Why Are So Many Wealthy People Building Futuristic High Tech Security Bunkers?
By Michael Snyder
The wealthy are spending more to protect themselves from all the rest of us than ever before. So why are they so concerned about the future? Do they know something that the rest of us don’t? Or do they just have the money to buy the type of security that the rest of us would if we could? Over the past few years, wealthy people all over America have been equipping their homes with futuristic high tech security systems that go far beyond the kinds of things portrayed in recent Hollywood films such as “The Purge“. We are talking about security bunkers with their own sustainable sources of food and water, hidden passageways that lead to ballistics-proof panic suites, and thermal heat detectors that can detect someone hiding up to 15 kilometers away. Most of these security measures will probably never even be needed if things stay pretty much as they are today. But if the thin veneer of civilization that we all take for granted on a daily basis continues to disintegrate and we see massive civil unrest in the years ahead, then those security measures are going to come in very handy indeed.
When it comes to prepping, sometimes it is the wealthy that are the most extreme. According to a recent Daily Mail article, the wealthy have become increasingly obsessed with home security in recent years…
Wealthy families across the country are shelling out millions to protect their loved ones from intruders, natural disasters or the apocalypse as home security goes increasingly sci-fi.
Companies that provide concerned homeowners with futuristic gadgets – and a priceless peace of mind – have revealed the growing demand of costly bunkers, passageways, panic rooms and recognition software.
Most people simply do not have the money for those sorts of things. But the wealthy do, and these days they have shown a willingness to shell out big bucks for extraordinary security measures that they hope will give them peace of mind. A recent Forbes article profiled the owner of a company called Strategically Armored & Fortified Environments (SAFE). He uses his own fortress-like home as a showcase for potential clients, and business is booming…
Al Corbi’s residence in the Hollywood Hills has the requisite white walls covered in artwork and picture windows offering breathtaking views of downtown Los Angeles, but it has more in common with NSA headquarters than with the other contemporary homes on the block. The Corbi family doesn’t need keys (thanks to biometric recognition software), doesn’t fear earthquakes (thanks to steel-reinforced concrete caissons that burrow 30 feet into the private hilltop) and sleeps easily inside a 2,500-square-foot home within a home: a ballistics-proof panic suite that Corbi refers to as a “safe core.”
According to Forbes, some of these homes that SAFE builds actually have “sustainable” security bunkers where families could potentially survive for multiple generations in the event of a major catastrophe…
SAFE’s bunkers operate on geothermal power and have sustainable food supplies, their own wells for water and full medical facilities. Many have amphitheaters, restaurants and health spas; for one client, Corbi designed a promenade with ceilings hand-painted with blue skies and “stores” displaying the family heirlooms. “These are things you would want to have personally, so right now it’s an ultimate entertainment area, but if there was a disaster you could go there and stay for a long time,” says Corbi.
A long time, indeed. He estimates that families could survive in the best planned of these luxurious strongholds for up to three generations. “They would be the new Adam and Eve, essentially, who would start up everything again.”
So what are the wealthy so concerned about?
After all, our politicians and the mainstream media keep telling us that everything is going to be just fine. So why are they going to such extraordinary lengths to prepare for the future?
Well, there are definitely some wealthy individuals that are among the 3 million preppers in the United States that are preparing for a future meltdown of society.
But many other wealthy individuals just want to make sure that their families are safe. Violent crime in the United States was up 15 percent last year, and anger toward the wealthy has risen to unprecedented heights since the last financial crisis.
Desperate people do desperate things, and without a doubt Americans are becoming increasingly desperate. In fact, these days criminals will go after just about anyone. For example, on Sunday someone actually ripped off the Salvation Army…
The Salvation Army said someone broke into one of its community centers in Washington and stole donations collected through the charity’s Red Kettle Program.
Maj. Lewis Reckline, area commander of the Salvation Army National Capital Area Command said the Solomon G. Brown Corps Community Center was burglarized at about 5:30 a.m. Sunday.
And in South Carolina the other day, a group of thugs shot and killed a 76-year-old lady during an attempt to rob her home…
A 76-year-old woman was killed in a shootout as a gang tried to rob her outside her South Carolina home in the early hours of Saturday.
Dorothy Hendrix was shot twice by the gang of two men and a woman, but she managed to shoot one of her assailants in the stomach before dying of her wounds.
So it is understandable that the wealthy would want to try to insulate themselves from all of this. After all, they are huge targets for desperate criminals and thieves.
And when it comes to spotting intruders, some of the technologies being used by the wealthy these days are truly amazing. For example, one company out in Oregon actually manufactures infrared cameras that can spot the thermal heat signature of someone hiding 15 kilometers away…
Another company, FLIR Systems, based in Wilsonville, Oregon, makes infrared cameras that can read the thermal heat signatures from anything nearby – even someone in a hiding place as far as 15km away.
Many of these technologies are very “cool”, but the sudden interest in them reveals something else about our society.
The level of trust in our society is rapidly breaking down, and people are scared.
In fact, one recent survey discovered that the level of trust that we have in one another is much, much lower than it was about 40 years ago…
For four decades, a gut-level ingredient of democracy — trust in the other fellow — has been quietly draining away.
These days, only one-third of Americans say most people can be trusted. Half felt that way in 1972, when the General Social Survey first asked the question.
Forty years later, a record high of nearly two-thirds say “you can’t be too careful” in dealing with people.
So what do you think?
Do you believe that most people can be trusted?
And why do you think that so many wealthy people are spending so much money on futuristic high tech security measures right now?
Please feel free to share what you think by posting a comment below…
Link:
http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/why-are-so-many-wealthy-people-building-futuristic-high-tech-security-bunkers
Tuesday, December 3, 2013
Once on watch list, always on watch list...
Over 700,000 people on US watch list: Once you get on, there’s no way off
RT
The names of nearly three-quarters of a million individuals have been secretly added to watch lists administered by the United States government, but federal officials are adamant about keeping information about these rosters under wraps.
A report by the New York Times’ Susan Stellin published over the weekend attempted to shine much-deserved light on an otherwise largely unexposed program of federal watch lists, but details about these directories — including the names of individuals on them and what they did to get there — remain as elusive as ever.
More than 12 years after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, federal agencies continue to keep lists on hand containing names of individuals of interest: people who often end up un-cleared to enter or exit the US due to an array of activity that could be considered suspicious or terrorist-related to government officials.
In 2008, the American Civil Liberties Union claimed that an Inspector General of the Department of Justice report found at least 700,000 individual names on the database maintained by the Terrorist Screening Center, the Federal Bureau of Investigation sub-office tasked with overseeing the “single database of identifying information about those known or reasonably suspected of being involved in terrorist activity.” Five years later, that number of suspicious persons is reportedly close to what it was at the time. Half-a-decade down the road, however, Americans and foreign nationals who end up on the government’s radar are offered little chance to find out how they ended there, or even file an appeal.
According to some, that’s just the start of what’s wrong with these lists.
“If you’ve done the paperwork correctly, then you can effectively enter someone onto the watch list,” SUNY Buffalo Law School associate professor Anya Bernstein told Stellin for this weekend’s report. What’s more, though, according to Bernstein, is that “There’s no indication that agencies undertake any kind of regular retrospective review to assess how good they are at predicting the conduct they’re targeting,” suggesting that anyone can be targeted and added to such a list with little oversight to protect them.
“When you have a huge list of people who are likely to commit terrorist acts, it’s easy to think that terrorism is a really big problem and we should be devoting a lot of resources to fighting it,” Bernstein added. With almost no transparency and outrages aplenty, though, she argues that the government’s watch lists are largely flawed and can erroneously ruin an innocent person’s life.
Such is the case with Rahinah Ibrahim, 48-year-old a former Standard University doctoral student who was expected to be in federal court in San Francisco, California Monday morning for the latest hearing in a case that stems from an incident in 2005 that ended with her learning she had been added to a terrorist watch list. Ibrahim was attempting to board a Hawaii-bound plane from San Francisco International Airport in traditional Muslim garb when she was taken into custody and told she had landed herself on a terrorist watch list. Nearly a decade later Ibrahim continues to disavow any connections with terrorism, but the issues surrounding the watch list program has made it seemingly impossible to find out what she did, let alone have her name removed from the list.
“We’ve tried to get discovery into whether our client has been surveilled and have been shut down on that,” Elizabeth Pipkin, a lawyer representing Ms. Ibrahim, added to the Times. “They won’t answer that question for us.”
“She doesn’t want this to happen to other people — to be wrongfully included on these lists that haunt them for years and years,” Pipkin said recently to Northern California’s Mercury News.
“No one knows how the targets get on the lists,” she said. “The government has never contested this case on the merits. We don’t think they have a defense.”
But with Monday’s hearing coming nearly a decade after Ibrahim first found herself in trouble, the likelihood of any reform coming soon to the watch list system seems slim-to-none. ACLU lawyer Hina Shamsi even told the Times that the system keeping the watch lists in tact seems to be more flawed than the one guarding over terrorist suspects held at America’s military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
“People who are accused of being enemy combatants at Guantánamo have the ability to challenge their detention, however imperfect that now is,” Shamsi told Stellin. “It makes no sense that people who have not actually been accused of any wrongdoing can’t challenge.”
A Terrorist Screening Center official reached for comment by the Times claimed that fewer than one percent of those listed on such rosters are US citizens or legal permanent residents, but as Stellin points out, “there is no way to confirm that number.”
Link:
http://rt.com/usa/federal-watch-list-unchecked-612/
RT
The names of nearly three-quarters of a million individuals have been secretly added to watch lists administered by the United States government, but federal officials are adamant about keeping information about these rosters under wraps.
A report by the New York Times’ Susan Stellin published over the weekend attempted to shine much-deserved light on an otherwise largely unexposed program of federal watch lists, but details about these directories — including the names of individuals on them and what they did to get there — remain as elusive as ever.
More than 12 years after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, federal agencies continue to keep lists on hand containing names of individuals of interest: people who often end up un-cleared to enter or exit the US due to an array of activity that could be considered suspicious or terrorist-related to government officials.
In 2008, the American Civil Liberties Union claimed that an Inspector General of the Department of Justice report found at least 700,000 individual names on the database maintained by the Terrorist Screening Center, the Federal Bureau of Investigation sub-office tasked with overseeing the “single database of identifying information about those known or reasonably suspected of being involved in terrorist activity.” Five years later, that number of suspicious persons is reportedly close to what it was at the time. Half-a-decade down the road, however, Americans and foreign nationals who end up on the government’s radar are offered little chance to find out how they ended there, or even file an appeal.
According to some, that’s just the start of what’s wrong with these lists.
“If you’ve done the paperwork correctly, then you can effectively enter someone onto the watch list,” SUNY Buffalo Law School associate professor Anya Bernstein told Stellin for this weekend’s report. What’s more, though, according to Bernstein, is that “There’s no indication that agencies undertake any kind of regular retrospective review to assess how good they are at predicting the conduct they’re targeting,” suggesting that anyone can be targeted and added to such a list with little oversight to protect them.
“When you have a huge list of people who are likely to commit terrorist acts, it’s easy to think that terrorism is a really big problem and we should be devoting a lot of resources to fighting it,” Bernstein added. With almost no transparency and outrages aplenty, though, she argues that the government’s watch lists are largely flawed and can erroneously ruin an innocent person’s life.
Such is the case with Rahinah Ibrahim, 48-year-old a former Standard University doctoral student who was expected to be in federal court in San Francisco, California Monday morning for the latest hearing in a case that stems from an incident in 2005 that ended with her learning she had been added to a terrorist watch list. Ibrahim was attempting to board a Hawaii-bound plane from San Francisco International Airport in traditional Muslim garb when she was taken into custody and told she had landed herself on a terrorist watch list. Nearly a decade later Ibrahim continues to disavow any connections with terrorism, but the issues surrounding the watch list program has made it seemingly impossible to find out what she did, let alone have her name removed from the list.
“We’ve tried to get discovery into whether our client has been surveilled and have been shut down on that,” Elizabeth Pipkin, a lawyer representing Ms. Ibrahim, added to the Times. “They won’t answer that question for us.”
“She doesn’t want this to happen to other people — to be wrongfully included on these lists that haunt them for years and years,” Pipkin said recently to Northern California’s Mercury News.
“No one knows how the targets get on the lists,” she said. “The government has never contested this case on the merits. We don’t think they have a defense.”
But with Monday’s hearing coming nearly a decade after Ibrahim first found herself in trouble, the likelihood of any reform coming soon to the watch list system seems slim-to-none. ACLU lawyer Hina Shamsi even told the Times that the system keeping the watch lists in tact seems to be more flawed than the one guarding over terrorist suspects held at America’s military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
“People who are accused of being enemy combatants at Guantánamo have the ability to challenge their detention, however imperfect that now is,” Shamsi told Stellin. “It makes no sense that people who have not actually been accused of any wrongdoing can’t challenge.”
