September 15, 2008 is the day that Lehman died and the moment that the world's central banks led by the Fed went all-in. As it has turned out, that was an epochal leap into the most dangerous monetary deformation that the world has ever known.

It needn't have been. What was really happening at this pregnant moment was that the remnants of honest capital markets were begging for a purge and liquidation of the speculative rot that had built up during the Greenspan era. But the phony depression scholar running the Fed, Ben Bernanke, would have none of it. So he falsely whooped-up a warning that Great Depression 2.0 was at hand - sending Washington, Wall Street and the rest of the world into an all-out panic.

You can print all the money you want, but it will never boost wages to keep up with prices.

Central banks have been pursuing two goals for the past six years: ignite inflation and an expansion of debt that will supposedly generate "growth." Despite squandering trillions of dollars, yen, yuan and euros, central banks have failed to ignite sustainable inflation or growth.

There's nothing mysterious about their failure: you can't get "good" inflation or growth if wages are stagnant or declining. The central banks don't bother to distinguish between "good" and "bad" inflation: any and all inflation is considered not only wonderful but essential to propping up the Ponzi scheme of debt-dependent consumption, a dynamic I described in Central Banks Create Deflation, Not Inflation.

"Good" inflation is wages rising faster than prices. When wages rise faster than consumer prices, households have more money to spend on consumption, and it's progressively easier for them to pay down debt and support additional borrowing.

"Bad" inflation is prices rising while wages stagnate. In "bad" inflation, prices keep rising as central bank money-printing devalues the currency, but wages don't rise along with prices. As a result, wages decline in real terms, i.e. purchasing power.

In Japan, where the central bank and government have struggled for years to generate price inflation as the means to "re-start growth," wages have fallen by 9% in real terms since 1997. (source:Voodoo Abenomics: Japan's Failed Comeback Plan Foreign Affairs)

I explain this in further depth in Inflation Is Not "Growth" (July 23, 2014). These charts reflect the stagnation of American wages and household incomes.

Image source: Rising Wages Where? Real Wages Post First Annual Decline Since 2012

When a financial crash does happen, you can forget about getting immediate access to your money.

Ellen Brown of The Web of Debt Blog says, "The banks will say, well, we don't have it. All the money goes into one big pool since Glass Steagall was repealed. They are allowed to gamble with that money and that's what they do. I think maybe Bank of America is the most vulnerable because of Merrill Lynch. Everybody is concerned, and they do very risky deals and they are on the edge. I think they have over $50 trillion in derivatives and over $1 trillion in deposits. . . The Dodd-Frank Act says we, the people, are no longer going to be responsible for the big banks when they collapse.

It is not clear the FDIC will even be able to borrow from the Treasury, but even if they could, who is going to pay that money back? Let's say they borrowed $1 trillion. Who is going to pay that $1 trillion dollars back? It will bankrupt all the small banks that had to contribute to this premium. They will say we're raising your premium to everything you got, basically. Little banks will go out of business, and who is going to survive--the big banks. . . . What we're going to have left is five big banks, and everybody else is going to be bankrupt."

The latest is called "Big Banks Will Take Depositors Money In Next Crash -Ellen Brown." The G-20 met recently in Australia to make new banking rules for the next financial calamity. Financial reform advocate Ellen Brown says these new rules will allow banks to take money from depositors and pensioners globally. Brown explains, "It became rules we agreed to actually implement. There was no treaty, and Congress didn't agree to all this. They use words so that it's not obvious to tell what they have done, but what they did was say, basically, that we, the governments, are no longer going to be responsible for bailing out the big banks. These are about 30 international banks. So, you are going to have to save yourselves, and the way you are going to have to do it is by bailing in the money of your creditors. The largest class of creditors of any bank is the depositors."

Ireland's lower house of parliament has unanimously approved a nonbinding, symbolic resolution calling on the government to recognize the state of Palestine formally on the basis of the 1967 borders.

The motion is similar to one passed in October by the upper house, the Seanad. It calls on the government to "officially recognize the State of Palestine, on the basis of the 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as the capital, as established in UN resolutions, as a further positive contribution to securing a negotiated two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."

The symbolic measure was sponsored by Sinn Fein, an Irish nationalist party with strong Palestinian links.

"Achieving and recognizing a Palestinian state has always been the objective of the Irish government. Everything we do in the Middle East is directed towards that aim," Sinn Fein's Phil Flanagan told a virtually empty parliamentary chamber, with barely a dozen lawmakers present in the 166-seat chamber, AP reported.

