Puppet MastersS


Gold Bar

Why are the banksters telling us to sell our gold when they are hoarding gold like crazy?

Michael Synder
The Economic Collapse Blog
Wed, 10 Apr 2013 19:05 UTC
Gold Bars
© The Economic Collapse Blog
The big banks are breathlessly proclaiming that now is the time to sell your gold. They are warning that we have now entered a "bear market" for gold and that the price of gold will continue to decline for the rest of the year. So should we believe them? Well, their warnings might be more credible if the central banks of the world were not hoarding gold like crazy.

During 2012, central bank gold buying was at the highest level that we have seen in almost 50 years. Meanwhile, insider buying of gold stocks has now reached multi-year highs and the U.S. Mint cannot even keep up with the insatiable demand for silver eagle coins. So what in the world is actually going on here? Right now, the central banks of the world are indulging in a money printing binge that reminds many of what happened during the early days of the Weimar Republic.

When you flood the financial system with paper money, that is eventually going to cause the prices for hard assets to go up dramatically. Could it be possible that the banksters are trying to drive down the price of both gold and silver so that they can gobble it up cheaply? Do they want to be the ones sitting on all of the "real money" once the paper money bubble that we are living in finally bursts?

Over the past few weeks, nearly every major newspaper in the world has run at least one story telling people that it is time to sell their gold.
Read More...
Dominoes

Neruda, Pinochet, and the Iron Lady

Jon Lee Anderson
The New Yorker
Wed, 10 Apr 2013 18:31 UTC
Neruda
This Feb. 14, 1952 file photo shows Chilean poet Pablo Neruda in Capri, Italy.
It's curious, historically speaking, that Margaret Thatcher died on the same day that forensic specialists, in Chile, exhumed the remains of the late, great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. The author of the epic Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair and the winner of the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature, Neruda died at the age of sixty-nine, supposedly of prostate cancer, just twelve days after the violent September 11, 1973, military coup launched by army chief Augusto Pinochet against the country's elected Socialist President, Salvador Allende. Warplanes had strafed the Presidential palace, and Allende had bravely held out, but committed suicide with a rifle given to him by Cuba's President Fidel Castro as Pinochet's goons stormed into the Presidential palace. Neruda was a close friend and supporter of Allende's; he was ill, but in the midst of planning to leave the country for Mexico, where he had been invited to go into exile. When he was on his deathbed in a clinic, his home had been broken into by soldiers and trashed.

At his funeral, a large crowd of mourners marched through the streets of Santiago - a grim city that was otherwise empty except for military vehicles. At his gravesite, in one of the only known acts of public defiance in the wake of the coup, the mourners sang the "Internationale" and saluted Neruda and also Allende. As they did, the regime's men were going around the city, burning the books of authors it didn't like, while hunting down those it could find to torture or kill.
Read More...
Vader

Obama's drone war kills 'others,' not just al Qaida leaders

Jonathan S. Landay
McClatchy
Wed, 10 Apr 2013 13:53 UTC
Image
© Yslb Pak Zhang Qi/Xinhua/MCTPakistani soldiers stand guard at the Shamsi Airbase located some 320 kilometers southwest of Quetta in southwest Pakistan, on December 11, 2011.
Contrary to assurances it has deployed U.S. drones only against known senior leaders of al Qaida and allied groups, the Obama administration has targeted and killed hundreds of suspected lower-level Afghan, Pakistani and unidentified "other" militants in scores of strikes in Pakistan's rugged tribal area, classified U.S. intelligence reports show.

The administration has said that strikes by the CIA's missile-firing Predator and Reaper drones are authorized only against "specific senior operational leaders of al Qaida and associated forces" involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks who are plotting "imminent" violent attacks on Americans.

"It has to be a threat that is serious and not speculative," President Barack Obama said in a Sept. 6, 2012, interview with CNN. "It has to be a situation in which we can't capture the individual before they move forward on some sort of operational plot against the United States."

Copies of the top-secret U.S. intelligence reports reviewed by McClatchy, however, show that drone strikes in Pakistan over a four-year period didn't adhere to those standards.