A Terrorist Screening Center official reached for comment by the Times claimed that fewer than one percent of those listed on such rosters are US citizens or legal permanent residents, but as Stellin points out, “there is no way to confirm that number.”
Link:
http://rt.com/usa/federal-watch-list-unchecked-612/
No security on Obamacare website...
No security ever built into Obamacare site: Hacker
Matthew J. Belvedere
It could take a year to secure the risk of “high exposures” of personal information on the federal Obamacare online exchange, a cybersecurity expert told CNBC on Monday. “When you develop a website, you develop it with security in mind. And it doesn’t appear to have happened this time,” said David Kennedy, a so-called “white hat” hacker who tests online security by breaching websites. He testified on Capitol Hill about the flaws of HealthCare.gov last week. “It’s really hard to go back and fix the security around it because security wasn’t built into it,” said Kennedy, chief executive of TrustedSec. “We’re talking multiple months to over a year to at least address some of the critical-to-high exposures on the website itself.” Link: http://www.cnbc.com/id/101225308
Matthew J. Belvedere
It could take a year to secure the risk of “high exposures” of personal information on the federal Obamacare online exchange, a cybersecurity expert told CNBC on Monday. “When you develop a website, you develop it with security in mind. And it doesn’t appear to have happened this time,” said David Kennedy, a so-called “white hat” hacker who tests online security by breaching websites. He testified on Capitol Hill about the flaws of HealthCare.gov last week. “It’s really hard to go back and fix the security around it because security wasn’t built into it,” said Kennedy, chief executive of TrustedSec. “We’re talking multiple months to over a year to at least address some of the critical-to-high exposures on the website itself.” Link: http://www.cnbc.com/id/101225308
Monday, December 2, 2013
Debunking the "Magic Bullet" theory...
JFK: Jim Garrison, The Warren Report and the end of the “magic bullet” absurdity
by Jim Fetzer (with Larry Rivera)
The crux of The Warren Commission Report (1964) is the claim that the same bullet that hit JFK in the back also hit Gov. John Connally, which the report itself downplays the “magic bullet” theory as “not necessary to any essential findings of the Commission”.
That is complete rubbish, however, since if the same bullet did not both exit JFK’s throat and enter John Connally’s back, then those wounds have to be accounted for on the basis of separate shots and separate shooters, which implies a conspiracy to kill JFK.
A mountain of evidence proves that the shot that hit JFK in the back did not enter at the base of his neck but 5.5″ below the collar to the right of the spinal column, which was a shallow shot at a downward angle, making it all but impossible it should have taken an upward turn to exit his throat.
With a deft verbal sleight-of-hand, the Warren Commission downplayed the significance of the “magic bullet” theory, where no less an authority than Michael Baden, M.D., the one-time medical examiner for New York City and head of the medical panel for the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) when it reinvestigated the case in 1977-78, has observed, “If the magic bullet theory is false, then there had to have been six shots from three directions”, which makes its tenability of enormous importance.
When we “look inside” The Warren Commission Report (1964), here is how it describes the matter (on page 16) after maintaining that the weight of the evidence “indicates” that only three shots were fired:
3. Although it is not necessary to any essential findings of the Commission to determine just which shot hit Governor Connally, there is very persuasive evidence from the experts to indicate that the same bullet which pierced the President’s throat also caused Governor Connally’s wounds. However, Governor Connally’s testimony and certain other factors have given rise to some difference of opinion as to this probability but there is no question in the mind of any member of the Commission that all the shots which caused the President’s and Governor Connally’s wounds were fired from the sixth floor window of the Texas School Book Depository.
That Governor Connally’s testimony should have given them pause is unsurprising, since he maintained until his death that he had been struck by a separate bullet and not by the same bullet that hit JFK. Here is a critique of the Warren Commission’s stance by New Orleans District Attorney, Jim Garrison, to wit:
So which is correct? Was JFK hit at the base of the back of his neck as the Warren Commission claims? or is Jim Garrison right and the “magic bullet” theory is a fairy tale? It turns out that there is a great deal of evidence that settles the question beyond a reasonable doubt. Just consider the following for yourself.
Where was JFK hit in the back?
I presented a lecture at Cambridge University during an international conference, which was published in an international peer-reviewed journal under the title, “Reasoning about Assassinations”, which I thought had settled the matter. Here is the shirt and the jacket he was wearing, left behind at Parkland:
They both show holes about 5.5″ below the collar and just to the right of the spinal column. During one of his visits to the National Archives, David W. Mantik, M.D., Ph.D., had a member of the staff put them on and determined that the hole in the shirt was slightly lower than the hole in the jacket. While some want to maintain that they were “bunched”, a wound at this location appears on the autopsy diagram:
The autopsy diagram was verified by Admiral George G. Burkley, the President’s personal physician, who also composed a death certificate on JFK, which described his death as the result of a massive wound to the back of the head and a second wound to his back at the level of the third thoracic vertebrae:
It will come as no surprise that the third thoracic vertebra is about 5.5″ below the collar, which confirms the other evidence from the shirt and the jacket he was wearing and the autopsy diagram. So we know where JFK was hit in the back, which was not at the base of back of the neck but 5.5″ below the collar.
The Warren Commission Reenactment
As though that were not proof enough, we also have an FBI Agent by the name of Sibert drew a sketch of the wound to the back in relation to the wound to the throat, which makes it very difficult to believe that a bullet that entered at the location he specifies at a downward angle could possibly have exited his throat:
And we have a great deal more, including Warren Commission staff reconstruction photos. Here is my favorite from the history of research on the assassination, featuring a young Arlene Specter, who is in the process of demonstrating the trajectory that the “magic bullet” would have taken where that theory true:
Since you can look below his hand and see the large patch on the back of the stand-in where the bullet had hit, a photograph intended to illustrate the “magic bullet” instead refutes it. And here the person who spent the most time with the body preparing it for burial describes the wounds that he observed:
Notice, in particular, that, in addition to the massive blow-out at the back of his head, the entry wound at the right temple and the small shrapnel wounds in his face, that the body had a “wound in back (5 to six inches) below shoulder to the right of back bone”. How much more proof do we need about its location?
Read the rest here:
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2013/11/26/jfk-jim-garrison-the-warren-report-and-the-end-of-the-magic-bullet-absurdity/
by Jim Fetzer (with Larry Rivera)
The crux of The Warren Commission Report (1964) is the claim that the same bullet that hit JFK in the back also hit Gov. John Connally, which the report itself downplays the “magic bullet” theory as “not necessary to any essential findings of the Commission”.
That is complete rubbish, however, since if the same bullet did not both exit JFK’s throat and enter John Connally’s back, then those wounds have to be accounted for on the basis of separate shots and separate shooters, which implies a conspiracy to kill JFK.
A mountain of evidence proves that the shot that hit JFK in the back did not enter at the base of his neck but 5.5″ below the collar to the right of the spinal column, which was a shallow shot at a downward angle, making it all but impossible it should have taken an upward turn to exit his throat.
With a deft verbal sleight-of-hand, the Warren Commission downplayed the significance of the “magic bullet” theory, where no less an authority than Michael Baden, M.D., the one-time medical examiner for New York City and head of the medical panel for the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) when it reinvestigated the case in 1977-78, has observed, “If the magic bullet theory is false, then there had to have been six shots from three directions”, which makes its tenability of enormous importance.
When we “look inside” The Warren Commission Report (1964), here is how it describes the matter (on page 16) after maintaining that the weight of the evidence “indicates” that only three shots were fired:
3. Although it is not necessary to any essential findings of the Commission to determine just which shot hit Governor Connally, there is very persuasive evidence from the experts to indicate that the same bullet which pierced the President’s throat also caused Governor Connally’s wounds. However, Governor Connally’s testimony and certain other factors have given rise to some difference of opinion as to this probability but there is no question in the mind of any member of the Commission that all the shots which caused the President’s and Governor Connally’s wounds were fired from the sixth floor window of the Texas School Book Depository.
That Governor Connally’s testimony should have given them pause is unsurprising, since he maintained until his death that he had been struck by a separate bullet and not by the same bullet that hit JFK. Here is a critique of the Warren Commission’s stance by New Orleans District Attorney, Jim Garrison, to wit:
So which is correct? Was JFK hit at the base of the back of his neck as the Warren Commission claims? or is Jim Garrison right and the “magic bullet” theory is a fairy tale? It turns out that there is a great deal of evidence that settles the question beyond a reasonable doubt. Just consider the following for yourself.
Where was JFK hit in the back?
I presented a lecture at Cambridge University during an international conference, which was published in an international peer-reviewed journal under the title, “Reasoning about Assassinations”, which I thought had settled the matter. Here is the shirt and the jacket he was wearing, left behind at Parkland:
They both show holes about 5.5″ below the collar and just to the right of the spinal column. During one of his visits to the National Archives, David W. Mantik, M.D., Ph.D., had a member of the staff put them on and determined that the hole in the shirt was slightly lower than the hole in the jacket. While some want to maintain that they were “bunched”, a wound at this location appears on the autopsy diagram:
The autopsy diagram was verified by Admiral George G. Burkley, the President’s personal physician, who also composed a death certificate on JFK, which described his death as the result of a massive wound to the back of the head and a second wound to his back at the level of the third thoracic vertebrae:
It will come as no surprise that the third thoracic vertebra is about 5.5″ below the collar, which confirms the other evidence from the shirt and the jacket he was wearing and the autopsy diagram. So we know where JFK was hit in the back, which was not at the base of back of the neck but 5.5″ below the collar.
The Warren Commission Reenactment
As though that were not proof enough, we also have an FBI Agent by the name of Sibert drew a sketch of the wound to the back in relation to the wound to the throat, which makes it very difficult to believe that a bullet that entered at the location he specifies at a downward angle could possibly have exited his throat:
And we have a great deal more, including Warren Commission staff reconstruction photos. Here is my favorite from the history of research on the assassination, featuring a young Arlene Specter, who is in the process of demonstrating the trajectory that the “magic bullet” would have taken where that theory true:
Since you can look below his hand and see the large patch on the back of the stand-in where the bullet had hit, a photograph intended to illustrate the “magic bullet” instead refutes it. And here the person who spent the most time with the body preparing it for burial describes the wounds that he observed:
Notice, in particular, that, in addition to the massive blow-out at the back of his head, the entry wound at the right temple and the small shrapnel wounds in his face, that the body had a “wound in back (5 to six inches) below shoulder to the right of back bone”. How much more proof do we need about its location?
Read the rest here:
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2013/11/26/jfk-jim-garrison-the-warren-report-and-the-end-of-the-magic-bullet-absurdity/
Now, who do you think they plan on using those against???
Written by Alex Newman
The federal government and the Obama administration are under fire for a variety of unconstitutional programs aimed at both militarizing and controlling local police and law enforcement, including supplying a vast array of sophisticated U.S. Defense Department “weapons of war” to city and county governments. Billions of dollars in military equipment has already been handed to municipal police departments and county sheriffs’ offices nationwide under the rapidly expanding federal schemes, but concerns from across the political spectrum are growing quickly as well.
This year alone, over 150 so-called “mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles,” or MRAPs, used by U.S. forces in Iraq, were distributed by the administration to local police departments within the “Homeland.” The Department of Homeland Security, meanwhile, has been at the center of mounting controversy for over a year as it stockpiled the beastly military vehicles and massive quantities of ammunition for domestic use. At the same time, federal efforts to unconstitutionally commandeer state and local law enforcement are accelerating.
Criticism of the controversial and growing law-enforcement militarization schemes, however, is also escalating across the political spectrum. One of the biggest concerns expressed by opponents is the threat to the independence and local accountability of police represented by unconstitutional federal handouts — most of which come with “strings” attached. Critics have also blasted what they say is the increased potential for unnecessary escalation of violence, the growing presence of “weapons of war” aimed at Americans on U.S. streets, and the huge costs to already-struggling taxpayers drowning in debts incurred by Washington, D.C. politicians.
However, amid mounting outrage and concerns over what more than two thirds of U.S. voters say is an “out-of-control” federal government that is “threatening basic civil liberties,” the administration is stepping up its showering of military equipment on local law enforcement officials. Even the establishment press is now reporting on the growing controversies — especially after the distribution of some 165, so far this year, 18-ton armored personnel carriers with gun turrets originally built for U.S. troops on Middle East battlefields. Another 731 have been requested, according to news reports.
