Kushmonster

Kushmonster

Wednesday, March 31, 2010

ARMAGOLDEN

Rumblings of huge run ups in the metals are sounding after the bombshells dropped on CFTC hearings. Rumors have Asian (read China) and Russian traders ready to enact massive raids against the LBMA (London Bullion Market Association) and NIMEX/ COMEX with revelations that these bullion markets "holdings" are leveraged 100:1, meaning that these pirates have just 1oz. of the metals for every 100 oz (on paper) they claim they, far outdistancing even the insane leverage exposure of the the TBTF banksters on Wall Street. Their massive short positions are about to be steamrolled into oblivion by the Sino-Sovietski squeeze play demanding physical delivery of gold and silver which the bullion bullies long ago leased out and consequently have 0. If so then this would be a "short squeeze" of apocolayptic proportions, with the potential not only of bringing down the major investment houses and banks but also the U.S.and UK governments as well. Sound farfetched? Well it does to me too. But this is the kind of buzz emanating from the gold warriors who made an unexpected shambles of the CFTC hearings on gold and silver manipulation. According to them, at the very least, this is going to provide the rocket fuel that will ignite an explosion in the metals markets in both Au and Ag, especially the latter. The extent of this fraud in a market that generates $5.4 Trillion net basis on the LMBA yearly and which is 1.5 times the size of the U.S. economy, not to speak of the various derivative contracts piggy backed on top of it all, is such that it has become a serious national security issue when compounded with and by the other ongoing catastrophic implications of the crack up of U.S./UK bond, housing, and derivatives markets. If the Asian/Russo play comes down, there will be a frantic attempt to cover shorts by buying back the gold the bullion bullies have scattered to the four winds to fund their paper palace house of cards with the inevitable nuking of the bullion market. This is nothing less than the greatest fraud in economic history the unravelling of which might well blow up not only the LBMA/Comex exchanges but might signal the red alert presaging the final collapse of the Anglo-European sovereigns already teetering on the brink.(April Fools Gold! courtesy of GATA)

A more moderate, sober, limited and realistic assessment of the prospects for the precious metals might be realized after the now infamous non-farm payroll report scheduled to be issued this Friday April 2nd. This is also Good Friday and the markets will be closed for the three day holiday weekend.(LBMA is also closed on Monday) Thus we might have to wait until Tuesday for the results. The first part of the preprogrammed smackdown is already in place though with a sharp run-up in the precious metals which usually precedes the sell off by JPMChase and HSBC et al. on the release of the government report. This is effected to exert maximum damage not only to the gold and silver markets but also to effectively front run and inflict just punishment on the clueless options traders. We must thank Mr. Andrew McGuire for pointing out the schematic timetable on this fraudulent activity. Now you too can trade like the big boys for maximum profits at 0 risk. If you can't beat 'em join 'em. Good luck and Happy Easter!

Sunday, March 28, 2010

SAY IT AIN'T SO, JONES


What's coming?

I had the disconcerting experience the other day of spending some time on the Georgia Guidestones website, www.the GeorgiaGuidestones.com . There was a long essay there, Blueprint for a Prison Planet published and copyrighted by Nick Sandberg in February of 2001. This particular piece along with others such as The New Order of the Barbarians, a "recollection" by Dr. Lawrence Dunegan of a lecture by one Dr. Richard Day given May 20,1969 could have literally provided the template (in so much that it faithfully reflected it) of Jones' well rehearsed and admittedly convincing weltanschuuang which is on full display in recent videos of his projected appearance on a soon to be broadcast CNN Anderson Cooper program. The very title of Sandberg's essay indicates the close and perhaps not so coincidental affinity with Jones' Prison Planet and InfoWars media empire. This is all the more surprising considering the obvious and general antipathy which Jones has expressed for the Guidestones and the New World Order governance which they have so come to represent. Though I am still at pains to understand the nature of this seemingly incongruous connection, to say the least, it raised some very unsettling questions which indicated that:
A. I must be missing out on something either due to some basic misperception, intellectual lapse or really naive misunderstanding or
B. Jones really is some kind of mouthpiece for the very NWO agenda he is seemingly so intent on exposing, acting in the capacity of the agent or mechanism for broadcasting "their" intents as they are obligated to do by their peculiar "ethic" which requires them to "warn" their intended victims, thus:
1. Absolving themselves (in their own distorted perceptions at least) of any moral culpability inherent in their intended nefarious agendas and
2. Convicting, a priori, the masses they are attempting to delude, subjugate, and enslave, of their own basic ignorance, apathy and moral indifference and pathetic inability to act in their own behalf which by the very laws of nature justifiably consign them to the inevitable extinction which they so deserve. (actually, Jones himself repeatedly levels the same accusation, harping on the theme continually in his daily broadcasts)

The Guidestones themselves give voice to this agenda. Lindsey Williams also testifies to it. I think that it at least bears some investigation. If this seemingly improbable and even preposterous assumption is the least bit credible then it follows that Jones recent and unprecedented appearances on the MSM (Fox News,Geraldo and CNN) may signal that he has reached the limits of his usefulness as well as of his expanding profile and is being set up for a takedown. (see also "You Don't Know What It Is, Do You Mr. Jones? on Kushmonster 11/5/09)

March 30
The recent FBI raids on the so-called Hutaree militia in Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana occurring only days after Jones taped the CNN interview evidently suggested to the ever conspiratorially minded head Info-warrior himself that this might well be the case. Jones spent the better part of his March 30 broadcast in some concerted efforts at evasive action, airing a portion of an interview he had taped last year with one of the Hutaree suspects now in custody, one Kristopher Sickles a.k.a."Pale Horse" of Sanduskey Ohio. (below, second from bottom left) Sickles had attained some fleeting fame due to a youtube posting some months ago in which, among many other things, masked and voice modulated,he called for a fully armed million strong militia march on Washington D.C. Jones has taken great pains to point out that he had exposed Sickles as a government provocateur in the aforementioned interview. Was Jones, as he himself seems to suggest, sucked into a classic "honey pot" operation designed to discredit him by his tacit association with Hutaree? During the broadcast he made a lengthy on air phone call to a unidentified CNN producer to ostensibly prove he had actually been interviewed (?) subsequently nervously querying the producer about the status of his interview and whether he was going to be lumped together with "the Michigan hillbillies".