The intelligence reports list killings of alleged Afghan insurgents whose organization wasn't on the U.S. list of terrorist groups at the time of the 9/11 strikes; of suspected members of a Pakistani extremist group that didn't exist at the time of 9/11; and of unidentified individuals described as "other militants" and "foreign fighters."
Read More...
War Whore

Seriously, Dick Cheney? 'We're in deep doo-doo' with North Korea


Fox2now.com
Wed, 10 Apr 2013 13:07 UTC
Image
© UPI/Jim Ruymen
Republican leaders in Congress received a dire warning on Tuesday from former Vice President Dick Cheney on the ongoing crisis in North Korea.

"We're in deep doo doo," Cheney told lawmakers, according to a GOP leadership aide.

Cheney added the current North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, is unpredictable and doesn't share the United States worldview.

One lawmaker present at the session, Rep. Steve Southerland of Florida, said Cheney wore a cowboy hat and "looked really good, spoke really clearly, lucidly."

"It was nice to see him doing well," Southerland said, noting the last time Cheney was on Capitol Hill he "didn't look good - very frail, but in this meeting he looked great."

Cheney, 72, underwent a successful heart transplant in 2012 after a series of heart attacks over many years.

Southerland said Cheney spent about 10 minutes in the GOP leadership meeting Tuesday, and didn't give any specific policy recommendations or critiques of how the Obama administration is handling the situation in North Korea.
Read More...
Dollar

Forget the need for a U.S. carbon tax - the economy has put a big dent in gasoline use and driving

Anthony Watts
Watts Up With That
Tue, 09 Apr 2013 12:27 UTC
A few days ago I did a report on the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) numbers for carbon dioxide emissions, showing that it was clearly down, and back to levels not seen since 1994, and noting that since Kyoto in 1997, U.S. emissions have dropped even though Kyoto was never ratified in the USA.

Image
If you thought that was troubling and strange have a look at these numbers which also indicate the state of the U.S. Economy. First, the number of miles driven monthly for the last 30 years. As you can see, just like global temperature has flatlined, so has the number of miles driven.

Image
Source data: http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/M12MTVUSM227NFWA

Now the amount of gasoline sold. Note the regular seasonal "heartbeat" pattern up to about 2008, then that pattern gives way to a precipitous drop at the end.
Read More...
V

Wikileaks publishes U.S. cable detailing plan to destabilize Chavez regime

William Blum
Information Clearing House
Tue, 09 Apr 2013 10:08 UTC
Image
Would you believe that the United States tried to do something that was not nice against Hugo Chávez?

Wikileaks has done it again. I guess the US will really have to get tough now with Julian Assange and Bradley Manning.

In a secret US cable to the State Department, dated November 9, 2006, and recently published online by WikiLeaks, former US ambassador to Venezuela, William Brownfield, outlines a comprehensive plan to destabilize the government of the late President Hugo Chávez. The cable begins with a Summary:
During his 8 years in power, President Chavez has systematically dismantled the institutions of democracy and governance. The USAID/OTI program objectives in Venezuela focus on strengthening democratic institutions and spaces through non-partisan cooperation with many sectors of Venezuelan society.
USAID/OTI = United States Agency for International Development/Office of Transition Initiatives. The latter is one of the many euphemisms that American diplomats use with each other and the world - They say it means a transition to "democracy". What it actually means is a transition from the target country adamantly refusing to cooperate with American imperialist grand designs to a country gladly willing (or acceding under pressure) to cooperate with American imperialist grand designs.
OTI supports the Freedom House (FH) "Right to Defend Human Rights" program with $1.1 million. Simultaneously through Development Alternatives Inc. (DAI), OTI has also provided 22 grants to human rights organizations.
Read More...
Eye 2

WikiLeaks: Vatican dismissed Pinochet massacre reports as 'communist propaganda'

Peter Finocchiaro
Huffington Post
Mon, 08 Apr 2013 10:00 UTC
Image
© Getty fileDiplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks on Monday show a Vatican official during the papacy of Paul VI (above) downplaying reports of massacre under Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.
Gen. Augusto Pinochet's military dictatorship was responsible for the deaths of as many as 3,200 people in Chile in the 1970s, but the Vatican dismissed reports of bloodshed at the time as "communist propaganda," according to diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks on Monday.