Of course, the federal programs distributing “surplus” military equipment to local law enforcement are not new. In fact, they go back decades. However, as The New American reported in 2011, the schemes are expanding at a record pace under the Obama administration. Ironically, perhaps, the federal flood of military hardware comes amid the executive branch’s fiendish assaults on the unalienable right of the people to keep and bear arms — often marketed by the current administration with claims that “weapons of war” do not belong on the streets of the “Homeland.”
Despite the president’s radical and deeply deceptive rhetoric attacking fundamental rights guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution, everyday Americans do not actually have access to military-grade weaponry — at least not without jumping through government hoops and mazes of red tape. Thanks to the federal government, though, more than a few local police departments, which the administration is increasingly seeking to control, do have access to “weapons of war” — drones, tanks, helicopters, grenade launchers, Humvees, MRAPs, and much more. All of it is being provided at U.S. taxpayer expense.
Just in New York State, the Associated Press reported last week that five county sheriff’s departments and three other police agencies have received MRAPs from the Defense Department this year. “It's armored. It's heavy. It's intimidating. And it's free,” said Albany County Sheriff Craig Apple, one of the officials whose department now has a federally provided MRAP beast of war. Another one of the armored personnel carriers went to the Ohio State University campus police, the AP reported. Dallas County and High Springs, Florida, each received one as well, along with numerous other cities across America.
The heavy military vehicles, costing U.S. taxpayers $500,000 each, were originally purchased by the U.S. Defense Department to help American troops battling heavily armed insurgents in Iraq. Now, they will be used by local police across America for purposes that are not entirely clear or well defined. Proponents of the scheme claim the “weapons of war” will largely be used as a “shock and awe”-type show of force for hostage situations and similar emergency scenarios — primarily to protect police officers. Critics, however, are becoming increasingly suspicious of the program.
“It’s a Trojan Horse, of course, one that is sold to communities as a benefit, all the while the real purpose is to keep the defense industry churning out profits, bring police departments in line with the military, and establish a standing army,” argued The Rutherford Institute President John Whitehead, an attorney whose non-profit focuses on protecting constitutionally guaranteed rights. “The results are deadly, as can be seen in the growing numbers of unarmed civilians shot by police during relatively routine encounters and in the use of SWAT teams to carry out relatively routine tasks.”
Whitehead, whose book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State documents the federal government’s efforts to militarize America’s local law-enforcement departments, goes on to cite a troubling array of outrageous abuses in a column about the trends published earlier this month. “Thus, while recycling unused military equipment might sound thrifty and practical, the ramifications are proving to be far more dangerous and deadly,” he said. “This is what happens when you have police not only acquiring the gear of American soldiers, but also the mindset of an army occupying hostile territory.”
Indeed, the entire function and traditional role of local police in America is being undermined in favor of something alien to U.S. history and law, Whitehead suggested. “In this way, the American citizen is no longer seen as an employer or master to be served by public servants like police officers,” he wrote. “With police playing the part of soldiers on the battlefield and the American citizen left to play the part of an enemy combatant, it’s a pretty safe bet that this particular exercise in the absurd will not have a happy ending.”
The John Birch Society, a constitutionalist organization (and affiliate of this magazine), has for decades been running a high-profile campaign to “Support Your Local Police and Keep Them Independent.” It, too, is concerned about the accelerating trends. “We were successful in stopping Police Civilian Review Boards in the 1960s and 70s and in getting the federal government’s Law Enforcement Assistance Administration abolished in 1982,” the group said on its website for the “Support Your Local Police” campaign. “Today, more than ever, we need grassroots activists to continue working to keep our local police under the supervision of local elected officials and free from state and federal control.”
In addition to criticism from constitutionalist, libertarian, and conservative forces, the federal schemes to militarize local law enforcement have also come under fire from groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union. “One of our concerns with this is it has a tendency to escalate violence," ACLU Center for Justice senior counsel Kara Dansky was quoted as saying by the Associated Press in a recent article about the controversial MRAP deliveries.
Meanwhile, in addition to the militarization, the Obama administration is also stepping up its efforts to turn traditionally independent local police departments into mere administrative arms of Washington, D.C.’s growing “Homeland Security” apparatus. The New American magazine’s Joe Wolverton has written extensively on the ongoing machinations. At the same time, the federal government is also working quietly but steadily to create its own fledgling national police force — even outfitting Homeland Security agents with “Police” outfits.
Aside from being unconstitutional, critics say there are many reasons why it is past time to rein in the federal government and its efforts to transform American law enforcement — not expand Washington, D.C.’s coercive power even further. Opponents of the administration’s escalating militarization and control schemes aimed at U.S. communities argue that Congress must address the expanding threats to citizens, liberty, and local police. The trends are clear, and without serious efforts to address them, the consequences could easily prove to be nightmarish for America.
Link:
http://thenewamerican.com/usnews/constitution/item/17056-obama-flooding-u-s-streets-with-weapons-of-war-for-local-police
"I wonder how many Americans ever consider the possibility that it is this constant barrage of death and destruction at the hands of U.S. forces that is generating the very militancy, insurgency, and terrorism that U.S. forces continue targeting."
Killing Unnamed Children in Afghanistan
by Jacob G. Hornberger
When I read this Washington Post article about the two-year-old child that U.S. forces just killed in Afghanistan, I wondered what the child’s name was. Nowhere was it to be found in the article. Maybe the Post hadn’t acquired the name. Or maybe it just doesn’t matter. It’s just one more death among the countless Afghan deaths at the hands of U.S. forces during the past 12 years.
The commander of U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan, Marine Corps Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., issued an apology for killing the child. I wonder if he cited the child’s name in his apology. In any event, no doubt Dunford is hoping that the apology will help the U.S. government secure permission from Afghan President Hamid Karzai to keep U.S. forces in Afghanistan past 2014.
The child’s death was justified by the same rationale that has been used to justify the deaths of countless other Afghan people since the U.S. invasion 12 years ago: what U.S. officials call “collateral damage.” U.S. officials said that they were targeting a “mid-level Taliban commander who had been involved in attacks” on coalition troops and “organizing and facilitating lethal aid to insurgents in the area.” The two-year old just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.
For 12 years, the U.S. government has had carte blanche to kill as many people as it wanted in Afghanistan. Whenever U.S. forces have dropped bombs and fired missiles at suspected “terrorists,” “militants,” or “insurgents,” there has been no second-guessing on the part of U.S. officials, no matter how many non-terrorists, non-militants, and non-insurgents have been killed in the process. Oh sure, apologies are oftentimes rendered and nominal payments of money are made to aggrieved families, but nothing has stopped the onslaught of death for 12 long years.
If they haven’t killed all the bad guys by now and if they haven’t trained the Afghan government to stand on its own, then it’s time to just declare the entire venture a failure and bring all the troops home now.
Let’s face it. That two-year-old didn’t have to die. If U.S. forces had already exited Afghanistan, then U.S. forces wouldn’t have been there to fire the missile that killed that kid.
Of course, U.S. officials would respond that then they wouldn’t have been able to kill that militant — the one who is “organizing and facilitating lethal aid to insurgents in the area.”
Well, let’s ask ourselves why that Afghan is a militant and why he’s engaged in that activity. It’s not because he was involved in the 9/11 attacks or planning on coming to get us here in the United States. It’s because that militant is trying to rid his country of a foreign occupier — and a brutal foreign occupier at that, one that fires missiles at people in reckless disregard of whether there are two-year-old children in the vicinity.
Long ago, the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan devolved into a war that targets people who are resisting the foreign occupation of their country and a war to prop up a corrupt, illegal pro-U.S. regime, one whose president requires bags full of cash to be regularly delivered to him by the CIA.
What about the possibility of the Taliban’s regaining control of the government? Who cares? What difference would it make? Even those who cite the ballyhooed terms “terrorism” and “national security” don’t get very far with those justifications anymore. After all, let’s not forget that if Karzai says no more occupation, U.S. forces are exiting the country regardless of who raises those ballyhooed terms. If “national security” was really at stake (whatever that term means), would U.S. officials really be exiting the country just because Karzai wanted them to?
Moreover, let’s face it: If terrorists want to attack the United States, they don’t need a friendly government in Afghanistan to do it. They can always find friendly governments elsewhere in the Middle East, such as Saudi Arabia, or simply some nice hotel room in Pakistan, Yemen, or even Berlin or London. Moreover, let’s not forget that the reason there is anti-American terrorism in the first place is owing to the U.S. national-security state’s interventionism in Afghanistan, the Middle East, and elsewhere in the region. Stopping the interventionism equals stopping the terrorism.
For 12 long years, Americans have been subjected to a constant deluge of death of foreigners at the hands of the U.S. national-security state. Death has become an everyday part of our lives. It seeps into our pores. It’s ingrained into our minds. Death has become so ordinary that most people don’t even wonder what the names of those who have been killed were or what kinds of lives they were living when they got killed.
It just doesn’t matter. All that matters is that the national-security state is “keeping us safe” by killing a never-ending stream of people. I wonder how many Americans ever consider the possibility that it is this constant barrage of death and destruction at the hands of U.S. forces that is generating the very militancy, insurgency, and terrorism that U.S. forces continue targeting.
It’s obvious that the U.S. Empire wants to continue occupying Afghanistan indefinitely into the future, knowing full well that that will ensure the endless cycle of death and destruction. My hope is that Karzai stands fast, as did the Iraqis, and kicks the American forces out of the country, preferably now rather than later. It would be the greatest gift that Karzai could give his country, the United States, and the world. At the very least, it would mean that there would be no more deaths of two-year-old unnamed children at the hands of U.S. forces, no more deaths of Afghans who are doing nothing more than trying to rid their country of a foreign occupier, and no more deaths of U.S. soldiers who kill and die for nothing.
Link:
http://fff.org/2013/12/02/killing-unnamed-children-in-afghanistan/
by Jacob G. Hornberger
When I read this Washington Post article about the two-year-old child that U.S. forces just killed in Afghanistan, I wondered what the child’s name was. Nowhere was it to be found in the article. Maybe the Post hadn’t acquired the name. Or maybe it just doesn’t matter. It’s just one more death among the countless Afghan deaths at the hands of U.S. forces during the past 12 years.
The commander of U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan, Marine Corps Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., issued an apology for killing the child. I wonder if he cited the child’s name in his apology. In any event, no doubt Dunford is hoping that the apology will help the U.S. government secure permission from Afghan President Hamid Karzai to keep U.S. forces in Afghanistan past 2014.
The child’s death was justified by the same rationale that has been used to justify the deaths of countless other Afghan people since the U.S. invasion 12 years ago: what U.S. officials call “collateral damage.” U.S. officials said that they were targeting a “mid-level Taliban commander who had been involved in attacks” on coalition troops and “organizing and facilitating lethal aid to insurgents in the area.” The two-year old just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.
For 12 years, the U.S. government has had carte blanche to kill as many people as it wanted in Afghanistan. Whenever U.S. forces have dropped bombs and fired missiles at suspected “terrorists,” “militants,” or “insurgents,” there has been no second-guessing on the part of U.S. officials, no matter how many non-terrorists, non-militants, and non-insurgents have been killed in the process. Oh sure, apologies are oftentimes rendered and nominal payments of money are made to aggrieved families, but nothing has stopped the onslaught of death for 12 long years.
If they haven’t killed all the bad guys by now and if they haven’t trained the Afghan government to stand on its own, then it’s time to just declare the entire venture a failure and bring all the troops home now.
Let’s face it. That two-year-old didn’t have to die. If U.S. forces had already exited Afghanistan, then U.S. forces wouldn’t have been there to fire the missile that killed that kid.
Of course, U.S. officials would respond that then they wouldn’t have been able to kill that militant — the one who is “organizing and facilitating lethal aid to insurgents in the area.”
Well, let’s ask ourselves why that Afghan is a militant and why he’s engaged in that activity. It’s not because he was involved in the 9/11 attacks or planning on coming to get us here in the United States. It’s because that militant is trying to rid his country of a foreign occupier — and a brutal foreign occupier at that, one that fires missiles at people in reckless disregard of whether there are two-year-old children in the vicinity.
Long ago, the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan devolved into a war that targets people who are resisting the foreign occupation of their country and a war to prop up a corrupt, illegal pro-U.S. regime, one whose president requires bags full of cash to be regularly delivered to him by the CIA.
What about the possibility of the Taliban’s regaining control of the government? Who cares? What difference would it make? Even those who cite the ballyhooed terms “terrorism” and “national security” don’t get very far with those justifications anymore. After all, let’s not forget that if Karzai says no more occupation, U.S. forces are exiting the country regardless of who raises those ballyhooed terms. If “national security” was really at stake (whatever that term means), would U.S. officials really be exiting the country just because Karzai wanted them to?
