FedUpUSA

I love this girl! If 12-year old Victoria Grant can explain how banks that print our nation’s currency and their puppet global banks are the most immoral criminal institutions on our planet responsible for oppression, mass suffering, and misery, shame on anyone else that is too lazy and/or too misanthropic to take the time or effort to watch this six minute video to understand this essential truth that is probably the most important misunderstood truth in the entire world. No humanitarian efforts will ever make a sustainable impact in this world if we first don’t tackle the fact that our modern banking system is criminal and must be destroyed, the truth of which 12-year old Victoria already understands. Trying to implement measures to solve poverty, hunger or war without first correcting the great injustice that we call “modern banking” is akin to never letting your children out of the house as the solution to the presence of an insatiable child rapist that lives in your neighborhood. It is absolutely the wrong approach and one that is destined for failure.

I will always have loads more respect for men like Pablo Escobar, “El Chapo” Guzman and “El Señor de los Cielos” Fuentes than any banking executive like Jamie Dimon, Lloyd Blankfein, Ben Bernanke, Mervyn King, Evelyn Rothschild, David Rockefeller, Vikram Pandit et al. For the feeble-minded that will seek to twist these words into an unintended meaning, no, I do not admire or believe that Escobar, Guzman or Fuentes are or were good people. However, I absolutely hold more respect for criminals that are honest enough to be 100% aboveboard about their criminality so that we never mistake or misunderstand their intent versus criminals that deliberately seek to deceive us so that they can utilize our misinformed and ill-gotten trust to enslave us. Even among criminals, a hierarchy of respect exists, as rapists, serial killers, and child molesters are the least respected of criminals within the penitentiary system and the most likely to receive a brutal beating for their sins while incarcerated.

Lords of brutal drug cartels, when they despise someone, will spit in the face of the person they despise or simply tell that person that he or she will be executed. There is never any doubt about their evil intentions. On the flipside of this coin are the lords of our banking system. Despite being misanthropes, lords of our banking system will smile in our faces, perpetually lie to us about how banking really works, and tell us that they want to help us. However, the second we turn our backs, they will stab us six inches deep in the middle of our backs or deliberately create massive inflation that silently and secretly sentences people to death from starvation. As John Maynard Keynes stated, “By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security but [also] at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth.” Keynes went on to explain, “There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic laws on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one in a million is able to diagnose.” For those that have internalized banker-cartel propaganda and still fail to grasp the unquestionable and indisputable immorality of our current banking system, simply put, bankers are the equivalent of modern day slave owners and we are the slaves. We will never have freedom, but only the illusion of freedom sold to us by politicians and bankers, as long as our current fractional reserve banking system persists. This is an indisputable fact that even Central Bankers have admitted from time to time. Remember that the notorious Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan once stated, “gold and economic freedom are inseparable.”

In conclusion, some may say that the title of this article is slightly misleading because the most important truth in life is love. For those that believe this to be the most important truth, remember that multiplying actions of love and generosity in this world is an exponentially more difficult proposition under our current immoral banking system than under a sound honest one. And for those that don’t believe that we can disable our current banking system, remember that there are nearly 7 billion of us that would benefit enormously from the destruction of our current banking system while there are only a few thousand in the entire world that reap tremendous ill-gotten gains from this morally reprehensible system. Our power is in numbers and it is a power that those of us on the right side of this fence have yet to fully utilize.

Can 7 billion people defeat a few thousand morally bankrupt people? Without hesitation, the answer is yes. Thus, I urge everyone to forward the below video not to anyone you know that fails to grasp the evils of our debt-based monetary system, but to everyone you know that fails to grasp the evils of our debt-based monetary system. Even those that have been brainwashed by the banking cartel into believing that our banking system is not the reason for failing economies worldwide today will likely suspend their skepticism for a New York minute and grant 12-year old Victoria Grant the benefit of the doubt in that her plea to return to sound, interest-free money as the mechanism to restoring freedom in our world has nothing to do with “selling her book”. Furthermore, who can possibly resist listening to an adorable 12-year old child dropping enlightenment in a concise, articulate six minute speech?