Hutaree mug shots

The murky situation was muddied still further when some new hillbillies entered into the equation via Fox News and the InfoWars comment line. Apparently (and you can't use that word overmuch in this context) some first class nut job posted on the InfoWars comment line some scarcely intelligible gibberish detailing threats against government agents potentially approaching his residence. (If you've ever has the misfortune to scroll through these posts, this one in scarcely exceptional, and indeed typifies the abysmal mental capacities of the mob of deviants and illiterates who regularly swarm the pages there.) At any rate Fox News, either through trolling through the garbage on this thread or by dint of planted inside information, "alerted the authorities".

"ACA" was subsequently detained, shotgun duly confiscated and taken to the Naval armory at Millington TN... Naval armory? Yes the person in question was the husband of a "military servicewoman" living on a Tennessee naval base. The shotgun was subsequently returned with no charges being filed even though "ACA" on a previous post had threatened to kill police and other law enforcement personnel, had praised the actions of Cessna kamikazi dive bomber Joe Stack, and threatened TSA personnel including his next door neighbor. The alleged source of his discontent was one of Jones' patented inflammatory rants entitled "The Cost of Defying Obamacare, $2,250 a month and IRS Goons Pointing Guns at Your Family".

In the ensuing apologia drawn up by Paul Joseph Watson, Jones was referred to as "denouncing violence and urges people to follow the non-violent principles of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King", quite a strange claim for an individual who waved what looked like a .357 Magnum on air in response to Michael Reagan's violent threats against Mark Dice and 9/11 Truth advocates.

That Jones thrives on and profits from such inglorious and sordid imbroglios is well known. His InfoWar and Prison Planet commercial mill, lauded by some as the undisputed media flagship of liberty and truth is, with no little justification, regarded by others as the amalgamation of a disturbing array of half truths, outright distortions, and obviously staged provocations all invested with Jones' own megalomanic penchant for self-glorification as some sort of counter-cultural demi-god.

Of course no one with such exposure is going to openly advocate violence. Yet inflammatory, derisive, and confrontational rhetoric goes a long way towards the tacit acceptance of violence as means of resolving the irreconcilable and polarizing battle lines which Jones and so many of his contemporaries are dredging into ever deepening trenches of divisiveness and discord. This is the methodology and modus operandi of the provocation, which both Jones and his declared enemies are past masters. It is little wonder then that some suppose Jones to share common cause with the forces of darkness he so adamantly professes to oppose.

Thursday, March 25, 2010

A MOST INSTRUCTIVE LESSON IN THE MANIPULATION OF GOLD COURTESY OF THE HOUSE OF MORGAN


ADDITIONAL STATEMENT BY BILL MURPHY, CHAIRMAN OF THE GOLD ANTI-TRUST ACTION COMMITTEE

HEARINGS ON THE METALS MARKETS, MARCH 25, 2010

On March 23, 2010 GATA Director Adrian Douglas was contacted by a whistleblower by the name of Andrew Maguire. Mr. Maguire, formerly of Goldman Sachs, is a metals trader in London. He has been told first hand by traders working for JPMorganChase that JPMorganChase manipulates the precious metals markets and they bragged how they make money doing so.

In November 2009 he contacted the CFTC enforcement division to report this criminal activity. He described in detail the way in which JPM signals to the market its intention to take down the precious metals<. Traders recognize these signals and make money shorting the metals along side JPM. He explained how there are routine market manipulations at the time of option expiry, Non-farm payroll data releases, and Comex contract rollover as well as other ad hoc events. On February 3 he gave two days advance warning by email to Mr Eliud Ramirez, a senior investigator of the Enforcement Division, that the precious metals would be attacked upon the release of the non-farm payroll data on February 5. (chart above) Then on February 5 as it played out exactly as predicted further emails were sent to Mr. Ramirez in real time while the manipulation was in progress. It would not be possible to predict such a market move in advance unless the market was manipulated.
In an email on that day Mr. Maguire said "It is 'common knowledge' here in London amongst the metals traders it is JPM's intent to flush out and cover as many shorts as possible prior to any discussion in March about position limits. I feel sorry for all those not in this loop. A serious amount of money was made and lost today and in my opinion as a result of the CFTC allowing by your own definition an illegal concentrated and manipulative position to continue"

Expiry of the COMEX APRIL call options is today. There was large open interest in strikes from $1100 to $1150 in gold. As always happens month after month HSBC and JPM sell short in large quantities to overwhelm all bids and make unsuspecting option holders lose their money. As predicted in advance by GATA the manipulation started on March 19th when gold was trading at $1126. By last night it traded at $1085.(chart above)

AND LETS NOT FORGET CHANCELLOR OF THE EX CHEQUER, THE HONORABLE GORDON BROWN BACK IN 1999:

"In front of 3 witnesses, Bank of England Governor Eddie George spoke to Nicholas J. Morrell (CEO of Lonmin Plc) after the Washington Agreement gold price explosion in Sept/Oct 1999. Mr. George said "We looked into the abyss if the gold price rose further. A further rise would have taken down one or several trading houses, which might have taken down all the rest in their wake. "Therefore at any price, at any cost, the central banks had to quell the gold price, manage it. It was very difficult to get the gold price under control but we have now succeeded. The US Fed was very active in getting the gold price down. So was the U.K."(relevant charts above)

all of this delightful information courtesy of Jesse's Café Américain and Zero Hedge. Don't they do great work! (applause!)