Moreover, let’s face it: If terrorists want to attack the United States, they don’t need a friendly government in Afghanistan to do it. They can always find friendly governments elsewhere in the Middle East, such as Saudi Arabia, or simply some nice hotel room in Pakistan, Yemen, or even Berlin or London. Moreover, let’s not forget that the reason there is anti-American terrorism in the first place is owing to the U.S. national-security state’s interventionism in Afghanistan, the Middle East, and elsewhere in the region. Stopping the interventionism equals stopping the terrorism.
For 12 long years, Americans have been subjected to a constant deluge of death of foreigners at the hands of the U.S. national-security state. Death has become an everyday part of our lives. It seeps into our pores. It’s ingrained into our minds. Death has become so ordinary that most people don’t even wonder what the names of those who have been killed were or what kinds of lives they were living when they got killed.
It just doesn’t matter. All that matters is that the national-security state is “keeping us safe” by killing a never-ending stream of people. I wonder how many Americans ever consider the possibility that it is this constant barrage of death and destruction at the hands of U.S. forces that is generating the very militancy, insurgency, and terrorism that U.S. forces continue targeting.
It’s obvious that the U.S. Empire wants to continue occupying Afghanistan indefinitely into the future, knowing full well that that will ensure the endless cycle of death and destruction. My hope is that Karzai stands fast, as did the Iraqis, and kicks the American forces out of the country, preferably now rather than later. It would be the greatest gift that Karzai could give his country, the United States, and the world. At the very least, it would mean that there would be no more deaths of two-year-old unnamed children at the hands of U.S. forces, no more deaths of Afghans who are doing nothing more than trying to rid their country of a foreign occupier, and no more deaths of U.S. soldiers who kill and die for nothing.
Link:
http://fff.org/2013/12/02/killing-unnamed-children-in-afghanistan/
Get ready for new internet taxes...
Get Ready to Pay More Online: Supremes Refuse to Hear Internet Tax Case
Kurt Nimmo
In another blow to the Constitution, the Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a case by Amazon and Overstock.com challenging a law that requires online retailers to collect sales tax in states where they have no physical presence. The Supreme Court refusal to hear the case will allow state governments to tax online retailers and turn online retailers into de facto tax collection agencies.
The Court had previously held that under the Commerce Clause (Article I, Section 8, Clause 3) and the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment states may not impose tax responsibility on out of state sellers that do not have a physical presence in the state.
“Some say that it is a legitimate exercise of Congress’s Commerce Clause power to give state governments the authority to force out-of-state businesses to collect sales taxes,” Ron Paul wrote in September. “But if that were the case, why shouldn’t state governments be able to force you to pay sales taxes where you physically cross state lines to make a purchase? The Commerce Clause was intended to facilitate the free flow of goods and services across state lines, not to help states impose new burdens on out of state businesses.”
Now that the Supremes have declined the Amazon case, Congress will be free to impose burdensome taxation and other regulations on the internet. Earlier this year, the Senate passed the Marketplace Fairness Act, legislation widely dubbed a national internet sales tax. The law requires 10,000 jurisdictions — including 46 states, six territories, and over 500 Native American tribal nations — to collect sales tax for government.
“By giving state governments the power to tax Internet retailers, the Marketplace Fairness Act further undermines our already moribund system of federalism,” explains Glenn Jacobs. “One of the key components of federalism is competition between the states. The idea is that the better the state, the more attractive it will be to individuals and businesses.”
Internet sales taxes are especially appealing to state governments looking to impose new taxation on citizens to address budget shortfalls. According to projections by Forrester Research, internet retailers may eventually fork out more than $3 billion annually for cash-hungry states.
“Advocating higher taxes, even on your competition, ends up hurting everyone,” writes Jacobs. “But the people that are hurt the most are consumers, everyday working families. The Marketplace Fairness Act will end up forcing consumers to pay higher prices for the goods they desire. It will limit consumer choice. As with all tax programs, it will transfer resources from the productive sector of the economy to the parasitic sector, thereby inhibiting capital formation and investment. It will put shackles on one of the economy’s fastest growing sectors, Internet commerce.”
Link:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/get-ready-to-pay-more-online-supremes-refuse-to-hear-internet-tax-case.html
Kurt Nimmo
In another blow to the Constitution, the Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a case by Amazon and Overstock.com challenging a law that requires online retailers to collect sales tax in states where they have no physical presence. The Supreme Court refusal to hear the case will allow state governments to tax online retailers and turn online retailers into de facto tax collection agencies.
The Court had previously held that under the Commerce Clause (Article I, Section 8, Clause 3) and the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment states may not impose tax responsibility on out of state sellers that do not have a physical presence in the state.
“Some say that it is a legitimate exercise of Congress’s Commerce Clause power to give state governments the authority to force out-of-state businesses to collect sales taxes,” Ron Paul wrote in September. “But if that were the case, why shouldn’t state governments be able to force you to pay sales taxes where you physically cross state lines to make a purchase? The Commerce Clause was intended to facilitate the free flow of goods and services across state lines, not to help states impose new burdens on out of state businesses.”
Now that the Supremes have declined the Amazon case, Congress will be free to impose burdensome taxation and other regulations on the internet. Earlier this year, the Senate passed the Marketplace Fairness Act, legislation widely dubbed a national internet sales tax. The law requires 10,000 jurisdictions — including 46 states, six territories, and over 500 Native American tribal nations — to collect sales tax for government.
“By giving state governments the power to tax Internet retailers, the Marketplace Fairness Act further undermines our already moribund system of federalism,” explains Glenn Jacobs. “One of the key components of federalism is competition between the states. The idea is that the better the state, the more attractive it will be to individuals and businesses.”
Internet sales taxes are especially appealing to state governments looking to impose new taxation on citizens to address budget shortfalls. According to projections by Forrester Research, internet retailers may eventually fork out more than $3 billion annually for cash-hungry states.
“Advocating higher taxes, even on your competition, ends up hurting everyone,” writes Jacobs. “But the people that are hurt the most are consumers, everyday working families. The Marketplace Fairness Act will end up forcing consumers to pay higher prices for the goods they desire. It will limit consumer choice. As with all tax programs, it will transfer resources from the productive sector of the economy to the parasitic sector, thereby inhibiting capital formation and investment. It will put shackles on one of the economy’s fastest growing sectors, Internet commerce.”
Link:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/get-ready-to-pay-more-online-supremes-refuse-to-hear-internet-tax-case.html
A true prison planet...
By Michael Snyder
If you live in the United States, you live in a high tech surveillance grid that is becoming more oppressive with each passing day. In America today, the control freaks that run things are completely obsessed with watching, tracking, monitoring and recording virtually everything that we do. If we continue on the path that we are currently on, we will be heading into a future where there will be absolutely no privacy of any kind. In fact, many would argue that we are essentially there already. Many people speak of this as being the “Information Age“, but most Americans don’t really stop and think about what that really means. Most of the information that is considered to be so “valuable” is actually about all of us. Businesses want to know as much about all of us as possible so that they can sell us stuff. Government officials want to know as much about all of us as possible so that they can make sure that we are not doing anything that they don’t like. There is a constant hunger for even more information, and so the surveillance technologies just continue to become even more advanced and the Big Brother control grid being constructed all around us just continues to become even more pervasive. Even though you may not be consciously aware of it, the truth is that it is surrounding you right now even as you read this. We live in a society where liberty and freedom are literally being strangled to death, but most Americans don’t seem to care.
Do you know who else gets watched, tracked and monitored 24 hours a day?
Prisoners do.
Surveillance is a form of control, and at this point we are little more than inmates inside a gigantic Big Brother surveillance grid.
Posted below is a list of 32 privacy destroying technologies that are systematically transforming America into a giant prison. Following each item, there is a short excerpt from a news report about that particular technology. If you want to read the entire article where the excerpt came from, just click the link to find the source. Individually, each of these technologies is deeply troubling. But when you step back and take a look at them all collectively, it is absolutely horrifying…
#1 Spying On Us Through Our Televisions: Put simply, our TVs have started spying on us.
Last week, there was a high-profile case in point. An IT consultant called Jason Huntley, who lives in a village near Hull, uncovered evidence that a flat-screen television, which had been sitting in his living room since the summer, was secretly invading his family’s privacy.
He began investigating the £400 LG device after noticing that its home screen appeared to be showing him ‘targeted’ adverts — for cars, and Knorr stock cubes — based on programmes he’d just been watching.
Huntley decided to monitor information that the so-called smart TV — which connects to the internet — was sending and receiving. He did this by using his laptop effectively as a bridge between his television and the internet receiver, so the laptop was able to show all the data being sucked out of his set.
He soon discovered that details of not just every show he watched but every button he pressed on his remote control were being sent back to LG’s corporate headquarters in South Korea.
#2 Next Generation Facial Recognition Technology: In a single second, law enforcement agents can match a suspect against millions upon millions of profiles in vast detailed databases stored on the cloud. It’s all done using facial recognition, and in Southern California it’s already occurring.
Imagine the police taking a picture: any picture of a person, anywhere, and matching it on the spot in less than a second to a personalized profile, scanning millions upon millions of entries from within vast, intricate databases stored on the cloud.
#3 Your Next Password Might Be Your Eye: You can use your phone to figure out your heart rate, track how much you walk, and even measure your sex life. But the powerful sensors inside smartphones can do more than keep you updated on your health: They can also turn your body into a password.
EyeVerify is a small Kansas City–based security company. Its core product is biometric eyescan software for smartphones. Every person has a unique pattern of blood vessels in their eyes. These blood vessels contrast with the whites of the eyes so clearly that they can always be read, even when there’s a lack of light. The best part? Those blood-vessel patterns can be photographed by phones and turned into unique data signatures which can be used to replace or supplement traditional passwords. “We turn a picture of your eye into a key that protects your digital identity,” says EyeVerify CEO Toby Rush.
#4 “Pre-Crime” Surveillance Cameras: Hundreds of pre-crime surveillance cameras are to be installed in San Francisco’s subway system that will analyze “suspicious behavior” and alert guards to potential criminal or terrorist activity – before any crime has been committed.
“Manufacturers BRS Labs said it has installed the cameras at tourist attractions, government buildings and military bases in the U.S. In its latest project BRS Labs is to install its devices on the transport system in San Francisco, which includes buses, trams and subways,” reports the Daily Mail.
The cameras are programmed with a list of behaviors considered “normal”. Anything that deviates from usual activity is classified as suspicious and guards are immediately alerted via text message or a phone call.
Equipped with the ability to track up to 150 suspects at a time, the cameras build up a “memory” of suspicious behavior to determine what constitutes potential criminal activity.
A total of 288 cameras will be installed across 12 transport hubs.
#5 New Software That Will Store And Analyze Millions Of Our Voices: ‘Voice Grid Nation’ is a system that uses advanced algorithms to match identities to voices. Brought to the US by Russia’s Speech Technology Center, it claims to be capable of allowing police, federal agencies and other law enforcement personnel to build up a huge database containing up to several million voices.
When authorities intercept a call they’ve deemed ‘hinky’, the recording is entered into the VoiceGrid program, which (probably) buzzes and whirrs and spits out a match. In five seconds, the program can scan through 10,000 voices, and it only needs 3 seconds for speech analysis. All that, combined with 100 simultaneous searches and the storage capacity of 2 million samples, gives SpeechPro, as the company is known in the US, the right to claim a 90% success rate.
#6 A Device That Captures Your Fingerprints From 20 Feet Away: Gaining access to your gym or office building could soon be as simple as waving a hand at the front door. A Hunsville, Ala.-based company called IDair is developing a system that can scan and identify a fingerprint from nearly 20 feet away. Coupled with other biometrics, it could soon allow security systems to grant or deny access from a distance, without requiring users to stop and scan a fingerprint, swipe an ID card, or otherwise lose a moment dealing with technology.
Currently IDair’s primary customer is the military, but the startup wants to open up commercially to any business or enterprise that wants to put a layer of security between its facilities and the larger world. A gym chain is already beta testing the system (no more using your roommate’s gym ID to get in a free workout), and IDair’s founder says that at some point his technology could enable purchases to be made biometrically, using fingerprints and irises as unique identifiers rather than credit card numbers and data embedded in magnetic strips or RFID chips.
#7 Molecular Scanners That Can Secretly Scan You From 164 Feet Away: Within the next year or two, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security will instantly know everything about your body, clothes, and luggage with a new laser-based molecular scanner fired from 164 feet (50 meters) away. From traces of drugs or gun powder on your clothes to what you had for breakfast to the adrenaline level in your body—agents will be able to get any information they want without even touching you.
And without you knowing it.
The technology is so incredibly effective that, in November 2011, its inventors were subcontracted by In-Q-Tel to work with the US Department of Homeland Security. In-Q-Tel is a company founded “in February 1999 by a group of private citizens at the request of the Director of the CIA and with the support of the U.S. Congress.” According to In-Q-Tel, they are the bridge between the Agency and new technology companies.
