#8 While there is certainly a danger that we would have inflation under a debt-free monetary system, the reality is that we are absolutely guaranteed inflation under the Federal Reserve system.

Most Americans believe that inflation is a fact of life, but the sad truth is that the United States has only had a major, ongoing problem with inflation since the Federal Reserve was created back in 1913.

If you do not believe this, just check out this chart.

Sadly, the U.S. dollar has lost well over 95 percent of its value since the Federal Reserve was created.

So, yes, there would be a need for monetary discipline under a debt-free monetary system, but it would be hard to do worse than the Federal Reserve has already been doing.

#9 If we nationalize the Federal Reserve, we would eliminate all of the financial bubbles that the Federal Reserve has been creating.

For example, there would not have been such a bad housing crash if the Federal Reserve had not created such perfect conditions for a housing bubble in the first place.

We should eliminate the Federal Reserve and allow the market to set interest rates.  Having a central authority that sets interest rates is just simply wrong and it creates all sorts of problems.

#10 The Federal Reserve has not been doing a good job.

In case anyone has not noticed, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has a very long track record of incompetence.  Nearly every major judgment that he has made since taking over that position has been dead wrong.

We are always told that we need someone to run the economy and that the Fed is there to keep depressions from happening.

Well, the truth is that the Fed actually greatly contributed to the Great Depression and it was at least partly responsible for the financial crash of 2008.

Now we are right on the verge of yet another massive financial implosion.

If someone keeps wrecking your car, you don’t let them keep driving it, do you?

#11 If we nationalize the Federal Reserve, we could potentially transition to “sound money” at some point.

There is great debate about this of course.  But it is a debate that we need to have.

But before we go to “hard money” we need to do something about this horrific debt that we have piled up for future generations first.  We simply cannot lock this debt in and expect them to pay for our mistakes.

We made this mess, so we need to clean it up.

Going to a debt-free monetary system would allow us to do that.

#12 If we nationalize the Federal Reserve, our local banks will have much more freedom.  Most Americans simply do not understand just how much power the Federal Reserve actually has over our local banks.

For example, just last year Federal Reserve officials walked into one bank in Oklahoma and demanded that they take down all the Bible verses and all the Christmas buttons that the bank had been displaying.

#13 If we nationalize the Federal Reserve, we won’t have trillions of dollars of secret loans being made to big financial institutions on Wall Street and in foreign countries.

Most Americans don’t realize this, but the Federal Reserve made $16.1 trillion in secret loans to their friends during the last financial crisis.

Meanwhile, hundreds of small banks were left out in the cold and the American people got no help.

This is rampant corruption and it needs to be stopped.

#14 The Federal Reserve needs to be nationalized because it is an unelected, unaccountable “fourth branch of government” that has gotten completely and totally out of control.  Even some members of Congress are now openly complaining about how much power the Fed has.  For example, Ron Paul told MSNBC last year that he believes that the Federal Reserve is now more powerful than Congress…..

“The regulations should be on the Federal Reserve. We should have transparency of the Federal Reserve. They can create trillions of dollars to bail out their friends, and we don’t even have any transparency of this. They’re more powerful than the Congress.”

To learn much more about the Federal Reserve and how it is destroying prosperity in America, there is a great animated documentary on YouTube entitled “The American Dream” that you can watch right here.

It is absolutely imperative that the American people get educated about the Federal Reserve and about why a debt-based monetary system is bad for us.

In 1922, Henry Ford wrote the following….

“The people must be helped to think naturally about money. They must be told what it is, and what makes it money, and what are the possible tricks of the present system which put nations and peoples under control of the few.”

The U.S. government does not need to go into debt to anyone.

The U.S. government is a sovereign nation.

So why in the world are we 15 trillion dollars in debt?

We have allowed ourselves to become willingly enslaved.

In the book of Proverbs, it tells us the following….

The rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender.

By allowing ourselves to become enslaved to debt, we have become the servants of the international banking system.

Our founding fathers attempted to warn us about this.

For example, Thomas Jefferson strongly believed that when the federal government borrows money in one generation which must be paid back by future generations it is equivalent to stealing….

And I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.

Not only that, Thomas Jefferson also once stated that if he could add just one more amendment to the U.S. Constitution it would be a ban on all government borrowing….

I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution. I would be willing to depend on that alone for the reduction of the administration of our government to the genuine principles of its Constitution; I mean an additional article, taking from the federal government the power of borrowing.

If we had implemented that advice, how much better off would we be today?

We can still do this.

We can take back control of our financial system.

We can nationalize the Federal Reserve.

We can dramatically cut taxes and eventually shut down the IRS.

We can give our children and grandchildren a future that is debt free.