Friday, March 19, 2010

CFTC, GATA FIDDLE WHILE THE WORLD BURNS (or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Hoard Gold)

In an article posted March 18 2010 on SilverSeek.com "Its the Message, Not The Messenger", high profile silver maven Ted Butler expresses his profound regrets for his expected non-appearance at the much heralded CFTC hearings on gold and silver position limits on March 25. Apparently Butler, who has tirelessly advocated his crusade against the manipulation of the precious metals markets for the better part of three decades has been hamstrung by allegations of financial impropriety for his 1984 involvement "in an incident involving orange juice futures" during his tenure as broker at Drexel Burnham Lambert. The CFTC has advised Butler that his appearance during the hearings would only distract from the historic proceedings with the inevitable surfacing of his past shady dealings which he admits have not been resolved. There has been a loud brouhaha over these hearings which have for some unknown reason raised the hopes of Butler and, among many others, the equally tireless though much less heralded metals chronicler Harvey Organ, concerning the"issue of establishing legitimate speculative position limits in silver along with the enforcement of bona fide hedge exemptions to those limits". Butler and other critics have pointed to the vast short positions in silver at JP Morgan Chase, HSBC, and other banks as overt attempts to suppress the price of silver.

The massive short silver position at Chase is the most instructive case history in the systemic fraud which has permeated the precious metals markets. Chase "inherited" its some 200 million ounces of silver short positioning from the now defunct Bear Stearns which it acquired in the questionable dealings following the collapse of Lehman in September 2008. Previous to that, AIG, the economic black hole that was once the largest insurance company in the cosmos, held the COMEX silver short positions along with similar shorts in gold, which it was required to cede to Bear Stearns by the Sheriff of Wall Street, Elliot Spitzer. Until its demise BS continued the salutary task of "manipulation and fleecing of the technical funds and other speculative traders" according to Butler. The acquisition of Bear Stearns by Chase resulted a massive takedown of silver from over $20/oz. to just under $9 in a matter of days, indicative of the deluge of paper silver selling that flooded the market in the engineered collapse, something not seen since the days of the Hunt brothers attempt to corner the market in 1980. This kind of naked short selling was an object lesson in the illegal manipulations employed to bail out the endemically insolvent banking system in both the U.S. and UK.

The disconnect between the exchange futures contract and the actual bullion price paid for transactions plays an essential role in this scam and will undoubtedly be one of the issues which will be addressed in the CFTC meeting. The so-called "Volcker Rule", which has been bandied about in the media overmuch these days, addresses at least in theory, the excessive leverage and amounts of risk inherent in the shady and fraudulent accounting practices which have allowed banks and other financial institutions to misrepresent their balance sheets to inflate speculative debt and asset bubbles, all the while reaping windfall profits. In this respect the supposed banking reform bill proposed by the sumptuously corrupt Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut to limit proprietary trading is little more than window dressing much in the same vein as the staged CFTC meetings on position limits.

The same type of chicanery in the precious metals markets ultimately results in the absurdity of the physical commodity having little if any role at all in the paper contract settlement. In other words the massive short positions in silver (and gold), though legally required to be backed by at least a significant percentage of the actual physical commodity held in reserve, are increasingly "short" and lacking the physical metal to fulfill contracts demanding delivery. This questionable situation has resulted in an unprecedented backwardation of the silver price noted by Antal Ferkete in December 2008 as well as threats of legal action brought to bear against the LBMA by investors demanding delivery. Earlier this year the LBMA was offering cash settlement at 25% premium in place of gold bullion delivery indicating the critical absence of the same in the exchange vaults.

The short positions now held by Chase came with interesting baggage which surfaced last year when the Chinese threatened to walk away from their derivative obligations contracted with the large U.S. investment banks. Apparently the silver positions were accompanied by equally massive offsetting OTC derivatives contracts possessed by Chinese state owned investment funds which provided AIG with the backing to carry on its shenanigans of selling of its short silver paper contracts on the Comex. With these derivative contracts passing through Bear Stearns, JPMC became the world's largest counterparty with an extraordinary derivative exposure whose notional value has been estimated at $80 to $90 trillion as opposed to $1.66 trillion in assets or roughly six times the GDP of the U.S. economy and outstripping the world economy itself by $21 billion. Butler has even gone so far as to suggest that these Chinese OTC derivative positions pose a threat to national security.

image001.png

Shortly after the takeover of Bear Stearns by JPM Chase, Butler came out with a very provocative article based on his conjecture that the takeover was a government sponsored bailout of the the largest silver short position on the Comex ostensibly to avert the supposed possibility of an imminent and severe national economic destabilization.(shades of Paulson's threats about Lehman) The newly acquired short position by JPMC amounted to a massive 33,805 contracts, more than 169 million ounces, equal to 25% of the world mine production,causing a 50% plunge in the price of silver "in spite of a widespread shortage of retail forms of investment silver".

Such a massive concentration of any commodity is unmistakable evidence of overt manipulation which, in addition Butler claims, was undertaken with the active collusion of the CFTC. He insists that the short squeeze which would have inevitably occurred if market forces had been allowed cover "would have driven silver prices to the $50 or $100 level" exposing the systemic manipulation of the precious metals markets which in this particular instance netted Morgan tens of billions of dollars in profits as they gobbled up shorts on the engineered fall in silver prices due to the combined agency of their COMEX and OTC derivative short positions.

It is scarcely surprising then that the CFTC would sanction and effectively silence Butler's testimony with such transparent blackmail as he alludes to above. The whole sordid story reveals the stranglehold the large commercials hold on the precious metals markets and bodes not well for the much ballyhooed March 25 CFTC hearings on gold and silver position limits under the chairmanship of yet another governement Goldman retread, Gary Gensler. Though the "historic nature" of such proceedings have raised much hope among the gold and silver writers, I think we can be assured that the eventual outcome will be little more than the usual tiresome whitewash, which we have come to expect from any government inquiry.

The singular and unprecedented positions of JPM Chase and HSBC in silver are exclusive to that commodity alone and symptomatic of the control exerted by the bullion banks and commercial interests in regard to the precious metals in general. In addition to reaping huge windfalls from their exclusive positions as they manipulate the price downwards, collecting on their massive shorts in the process, they build large positions on the way up for another round of profit taking on the tops. This apparently failsafe method of illegal insider trading has gone on for decades with the CFTC turning a blind eye to the con game and in all likelihood in on the take themselves. The following chart gives a graphic indication of the effect of massive short selling on the price of silver.