Their plan is to install this molecular-level scanning in airports and border crossings all across the United States.
#8 Mobile Backscatter Vans: American cops are set to join the US military in deploying American Science & Engineering’s Z Backscatter Vans, or mobile backscatter radiation x-rays. These are what TSA officials call “the amazing radioactive genital viewer,” now seen in airports around America, ionizing the private parts of children, the elderly, and you (yes you).
These pornoscannerwagons will look like regular anonymous vans, and will cruise America’s streets, indiscriminately peering through the cars (and clothes) of anyone in range of its mighty isotope-cannon. But don’t worry, it’s not a violation of privacy. As AS&E’s vice president of marketing Joe Reiss sez, “From a privacy standpoint, I’m hard-pressed to see what the concern or objection could be.”
#9 RFID Microchips In Our Schools: Upon arriving in the morning, according to the Associated Press, each student at the CCC-George Miller preschool will don a jersey with a stitched in RFID chip. As the kids go about the business of learning, sensors in the school will record their movements, collecting attendance for both classes and meals. Officials from the school have claimed they’re only recording information they’re required to provide while receiving federal funds for their Headstart program.
#10 Palm Scanning Devices In Our Schools: Puyallup School District says by the end of the year, every lunchroom will have palm scanning devices that will allow students to pay for their lunch with a wave of a hand.
“Efficiency is another reason for implementing this. The accuracy of the scanner reduces human error, reduces fraud, the ability for students to share numbers allows parents to know the money that they’re spending is being spent on their child’s lunch,” said Brian Fox, spokesperson for Puyallup School District.
The district says the devices will be in all 32 schools by the end of the school year.
#11 Iris Scanning Devices In Our Schools: Kids lose their school IDs but they don’t often lose their eyeballs.
That’s one of the reasons why a growing number of schools are replacing traditional identification cards with iris scanners. By the fall, several schools — ranging from elementary schools to colleges — will be rolling out various iris scanning security methods.
#12 Implantable Medical Laboratory-On-A-Chip: French researchers are zeroing in on a tiny, chip-based medical laboratory test device designed to be implanted under the skin. This miniature blood laboratory may revolutionize healthcare by continuously monitoring high-risk, chronically ill patients.
This ground-breaking work is being done by developers at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), or Swiss Institute of Technology, in Lausanne, Switzerland. The implantable lab-testing device is linked to the user’s cell phone and can send alerts to doctors before symptoms are evident.
#13 Smart Phone Eye Scanners: A patent application filed by Samsung seems to indicate that next-generation Galaxy smartphones might feature biometric authentication as an alternative to PINs or passwords.
Unlike arch-rival Apple’s Touch ID, however, the South Korean technology giant won’t be scanning users’ fingerprints. Instead, the patent – spotted by blog Patent Bolt – describes a novel iris scanning technique.
According to Samsung, the non-contact nature of eye scanning means handset owners “do not feel uncomfortable” with the technology, while at the same time the iris offers more unique patterns than the fingerprint does.
#14 Cell Phone Tower “Stingrays”: You make a call on your cellphone thinking the only thing standing between you and the recipient of your call is your carrier’s cellphone tower. In fact, that tower your phone is connecting to just might be a boobytrap set up by law enforcement to ensnare your phone signals and maybe even the content of your calls.
So-called stingrays are one of the new high-tech tools that authorities are using to track and identify you. The devices, about the size of a suitcase, spoof a legitimate cellphone tower in order to trick nearby cellphones and other wireless communication devices into connecting to the tower, as they would to a real cellphone tower.
The government maintains that the stingrays don’t violate Fourth Amendment rights, since Americans don’t have a legitimate expectation of privacy for data sent from their mobile phones and other wireless devices to a cell tower.
#15 Using Your Cell Phone Microphone As A “Roving Bug”: The FBI appears to have begun using a novel form of electronic surveillance in criminal investigations: remotely activating a mobile phone’s microphone and using it to eavesdrop on nearby conversations.
The technique is called a “roving bug,” and was approved by top U.S. Department of Justice officials for use against members of a New York organized crime family who were wary of conventional surveillance techniques such as tailing a suspect or wiretapping him.
#16 The Government Is Using Our Cell Phones To Track Our Movements: One of the biggest changes is the ability to track your physical location. I’m sorry I came in at the end of the previous talk. I heard them talk about surveying cell phones with a drone, in a wide area — this is something that is done routinely now. I can tell you that everybody that attended an Occupy Wall Street protest, and didn’t turn their cell phone off, or put it — and sometimes even if they did — the identity of that cell phone has been logged, and everybody who was at that demonstration, whether they were arrested, not arrested, whether their photos were ID’d, whether an informant pointed them out, it’s known they were there anyway. This is routine.
#17 Police Using “Extraction Devices” To Take Our Cell Phone Data: The Michigan State Police have a handful of portable machines called “extraction devices” that have the potential to download personal information from motorists they pull over, and the ACLU would like to know more about them.
The devices, sold by a company called Cellebrite, can download text messages, photos, video, and even GPS data from most brands of cell phones. The handheld machines have various interfaces to work with different models and can even bypass security passwords and access some information.
#18 Automated License Plate Readers: More than 250 cameras in the District and its suburbs scan license plates in real time, helping police pinpoint stolen cars and fleeing killers. But the program quietly has expanded beyond what anyone had imagined even a few years ago.
With virtually no public debate, police agencies have begun storing the information from the cameras, building databases that document the travels of millions of vehicles.
Nowhere is that more prevalent than in the District, which has more than one plate-reader per square mile, the highest concentration in the nation. Police in the Washington suburbs have dozens of them as well, and local agencies plan to add many more in coming months, creating a comprehensive dragnet that will include all the approaches into the District.
#19 Street Lights That Can Record Private Conversations: Federally-funded high-tech street lights now being installed in American cities are not only set to aid the DHS in making “security announcements” and acting as talking surveillance cameras, they are also capable of “recording conversations,” bringing the potential privacy threat posed by ‘Intellistreets’ to a whole new level.
#20 Spying On Us Through Our Video Game Systems: Users of the new Xbox One are complaining that Kinect is monitoring their Skype conversations for swearing and then punishing them with account bans. Microsoft has admitted it is punishing gamers for bad language but denied that it is snooping on private Skype chats.
#21 Data Mining: The company fits into a category called database marketing. It started in 1969 as an outfit called Demographics Inc., using phone books and other notably low-tech tools, as well as one computer, to amass information on voters and consumers for direct marketing. Almost 40 years later, Acxiom has detailed entries for more than 190 million people and 126 million households in the U.S., and about 500 million active consumers worldwide. More than 23,000 servers in Conway, just north of Little Rock, collect and analyze more than 50 trillion data ‘transactions’ a year.
#22 A New Technology Called “Coin” Is Being Called “The Future Of Money”: The future of money has arrived, and it’s called Coin.
It looks like a credit card. It’s the size of a credit card. It swipes in credit card machines. But it holds the information of up to eight of your debit, credit, rewards, or gift cards. And you can switch between cards by simply pressing a button.
The new product, launched recently, promises to change the way consumers spend money in a secure and efficient way.
#23 A National Database Of All Financial Transactions: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is looking to create a “Google Earth” of every financial transaction of every American, Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY) warned today in a Senate speech opposing confirmation of Richard Cordray as CFPB director.
“This bill (creating the CFPB) was supposed to be about regulating Wall Street. Instead, it’s creating a Google Earth on every financial transaction. That’s right: the government will be able to see every detail of your finances. Your permission – not needed,” Sen. Enzi said.
#24 The Coming National DNA Database: A national DNA database is coming. Barack Obama has already said that he wants one. A major Supreme Court decision last month paved the way for one. The DNA of those that commit “serious crimes” is already being routinely collected all over the nation. Some states (such as New Jersey) are now passing laws that will require DNA collection from those charged with committing “low level crimes”. And a law that was passed under George W. Bush allows the federal government to screen the DNA of all newborn babies in the United States. So how long will it be before we are all required to give DNA samples to the authorities?
#25 The Systematic Recording Of Talk Radio Programs: Next time you call a talk radio station, beware: The FBI may be listening.
According to WMAL.com, “The FBI has awarded a $524,927 contract to a Virginia company to record as much radio news and talk programming as it can find on the Internet. … The FBI says it is not playing Big Brother by policing the airwaves, but rather seeking access to what airs as potential evidence.”
#26 The FBI’s Next Generation Identification System: The US Federal Bureau of Investigation has begun rolling out its new $1 billion biometric Next Generation Identification (NGI) system. In essence, NGI is a nationwide database of mugshots, iris scans, DNA records, voice samples, and other biometrics, that will help the FBI identify and catch criminals — but it is how this biometric data is captured, through a nationwide network of cameras and photo databases, that is raising the eyebrows of privacy advocates.
Until now, the FBI relied on IAFIS, a national fingerprint database that has long been due an overhaul. Over the last few months, the FBI has been pilot testing a facial recognition system — and soon, detectives will also be able to search the system for other biometrics such as DNA records and iris scans.
#27 Trapwire: “You are being watched. The government has a secret system – a machine – that spies on you every hour of every day.” That is how each episode of “Person of Interest” on CBS begins. Most Americans that have watched the show just assume that such a surveillance network is completely fictional and that the government would never watch us like that. Sadly, most Americans are wrong. Shocking new details have emerged this week which prove that a creepy nationwide network of spy cameras is being rolled out across the United States. Reportedly, these new spy cameras are “more accurate than modern facial recognition technology”, and every few seconds they send back data from cities and major landmarks all over the United States to a centralized processing center where it is analyzed. The authorities believe that the world has become such a dangerous place that the only way to keep us all safe is to watch what everyone does all the time. But the truth is that instead of “saving America”, all of these repressive surveillance technologies are slowly killing our liberties and our freedoms. America is being transformed into an Orwellian prison camp right in front of our eyes, and very few people are even objecting to it.
#28 Spyware That Monitors The Behavior Of Government Workers: When the Food and Drug Administration started spying on a group of agency scientists, it installed monitoring software on their laptop computers to capture their communications.
The software, sold by SpectorSoft of Vero Beach, Fla., could do more than vacuum up the scientists’ e-mails as they complained to lawmakers and others about medical devices they thought were dangerous. It could be programmed to intercept a tweet or Facebook post. It could snap screen shots of their computers. It could even track an employee’s keystrokes, retrieve files from hard drives or search for keywords.
#29 Political Campaign Databases: If you voted this election season, President Obama almost certainly has a file on you. His vast campaign database includes information on voters’ magazine subscriptions, car registrations, housing values and hunting licenses, along with scores estimating how likely they were to cast ballots for his reelection.
#30 Spying On Us Through Our Appliances: Spies will no longer have to plant bugs in your home – the rise of ‘connected’ gadgets controlled by apps will mean that people ‘bug’ their own homes, says CIA director David Petraeus.
The CIA claims it will be able to ‘read’ these devices via the internet – and perhaps even via radio waves from outside the home.
Everything from remote controls to clock radios can now be controlled via apps – and chip company ARM recently unveiled low-powered, cheaper chips which will be used in everything from fridges and ovens to doorbells.
The resultant chorus of ‘connected’ gadgets will be able to be read like a book – and even remote-controlled, according to CIA CIA Director David Petraeus, according to a recent report by Wired’s ‘Danger Room’ blog.
#31 Unmanned Aerial Drones: Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency is using aerial drones to spy on farmers in Nebraska and Iowa. The surveillance came under scrutiny last week when Nebraska’s congressional delegation sent a joint letter to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson.
On Friday, EPA officialdom in “Region 7” responded to the letter.
“Courts, including the Supreme Court, have found similar types of flights to be legal (for example to take aerial photographs of a chemical manufacturing facility) and EPA would use such flights in appropriate instances to protect people and the environment from violations of the Clean Water Act,” the agency said in response to the letter.
#32 NSA Snooping: Speaking to a raucous audience via Skype on Friday, Greenwald said the NSA’s “brand-new technology” gives it the power to “redirect into its own repositories one billion cell phone calls every single day.”
“But what we’re really talking about here is a globalized system that prevents any form of electronic communication from taking place without its being stored and monitored by the National Security Agency,” Greenwald said. “It doesn’t mean that they’re listening to every call; it means they’re storing every call and have the capability to listen to them at any time, and it does mean that they’re collecting millions upon millions upon millions of our phone and email records.”
Greenwald added that the NSA technology is “designed to destroy all privacy. And what’s incredibly menacing about it is that it’s all taking place in the dark with no accountability and virtually no safeguards.”
Every single day, the NSA intercepts and permanently stores close to 2 billion emails and phone calls in addition to a whole host of other data.
So where does all of that data go?
