Respected economist John Williams, editor of ShadowStats.com, a popular website that tracks real inflation figures, is advising that people hoard physical gold as well as food items in bulk so that they have some means with which to barter as the economic crisis turns ugly.
“Three or four years into the future I think we could be in a hyperinflation, within the current year you’re going to see much higher inflation than most people are looking at,” Williams told MarketWatch.
Williams said that his definition of hyperinflation would be a situation in which a $100 dollar bill would become more functional as a piece of toilet paper than a store of value.
“This is a time when you want to preserve your wealth and assets because inflation will knock the value out of it,” he added, advising that people buy physical gold and assets other than the U.S. dollar.
In Italy, on 3 August 1990, then-prime minister Giulio Andreotti confirmed the existence of a secret army code-named “Gladio” – the Latin word for “sword” – within the state. His testimony before the Senate subcommittee investigating terrorism in Italy sent shockwaves through the Italian parliament and the public, as speculation arose that the secret army had possibly manipulated Italian politics through acts of terrorism.
Andreotti revealed that the secret Gladio army had been hidden within the Defense Ministry as a subsection of the military secret service, SISMI. General Vito Miceli, a former director of the Italian military secret service, could hardly believe that Andreotti had lifted the secret, and protested:
“I have gone to prison because I did not want to reveal the existence of this super secret organization. And now Andreotti comes along and tells it to parliament!” According to a document compiled by the Italian military secret service in 1959, the secret armies had a two-fold strategic purpose: firstly, to operate as a so-called “stay-behind” group in the case of a Soviet invasion and to carry out a guerrilla war in occupied territories; secondly, to carry out domestic operations in case of “emergency situations”.
The military secret services’ perceptions of what constituted an “emergency” was well defined in Cold War Italy and focused on the increasing strength of the Italian Communist and the Socialist parties, both of which were tasked with weakening NATO “from within”. Felice Casson, an Italian judge who during his investigations into right-wing terrorism had first discovered the secret Gladio army and had forced Andreotti to take a stand, found that the secret army had linked up with right-wing terrorists in order to confront “emergency situations”. The terrorists, supplied by the secret army, carried out bomb attacks in public places, blamed them on the Italian left, and were thereafter protected from prosecution by the military secret service. “You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game,” right-wing terrorist Vincezo Vinciguerra explained the so-called “strategy of tension” to Casson.
“The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the state to ask for greater security. This is the political logic that lies behind all the massacres and the bombings which remain unpunished, because the state cannot convict itself or declare itself responsible for what happened.”
[Click on link below video to read rest of article and to see parts 2 to 5 of video]
Paul Joseph Watson | Prison Planet.com | Monday, February 16, 2009
In an interview with Sir David Frost on Al Jazeera television, veteran investor Jim Rogers pinned the blame for the economic crisis squarely at the feet of the Federal Reserve, and said that the World Bank and the IMF should be abolished, not given more power, if a recovery is to be made.
Rogers strongly slammed Obama’s stimulus package, pointing out that more good money was being thrown after bad, and that the bailouts were only making things worse. The veteran investor said that the U.S. was following the same disastrous policies as Japan in propping up companies that should be allowed to fail, and that the same consequences would be reaped as much as 20 years into the future.
“The way the system is supposed to work, when times like this come, the solid people, the competent people, take over the assets from the incompetent people and then you start over again from a sound base, this is what South Korea did, this is what Russia did, and they did fine. What they’re doing this time is they’re taking the assets away from the competent people and giving them to the incompetent people and saying now you compete with the competent people with their assets and their money – it’s terrible economics and it’s not going to work, it hasn’t worked before and it’s not going to work this time,” said Rogers.
Rogers said that price had to be paid for 15 years of excess, but that the crisis could have been overcome in two or three years had zombie companies and banks been allowed to go to the wall. Continue reading ‘Jim Rogers: Abolish The IMF & World Bank’
Warns that more debt based monetary policy will lead to hyperinflation
Steve Watson | Infowars.net |Tuesday, Feb 10th, 2009
Renowned investor and respected financial commentator Jim Rogers has slammed the latest economic rescue package, declaring that it will not work and will most probably make the situation worse than it already is.
Rogers, the creator of the Rogers International Commodities Index (RICI), told CNBC that the latest so called “stimulus” is more of the same debt based policy that has led the world to the brink of total financial meltdown.
Rogers also pointed out that the offered solution is coming from the very same people who allowed the financial crisis to arise in the first instance.
“It is mind-boggling to me,” Rogers told “Squawk Box Europe.”
“If I were on your show 15 weeks in a row and was wrong, you’d probably never invite me back. These guys have been wrong year after year after year consistently and here they are making the same mistakes again. This is not going to solve the problem, it’s going to make it worse.” Continue reading ‘Rogers: Stimulus Bill will Make the Problem Worse’
“The aftermath of Reagan’s presidency,” Garry Wills wrote in a famous introduction to his 1987 book “Reagan’s America,” “has proved, over and over, that Reaganism without Reagan is unsustainable.” In the two decades since Wills’ book was published, a significant portion of the press and public seems to have forgotten that. William Kleinknecht is on a mission: In “The Man Who Sold the World: Ronald Reagan and the Betrayal of Main Street America,” he is out to demonstrate that Reaganism with Reagan never worked.
Kleinknecht, a veteran crime correspondent for the Newark Star-Ledger and the New York Daily News and an American Society of Professional Journalists award winner, is angry. But unlike many writers who have taken scatter shots at the Reagan legacy, Kleinknecht hasn’t lost his temper—in Henry James’ words, he has found it.