Meanwhile the Gold and Silver writers themselves expectantly await their deliverance from the wasteland of investment marginalization to which they have been consigned and from where we hear the wailing of their voices in unison proclaiming that their vindication is near at hand with new and equally vain prophetic utterances concerning "moon shots" and "parabolic blow offs" which never quite seem to materialize. Other than providing a constant supply of fodder for the banksters in the way of a constant stream of credulous speculators who buy into the effervescent enthusiasms which accompany each pump in the market and then subsequently are flushed out of their holdings with the inevitable elevator ride down, the "writers", as Stewart Thomson derisively refers to them, as they await the signal "event" which will translate them into the promised land of unlimited returns on gold and silver, are a generally forlorn and ineffectual lot mooning after a perpetually retreating expectation.

Even the old hands cannot escape this unfortunate assignation to some extent. One has to only think of the great Goldmaster Jim Sinclair and his dire predictions for the impending collapse of the US$ to be accomplished with finality on a mysterious red letter day last November and the subsequent moon shot for Gold to $1224 and to the nether regions beyond. Well at least his sibylline augury proved half right, before Gold crashed hard and the dollar started its surprising recrudescence. Then there was his prognostication that, with the anticipated volatility in the markets, Gold would be rising by $100/$200 a day...a day! This in a market which has seen on the average, at best, a 1% to 2% daily gain due to the inevitable price capping by the bullion banks. Though his predictions were more modest, Jim Willie fared little better when he called for $25 silver by the end of last year. Oh well...meanwhile Gold has inched upwards at its usual tortoise-like pace, oblivious to all the furious clamoring attending its inevitable glacial ascent.

As the CFTC trots out Commissioner Brad Chilton to run interference for its March 25 meeting, he faces a motley assemblage of investors, activists, "writers", and other assorted gold bugs, all intent on exposing the decades long conspiratorial underpinnings of the bullion bullies. GATA's day in the sun however is bound to be a short one, as Chilton mincingly suggests that although he is in profound sympathy with their long standing opposition to the lack of position limits in the precious metals commodity trade, he is convinced that the other commissioners, including apparently, former Goldman Sachs honcho Gensler, do not share his support. Surprise, surprise. The hope that stirred among the gold bugs was occasioned by CFTC action last year regarding similar heavily weighted positions in the energy commodities sector.

While the assembled knights errant of precious metals tilt at the CFTC windmills and congratulate themselves on this meeting as a significant milestone in their long struggle to secure their rights, some other less publicized and yet relevant issues of a more pragmatic nature might be admitted which pose the distinct possibility of a much less sanguine outcome to their noble and yet quixotic quest. These involve the same powerful agencies of international high finance at their avowed nemesis JP Morgan Chase who, under the aegis of Alan Greenspan, created the financial instruments today known as Over the Counter(OTC) derivatives way back in the Clinton regime. What was briefly alluded to above concerning the Chinese involvement in OTC derivatives contracts offsetting the massive JPMC silver short positions provides only an indication of the potential for the slow motion economic holocaust which is presently unfolding in the global economy.

On the global casino gaming tables otherwise known as the international financial markets, stock exchanges, and currency exchanges, the money masters are now calling in all their OTCD bets. The greatest crap shoot in history is now over, the house lights have gone up and the losers have been gamed. Just as there are two sides to every trade, the same is true with these bets; the bankers have won on their OTCD bets and the losers who made the mistake of betting against the house are just about everybody else.

"The Banksters have turned the G-men into their collection agents for a giant protection racket. One designed to make them Quadrillionaires... The mechanism of the collection is the devaluing of paper money that is a defacto repo of nonpaper assets. The coming global paper currency devaluations against gold, what those are is the MECHANISM for the banksters to collect hundreds of trillions of dollars they WON in OTCD bets against the fundsters, cities, states, nations and really against joe blow price chaser as well...The Golden Rule is that he who has the most gold rules. The banksters have the most gold and so they rule. And their rule is to collect the trillions that they are owed... the banksters are going to fade you away and suck the blood out of you one drop at a time, you're somebody with financial cancer that is incurable. It will be a decades long death of horrors..." Stewart Thomson

So as the usual melodrama and playacting goes on in Washington with its equally predictable sonorous reverberations in the echo chamber of the mainstream media outlets, the script has already been written and well rehearsed with the appointed dramatis personae departing not one jot or tittle from their prescribed roles. All the fustian and nonsensical posturing about open markets and "position limits" is but so much froth on the lips. The corrupt martinets on the dais of government agency smile condescendingly at these earnest and credulous citizen- petitioners as they flail and gesture in a great display of the futile and impotent assertions of the rights incumbent upon their status as "free men". As Goethe once averred "There is no one more enslaved than he who falsely believes he is free". Well, I suppose it's to their credit that they are aware of the gross indignities of being circumscribed in their acquisitions by the detestable CFTC bureaucrats and their cohorts at Morgan Chase. It must be some consolation to realize that they have at least been granted the great and rare privilege of being acknowledged by the castle gatekeepers.


Sunday, March 14, 2010

ATHENIAN POLICE METE OUT JUSTICE TO INSURRECTIONISTS

greece15.jpg

It has been suggested by several commentators that the chaos erupting in Greece be compared to the legendary tale of the Sword of Damocles. Actually it was the sword of Dionysius II of Syracuse, who on a drunken whim suggested that one of his indolent parasitic courtiers ensconce himself on the royal throne to get a first hand taste of what it was like to rule his domain. In the midst of the usual court revels, Damocles happened to glance up and noticed the sharpened sword perilously suspended above his head by a slender filament of hair which must have caused him to hastily evacuate his recently assumed position.

Dionysius II of Syracuse was, along with so many other tyrants of whom he is emblematic, "incompetent in governing men" and known for his "lavishly dissolute lifestyle", both of which issues have timely relevance. Though not one to split hairs, I would suggest the precariously suspended sword has already departed from its tenuous moorings and is plummeting to its appointed target. Though Germany will hesitate to deflect its path, the IMF might be the ultimate backstop. The structural adjustments and "austerity measures" being inflicted on the Greek populace and productive of the patented Stiglitz "IMF riot" are already the handwriting on the wall bearing the oft repeated and indelible signature of that plenipotentiary agency. Greece will scarcely be dispatched with one fell stroke however. And that's where our simile ends. It is more likely to be a death of a thousand cuts.