Zero Hedge

Flash off the rumor mill, unconfirmed — it appears the Greek banks were just cut off by the ECB.

If this is true then this is the latest “Gun up the nose” game by the Germans and ECB, and is almost-certain, in this political climate, to blow up their face (and quite possibly with shooting involved on the part of the Greeks too.)

This instantly hit the Euro and US stock market, which had been having a reasonably decent day.

If true and confirmed then Greece has been effectively orphaned.  This appears to be a facial attempt to stick a tourniquet on Greece’s neck, as with elections due next month cutting off Greek banks now will basically guarantee they all detonate.

Expect the incipient bank runs to resume en-masse within hours if not minutes.

Time to critical mass is now measured in days if not hours, and if acceleration occurs the weekend is the perfect time for Greek authorities to drop the hammer in the form of a bank holiday and capital controls as they will have no choice irrespective of the critical damage that will result from them doing so.

More as I’m able to learn and/or confirm it.

Update: Just repeated on CNBC – ECB stopping monetary policy operations with “some” Greek banks.  Hmmm…. what’s “some” gents?

But remember folks, Nobody committed any crimes (according to Gary Johnson, Obama and, I suspect, Mitt(ens) Romney.)

Last week, in response to an Overstock.com motion to unseal certain documents, the banks’ lawyers, apparently accidentally, filed an unredacted version of Overstock’s motion as an exhibit in their declaration of opposition to that motion. In doing so, they inadvertently entered into the public record a sort of greatest-hits selection of the very material they’ve been fighting for years to keep sealed.

For the un-initiated in this issue, Overstock went after virtually everyone in the big banking world, particularly Goldman, when their stock was shorted into the dirt.  Their allegation was that the firm (and others) were counterfeiting their shares by selling short shares they never owned and couldn’t locate for a borrow.  In effect they were representing more shares in the market than existed, which is exactly identical to counterfeiting them in terms of economic impact, exactly as if you ran off some extra $100 bills on your office copier.

But what shows up here?  Hubris and utter contempt for the law.

“Fuck the compliance area – procedures, schmecedures,” chirps Peter Melz, former president of Merrill Lynch Professional Clearing Corp. (a.k.a. Merrill Pro), when a subordinate worries about the company failing to comply with the rules governing short sales.

Uh huh.

And against this backdrop we’re supposed to expect that these very same banksters give a damn about the effective counterfeiting of United States currency that takes place when they emit unbacked credit, especially when the latter isn’t considered an offense (but ought to be) while the former is and they thumb their noses at the regulations?

I repeat:

None — absolutely none — of the contenders in our Presidential contest will talk about this.  Yet this issue — the counterfeiting of financial assets, some unlawfully and some “legal”, are how they fleece you, the common man, intentionally disadvantaging you as an individual and enriching themselves.

I will not support and in fact will and do actively oppose and will attempt to insure the defeat of any and all political candidates for a federal office who refuse to address this issue head on and deal with it, irrespective of party affiliation.  I take this position because as a Libertarian I have signed the Libertarian oath which states:

I do not believe in the initiation of force to achieve political or social goals.

That includes fraud, and counterfeiting in all of its forms, whether recognized as felonious or not, is fraud.

Period.

We will not find solutions to our economic mess until we face what has been done and what is being done today, honestly examining the procedures and actions of these individuals and firms, stopping the abuses and holding the malefactors to account.

Medicare is an example of an unsustainable system that will go away in the decade ahead.
Here are the sobering facts about the number of workers and those drawing Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid entitlements in the U.S.While the government claims to have a “trust fund” to pay for Social Security and Medicare, this is illusory propaganda. There are no funds set aside to pay these entitlements–they are “pay as you go” programs funded by current tax revenues.  If the tax revenues don’t cover the programs’ expenses, the Treasury sells bonds, i.e. issues debt to pay the entitlements.

