"[Every time you see a big drop in gold, the people smart enough to buy it are the people you want to bet on. In this case, those people are the Chinese.” - Stephen Leeb, Leeb Capital Management, 5/30/13
Dear All,
First, a big shout-out to the folks in Bluffdale, Utah, religious followers of this blog. It's readers like you who make it all worthwhile.
This week's confirmation that the U.S. is now a Stasi-like surveillance state apparently came as a complete shock to mainstream media, which marginalized these precise revelations by NSA whistleblower William Binney several years ago, as it did the unambiguous comments made to CNN by former FBI counterterrorism agent Tim Clemente as recently as May 1st.
"Prism" is "Stellar Wind." From a 3/15/12 Wired Magazine expose:
"According to Binney, one of the deepest secrets of the Stellar Wind program—again, never confirmed until now—was that the NSA gained warrantless access to AT&T’s vast trove of domestic and international billing records, detailed information about who called whom in the US and around the world. As of 2007, AT&T had more than 2.8 trillion records housed in a database at its Florham Park, New Jersey, complex.
Verizon was also part of the program, Binney says, and that greatly expanded the volume of calls subject to the agency’s domestic eavesdropping. “That multiplies the call rate by at least a factor of five,” he says. “So you’re over a billion and a half calls a day.” (Spokespeople for Verizon and AT&T said their companies would not comment on matters of national security.)"
Yet journalists/bloggers holding the view that this massive operation actually existed have until this week, largely been dismissed as conspiracy theorists. Establishment media has worked hand-in-hand with the Obama administration to discredit critics of its national security agenda but this week when a British publication "legitimized" what is in reality an old story, U.S. media jumped in when it was left with no choice. The only substantive investigative journalism taking place today is on alternative internet sites and sadly -- as was seen this week -- in foreign media. Since the founding of this country we have thought of the "press" -- originally print and then broadcast as well -- as the system's "Fourth Estate." It can now be said that the press has been merged or folded back into the machinery of government, a servile appendage to the political class. With heavily embedded corporate interests and conflicts that restrain it from challanging the status quo, newspapers and broadcasters are no longer this country's watchdog. (Mainstream Media failed to break even one of four Obama scandals). That role is now filled by the blogosphere -- the country's new Fourth Estate.
Look for the Administration to seek to intimidate Glenn Greenwald -- the U.K. Guardian's journalist/blogger who reported the Prism story, in the same manner in which it went after Wikileak's Julian Assange. Whoops -- just in: Reuters: Government likely to open criminal probe into NSA leaks And how rich is the following? The source of the Reuters story on the leak investigation were law enforcement and security officials "who were not authorized to speak publicly." In other words -- leakers.
The most off-putting aspect of the Justice Department secret leak probe into Fox News reporter James Rosen's activities is the self-absorbed and high-handed reaction of the press. The scandal has fostered the collective indignation of virtually the entire left/right spectrum of mainstream media, yet when the identical constitutional circumstances presented themselves in the form of Wikileaks the establishment press not only left Julian Assange high and dry, it generally presented the government's position as reasonable. Witness the scant coverage the press is providing one of the most important civil liberties trials in this country's history -- the court martial of Bradley Manning, which commenced this past week.
The Washington press corps is quite provincial in how it views the application of first amendment rights, and until what it considers to be its "special" status was directly threatened, has been disturbingly acquiescent to the Obama administration's obstruction of an array of civil liberties.
This country's most enthusiastic warhound, U.S. Senator John McCain
snuck into Syria recently to meet with the Free Syrian Army, which despite U.S. claims to the contrary is a rebel group essentially commanded by the Al Qaeda linked
Jabhat al-Nusra. The hot-headed senator felt compelled to poke a stick in the rattlesnake pit of that region's guerilla conflict where allegiances among rebel groups is fleeting at best and most often duplicitous. Apart from the entirely misguided notion that fostering regime change in Syria or elsewhere is a means to either improving the lives of the populace or furthering U.S. interests, why is it that certain deranged public officials can freely associate with terrorists in foreign countries while individuals acting privately who are suspected of such activities are subject to indefinite detention at Guantanamo Bay? For the record, the FSA/al-Nusra Front engages in the usual potpourri of community-minded activities such as beheadings, mass executions and is strongly suspected of using chemical weapons.
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patdollard.com
This Youtube clip of Grant Williams, who authors the superb newsletter, "Things That Make You Go Hmmm....." is well worth your time. The 48 minutes you'll spend viewing Grant's 'blackboard' is time far more productively spent than any with the Wall Street Journal or watching CNBC: Grant Williams: Do the Math
I draw your attention to this piece by Mike Krieger on the government's crackdown on an online currency exchange accused of money laundering. When HSBC was recently caught engaging in massive facilitation of narcotics cash flows there were no criminal charges; only civil fines were assessed, nobody went to jail, shareholders were forced to absorb the cost of the fines and the bank continued in business: Some Money Launderers are “More Equal” than Others
"The crackdown on Liberty Reserve has nothing to do with “money laundering. It’s about a cartel of “too big to jail” banks and the fraud financial system they operate eliminating any players that try to encroach on their turf."
A 'state' of disability...Every successive month since 1997, without exception -- the number of Americans receiving disability benefits (as of May, a record 10,978,040) has increased: If 'Disability' were a state it would be 8th Most Populous
Most Americans believe that without insurance, healthcare would be unaffordable. Actually if the health insurance complex disappeared entirely, healthcare costs would crash: Local doctor's solution to healthcare crisis
The trend...
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Gold is the natural enemy of central banks -- a threat to their particular brand of fiat. The employment of extreme measures such as this is like trying to hold back the oceans: Desperate RBI bans gold imports with bank credit
U.S. Mint: Demand for gold and silver bullion coins still at "unprecedented" high levels
All Time Record Gold Transactions Reported By LBMA
Junior Mining Stocks see Record Insider Buying
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