Wednesday, March 10, 2010

IMF GHOUL CRASHES NAIROBI STREET PARTY (where two elephants fight, the grass suffers)




Most probably the distinguished Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, did not have the opportunity nor the inclination to meet with any of the ordinary denizens of the streets of Nairobi, Kenya, some of whom are on full display plying their unusual and desperate trade in the above video. "Le grande seducteur", as Strauss-Con(!) had been dubbed by the Parisian tabloids endlessly titillated by his numerous sexploits, was busy with consultations on behalf of the IMF with the "Two Elephant"power sharing coalition of president Mwai Kibaki and his former arch-rival and present premier Raila Odinga. Louse- Con(!) was kicking off his third visit to the Mother Continent in just four months. The Two Elephants had engaged in a mutually vitriolic and contentious rivalry in the disputed December 27, 2007 presidential election , followed by an unprecedented outbreak of "tribal violence" which left thousands dead, 350,000 displaced refugees and a national catastrophe of once unimagined proportions in a country which had long held a reputation as an"oasis of peace in a troubled region".

"The prize at stake was the presidency. As in many other African countries, the ultimate prize comes with unimaginable powers to misappropriate national economic resources, reward political cronies and frustrate rivals into submission. Sadly, neither of the two elephants has had the courage to make the ultimate sacrifice for his own political ambitions. Instead innocent Kenyans have paid the price. With vitriolic rhetoric, the assorted cast of Kenyan politicians goaded masses of supporters into battle, while they, ensconced in their villas, looked on, only occasionally venturing out in heavily protected convoys of SUVs"
Agbonkhianmeghe E. Orobator

Kenya, like the rest of the African continent can expect little but more of the same. According to former World Bank president and Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, "under the guiding hand of IMF structural assistance, Africa's income dropped by 23%." Far from being the international economic missionary organization which it pretends to be, the IMF resembles more of a vast mobilization of international piracy devoted to the subjection, domination and economic enslavement of entire sovereign nations. This is accomplished by a complex series of bribes payoffs and kickbacks, the manipulation of currency and above all, the number one tool of banksters world wide, interest bearing loans and collateralized debt obligations involving real estate, land, national utilities and resources etc. As investigative journalist Greg Palast reports, "The IMF is really its own secret government"

That the African continent with its vast untapped resources and potential immense pool of cheap labor would attract the malign interests and intentions of the IMF/World Band and WTO is scarcely surprising. Palast's work "IMF's Four Steps to Damnation" is a concise, brief and informative primer on the devious machinations of the supra-national agency. Based on interviews with Stigligz and top secret, "confidential and restricted" memoranda obtained from IMF sources, Palast exposes the IMF playbook and its clandestine game plan for global economic domination. Let's cut right to the chase with the following quote from Palast's excellent chronicle of the skullduggery and and malignant treachery practiced by plutocrats who inhabit the thrones of world power, "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy". Speaking about the violent 1999 protests which scuttled the WTO shenanigans in Seattle, Palast writes the following:

"The spiky-haired protesters in the streets of Seattle believe there’s some kind of grand conspiracy between the corporate powers, the IMF, the World Bank and an alphabet soup of agencies which work to suck the blood of Bolivians and steal the gold from Tanzania. But the tree-huggers are wrong; the details are far more stomach-churning than they imagine. In March 2001, when Ecuador’s government raised the price of domestic gas and hungry Indians burned the capital, I was reading the World Bank’s confidential plan issued months before. The bank, with the IMF, had directed this 60 per cent increase in the price of domestic fuel, predicting coldly this could set the nation alight. It’s as if the riots were scheduled right into the plan. And they were, at least according to one of the only inside sources I can name, Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist of the World Bank. “We called them the IMF riots.” The riots were programmed as well as the response, what the document called “resolve”—the police, the tanks, the crackdown."


As to the four steps to IMF damnation


Step One is Privatization. In marginalized and impoverished third world countries such as the African continent, the international mobsters employ the time honored methods of any reputable organized criminal organization; extortion, bribery, payoffs and kickbacks to secure the allegiance and loyalty of the political leadership, which in many cases the IMF has helped to install. The result is a massive sell off of public assets and utilities at fire sale prices and lucrative commissions for the corrupt brokers. This kind of gangsterism pales in comparison with the wholesale looting of the Russian economy in the late 90's after the fall of the Soviet Union. Presided over by Stiglitz himself with the able assistance of present Office of Management and Budget head Peter Orszag who was acting as Russian Finance Minister under the aegis of economic hit man vice president Al Gore, Russian industrial, mineral and oil concessions were appropriated by U.S./IMF backed oligarchs who subsequently engaged in an orgy of asset stripping resulting in the crippling of national output by 50%.


Step Two is Market Liberalization. With any vestiges of protectionism via trade barriers and tariffs effectively removed the market predators go to work on the public assets. Hot money inflows lead to rampant "speculation in real estate and currency". As speculative investment at low rates of interest builds so do prices, as the impoverished majority is marginalized even further. Then the rug is pulled out from under the unwary parties to the scam, the bubble bursts, and capital flees the country with the resultant social unrest and societal breakdown. Interest rates grow astronomically as property values deflate, industrial and infrastructure development cease and " the national treasury is drained."To this is added the infamous and destructive IMF quota, where each country is required by the economic predators to deposit large amounts of "aid money" into the IMF coffers itself at pitiable low rates of interest while the further borrowing of US$ at much higher rates of interest are necessitated for IMF sponsored infrastructure and development projects.


Step Three is Market Based Pricing which in simple terms represents the elimination of food and fuel subsidies necessitated by the IMF predatory lending policies themselves as the majority of impoverished denizens are pushed further and further below the poverty line. Prices on basic necessities rise.This is, of course, productive of the Stiglitz "IMF riot" mentioned above. The innocuous sounding "Interim Country Assistance Policy" is the document that Palast refers to when he suggests that IMF policy is actually designed to bring about the the expected and resultant social chaos. Palast suggests that this is nothing short of "economic arson", which allows the process of the vicious circle to proceed to the next step- the final appropriation of what little assets remain at prices which are just a step above outright expropriation.