Social Security (SSA) has 61 million beneficiariesas of March 2012.

Medicare has 49 million beneficiariesas of November 2011.

Medicaid has over 50 million beneficiaries; another source puts the current number at 58 million.

Kaiser Family Foundation says roughly 7 million “dual-eligibles” who receive both Medicaid and Medicare, so let’s use the data point of 50 million Medicaid-only recipients.

We can assume that most people drawing Medicare benefits also draw Social Security, while the 8+ million drawing disability from Social Security are also covered by Medicaid.

However you slice it, there are roughly 60 million people drawing Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid and another 50 million Medicaid recipients for a total of 110 million people drawing significant entitlements.

As I have noted here many times, there are only 115 million full-time jobs in the U.S.

That means the ratio of workers to recipients of  significant “pay as you go” entitlements is roughly 1-to-1: 115 million full-time workers and 110 million people drawing Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid.

These programs consume the majority of the Federal budget.  The Federal government spends around $3.7 trillion and collects around $2.6 trillion in taxes, so the basic deficit is $1.1 trillion. Off-balance sheet “supplemental appropriations” mean the real deficit is actually considerably higher.

Social Security costs $817 billion, Medicare and Medicaid costs total about $800 billion  annually, and program outlays rise every year. The Pentagon/National Security budget is around $690 billion.

As I detailed in The Fraud at the Heart of Social Security   (January 17, 2011), the program paid out $707 billion in 2010 and collected $631 billion in taxes, a $76 billion shortfall for 2010. The current program (2012) cost is $817 billion, a leap of $100 billion in a few short years as Baby Boomers flood into the program.

Of the roughly 150 million workers in the U.S., 38 million earn less than $10,000 per year, 50 million earn less that $15,000 a year and 61 million earn less than $20,000 annually. All these numbers are drawn directly from Social Security Administration payroll data.

100 million wage earners, or 2/3 the entire workforce, earn less than $40,000 per year.

Median pay in the U.S. is about $26,360 annually, while the average pay is about $40,000. Since the average American household takes in $63,091 per year, it seems the typical wage is roughly $30,000 a year.

The Medicare tax is 2.9% of wages, 1.45% each for employer and employee.If the typical worker makes $30,000 a year for 35 years, then lifetime earnings are about $1 million. If we take the $40,000/year average, then that rises to around $1.4 million in lifetime earnings. The 2.9% Medicare tax thus totals about $30,000 to $40,000 in lifetime contributions for the average worker.

The average benefits extracted from the system run from $393,000 to $525,000  (due to the benefits extended to non-working spouses, benefits for never-married people may be somewhat lower). Average annual costs per beneficiary run as high as $18,000, though expenses typically rise significantly in the last year of life.

As I have reported here earlier, a friend’s father was in the hospital a few years ago for less than a week for “observation” and a non-invasive gall-stone procedure. Medicare was billed $120,000, or roughly the lifetime contributions of three workers for this modest procedure and a few days in a hospital. My Mom had an office procedure performed on one of her toes and Medicare was billed $12,000.  An office procedure (not in surgery) that took a few minutes absorbed 1/3 of my entire lifetime contributions to Medicare.

What we have is a system where the full-time worker to beneficiary is already 1-to-1 and the system pays out 10 times more per person than it collects in taxes.  The Medicare system would need about 10 workers for every beneficiary to be sustainable. Right now the ratio is just above 2-to-1. That simply is not sustainable.

Tweaking the payouts doesn’t change the basic math: “pay as you go” entitlements are not sustainable when the number of recipients equals the number of full-time workers. Programs that pay out $400,000 per person (many of whom did not work a lifetime) and collect $40,000 per lifetime of full-time work are not sustainable.

Wishing the math were different does not make it different.

For more on this topic, please see:

America’s Hidden 8%  VAT: Sickcare(May 10, 2012)

How We Do Harm: A Doctor Breaks Ranks About Being Sick in America (print)     (Kindle)

Charles Hugh Smith – Of Two Minds