Pinochet came to power in 1973 as the head of a military coup against democratically elected socialist President Salvador Allende. The right-wing junta that subsequently ruled the country from 1973 to 1990 was responsible for the murders of as many as 3,200 people, as well as the arrest of tens of thousands more, many of whom were tortured.

In a 1973 diplomatic cable addressed to Henry Kissinger, then serving as the United States' Secretary of State, high-ranking Vatican official Giovanni Benelli was quoted as relaying "his and the pope's grave concern over successful international leftist campaign to misconstrue completely realities of Chilean situation." Benelli dismissed reports of massacre as "unfounded" and "possibly [the] greatest success of Communist propaganda," while explaining away whatever violence had occurred as "unfortunately natural following coup d'etat."
Read More...
Megaphone

"Tramp the Dirt Down": Margaret Thatcher is dead

George Galloway
Information Clearing House
Tue, 09 Apr 2013 09:53 UTC
Image
George Galloway
The old saw that one shouldn't speak ill of the recently dead cannot possibly apply to controversial figures in public life. It certainly didn't apply to President Hugo Chavez who predeceased Margaret Thatcher amidst a blizzard of abuse.

The main reason it must not preclude entering the lists amidst a wave of hagiographic sycophantic tosh of the kind that has engulfed Britain these last hours is that otherwise the hagiographers will have the field to themselves.

Every controversial divisive deadly thing that Thatcher did will be placed in soft focus, bathed in a rose-coloured light, and provide a first draft of history that will be, simply, wrong.

As is now well-known, I refused to do that today on the demise of a wicked woman who tore apart what remained good about my country, and set an agenda which has been followed, more or less, by all of her successors. I certainly wasn't prepared to leave the obituaries to those who profited from her rule or those who have aped her ever since.

So here is my own memory of Thatcher and what she did in her time on this earth.
Read More...
Crusader

Best of the Web: Margaret Thatcher's criminal legacy

Finian Cunningham
Press TV
Tue, 09 Apr 2013 09:43 UTC
Image
Hours after the death of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, the history books are being re-written and the beatification of the Iron Lady is well underway.

Current British premier David Cameron praised Lady Thatcher for having "saved Britain" and for making the has-been colonial power "great again".

Tributes poured forth from French and German leaders, Francoise Hollande and Angela Merkel, while US President Barack Obama said America had lost a "special friend".

Former American secretary of state Henry Kissinger and former Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev also lamented the loss of "an historic world figure". Polish ex-president Lech Walesa hailed Margaret Thatcher for having brought down the Soviet Union and Communism.

Such fulsome praise may be expected coming from so many war criminals. But it is instructive of how history is written by the victors and criminals in high office. Obama, Cameron, Hollande and Merkel should all be arraigned and prosecuted for war crimes in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Pakistan, Somalia and Mali, among other places. Kissinger has long evaded justice for over four decades for his role in the US genocide in Southeast Asia during the so-called Vietnam War in which over three million people were obliterated in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

The British state is to give Thatcher, who died this week aged 87, a full military-honours funeral. The praise, eulogies, wreaths and ceremonies are all self-indictments of association with one of the most ruthless and criminal political figures in modern times.
Read More...
USA

Secret FDIC plan to loot bank accounts

Stephen Lendman
Information Clearing House
Tue, 09 Apr 2013 09:35 UTC
Image
It shouldn't surprise. It's already policy. Market analyst Graham Summers explained. Depositor theft is coming. Europe is banker occupied territory. So is America.

Finance is a new form of warfare. It's more powerful than standing armies. Banking giants run things. Money power has final say.

Economies are strip-mined for profit. Communities are laid waste. Ordinary people are impoverished. Even their bank accounts aren't safe.

Cypriot officials agreed to tax them. Canada, New Zealand, and Euroland member states plan doing the same thing. So does America.

Officially they're called "bail-ins." It's code language for grand theft. Instead of breaking up, nationalizing, or closing down failed banks, depositor funds will keep them operating.

Money printing madness can't go on forever. Regulators, like FDIC, haven't enough money to insure depositors. It's simple mathematical logic.
Read More...