Spanish philosopher Santayana warned that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, but a more serious problem than mere historical amnesia is historical revisionism, where whole societies somehow become convinced of something that never happened or just the opposite of what really happened. The history of Greek and German debt is a good example.

Money creation VS debt creation

Debt and money are frequently confused. We read about money creation, "money created out of thin air", and we imagine printing presses spewing out tons of paper bank notes.

The only drawback of money creation is the erosion of the value of the currency (inflation) because of excessive supply. To illustrate this process, imagine a gigantic oil field were to be found in Siberia tomorrow; it would reduce the price for oil because of the increased supply.

In this sense, money creation impacts every operator (banks, states, citizens) holding money, by decreasing the value of their holding. The more money that exists, the less it is valued, like most other commodities.

But today, 97% of digital money is "created" through debts issued by private banks. This means that, today, money is not created to serve economic development or national monetary policies but solely to maximize the profits of private banks.

You put a big chunk of your nest egg in a life insurance policy with an A+ company. You invest another sizable amount in a portfolio of high-rated corporate bonds and tax-free municipal bonds. Then, feeling safe and secure with most of your funds, you take a flyer on a few stocks that a half-dozen separate research analysts have unanimously rated as a "buy" or at least a "hold." You assume you've made informed decisions based on the best research the world has to offer. The reality: Even in the absence of bubbles or busts, you could suffer wipeout losses.

Hard to believe this could actually happen? Actually, it already has happened. It is a paramount goal to make absolutely certain you don't get caught in Wall Street deceptions like these in the future. So in this article, I tell you what they are, how they emerged, and how to avoid them.

Their primary cause: Legalized payola and massive conflicts of interest.
The primary result: Distorted research and inflated ratings on hundreds of thousands of companies, bonds, stocks, and investments of all kinds.
The threat to you: Far fewer profits (or bigger losses) in your investments than you would have anticipated otherwise.

Indeed, Wall Street's inflated ratings are, themselves, a kind of bubble, which, when fully exposed, could suffer a great bust of its own — deepening the price decline, hurting the chances of each company's survival, and aggravating any economic crisis. Wall Street's ratings are the brains and nervous system of the global financial markets, and those markets, in turn, are the heartbeat of the global economy. So when the integrity of the ratings is severely compromised, it places everyone in danger, whether an investor or not, whether rich or poor.

Never a country known for its human rights and civil liberties, Kuwait is now attempting to take the lead in the Gulf for the country most integrated with the technological control grid and biometric surveillance state.

This is because the small nation recently announced the passage of a law that mandates every person residing in Kuwait must submit to a DNA sample that will be stored in a massive database upon penalty of fines and jail time.

Kuwait has 1.3 million citizens that will be subject to the law but its 2.9 million foreign residents are subject as well.

Any person who refuses to submit to the DNA tests and data mining operation will be subject to $33,000 in fines and up to one year in prison. Any person who provides a fake sample will face up to seven years.

Iran and six leading world powers signed a comprehensive plan for ending international sanctions against Iran in exchange for putting restrictions on its controversial nuclear program. RT takes a look at the groundbreaking document.

The deal signed in Vienna on Tuesday is meant to break a 12-year standoff over Iran's nuclear activities, which some nations claimed involved military research. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) acknowledges Iran's right for peaceful nuclear development on par with any other signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The agreement provides for a joint commission to be established to monitor the implementation of the action plan and handle dispute situations. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is tasked with verifying voluntary nuclear-related measures by Iran. Iran and the six nations - China, France, Germany, Russia, the UK and the US, are to hold ministerial-level meetings at least once every two years to monitor the progress.

The Kremlin is increasingly concerned about an Islamist uprising in one of the weak autocracies along its southern flank, most of which will be attending the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit today in Ufa, Russia. For all Washington's intense focus on the self-declared Islamic State and other Islamist militants, the threat such groups pose is largely a distant one. The danger is real, but it is one where the risks are primarily to US interests and allies thousands of miles away, not the homeland itself.

But for Russia, just a few hundred miles from Islamist territory in Afghanistan, the danger really could emerge right next door.