Step Four is Free Trade. This represents the new frontier of so called "free market capitalism"of the likes of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics. It is also the province of the WTO and World Bank, the sister organizations of the IMF, and the regulatory and fiscal agents of the IMF depredations. Now that the major means of production and public utilities are firmly in IMF hands, the newly established economic institutional parameters represented by the WTO and WB insure the consistent flow of national wealth into the coffers of the western central banks and the US Treasury and IMF. Obama's recent bequest of $100 billion to the IMF is representative of the symbiotic relationship between the two agencies. That these four steps are in the process of being rapidly enacted in the United States itself are symptomatic of the tightening grip which the international cabal has slowly established over the domestic economic policies of the once great nation.


Obama's Coming out Party

A strange and unexpected party to the Kenyan election conflagration was the relatively unknown junior U.S. Senator from the state of Illinois, one Barack Hussein Obama. In his third trip to the continent in 2006, Obama was on a critical mission to Kenya, might we guess, at the behest of the same plenipotentiaries who were grooming him for the U.S. presidency and whom Strauss-Kahn might serve in in a very special capacity as well. Though ostensibly on some transparent AIDS awareness mission, his appearance just before the critical and hotly contested election in the country of his supposed origins and in obvious support of the Odinga, testified to his real agenda. Kibaki himself was outraged, accusing the senator of meddling in Kenyan politics while Obama made daily appearances with Odinga, deploring the corruption of the Kibaki government.
obamaodinga
Odinga himself, educated in East Germany and apparently somewhat of an avowed marxist, openly cultivated the minority Muslim constituency in the overwhelmingly Christian Kenya. A Luo tribesman like Obama's putative father(see Obama, Neptune and the Culture of Death on Kushmonster September 13, 2009), he has been accused of making common cause with "radical Muslims seeking to expand Islam in Kenya". The National Muslim Leaders Forum came out in full support of Odinga, who promised "to rewrite the Constitution of Kenya to recognize Shari'a as the only true law sanctioned by the Holy Quran..." These and similar extreme measures served to exacerbate religious tensions in addition to the already inflamed tribal divides which broke out into open warfare after the election results declared the Kikuyu tribesman Kibaki the winner. Odinga ,assured the inevitability of the ensuing carnage when he refused to accept the election results.

Though Obama subsequently posed as a disinterested broker of the disputed Kenyan elections in his own presidential primary campaign, his ongoing support of Odinga was quite obvious and in a large way responsible for the inclusion of the latter in the provisional coalition government along with the efforts of the secretary general of the United Nations, Kofi Annan. This characteristic subversion of a national electoral process by the exploitation of ethnic, class, tribal and religious tensions, and the subsequent "resolution" at the behest of these same agents of provocation is the "divide and conquer" stratagem so effectively deployed in the Balkans during the breakup and civil war in the former Yugoslavia, in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Pakistan, and in the republics of the former Soviet Union in the various color code"peoples revolutions". The most attempt to destabilize the Iranian government in another "disputed election" and yet another color code people power "revolution" succeeded only in a retrenchment of the reactionary regime in that country. It is interesting to note that Odinga's Orange Democratic Movement evoked Yushchenko's Orange Revolution in the Ukraine in 2004.

Obama's foray into Kenyan politics could be regarded as the coming out party for the remarkably divisive and polarizing impact with which his handlers have intended to effect the radical and necessary socio-economic changes attendant upon the engineered collapse of the American economy, while strengthening and further amalgamating the incestuous union of the financial and governmental institutional power which has been slowly coalescing over the past decades. It was no accident that the future president in 1983 had worked at Business Corporation International (BIC) after a CIA sponsored trip to Pakistan in 1981 in the possible capacity as an NOC (Non Official Cover) in the initial stages of the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. According to Wayne Madsen, Obama's association with the longstanding CIA front organization involved, at the least, providing financial intelligence to the CIA. This type of pedigree might be understood in light of Obama's other decided gifts for duplicity as a preeminent qualification for his assignment as economic hit man for the post-industrial economy.


IMF Hegemony

Strauss-Kahn's recent foray into Africa was his third trip in only four months, testifying to the increasingly avid interest which the IMF is displaying towards certain nations on the continent. Kenya, Zambia, and South Africa were the particular focus on this excursion, with the usual IMF platitudes being liberally dispensed concerning its avowed and magnanimous interest in the economic and social welfare of the continent as a whole. At the end of his Kenyan mission, Strauss-Kahn in a very pithy and revealing statement disclosed that "You need us and the global economy needs you. We are trying to build something new here in Kenya, which will help you help us. Notice the interesting juxtaposition; not which will help us help you, as one might expect, but instead which will help you help us.

Just what the nature of what the IMF and its interchangeable partners in the WTO, World Bank, and WHO, are trying to "build" in Kenya and throughout the African continent can perhaps best be understood by the actions undertaken by the megalithic economic entity since its inception in 1944 as an outgrowth of the Bretton-Woods agreement, itself a creation of the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference chaired by Harry Dexter White of the U.S. Treasury and English economist John Maynard Keynes. In an exceedingly gross understatement of the purposes of this cabal of elite economic theoreticians, Keynes stated with the same kind of contumacious arrogance as evinced by Strauss-Khan, "I doubt if the world understands the bigger things we are bringing to birth".

The substance of the bigger things being brought to birth are open to interpretation. The IMF, of course, depicts itself as an essential and even indispensable agent for the maintenance and development of a thriving world economy. Its mandate according to the IMF website was to ostensibly reinvigorate world trade which had collapsed during the Great Depression years due to protectionism and national barriers to foreign trade creating a competitive devaluation of national currencies in an effort to create larger export markets. As with so many of the fund's policies, such a simplistic assumption was more likely an effort to justify a prearranged agenda which had other and distinctly less altruistic aims.