We can escape the tyranny of the international bankers.

The choice, America, is up to you.

http://www.infowars.com/14-reasons-why-we-should-nationalize-the-federal-reserve/

‘The Marines are Coming to PROTECT the Protestors’

Jan 27, 2012 | Central Banking Elite

#OccupyWallStreet – ‘The Marines are Coming to PROTECT the Protestors’

Last updated on October 11, 2011 at 9:47 am EDT by in5d Alternative News

by Gregg Prescott, M.S. .
www.in5d.com
www.maya12-21-2012.com
www.HolisticCancerResearch.com

October 1, 2011 – TAMPA, FL – The Occupy Wall Street movement may have just received an unexpected surprise – United States Army and Marine troops are reportedly on their way to various protest locations to support the movement and to protect the protesters.

Army serviceman  Ward Reilly posted the following on Facebook:

“I’m heading up there tonight in my dress blues. So far, 15 of my fellow marine buddies are meeting me there, also in Uniform.

I want to send the following message to Wall St and Congress:

I didn’t fight for Wall St. I fought for America. Now it’s Congress’ turn.

My true hope, though, is that we Veterans can act as first line of defense between the police and the protester. If they want to get to some protesters so they can mace them, they will have to get through the Fucking Marine Corps first. Let’s see a cop mace a bunch of decorated war vets.

I apologize now for typos and errors. Typing this on iPhone whilst heading to NYC. We can organize once we’re there. That’s what we do best.If you see someone in uniform, gather together.

A formation will be held tonight at 10PM.

We all took an oath to uphold, protect and defend the constitution of this country. That’s what we will be doing.

Hope to see you there!!”

Reilly added, “Please note…this is from another veteran, NOT ME. (I was Army, he’s a Marine)…and I am on my way to DC, not NYC. :>) ….but this is fantastic, and he’s not a VFP guy….just a soldier that is outraged by what we have become in this country, as it should be.

Occupy Washington, DC link

“A LOT of veterans get it,” Reilly stated.  “Only one third of one percent of our citizens serve in the military, and we are the ones who sacrifice MUCH, and all we ask in return is that civilians control the people they elect. (miserable failure so far) But …the image of police, or anyone else, pepper spraying veterans or even confronting them, is “priceless” as they say, and will help slap this country into seeing what we have become.(totally insane, politically and police-state-wise). And EXACTLY what I have requested from my brother and sister veterans in DC Oct.6.”

Reilly added an edited statement: “I’m no longer in active duty or in any way contractually indebted to the military. Nor are any of my friends that are joining me.

To the officers’ of this thread: I’m aware of the potential, maybe inevitable trouble I can get in. So too are my friends.

I don’t really care about the debate here, the upvotes, the downvotes or anything in here really. Mental masturbation is awesome and all. But fucking hell people get off reddit and do something about it. The decision is made. I just figured reddit to be a useful tool to get the attention of a good amount of veterans.”

This tipping point could be the defining moment that sends the Occupy Wall Street movement into perpetual motion.

In this writer’s opinion, these servicemen, and any other troops who join in, are heroes, just like the everyday heroes who have been there from day 1 along with those who are now joining in.

JP Morgan Lobbying for Support?

In related news, JP Morgan recently donated the largest gift in their history of $4.6 million to the NYPD. New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly sent CEO and Chairman Jamie Dimon a note expressing “profound gratitude” for the company’s donation.

Additionally, JP Morgan owns $79 TRILLION in derivatives.

Let’s go back in history. In 1893, bankster JP Morgan funded Tesla’s free energy device. When Morgan found out that there was no way of charging people for it, he suppressed this technology. Shortly afterwards, Morgan became one of the founding fathers of the Federal Reserve Ponzi scheme. The corruption between JP Morgan, the individual and JP Morgan, the corporation, is undivided.

This is the latest in5d alternative news headline: Mayor Bloomberg Claims ‘Occupy Wall Street’ Protesters Are Targeting Bankers Who ‘Are Struggling To Make Ends Meet’ Struggling? What about the 300+ million Americans who are “struggling”? What about the numerous “struggling” people who had their homes foreclosed by the banksters? What about the record number of “struggling” unemployed Americans who cannot find a job in this recession? How dare he…

Civil Right Attorney Sam Cohen is also siding with the Occupy Wall Street movement, adding, “We believe that the NYPD has been applying law incorrectly in a deliberate attempt to disrupt the occupation.”

For a GLOBAL list of Occupy Wall Street protests, check out Occupy Together – A Global Occupation Movement

What are your thoughts? Comment below.

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http://www.in5d.com/occupy-wall-street-the-marines-are-coming-to-protect-the-protestors.html