Well, the NSA recently completely construction of the largest data center in the history of the world out in Utah. It will reportedly have the capability of storing 5 zettabytes of data. That is an amount of data that is almost incomprehensible.
This data center has approximately a million square feet of storage space, it cost nearly 2 billion dollars to build, and it is going to take about 40 million dollars a year just to pay for the energy needed to run it.
Without a doubt, we have become a surveillance society.
And if the American people don’t object now, this will just be the tip of the iceberg.
If we continue down this same path, what is coming will be far more horrifying than anything that George Orwell ever dreamed of.
So what do you think about all of this?
Please feel free to share your thoughts by posting a comment below…
Link:
http://thetruthwins.com/archives/32-privacy-destroying-technologies-that-are-systematically-transforming-america-into-a-giant-prison
Are you perpared???
What Will the Coming Civil Unrest Look Like?
By Dave Hodges
According to a survey conducted by the Adelphi University Center for Health Innovation, 55 percent of Americans believe that the government will come to their rescue when the proverbial poop hits the fan because your big brother really cares. Literally, every alternative media outlet could show conclusive proof that an EMP was going to wipe out the power grid. We could conclusively prove that nuclear bombs were going off in 39 American cities in the most horrific false flag attack in world history and it would not make any difference to 55% of all Americans because oftheir cognitive dissonance.
In Part One of this series, I detailed how the present administration, through Executive Order 13603, is positioning itself to impose martial law and subsequently control all food and food production. Part One further pointed out that despots use the control of food, and subsequent starvation of millions, as a means to subjugate an unruly population.
The United States is staring at an economic collapse in the face with its $17 trillion dollar deficit, $238 trillion dollars of unfunded mandates (e.g. social security, Medicare, etc.) and a one quadrillion dollar derivatives debt in which the governments of the world are being forced to assume in the form of the “bailouts”. Even if Obama and his bankster puppet masters never had any intention of executing a false flag event in order to put this country into martial law in order to fully complete the coup d’état that is already underway, a crash is coming. The banks are going to collapse, the people will riot, there will be food shortages, whether they be planned or unplanned. I do, however, believe that food will undoubtedly be used to control the unruly masses, despite the DHS and their new found friends in the Chinese and Russian armies which are on our soil.
Are you prepared? At the bottom of this article, I will visually demonstrate to the reader with real time examples of human behavior in groups, how each of us is going to be in very grave danger when the collapse comes. But first, let’s analyze America’s present level of individual and collective preparedness.
How Prepared Is America?
Last year, the Adelphi University research center tells us that 53% of all Americans do not have a three day supply of nonperishable food and water in their homes. FEMA and DHS are not about serving the needs of the American people; These agencies are about preserving the status quo of the powers that be. But don’t try and tell that to 55% of the citizens of this country.
Most Likely Causes of a Societal Breakdown
As the TV show by the same name, there are literally a 1,000 ways to die. The following six events represent some of the most likely events which would mortally wound our society.
1. World War III
2. False flag attack as a result of a series of nuclear explosions
3. False flag attack as a result of a chemical and biological attack
4. EMP attack
5. Military coup resulting in civil war
6. Economic collapse
America’s Level of Preparedness
A brief summation of the Adelphi study reveals the following:
•44 percent don’t have first-aid kits
•48 percent lack emergency supplies
•53 percent do not have a minimum three-day supply of nonperishable food and water at home
•55 percent believe local authorities will come to their rescue if disaster strikes
This means that 56% of those with first-aid kits, 52% of those with emergency supplies, and 47% of those who have more than three days worth of water, will be victimized by those who have not properly planned. Please allow me to put this into a real number for you. Over 130 million teenagers and adults will be in the streets seeking to obtain life-sustaining resources in a very short time following the disaster event. This is a train wreck starting to happen.
Time Frame for Societal Breakdown
Those that would be fortunate enough to survive the initial event, or series of events, would face the following timetable of events.
In the first one to two days, all shelves would be emptied of food, water, guns and medical supplies. There will be no resupply as nothing will be shipped.
On the beginning of the third day, individuals will be in the streets scavenging for anything they can find that will keep themselves and their families alive. If there is a loss of power, many will die as a result of exposure to the elements.
By the fifth day, desperate people will organize into collectives (i.e. gangs) and will go house to house looking for stored supplies from the half that has somewhat prepared. Neighborhoods will begin to organize themselves into local vigilante groups for protection from local gangs who have become desperate. This is the day that many of the police walked off the job in New Orleans in order to protect their families. Groups of police could become the most dangerous groups in society.
In the days that follow, nobody can be trusted. There will be people who will dress up in official looking uniforms (e.g. military, national guard, police) in order to gain entry into a fortified home.
The game changing event will be a civil war. Not only will you have to deal with marauding hordes of resource deficient people, you could also be caught in the crossfire between two, or more warring armies.
Casualty Rates
1. World War III. The casualty estimates dating back to the 1960′s and 1970′s related to an all-out nuclear war was placed at 150 million Americans or at 80-85%.
2. False flag attack as a result of a series of nuclear explosions. The casualty rate is indeterminable and would depend of the number of cities involved and their relative populations and the size and placement of the nuclear device. Generally speaking, one nuclear device in a city the size of Phoenix would kill 20,000 to 100,000 people. Many more would die in the upcoming weeks due to the effects of radiation.
3. False flag attack as a result of a chemical and biological attack. The casualty rates are indeterminable.
4. EMP attack. The Naval War College tells us that within two years of a power grid take down, that 90% of us would be dead.
5. Military coup resulting in civil war. The casualty rates of war as well as civilians victimizing each other would be impossible to calculate. Conservative estimates would place the rate at 5% to 25%.
6. Economic collapse. It is impossible to exactly determine. I think a safe bet would place this event in the category of an EMP attack in which the effects would only be felt for a month. The government would be able to establish order following a brutal crackdown. However, in our weakened state, we would be inviting an invasion. A civil war could break out as well.
What Will the Riots Look Like?
NORTHCOM, DHS, FEMA and the Russians have all practiced on quelling domestic disturbances and conducting gun confiscation. Even the elite have gathered their own private armies in preparation for the same civil unrest.
Unfortunately, DHS is not releasing any videos which demonstrate the severity of the civilian uprising that they are practicing for. However, we do have some Black Friday drills which exemplify how crazy it will get in the first few hours of a societal breakdown.
The following video is from the 2012 version of Black Friday. It raises the question, that if people will act like animals with depraved indifference towards the welfare of their fellow human beings in the first few minutes of a Black Friday sale, what will they do when it comes to food, water and guns?
If you think that this phenomena is just confined to 2012, think again. The following two videos from yesterday’s 2013 version of Black Friday.
And if this is not enough for you, take a look at what was going on in Texas on Friday.
Conclusion
At minimum, there is an economic collapse in our near future with the massive debt which is unsustainable. The presence of the NDAA and EO 13603 speaks to the government’s plans to deal forcefully with any disturbances. The preparation by DHS is unmistakable with its acquisition of over two billion rounds of ammunition and 2700 armored personnel carriers. And when we see foreign troops (e.g. the Russians and the Chinese), we should all be gravely concerned.
To the 55% who are clueless, take out an insurance policy and begin to store food, water guns and ammunition. To everyone else, who has at least some idea of what is going on, begin to reach out to your neighbors because you will need the additional safety that numbers can bring.
Link:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2013/12/dave-hodges/the-coming-civil-unrest/
By Dave Hodges
According to a survey conducted by the Adelphi University Center for Health Innovation, 55 percent of Americans believe that the government will come to their rescue when the proverbial poop hits the fan because your big brother really cares. Literally, every alternative media outlet could show conclusive proof that an EMP was going to wipe out the power grid. We could conclusively prove that nuclear bombs were going off in 39 American cities in the most horrific false flag attack in world history and it would not make any difference to 55% of all Americans because oftheir cognitive dissonance.
In Part One of this series, I detailed how the present administration, through Executive Order 13603, is positioning itself to impose martial law and subsequently control all food and food production. Part One further pointed out that despots use the control of food, and subsequent starvation of millions, as a means to subjugate an unruly population.
The United States is staring at an economic collapse in the face with its $17 trillion dollar deficit, $238 trillion dollars of unfunded mandates (e.g. social security, Medicare, etc.) and a one quadrillion dollar derivatives debt in which the governments of the world are being forced to assume in the form of the “bailouts”. Even if Obama and his bankster puppet masters never had any intention of executing a false flag event in order to put this country into martial law in order to fully complete the coup d’état that is already underway, a crash is coming. The banks are going to collapse, the people will riot, there will be food shortages, whether they be planned or unplanned. I do, however, believe that food will undoubtedly be used to control the unruly masses, despite the DHS and their new found friends in the Chinese and Russian armies which are on our soil.
Are you prepared? At the bottom of this article, I will visually demonstrate to the reader with real time examples of human behavior in groups, how each of us is going to be in very grave danger when the collapse comes. But first, let’s analyze America’s present level of individual and collective preparedness.
How Prepared Is America?
Last year, the Adelphi University research center tells us that 53% of all Americans do not have a three day supply of nonperishable food and water in their homes. FEMA and DHS are not about serving the needs of the American people; These agencies are about preserving the status quo of the powers that be. But don’t try and tell that to 55% of the citizens of this country.
Most Likely Causes of a Societal Breakdown
As the TV show by the same name, there are literally a 1,000 ways to die. The following six events represent some of the most likely events which would mortally wound our society.
1. World War III
2. False flag attack as a result of a series of nuclear explosions
3. False flag attack as a result of a chemical and biological attack
4. EMP attack
5. Military coup resulting in civil war
6. Economic collapse
America’s Level of Preparedness
A brief summation of the Adelphi study reveals the following:
•44 percent don’t have first-aid kits
•48 percent lack emergency supplies
•53 percent do not have a minimum three-day supply of nonperishable food and water at home
•55 percent believe local authorities will come to their rescue if disaster strikes
This means that 56% of those with first-aid kits, 52% of those with emergency supplies, and 47% of those who have more than three days worth of water, will be victimized by those who have not properly planned. Please allow me to put this into a real number for you. Over 130 million teenagers and adults will be in the streets seeking to obtain life-sustaining resources in a very short time following the disaster event. This is a train wreck starting to happen.
Time Frame for Societal Breakdown
Those that would be fortunate enough to survive the initial event, or series of events, would face the following timetable of events.
In the first one to two days, all shelves would be emptied of food, water, guns and medical supplies. There will be no resupply as nothing will be shipped.
On the beginning of the third day, individuals will be in the streets scavenging for anything they can find that will keep themselves and their families alive. If there is a loss of power, many will die as a result of exposure to the elements.
By the fifth day, desperate people will organize into collectives (i.e. gangs) and will go house to house looking for stored supplies from the half that has somewhat prepared. Neighborhoods will begin to organize themselves into local vigilante groups for protection from local gangs who have become desperate. This is the day that many of the police walked off the job in New Orleans in order to protect their families. Groups of police could become the most dangerous groups in society.
In the days that follow, nobody can be trusted. There will be people who will dress up in official looking uniforms (e.g. military, national guard, police) in order to gain entry into a fortified home.
The game changing event will be a civil war. Not only will you have to deal with marauding hordes of resource deficient people, you could also be caught in the crossfire between two, or more warring armies.
Casualty Rates
1. World War III. The casualty estimates dating back to the 1960′s and 1970′s related to an all-out nuclear war was placed at 150 million Americans or at 80-85%.
2. False flag attack as a result of a series of nuclear explosions. The casualty rate is indeterminable and would depend of the number of cities involved and their relative populations and the size and placement of the nuclear device. Generally speaking, one nuclear device in a city the size of Phoenix would kill 20,000 to 100,000 people. Many more would die in the upcoming weeks due to the effects of radiation.
3. False flag attack as a result of a chemical and biological attack. The casualty rates are indeterminable.
4. EMP attack. The Naval War College tells us that within two years of a power grid take down, that 90% of us would be dead.
5. Military coup resulting in civil war. The casualty rates of war as well as civilians victimizing each other would be impossible to calculate. Conservative estimates would place the rate at 5% to 25%.
6. Economic collapse. It is impossible to exactly determine. I think a safe bet would place this event in the category of an EMP attack in which the effects would only be felt for a month. The government would be able to establish order following a brutal crackdown. However, in our weakened state, we would be inviting an invasion. A civil war could break out as well.
What Will the Riots Look Like?
NORTHCOM, DHS, FEMA and the Russians have all practiced on quelling domestic disturbances and conducting gun confiscation. Even the elite have gathered their own private armies in preparation for the same civil unrest.
Unfortunately, DHS is not releasing any videos which demonstrate the severity of the civilian uprising that they are practicing for. However, we do have some Black Friday drills which exemplify how crazy it will get in the first few hours of a societal breakdown.