The wholesale destruction visited upon Europe, Russia, and Japan during the Second World War cleared the world stage for the implementation of a world order designed to finally eliminate the antiquated and outmoded nation/state in favor of a universal world governmental body of which the United Nations itself was but the prototype. In similar manner the League of Nations had emerged from the rubble of the Great War along with the first inchoate steps towards the establishment of an Jewish homeland in Palestine with the Sykes-Picot agreement prefiguring the establishment of the State of Israel at the end of WW II. With the utter subjugation of the power of an aspiring colonial Imperial Germany, the way was paved for the next stage of the Hegelian dialectic, the Cold War. And just as the Federal Reserve laid the groundwork for the "War to End All Wars", so the supra-monetary IMF emerged internationally to establish the framework for an much greater and seemingly impossible endeavor; the elimination of the East-West Cold War struggle between the remaining superpowers of the Soviet Union and the United States.

SDR

That the nature of World War IV would partake of the financial hurricanes which would devastate nations as thoroughly and more efficiently than large and protracted military struggles was prefigured in the collapse of the Bretton-Woods agreement in 1971. With the keen anticipation or, should we say, the prescient and pro-active planning which has characterized IMF agenda since its inception, a new agent of credit and monetary exchange was created in 1969 called the SDR or Special Drawing Rights. This novel financial entity antedated Nixon's announcement in 1971 of the final decoupling of gold from the US dollar as foreign sovereigns, notably France, gang rushed the U.S. Treasury seeking to exchange their suddenly dubious dollar denominations for Au. It was déjà-vu /1934, when Roosevelt had to fend off a similar unfriendly run on U.S. banks by its own citizens, declaring a bank holiday, confiscating gold and gold certificates and devaluing the dollar by 60%, while revaluing gold from $24 to $35 (A similar measure appears pending here in 2010) These sticky situations are emblematic of the kind of wanton financial destruction of which we shall see the IMF carpetbaggers are past masters.

The innate predilection of the IMF for creating crises and then proposing "solutions" for the very conflagrations they have set in motion has been the standard modus operandi from its inception. In this respect it was suggested that the SDR based flexible exchange rates which ensued in 1971 "made it easier for the various national economies to adjust to "more expensive oil". In effect though as with so many other such self-congratulatory dictums, the exact opposite was the case. Artificial shortages of crude oil created the "exogenous shocks" of rising prices for domestic products thus effectively denominating national debt in petro-dollars. Money transferred to petro-producing countries for oil was returned in the United States in Treasury bond investment thus subsidizing the exponetially rising national debt at the gas pump. In less developed countries, the inflows of IMF capital loan investment were soon flowing out in disproportionate amounts to both fund infrastructure and development projects as well as the rapidly accelerating rates of interest payments with the intended and expected diminishment of asset values, local productive capacities and the sequestering of national treasuries.

The IMF explanation of the SDR was to establish a "supplementary reserve asset" as gold and the US$ had become "inadequate to support trade and financial development". Once again in a self fulfilling prophecy, two years later in 1971 the US$ was dutifully and finally severed from any last tenuous grounding in Au and allowed to float along with and against other world currencies while retaining its status a world reserve currency. Originally valued @ .888671 gm. of fine gold, after the collapse of Bretton-Woods, the SDR came to be appraised against the original basket of currencies: Euro, JPYen, English Pound Sterling and US$, based on "exchange rates at noon on the London Market". The new and "bigger" arrangement however involved the subsumption of the dollar into the larger orbit of the IMF/World Bank macro-economic schema. This alignment some four decades later has evolved into its intended objective of ultimately jettisoning the rapidly weakening US$ in favor of the SDR and a "basket" of world currencies with the eventual inclusion of the Chinese yuan (renminbi) as a new reserve currency, an eventuality which Strauss-Khan has recently openly suggested.

It becomes quite obvious that the incremental decades long strategy enacted with the creation of the IMF/World Bank at Bretton-Woods and based upon the Keynesian economic model has finally come full circle. The departure of the U.S. industrial and manufacturing base coupled with job and capital flight along with loss of intellectual properties has been creative of a paper thin consumer-servant economy. A concomitant proliferation of progressive levels of debt, cycled and recycled into a succession of asset inflated bubbles supported only by systemic financial criminality at the Federal Reserve and Treasury with the collusion of supra-national banking cartels, has finally and fatally subverted the economic and social welfare of the people of the United States. That this signal calamity should follow so immediately on the collapse of the Soviet Union and the late 90's sell off of Russian assets under the Clinton administration reveals the IMF/World Bank agenda is rapidly approaching its denouément under the regime of Messieur Dominique Strauss-Khan.

postscript:Reply to Robert Jones On Dominique Strauss-Kahn's January 20, 2010 Asian Financial Forum address in Hong Kong

Louse-Con's most recent African campaign which concluded just a few days ago expressed a significant re-iteration of the themes contained in his Asian address. Any thorough assessment of the aims, objectives and overall agenda of the IMF/World Bank/WTO requires a careful reading between the lines of the official statements trotted out for public consumption. Basically a pack of lies interlaced with self serving platitudes, you can generally assume that any mission statement usually signifies the opposite especially from the standpoint of past history.
His disingenuous pledges to "make the financial sector safer" and "reduce the burden of the financial crisis on taxpayers" can be construed to mean more thoroughgoing subversion of financial markets (especially with derivative instruments) and a shifting of the losses inherent therein to the"taxpayers", precisely echoing the hypocrisy and outright mendacity of his promise to reverse "privatization of profits and socialization of losses" which has been an elemental corner stone of IMF asset stripping over the past several decades.
Increasing and significant investment by the PRC throughout the African continent is but another part of the IMF playbook whose quota system of SDR (Special Drawing Rights) "supplementary reserve assets" serve as the financial platform whereby, through currency and interest rate manipulations, developing countries are required to divert large -amounts of their currency into IMF deposits drawing ridiculously low rates of interest while at the same time borrowing US$ denominated SDRs at much higher interest rates to fund IMF "development and infrastructure projects".
The combination of vast untapped resources and immense pools of cheap labor in the African and South American continents combined with the vast accumulations of US Treasury assets on reserve in Chinese banks, and an emerging Chinese domestic consumer base, are a perfect set up for a global economic juggernaut destined to upend and supplant the economically eviscerated and militarily overextended U.S. imperial empire. The IMF Trojan Horse headquartered in Washington, recently funded with a $100 billion loan from Obama via the U.S. Treasury to complete its recent $1 trillion capitalization, will only ensure the inevitability of our national collapse