In a fiery and lucid introduction he writes, “This book is born of annoyance: a great bewilderment over the myth that continues to surround the presidency of Ronald Reagan. It gives voice to a vast swath of psychically disenfranchised Americans, millions of them, lumped most thickly in the urban areas on either coast, who never understood Reagan’s appeal.” Kleinknecht’s thesis is nothing less than that Reagan was the “obvious enemy of the common people he claimed to represent, this empty suit who believed in flying saucers and allowed an astrologer to guide his presidential scheduling. …” The great conundrum “is this: none of [the] unmistakable harbingers of American decline is being laid where it belongs—at the door of Ronald Reagan” [emphasis Kleinknecht’s]. Continue reading ‘Allen Barra on the Myth of Ronald Reagan’
Lawrence Summers is the head of Obama’s National Economic Council, and as such oversees much of Obama’s economic policy.
Summers has a reputation in developing countries for being a nasty guy, having said – as chief economist for the World Bank – that third world countries were “underpolluted”.
But more importantly, Summers is the guy responsible for:
Repealing New Deal era legislation which separated investment banks from commercial banks, insurers and stock brokers, and which kept companies from becoming “too big to fail”
In other words, Summers is one of the main guys who got us into this mess. Expecting him to really shake up the financial system is like asking the fox to guard the henhouse.
Following the massive terrorist attacks against New York and Washington, the FBI dedicated 7,000 of its 11,000 Special Agents and thousands of FBI support personnel to the PENTTBOM investigation. “PENTTBOM” is short for Pentagon, Twin Towers Bombing.
Even the former head of the Fire Science Division of the government agency which claims that the World Trade Centers collapsed due to fire, who is one of the world’s leading fire science researchers and safety engineers, a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering (Dr. James Quintiere) doesn’t bevelieve an adequate investigation into 9/11 has been conducted. He has called for anindependent review of the World Trade Center Twin Tower collapse investigation. “I wish that there would be a peer review of this,” he said, referring to the NIST investigation. “I think all the records that NIST has assembled should be archived. I would really like to see someone else take a look at what they’ve done; both structurally and from a fire point of view. … I think the official conclusion that NIST arrived at is questionable.”
New videos of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel fire in Beijing highlight the vivid contrast between the damage it suffered as it was completely consumed by roaring flames, yet remained standing, and the comparative sporadic fires across just 8 floors that led to the complete free fall collapse of WTC 7.
9/11 truth debunkers are in a bind as to how to respond to the Beijing skyscraper fire because of the building’s similarity in size to Building 7 and the gargantuan fire damage it suffered in comparison with the limited “office fires” witnessed in WTC 7. The Mandarin Oriental Hotel is over 500 feet tall, just 100 feet short of the height of WTC 7.
The fires that consumed the Beijing building were on a completely different scale to those witnessed on 9/11, with the flames so violent and widespread that they masked almost the entire view of the building.
The best debunkers have come up with seems to be the false notion that the fires caused a partial collapse by making the building “lean”. This is of course complete baloney because the facade of the building was designed to appear as if it was leaning in the first place, as the image below highlights, with shots before and after the fire.
Are you ready for Lincoln? With the bicentennial of his birth in sight—to say nothing of last Tuesday’s historic inauguration of President Barack Obama, who happened to launch his presidential campaign from Springfield, Ill.—new books about the 16th president, never in short supply, have been coming down the pike: Lincoln as emancipator, as passive pragmatist (the David Herbert Donald view), as melancholic, as homosexual, as husband, as racist, as Jacksonian, as Jeffersonian, as lawyer, as reader and canonical writer (a fine new book by Fred Kaplan), as reconsidered (the recent, excellent volume edited by Eric Foner), as containing multitudes (George Frederickson’s posthumous insight), and as brilliant commander in chief (the latest contribution of James McPherson). And that’s not all: Still coming are books on Lincoln in 1864 and Lincoln and his Cabinet secretaries and Lincoln and his admirals and Lincoln and Darwin (from the elegant pen of Adam Gopnik) and Lincoln and the Todds, as well as “Mary Todd Lincoln,” by Catherine Clinton, and “The Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Legacy,” edited by eminent Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer and published by the Library of America. In addition, a magisterial new biography, “A. Lincoln,” by the eloquent Ronald C. White Jr., will attempt to meld these Lincolns into a whole. Continue reading ‘Brenda Wineapple on Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass’
Counter-terrorism experts presumably have some insight into terrorism, right?
In fact, numerous high-level counter-terrorism experts question the government’s investigation of – and explanation for – 9/11.
For example:
Terrell (Terry) E. Arnold was the number 2 counter-terrorism official at the U.S. State Department, and is one of the world’s leading experts on terror. Arnold served as the Deputy Director, Office of Counter-Terrorism and Emergency Planning, at the U.S. State Department. He is also the former Chairman of the Department of International Studies at the National War College. Arnold is skeptical of the government’s explanation for 9/11
Bogdan Dzakovic was a 14-year counter-terrorism expert in the Security Division of the Federal Aviation Administration. Dzakovic was Team Leader of the FAA’s Red (Terrorism) Team, which conducted undercover tests on airport security through simulated terrorist attacks. Dzakovic said about the 9/11 Commission:
“The best I could say about it is they really botched the job by not really going into the real failures. … At worst, I think the 9/11 Commission Report is treasonous.”
John Loftus, former Federal Prosecutor, Office of Special Investigations, U.S. Department of Justice under Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan; former U.S. Army Intelligence officer, and currently a widely-sought media commentator on terrorism and intelligence services questions the government’s version of 9/11
Col. David Hunt, MA, is an expert in Special Operations, Counter Terrorism and Intelligence Operations. Hunt says that the Able Danger program was real, and that high-level White House officials were briefed about the 9/11 terrorists – including Mohamed Atta – before 9/11
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