The threat of Islamist takeover in one or more of the three weak, authoritarian post-Soviet states — Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan — that border Afghanistan is a long-standing fear in Moscow. And it will be a major topic of discussion as Russia hosts a summit of the Central Asia-oriented Shanghai Cooperation Organization [SCO] in the Urals city of Ufa today.

The new bailout agreement is a total humiliation of the entire Greek nation and full scale colonization, according to a professor at a Greek university.

The agreement between Greece and its creditors completely ignores the results of the Greek national referendum held on July 5. The new deal will make the situation in the country even worse, said Dimitrios Patelis, Professor at the Technical University of Crete.

The Greek public shouted a resounding "No" to austerity measures on July 5 in a nationwide referendum on international creditors' proposals.

It sounds almost unimaginable, but it isn't the script of a new Hollywood movie: the Pentagon has literally forced movie producers to turn villains into heroes, add U.S. Military rescues, as well as changing scenes that they deem "sensitive."

Producers and directors say they are literally being forced to re-write scripts. If the United States Department of Defense deems their content ­inappropriate, the changes are strongly "suggested."

The relevant files about this military involvement in Hollywood, from the California-based Department of Defense Entertainment Liaison Office were released after a Freedom of Information Act request by Bath University's Dr Matthew Alford, whose research focuses on the relationship between entertainment, political power, and propaganda in the United States.

The 1,400-page military document can be downloaded as the 2004-5 weekly reports here and the 2005-6 weekly reports here.

The sheer size of the DOD's involvement in the entertainment industry is mind-boggling. The full DOD film list details just how much the military has involved itself in Hollywood.

Such involvement includes altering scripts to accommodate Pentagon requests, many have in ­exchange gained inexpensive access to military locations, vehicles and gear they need to make their films.

The agreement on the Iranian nuclear problem will serve as an impetus to solving other crises in the sphere of nuclear non-proliferation, particularly the Korean peninsula crisis, Anton Khlopkov, the founding director of the Center for Energy and Security Studies (CENESS), told Sputnik Tuesday.

Earlier on Tuesday, Tehran and the P5+1 group of international negotiators comprising Russia, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany and China reached a comprehensive agreement that will ensure the peaceful nature of Iranian nuclear activities in exchange for the lifting of sanctions imposed on the country.

"Agreements on the Iranian nuclear program lay a good foundation to activate efforts on resolving the crisis in DPRK [North Korea.] In recent years, [international players] in particular the United States, have paid too little attention to initiatives to settle the crisis on the Korean peninsula, which were coming from the DPRK side as well," Khlopkov said.

The poor and the working class in the United States know what it is to be Greek. They know underemployment and unemployment. They know life without a pension. They know existence on a few dollars a day. They know gas and electricity being turned off because of unpaid bills. They know the crippling weight of debt. They know being sick and unable to afford medical care. They know the state seizing their meager assets, a process known in the United States as "civil asset forfeiture," which has permitted American police agencies to confiscate more than $3 billion in cash and property. They know the profound despair and abandonment that come when schools, libraries, neighborhood health clinics, day care services, roads, bridges, public buildings and assistance programs are neglected or closed. They know the financial elites' hijacking of democratic institutions to impose widespread misery in the name of austerity. They, like the Greeks, know what it is to be abandoned.

The Greeks and the U.S. working poor endure the same deprivations because they are being assaulted by the same system—corporate capitalism. There are no internal constraints on corporate capitalism. And the few external constraints that existed have been removed. Corporate capitalism, manipulating the world's most powerful financial institutions, including the Eurogroup, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Federal Reserve, does what it is designed to do: It turns everything, including human beings and the natural world, into commodities to be exploited until exhaustion or collapse. In the extraction process, labor unions are broken, regulatory agencies are gutted, laws are written by corporate lobbyists to legalize fraud and empower global monopolies, and public utilities are privatized. Secret trade agreements—which even elected officials who view the documents are not allowed to speak about—empower corporate oligarchs to amass even greater power and accrue even greater profits at the expense of workers. To swell its profits, corporate capitalism plunders, represses and drives into bankruptcy individuals, cities, states and governments. It ultimately demolishes the structures and markets that make capitalism possible. But this is of little consolation for those who endure its evil. By the time it slays itself it will have left untold human misery in its wake.