We all know Goldman Sachs is the very embodiment of evil...or do we? What is Goldman Sachs? What does it do? Where did it come from and where is it going, and is there anything that can be done to stop it? Buckle in for this edition of The Corbett Report where James dares to take on the vampire squid itself.
 

 

 

 

By Robert Scheer
truthdig.com

Barack Obama’s Justice Department on Monday announced that Citigroup would pay $7 billion in fines, a move that will avoid a humiliating trial dealing with the seamy financial products the bank had marketed to an unsuspecting public, causing vast damage to the economy.

Citigroup is the too-big-to-fail bank that was allowed to form only when Bill Clinton signed legislation reversing the sensible restraints on Wall Street instituted by President Franklin Roosevelt to avoid another Great Depression. 

Those filled with Clinton nostalgia these days might want to reflect back on how truly destructive was his legacy for hardworking people throughout the world who lost so much due to the financial shenanigans that he made legal.

“Today what we are doing is modernizing the financial services industry, tearing down those antiquated laws and granting banks significant new authority,” a beaming Clinton boasted after signing the Financial Services Modernization Act into law in 1999.

Called the Citigroup authorization act by some wags at the time, those antiquated laws, the Glass-Steagall Act primarily, had put a safety barrier between the high rollers in Wall Street investment firms and the staid commercial banks charged with preserving the savings of ordinary folk. The new law permitted them to merge.

21stCenturyWire.com

Forcing everyone to spend only by electronic means from an account held at a (government-linked) bank gives technocrats far better tools of social, political and economic control over individuals and communities. This is the war against cash.

Governments, at least modern western governments, have always hated cash transactions. Cash is private, and cash is hard to tax. So politicians trump up phony reasons like drug trafficking and money laundering to win support for bad laws like the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970, which makes even small cash transactions potentially reportable to the Feds.”
“Today cash is under attack like never before. Ultra low interest rates are the norm for commercial bank accounts. In Europe, as the ECB ventures into negative nominal interest rates, certain banks threaten to charge customers for depositing cash. Meanwhile, certain European bonds now pay negative yields, effectively turning them into insurance products rather than financial assets. And some economists now call for the outright abolition of cash, which shows just how far some will go in their crazed belief that economic prosperity can be commanded by forcing us to spend rather than save.

The War on Cash is real, and it will only intensify from here on out. Dr. Joe Salerno delivers a powerful and comprehensive breakdown of how it’s happening…

 

 

 

By Claire Bernish
 

(ANTIMEDIA) After Iceland suffered a heavy hit in the 2008-2009 financial crisis, which famously resulted in convictions and jail terms for a number of top banking executives, the IMF now says the country has managed to achieve economic recovery—“without compromising its welfare model,” which includes universal healthcare and education. In fact, Iceland is on track to become the first European country that suffered in the financial meltdown to “surpass its pre-crisis peak of economic output”—essentially proving to the U.S. that bailing out “too big to fail” banks wasn’t the way to go.

Iceland is beautifully, yet unfortunately, unique in how it chose to handle the disaster. It simply let the banks fail, which resulted in defaults totaling $85 billion—lending ample justification for the prosecution and conviction of bank executives for various fraud-related charges. The decision seemed shocking at the time, but the gamble has obviously paid off. Choosing a different route, the U.S. bailed out the banks and let executives off the hook by levying fines that ultimately ended up being paid by the corporations—meaning the executives ostensibly responsible for the mess got off scot-free.

This is part three of the documentary Zeitgeist.  The word zeitgeist means "the defining spirit or mood of a particular period of history as defined by the ideas and beliefs of the time."   Part three details the global elites, those that own and control the central banks and as a result, just about everything else of consequence.  It goes into who they are and what they've done and are doing to this planet to achieve their maniacal goals to control all of mankind.  These are not kind beneficent people.  They are the ones that cause all wars and are behind all the raping and pillaging going on throughout the world.