"While successive governments have always seen recognition coming as part of an agreed peace, I've made it clear that I've absolutely no difficulty in principle with the idea of early recognition, if I believe it can contribute to achieving a settlement of the conflict. The present stalemate is not acceptable to me," Flanagan stated.

The European Council on Foreign Relations and Berlin think-tank Friedrich Ebert Stiftung have just reached more or less the same conclusion.

If the dangerous stand-off between the EU and Russia over Ukraine is not solved, the EU could face, up to 2030, a military build-up in eastern Europe; a new arms race with NATO as a protagonist; and a semi-permanent "zone of instability" from the Baltic to the Balkans and the Black Sea.

What these two think-tanks don't - and won't - ever acknowledge is that a new European "arc of instability" - from the Baltic to the Black Sea, as myself and other independent analysts have stressed - is exactly what the Empire of Chaos and its weaponized arm - NATO - are working on to prevent closer Eurasia integration.

By the way, the Pentagon excels in fabricating "arcs of instability". The previous one was - and remains - massive, stretching from the Maghreb to Xinjiang in western China across the Middle East and Central Asia.

Moscow has totally identified the plot; Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, once again, has made it crystal clear, in detail.

And crucially, some influential sectors in Germany also did, as in members of the cultural elite destroying the notion of a new war in Europe: "Not in our name."

The same applies to those that always preach more transatlantic cooperation, extol the US's "defining" role in Germany, and effusively praise Germany as the most American country in Europe; that's the case of the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper - which stands for the core of the political and economic establishment in Germany.

It's still in an embryonic stage, and has not yet made Chancellor Angela Merkel see the light; but a reverse reengineering of Atlanticist relations is already in progress in Germany.

The United States is seeking to dismember China because it has a history of invasion throughout the world, an American researcher in California says.

"The US has invaded countries throughout the world, in its own backyard, in Latin America and particularly around the periphery of China," said Dennis Etler, a professor of Anthropology at Cabrillo College in Aptos, California.

"Two wars have been fought on China's borders (by the US) within the last half century," Etler told Press TV on Wednesday.


"China has a history of course over the last 150 years of invasion, occupation and destruction by forces both East and West, of course there's European colonialism and Japanese imperialism as well as US imperialism have wreaked havoc on China," Etler added.

China has a right to defend itself from US "imperialism" which still has a desire to dismember China, similar to what it did with the former Soviet Union, former Yugoslavia, Iraq and other nations, Etler stated.

A new report has revealed that the Chinese Navy is preparing for a possible enemy attack, arming its submarines with nuclear missiles that could reach the United States.


Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday that the Asian superpower is "cloaking its arsenal with the invisibility needed to retaliate in the event of an enemy strike."

China has also been developing advanced anti-ship ballistic missiles that could target US naval forces in the South China Sea.

Israel has once again conducted air strikes against the Syrian government and its people, in yet another act of unprovoked aggression and international criminality. The New York Times would report in their article, "Syria Reports New Strikes From Israel Near Capital," that:

Israeli warplanes struck at least two areas near Damascus on Sunday, the Syrian Armed Forces General Command said in a statement, apparently ending a months long hiatus in strikes attributed to Israel against sophisticated weaponry destined for Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Israeli officials refused to confirm or deny the latest reports from Syria, maintaining a policy of ambiguity that is meant to allow the other side to save face and to stave off retaliation.

Strikes hit government facilities in the capital as well as Damascus International Airport. One must wonder why Israel attacks what it has called "regional threats" in Damascus when it allows terrorist groups including Al Qaeda's Al Nusra Front to park tanks along its borders.

Israel Strikes At Only Viable Nation Fighting ISIS in Region

At this current juncture in the Syrian crisis the illusion of "moderate rebels" has so utterly evaporated that even groups the US supposedly "vetted" and armed with sophisticated anti-tank weapons are now openly aligned with the so-called Islamic State (ISIS). The implications of this are, and as the Syrian government has said since 2011, that the Syrian government is fighting a battle not against its own people or "pro-democracy" forces, but heavily armed sectarian extremists either flying the flag of Al Qaeda, or openly having pledged allegiance to it.