pps: The role of the SDR as "supplementary reserve asset" in the context of the increasingly volatile and unstable currency exchange rates assumes a growing and more significant importance in the internal affairs of nations via the preponderance of sovereign debt. The IMF, in like manner, will grow to assume its long expected and intended status as the ultimate arbiter and repository of world currencies in the establishment of the new world reserve currency. The inevitable addition of the Chinese yuan to the present baskets of currencies will signify the attainment of the long held IMF aim of supplanting the US$ as the ultimate unit of account. A polar shift in the world economic paradigm has been underway since the inception of the IMF at the watershed Bretton-Woods Agreement which paved the way for the establishment of Keynesian economic modalities in the emerging trilateral sphere of post war "economic cooperation". The creation of the SDR in 1969, anticipating the establishment of free floating rates of exchange, and the final abandonment of the gold standard, itself laid the groundwork for the supplanting of the provisional aims of Bretton-Woods in favor of the emerging petro-dollar economies based on relative consumption of oil resources.The successive exogenous shocks, attendant upon the new oil economy, to global national economies and particularly newly emerging and oil importing third world nations necessitated the establishment of a successive adaptation of IMF lending instruments to accommodate increasing borrowing from commercial banks at increasing rates of interest. For this purpose, SDR allocated holdings involving loans paid and charged to IMF member nations on a portion of requisite quota subscriptions have been enabled. In the context of of the potential claim by the IMF via the SDR on "freely usable currencies" of its members, the competition for export markets by means of devaluation of national currencies, and the raising of barriers to foreign trade are in the final stages of elimination in favor of the global entity envisioned by IMF world governance. The suggestion that Greece, or for that matter any other IMF member nation would petition the fund for stand by arrangements and other forms of financial support incumbent upon structural and enhanced structural adjustments is and has been a given for the past several decades


pps: The assumption here as with so much other reportage concerning the crisis in Euroland is that the IMF has stood aloof from the economic dislocations roiling the continent and even the United States itself. Ever since its inception more than a half century ago, and through its successive evolutions through the significant economic disruptions which were the expected and intended results of its own policies, the IMF has played a pivotal if not generally acknowledged role in the inexorable progression to the institution of a world economic order with the SDR "supplementary reserve asset" as the fulcrum of a new world reserve currency.The glaringly obvious disparity between the IMF projected GDP growth, sovereign balances versus the "actuals" is nothing especially new in the IMF playbook. This tactic is an essential tool in the undermining and subversion of existing economies by an overestimation of asset values and GDP growth with the obvious intention of exploiting the resulting and unsustainable gap between the devaluing assets and the exponentially developing debt burdens engineered largely through IMF allocations and quota reserve funds interest rates.What has happened here in the United States over the past several years is an object lesson in the application of IMF funding, interest rate and currency exchange manipulations which have long been standard practice in third world and developing nations and are now coming home to roost. First in the Euro Zone, where sovereigns will be attacked and picked apart one by one by currency speculation and counter party claims to OTC derivative contracts, and secondly in the U.S. where the pickings will be still larger with vast pension funds, state and municipality bonds and infrastructure developments all fatally encumbered with the same excessive leverage, unserviceable debt levels and the same OTCD outstanding claims on pre-engineered funding gaps, courtesy of the Federal Reserve and its IMF big brother.

Monday, March 1, 2010

Reply to Chris Hedges "Zero Point of Systemic Collapse"

Aleksandr Herzen, speaking a century ago to a group of anarchists about how to overthrow the czar, reminded his listeners that it was not their job to save a dying system but to replace it: “We think we are the doctors. We are the disease.” All resistance must recognize that the body politic and global capitalism are dead. We should stop wasting energy trying to reform or appeal to it. This does not mean the end of resistance, but it does mean very different forms of resistance. It means turning our energies toward building sustainable communities to weather the coming crisis, since we will be unable to survive and resist without a cooperative effort.

These communities, if they retreat into a pure survivalist mode without linking themselves to the concentric circles of the wider community, the state and the planet, will become as morally and spiritually bankrupt as the corporate forces arrayed against us. All infrastructures we build, like the monasteries in the Middle Ages, should seek to keep alive the intellectual and artistic traditions that make a civil society, humanism and the common good possible. Access to parcels of agricultural land will be paramount. We will have to grasp, as the medieval monks did, that we cannot alter the larger culture around us, at least in the short term, but we may be able to retain the moral codes and culture for generations beyond ours. Resistance will be reduced to small, often imperceptible acts of defiance, as those who retained their integrity discovered in the long night of 20th-century fascism and communism.- From Chris Hedges "Zero Point of Systemic Collapse" https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/88/chris-hedges.html

I've followed Mr. Hedge's journalistic contributions and his more recent polemical jeremiads. He speaks out of a informed and outraged sense of injustice undoubtedly shared by many perceptive individuals and commentators. I must admit, though I have a great respect for his endeavors, that this particular piece seemed a little tired and overwrought as if he had perhaps unconsciously succumbed to the enormity of the issues which he has so zealously confronted all these years. Whether or not this is the case, the testimony of many of those posting on this thread reveal the same kind of agitated expectation casting about for answers to a whole range of perplexing anomalies. As with any crisis, the responses are as many and varied as the whole range of emotion, verging from the dismissive and even hostile to the more quiescent and reflective. The internet forum, while allowing an elaborate and extensive breadth of opinion, at the same time tends to dilute and attenuate meaning, often at the expense of depth and lasting significance. People can only be awakened and informed so much before even the most trenchant and cutting edge insights lose their inherent relevance. At that point I suppose my backyard compost pile or Mr Hedges Canadian farmland might deservedly become all that more inviting.