The following video is from the 2012 version of Black Friday. It raises the question, that if people will act like animals with depraved indifference towards the welfare of their fellow human beings in the first few minutes of a Black Friday sale, what will they do when it comes to food, water and guns?
If you think that this phenomena is just confined to 2012, think again. The following two videos from yesterday’s 2013 version of Black Friday.
And if this is not enough for you, take a look at what was going on in Texas on Friday.
Conclusion
At minimum, there is an economic collapse in our near future with the massive debt which is unsustainable. The presence of the NDAA and EO 13603 speaks to the government’s plans to deal forcefully with any disturbances. The preparation by DHS is unmistakable with its acquisition of over two billion rounds of ammunition and 2700 armored personnel carriers. And when we see foreign troops (e.g. the Russians and the Chinese), we should all be gravely concerned.
To the 55% who are clueless, take out an insurance policy and begin to store food, water guns and ammunition. To everyone else, who has at least some idea of what is going on, begin to reach out to your neighbors because you will need the additional safety that numbers can bring.
Link:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2013/12/dave-hodges/the-coming-civil-unrest/
Ukraine rejects the EU...
Congratulations, Ukraine!
By Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey
A wise decision by the Ukraine not to fall into the European Union’s web, not to fall for the siren’s song, not to believe the false promises of prosperity, not to follow the starry-eyed misguidedness of some of Ukraine’s young population who see the EU as some sort of Nirvana. Viktor Yanukovich just saved Ukraine, and them, from a terrible fate.
Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time there was a farmer, the Big Farmer, who worked hard, so hard in fact that every square inch of his land was productive. One day he decided he needed some extra space for his workers to produce more, so gradually he invaded the land of the neighboring farms, some less productive than others. The Big Farmer made allies with some, massacred others and became most unpopular, so much so that the other farmers gathered together and formed an alliance against him. Collectively, they won and the Big Farmer was crushed in the Great Conflict.
Crushed, but not destroyed. Shortly after the end of the Great Conflict, the other farmers and their friend on the other side of the Ocean decided that they needed the strength of the Big Farmer to protect them and to be a part of a strong economy so they financed the Big Farmer to make his lands productive again.
It took just a few years before the Big Farmer was as strong as he was before. This time he knew that by physical invasion of territories outside his lands, he would incur the wrath of the other farmers, so he devised the Great Plan.
The Great Plan was conceived with the connivance of the Fat Cow farm lying to his west, a large piece of fertile agricultural land which the Big Farmer had invaded twice already before the Great Conflict. The Great Plan was to sign an agreement which would produce a Union of farms, an agreement drawn up with such beautiful language that all those that read it would fall into a trance, become hypnotized and strive obediently towards the Plan.
As the Big Farmer grew stronger and more powerful, he also became richer and was able to pay the other signatory members of the agreement sums of money, convincing them that it would be more comfortable for them to sit on their backsides in the sun, playing cards and dominoes, to destroy all their agriculture so that their farmers could rest and get drunk, to destroy their industries so that their factory workers could lie around at home on their backs zapping between TV channels, to sink the fishing fleet so that the fishermen would spend more time with their wives than with the, erm…mermaids.
“Being paid not to work? Why, what a wonderful idea!” said the eager new signatory members of the Plan, which appeared so attractive in fact that more and more members lined up to join, including the Eccentric Islanders off the west coast of Europe, long suspicious of their continental garlic-eating, mustachioed neighbors.
Suddenly, the spell wore off, but too late. One fine day the signatory members awoke with a thumping headache as it suddenly dawned upon them that they had no means to fish, produce machines or farm and if they wanted these products they had to buy them…from the Big Farmer. The signatory members suddenly realized that their children had no jobs to go to because the factories had been destroyed, their fishing fleets had been sunk, the apple trees had been ploughed into the ground and their pigs and chickens had been slaughtered.
There was not enough money in their economies because their States were facing ever-increasing social welfare bills, increasing unemployment benefit pay-offs and decreasing revenue from taxation. Families were torn apart because the second and third generations were pouring out of the Farms looking for work elsewhere, because there was none at home.
Workers from poorer lands outside the Farms were drafted in to make up the shortfall and soon the entire social and economic fabric of the Farms changed drastically. Coupled with this, many of the farmers made the mistake of adopting a common currency, denying them any little leverage they had in supporting their economies or at least playing a part in their management, while at the same time the Big Farmer imposed constraints upon them in a top-down approach which made more sense to Him (now written with a capital H after a special edict) than it did to them.
So Viktor Yanukovich, many congratulations on your stance not to sign a trade agreement with the European Union. In so doing, you have protected your people, you have protected their jobs, you have protected your farmers, you have protected your industry, you have protected your fisheries, you have protected your agriculture, you have protected your education system and you have protected Ukraine’s future.
For those Ukrainians who wish to join the EU, go and see for yourselves. Take your pick. In the UK there are 80,000 homeless children, in some areas of the EU there is 40% youth unemployment, in many cities you dare not venture out at night for fear of being attacked by drunkards or drug addicts, home invasions are rife, you come out of a hospital more ill than before you went in, education systems struggle to cope with under-funding, the banks do not lend you enough money to buy a house, rents are skyrocketing, unemployment is the norm, keeping a job depends on working in slave-like conditions in return for less and less and a super-class of countless political echelons costs more and more to fund, like a gluttonous monster, a flesh-eating bacterium devouring all around it.
Welcome to the European Union. For those Ukrainians taking to the streets in protest, you don’t know what you are missing.
Link:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2013/12/no_author/get-lost-eu/
By Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey
A wise decision by the Ukraine not to fall into the European Union’s web, not to fall for the siren’s song, not to believe the false promises of prosperity, not to follow the starry-eyed misguidedness of some of Ukraine’s young population who see the EU as some sort of Nirvana. Viktor Yanukovich just saved Ukraine, and them, from a terrible fate.
Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time there was a farmer, the Big Farmer, who worked hard, so hard in fact that every square inch of his land was productive. One day he decided he needed some extra space for his workers to produce more, so gradually he invaded the land of the neighboring farms, some less productive than others. The Big Farmer made allies with some, massacred others and became most unpopular, so much so that the other farmers gathered together and formed an alliance against him. Collectively, they won and the Big Farmer was crushed in the Great Conflict.
Crushed, but not destroyed. Shortly after the end of the Great Conflict, the other farmers and their friend on the other side of the Ocean decided that they needed the strength of the Big Farmer to protect them and to be a part of a strong economy so they financed the Big Farmer to make his lands productive again.
It took just a few years before the Big Farmer was as strong as he was before. This time he knew that by physical invasion of territories outside his lands, he would incur the wrath of the other farmers, so he devised the Great Plan.
The Great Plan was conceived with the connivance of the Fat Cow farm lying to his west, a large piece of fertile agricultural land which the Big Farmer had invaded twice already before the Great Conflict. The Great Plan was to sign an agreement which would produce a Union of farms, an agreement drawn up with such beautiful language that all those that read it would fall into a trance, become hypnotized and strive obediently towards the Plan.
As the Big Farmer grew stronger and more powerful, he also became richer and was able to pay the other signatory members of the agreement sums of money, convincing them that it would be more comfortable for them to sit on their backsides in the sun, playing cards and dominoes, to destroy all their agriculture so that their farmers could rest and get drunk, to destroy their industries so that their factory workers could lie around at home on their backs zapping between TV channels, to sink the fishing fleet so that the fishermen would spend more time with their wives than with the, erm…mermaids.
“Being paid not to work? Why, what a wonderful idea!” said the eager new signatory members of the Plan, which appeared so attractive in fact that more and more members lined up to join, including the Eccentric Islanders off the west coast of Europe, long suspicious of their continental garlic-eating, mustachioed neighbors.
Suddenly, the spell wore off, but too late. One fine day the signatory members awoke with a thumping headache as it suddenly dawned upon them that they had no means to fish, produce machines or farm and if they wanted these products they had to buy them…from the Big Farmer. The signatory members suddenly realized that their children had no jobs to go to because the factories had been destroyed, their fishing fleets had been sunk, the apple trees had been ploughed into the ground and their pigs and chickens had been slaughtered.
There was not enough money in their economies because their States were facing ever-increasing social welfare bills, increasing unemployment benefit pay-offs and decreasing revenue from taxation. Families were torn apart because the second and third generations were pouring out of the Farms looking for work elsewhere, because there was none at home.
Workers from poorer lands outside the Farms were drafted in to make up the shortfall and soon the entire social and economic fabric of the Farms changed drastically. Coupled with this, many of the farmers made the mistake of adopting a common currency, denying them any little leverage they had in supporting their economies or at least playing a part in their management, while at the same time the Big Farmer imposed constraints upon them in a top-down approach which made more sense to Him (now written with a capital H after a special edict) than it did to them.
So Viktor Yanukovich, many congratulations on your stance not to sign a trade agreement with the European Union. In so doing, you have protected your people, you have protected their jobs, you have protected your farmers, you have protected your industry, you have protected your fisheries, you have protected your agriculture, you have protected your education system and you have protected Ukraine’s future.
For those Ukrainians who wish to join the EU, go and see for yourselves. Take your pick. In the UK there are 80,000 homeless children, in some areas of the EU there is 40% youth unemployment, in many cities you dare not venture out at night for fear of being attacked by drunkards or drug addicts, home invasions are rife, you come out of a hospital more ill than before you went in, education systems struggle to cope with under-funding, the banks do not lend you enough money to buy a house, rents are skyrocketing, unemployment is the norm, keeping a job depends on working in slave-like conditions in return for less and less and a super-class of countless political echelons costs more and more to fund, like a gluttonous monster, a flesh-eating bacterium devouring all around it.
Welcome to the European Union. For those Ukrainians taking to the streets in protest, you don’t know what you are missing.
Link:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2013/12/no_author/get-lost-eu/
"When this stock market bubble does burst, those wealthy Americans are going to be in for a tremendous amount of pain."
15 Signs That We Are Near The Peak Of An Absolutely Massive Stock Market Bubble
By Michael Snyder
One of the men that won the Nobel Prize for economics this year says that "bubbles look like this" and that he is "most worried about the boom in the U.S. stock market." But you don't have to be a Nobel Prize winner to see what is happening. It should be glaringly apparent to anyone with half a brain. The financial markets have been soaring while the overall economy has been stagnating. Reckless injections of liquidity into the financial system by the Federal Reserve have pumped up stock prices to ridiculous extremes, and people are becoming concerned. In fact, Google searches for the term "stock bubble" are now at the highest level that we have seen since November 2007. Despite assurances from the mainstream media and the Federal Reserve that everything is just fine, many Americans are beginning to realize that we have seen this movie before. We saw it during the dotcom bubble, and we saw it during the lead up to the horrible financial crisis of 2008. So precisely when will the bubble burst this time? Nobody knows for sure, but without a doubt this irrational financial bubble will burst at some point. Remember, a bubble is always the biggest right before it bursts, and the following are 15 signs that we are near the peak of an absolutely massive stock market bubble...
#1 Bob Shiller, one of the winners of this year's Nobel Prize for economics, says that "bubbles look like this" and that he is "most worried about the boom in the U.S. stock market."
#2 The total amount of margin debt has risen by 50 percent since January 2012 and it is now at the highest level ever recorded. The last two times that margin debt skyrocketed like this were just before the bursting of the dotcom bubble in 2000 and just before the financial crisis of 2008. When this house of cards comes crashing down, things are going to get very messy...
"When the tablecloth gets pulled out from under the place settings, you're going to have a lot of them crash and smash on the floor," said Uri Landesman, president of Platinum Partners hedge fund. "That margin's going to get pulled and everyone's going to have to cover. That's when you get really serious corrections."
#3 Since the bottom of the market in 2009, the Dow has jumped 143 percent, the S&P 500 is up 165 percent and the Nasdaq has risen an astounding 213 percent. This does not reflect economic reality in any way, shape or form.
#4 Market research firm TrimTabs says that the S&P 500 is "very overpriced" right now.
#5 Marc Faber recently told CNBC that "we are in a gigantic speculative bubble".
#6 In the United States, Google searches for the term "stock bubble" are at the highest level that we have seen since November 2007 - just before the last stock market crash.
#7 Price to earnings ratios are very high right now...
The Dow was trading at 17.8 times the past four quarters of earnings of its 30 components, according to The Wall Street Journal on Friday. That was up from 13.7 times its earnings a year ago. The S&P 500 is trading at 18.7 times earnings. The Nasdaq-100 Index is trading at 21.5 times earnings. At the very least, the ratios are signaling that stock prices are rich.
#8 According to CNBC, Pinterest is currently valued at more than 3 billion dollars even though it has never earned a profit.