It becomes increasingly difficult for casual observers then, to understand why nations like Israel are still conducting attacks directly against the government of Syria while providing defacto sanctuaries for ISIS terrorists and their affiliates along their border with Syria in the occupied Golan Heights. It would appear to the casual observer that Israel, Al Qaeda, and ISIS are in fact in league, and the conflict raging within Syria is instead a proxy war being waged from beyond its borders rather than solely within them.

Indeed, these implications are not only logical considering Israel's recent attacks, the latest in a series of attacks it has carried out in support of terrorists and against the Syrian government since 2011, but they are also backed up with documented evidence from as early as 2007. However, Israel does not act alone.

One prisoner at a CIA black site froze to death. Others were forced to stand on broken feet, threatened sexually with broomsticks, or subjected to "rectal feeding" for no apparent medical reason. The Senate Intelligence Committee released those details and more Tuesday in the 500-page execu​tive summary of its report on the CIA's Bush-era "enhanced interrogation" program.

Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein unveiled the long-awaited, long-delayed report by the Senate Intelligence Committee on the CIA's now-discontinued "Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation" program this morning, calling it a "stain on our country and our values."

The controversial 6,700-page report describes, among other things, detainees being kept in a dark, freezing, dungeon-like prison, being kept awake for up to 180 hours at a time, and being subjected to "near-drowning" over and over. The three-year Senate investigation concluded the "brutal interrogation techniques in violation of US law, treaty obligations, and our values" were not effective in prying intelligence from detainees.

The report also found that the CIA misled the public, the White House and Congress on both the brutality of the program and its effectiveness.

"The waterboarding technique was physically harmful, inducing convulsions and vomiting," the report states. "Abu Zubaydah, for example, became 'completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth.' Internal CIA records describe the waterboarding of Khalid Shaykh Mohammad as evolving in to a 'series of near drownings.'"

CIA interrogators threatened detainees with broomsticks and power drills and threatened to rape and kill detainees' mothers. Other detainees with broken feet and legs were subjected to stress positions for extended periods of time.

'Information' that supports your side; disinformation that invents, distorts or invents the truth or presents spurious allegations and assumptions as facts; outright lies and propaganda; controlling the flow of information through 'embedded' reporters and hand-picked pools in order to eliminate 'inconvenient facts' or simply prevent journalists from ever seeing them - all these techniques and methods have long been essential to modern war, and they have become crucial to the murky wars and armed conflicts of the early 21st century.

The essential purpose of such efforts is to attain 'information dominance' and make sure that your 'narrative' is the one that most people hear, that they keep on hearing it as often as possible, that you can shape the ways in which these conflicts are represented and perceived by a global audience that now receives information through an all-pervasive mass media that includes 24-hour tv, the Internet, smartphones and tablets.

The best propaganda of all is the kind that you don't even recognize as propaganda; you simply assume that what you see is what you get; that the journalists and pundits you see are independent of their governments and willing to hold their actions up to scrutiny and ask questions that they don't to hear; that the journalists, newsreaders and pundits you are watching or listening to have any subjective perspective or ulterior motives or any interest in anything except the plain unvarnished truth.

In the West we often take it for granted that this is what we've got, and that our media would never and could never stoop so low as to transform journalism into propaganda. That is something that other countries do.

The problem is that large sections of the world's population don't believe in our inherent truthfulness as much as we do or are tired of hearing our stories. Now satellite technology and the worldwide web have made it possible for different voices to provide a different perspective, and even to counter the stories emanating from CNN, the BBC and numerous other outlets, and when it happens our own masters of war are not happy about it.

US House members admitted they had not read the entire $585 billion, 1,648-page National Defense Authorization Act, which predominantly specifies budgeting for the Defense Department, before it was voted on Thursday in Congress.

"Of course not. Are you kidding?" Rep. Jim Moran (D-Virginia) said when asked by CNSNews if he had perused the entire bill, which was just posted online late Tuesday night before it was ultimately passed in by the House by a vote of 300-119 about 36 hours later.

Moran said he did not plan to read the entire bill before voting because "I trust the leadership."


"Do you think [House Speaker John] Boehner and [Senate Majority Leader Harry] Reid have read it?"asked CNSNews.

"I know their staff has," Moran responded.

When pressed directly about his knowledge of every aspect of the massive National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2015, House Speaker Boehner (R-Ohio) assured CNSNews he was aware of all aspects of the multi-faceted, complex bill.

"I've been through almost every part of that bill, as it was being put together," he said. "So, trust me, I am well aware of what's in that bill."