#9 Twitter is a seven-year-old company that has never made a profit. It actually lost 64.6 million dollars last quarter. But according to the financial markets it is currently worth about 22 billion dollars.
#10 Right now, Facebook is trading at a valuation that is equivalent to approximately 100 years of earnings, and it is currently supposedly worth about 115 billion dollars.
#11 Howard Marks of Oaktree Capital recently stated that he believes that "markets are riskier than at any time since the depths of the 2008/9 crisis".
#12 As Graham Summers recently noted, retail investors are buying stocks at a level not seen since the peak of the dotcom bubble back in 2000.
#13 David Stockman, a former director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan, believes that this financial bubble is going to end very badly...
"We have a massive bubble everywhere, from Japan, to China, Europe, to the UK. As a result of this, I think world financial markets are extremely dangerous, unstable, and subject to serious trouble and dislocation in the future."
#14 Bob Janjuah of Nomura Securities believes that there "could be a 25% to 50% sell off in global stock markets" over the next couple of years.
#15 According to Tyler Durden of Zero Hedge, the U.S. stock market is repeating a pattern that we have seen many times before. According to him, we are experiencing "a well-defined syndrome of 'overvalued, overbought, overbullish, rising-yield' conditions that has appeared exclusively at speculative market peaks – including (exhaustively) 1929, 1972, 1987, 2000, 2007, 2011 (before a market loss of nearly 20% that was truncated by investor faith in a new round of monetary easing), and at three points in 2013: February, May, and today."
As I mentioned at the top of this article, this stock market bubble has been fueled by quantitative easing. Easy money from the Fed has been artificially inflating stock prices, and this has greatly benefited a very small percentage of the U.S. population. In fact, 82 percent of all individually held stocks are owned by the wealthiest 5 percent of all Americans.
When this stock market bubble does burst, those wealthy Americans are going to be in for a tremendous amount of pain.
But there are some people out there that argue that what we are witnessing is not a stock market bubble at all. That includes Janet Yellen, the new head of the Federal Reserve. Recently, she insisted that there is absolutely nothing to be worried about...
"Stock prices have risen pretty robustly," Yellen said. "But I think that if you look at traditional valuation measures, you would not see stock prices in territory that suggests bubble-like conditions."
We shall see who was right and who was wrong. Let's all file that one away and come back to it in a few years.
So where are stocks going next?
If you had the answer to that question, you could probably make a lot of money.
Yes, the current bubble could burst at any moment, or stocks could continue going up for a little while longer.
After all, the S&P 500 has risen in December about 80 percent of the time over the past thirty years.
Perhaps that will be the case this December as well.
Perhaps not.
Do you feel lucky?
Link:
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/15-signs-that-we-are-near-the-peak-of-an-absolutely-massive-stock-market-bubble
By Michael Snyder
One of the men that won the Nobel Prize for economics this year says that "bubbles look like this" and that he is "most worried about the boom in the U.S. stock market." But you don't have to be a Nobel Prize winner to see what is happening. It should be glaringly apparent to anyone with half a brain. The financial markets have been soaring while the overall economy has been stagnating. Reckless injections of liquidity into the financial system by the Federal Reserve have pumped up stock prices to ridiculous extremes, and people are becoming concerned. In fact, Google searches for the term "stock bubble" are now at the highest level that we have seen since November 2007. Despite assurances from the mainstream media and the Federal Reserve that everything is just fine, many Americans are beginning to realize that we have seen this movie before. We saw it during the dotcom bubble, and we saw it during the lead up to the horrible financial crisis of 2008. So precisely when will the bubble burst this time? Nobody knows for sure, but without a doubt this irrational financial bubble will burst at some point. Remember, a bubble is always the biggest right before it bursts, and the following are 15 signs that we are near the peak of an absolutely massive stock market bubble...
#1 Bob Shiller, one of the winners of this year's Nobel Prize for economics, says that "bubbles look like this" and that he is "most worried about the boom in the U.S. stock market."
#2 The total amount of margin debt has risen by 50 percent since January 2012 and it is now at the highest level ever recorded. The last two times that margin debt skyrocketed like this were just before the bursting of the dotcom bubble in 2000 and just before the financial crisis of 2008. When this house of cards comes crashing down, things are going to get very messy...
"When the tablecloth gets pulled out from under the place settings, you're going to have a lot of them crash and smash on the floor," said Uri Landesman, president of Platinum Partners hedge fund. "That margin's going to get pulled and everyone's going to have to cover. That's when you get really serious corrections."
#3 Since the bottom of the market in 2009, the Dow has jumped 143 percent, the S&P 500 is up 165 percent and the Nasdaq has risen an astounding 213 percent. This does not reflect economic reality in any way, shape or form.
#4 Market research firm TrimTabs says that the S&P 500 is "very overpriced" right now.
#5 Marc Faber recently told CNBC that "we are in a gigantic speculative bubble".
#6 In the United States, Google searches for the term "stock bubble" are at the highest level that we have seen since November 2007 - just before the last stock market crash.
#7 Price to earnings ratios are very high right now...
The Dow was trading at 17.8 times the past four quarters of earnings of its 30 components, according to The Wall Street Journal on Friday. That was up from 13.7 times its earnings a year ago. The S&P 500 is trading at 18.7 times earnings. The Nasdaq-100 Index is trading at 21.5 times earnings. At the very least, the ratios are signaling that stock prices are rich.
#8 According to CNBC, Pinterest is currently valued at more than 3 billion dollars even though it has never earned a profit.
#9 Twitter is a seven-year-old company that has never made a profit. It actually lost 64.6 million dollars last quarter. But according to the financial markets it is currently worth about 22 billion dollars.
#10 Right now, Facebook is trading at a valuation that is equivalent to approximately 100 years of earnings, and it is currently supposedly worth about 115 billion dollars.
#11 Howard Marks of Oaktree Capital recently stated that he believes that "markets are riskier than at any time since the depths of the 2008/9 crisis".
#12 As Graham Summers recently noted, retail investors are buying stocks at a level not seen since the peak of the dotcom bubble back in 2000.
#13 David Stockman, a former director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan, believes that this financial bubble is going to end very badly...
"We have a massive bubble everywhere, from Japan, to China, Europe, to the UK. As a result of this, I think world financial markets are extremely dangerous, unstable, and subject to serious trouble and dislocation in the future."
#14 Bob Janjuah of Nomura Securities believes that there "could be a 25% to 50% sell off in global stock markets" over the next couple of years.
#15 According to Tyler Durden of Zero Hedge, the U.S. stock market is repeating a pattern that we have seen many times before. According to him, we are experiencing "a well-defined syndrome of 'overvalued, overbought, overbullish, rising-yield' conditions that has appeared exclusively at speculative market peaks – including (exhaustively) 1929, 1972, 1987, 2000, 2007, 2011 (before a market loss of nearly 20% that was truncated by investor faith in a new round of monetary easing), and at three points in 2013: February, May, and today."
As I mentioned at the top of this article, this stock market bubble has been fueled by quantitative easing. Easy money from the Fed has been artificially inflating stock prices, and this has greatly benefited a very small percentage of the U.S. population. In fact, 82 percent of all individually held stocks are owned by the wealthiest 5 percent of all Americans.
When this stock market bubble does burst, those wealthy Americans are going to be in for a tremendous amount of pain.
But there are some people out there that argue that what we are witnessing is not a stock market bubble at all. That includes Janet Yellen, the new head of the Federal Reserve. Recently, she insisted that there is absolutely nothing to be worried about...
"Stock prices have risen pretty robustly," Yellen said. "But I think that if you look at traditional valuation measures, you would not see stock prices in territory that suggests bubble-like conditions."
We shall see who was right and who was wrong. Let's all file that one away and come back to it in a few years.
So where are stocks going next?
If you had the answer to that question, you could probably make a lot of money.
Yes, the current bubble could burst at any moment, or stocks could continue going up for a little while longer.
After all, the S&P 500 has risen in December about 80 percent of the time over the past thirty years.
Perhaps that will be the case this December as well.
Perhaps not.
Do you feel lucky?
Link:
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/15-signs-that-we-are-near-the-peak-of-an-absolutely-massive-stock-market-bubble
"Our national debt has grown, millions have already been impoverished and millions more will be soon. The next crisis is imminent."
It Will Implode: “We Will See The Demise of the Dollar”
Mac Slavo
Few economic analysts truly understand the underlying fundamentals of the global economy and their impact on the workings of the world. Fewer still are willing to share that knowledge with the general public and advise others on how to shield themselves against a destabilization of the system as we have come to know it.
Bud Conrad of Casey Research is one of those who does, and in the interview below with Future Money Trends he discusses the end result of the manipulations currently being executed by our government, central banks, and financial institutions.
Despite what we’ve be told is the case, they have fixed absolutely nothing. Our national debt has grown, millions have already been impoverished and millions more will be soon. The next crisis is imminent.
The complex of potential future problems will be based on the same problems that caused the 2008 downturn… too much government debt, too much private debt and a collapse of that debt when it can’t be paid, creating a new economic crisis.
Look at the big long-term future of our economic situation… I have predicted, that in my lifetime, the US government issue of currency can’t be trusted.
It will implode and will issue a new currency to replace the dollar. That will destroy an awful lot of debts.
It will give the government a new leg, and if they can base it on something like gold it will, both, be very bullish for gold and create new confidence. If they create a new paper system like the old paper system it’ll die just like a Banana republic [like] Argentina about every ten years later.
With that… I am saying in my lifetime we’ll see the demise of the dollar and certainly before that we’ll see gold at $10,000 an ounce.
This critical information for those who want to understand what’s happening behind the scenes and how those schemes will affect the future of our economic and monetary systems:
What’s important to understand is that the manipulation is rampant, as Bud explains in the interview above, and it will soon be revealed in the form of widespread collapse of our economic and financial systems.
Consider the monetary calamity that must occur in order for gold to rise to $10,000 an ounce, and understand that whatever causes such a price spike will be an unprecedented event in human history. It won’t just be gold that’s rising, but any tangible asset essential to survival or the flow of commerce.
Acquire those assets now at a fair price – while you still can.
Link:
http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/in-our-lifetime-it-will-implode-we-will-see-the-demise-of-the-dollar_11302013
Mac Slavo
Few economic analysts truly understand the underlying fundamentals of the global economy and their impact on the workings of the world. Fewer still are willing to share that knowledge with the general public and advise others on how to shield themselves against a destabilization of the system as we have come to know it.
Bud Conrad of Casey Research is one of those who does, and in the interview below with Future Money Trends he discusses the end result of the manipulations currently being executed by our government, central banks, and financial institutions.
Despite what we’ve be told is the case, they have fixed absolutely nothing. Our national debt has grown, millions have already been impoverished and millions more will be soon. The next crisis is imminent.
The complex of potential future problems will be based on the same problems that caused the 2008 downturn… too much government debt, too much private debt and a collapse of that debt when it can’t be paid, creating a new economic crisis.
Look at the big long-term future of our economic situation… I have predicted, that in my lifetime, the US government issue of currency can’t be trusted.
It will implode and will issue a new currency to replace the dollar. That will destroy an awful lot of debts.
It will give the government a new leg, and if they can base it on something like gold it will, both, be very bullish for gold and create new confidence. If they create a new paper system like the old paper system it’ll die just like a Banana republic [like] Argentina about every ten years later.
With that… I am saying in my lifetime we’ll see the demise of the dollar and certainly before that we’ll see gold at $10,000 an ounce.
This critical information for those who want to understand what’s happening behind the scenes and how those schemes will affect the future of our economic and monetary systems:
What’s important to understand is that the manipulation is rampant, as Bud explains in the interview above, and it will soon be revealed in the form of widespread collapse of our economic and financial systems.
Consider the monetary calamity that must occur in order for gold to rise to $10,000 an ounce, and understand that whatever causes such a price spike will be an unprecedented event in human history. It won’t just be gold that’s rising, but any tangible asset essential to survival or the flow of commerce.
Acquire those assets now at a fair price – while you still can.
Link:
http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/in-our-lifetime-it-will-implode-we-will-see-the-demise-of-the-dollar_11302013
Sunday, December 1, 2013
Inflation??? What inflation???
As we have all become slaves to a society of high taxation and low wages, one can enjoy a mere 12 ounce Pepsi cola for $2.25
One thing is for sure, the U.S. postage stamp started out at 1¢, now we are looking at $0.46 just to send a letter.
However, no one could prepare themselves for the Pepsi 4-pack of bottles at Foodland for $8.99, now on sale for $4.99 in what can only be described as robbery. Even at sale price that’s $1.25 each!
Interestingly enough the DOW has recently reached an all-time high.
Link:
http://intellihub.com/2013/11/30/inflation-hits-new-level-12oz-pepsi-2-25-each/
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