Part 1 jumps into the fray with a discussion of religion as one of the oldest and most powerful forms of control known to man.  While it focuses primarily on Christianity, it reveals how the religious stories told to believers are remarkably similar between religions and it's stunning to trace them back long before Christ was ever born.  See Part 1 here.

See Part 2 here..    Learn the truth behind the events of 9-11 and the reality that it was deliberately orchestrated by the global elites to start yet another war through which they can continue their agenda for world conquestemphasized how those in power use fear and conflict as another primary means of controlling populations.Part 2

For more info on the movie please visit the official web site at: zeitgeistmovie.com

 

 

 

Bankers have legalized and institutionalized a criminal monopoly on counterfeiting money.

This is the last in a series written on the workings of our fraudulent banking system. You can find part one here called, "You Can't Bank on the Bankers." You can find part two here called "The Single Largest Crime In World History . . . Bankers steal the sovereign right of nations to create money."

MONEY . . . it's arguably one of the most important resources in our lives and yet most of us have no idea what it really is or more importantly what it's supposed to be. Money is supposed to be a medium of value that allows for a free exchange of goods and services. Money can be anything people commonly recognize as valuable and desirable. Commodities like gold and silver have been used because they have always been recognized as being valuable, relatively rare, durable, easily divisible and readily accepted in exchange for goods and services. The basic idea of money is that it has tangible value that everyone will accept as payment for other items of value.

Money is straightforward when it's commodity-based. A great example is money made from precious metals. You can see with your own eyes that it's something of value. The problems start when governments introduce money substitutes into the economy. A government can declare that anything is money. This kind of money is called "fiat money" because it is simply declared to be money by fiat or decree.

Resources exist that are said to be the property of society as a whole, things like water and air. Money should be one of those community resources. Money is required in order to create and maintain a healthy, prosperous economy. Money should not be a privatized resource any more than water or air should be. One of the main reasons we establish government in the first place is we all need a way to protect the common resources from exploitation by selfish individuals. One of most important duties of government is to provide a sound monetary system for the benefit of all not just a greedy few.

Last week I covered the fraud of "fractional reserve banking," the nifty little rule that bankers made up that allows them to claim they have SUBSTANTIALLY more money than they actually have. For example, if a banker has a million dollars in customer deposits, he gets to say he really has ten million dollars. A banker can create nine extra million dollars just by making journal entries. Bankers do nothing to earn that nine million. They just say they have it and we allow them to get away with it. For those of you who missed last week's article you can read it here.

You'd think the enormous advantage the fractional reserve banking scam gives the bankers would make them happy little campers. Well . . . you'd be wrong. Predatory bankers are never satisfied. They are like hungry ghosts, beings that are impossible to satisfy. The one big problem with the fractional reserve banking scam is it can only be used on money currently in circulation. For example, if there were only a billion dollars in circulation and it was all deposited into one bank, that bank could only multiply that billion dollars ten times to make an additional nine billion dollars. To a banker, that just won't do.

There is another little snafu with the fractional reserve scam. The extra money they are allowed to create is lent out at interest. In other words, if they have a million in deposits, they can then say they have an extra nine million that they lend out at say ten percent interest. What they can't create is the money necessary to cover the interest. If a banker lends out nine million dollars at ten percent annual interest where is that nine hundred thousand dollars going to come from to pay the interest? The banker is allowed to create the nine million through the fractional reserve scam but they can't create the extra nine hundred thousand dollars to cover the interest payments. Every year more money is needed to cover interest payments. Over time, the interest owed increases exponentially, exceeding the money in circulation. Since money to cover the interest payments is never created, eventually the money in circulation can't even pay the interest much less the principle and the system collapses under its own weight of debt. It's inevitable with this fraudulent system. Not to worry though. Bankers are nothing if not devious. They have ways to prolong the inevitable.

By Greg Palast
Vice.com

When a little birdie dropped the End Game memo through my window, its content was so explosive, so sick and plain evil, I just couldn't believe it.

The Memo confirmed every conspiracy freak’s fantasy: that in the late 1990s, the top US Treasury officials secretly conspired with a small cabal of banker big-shots to rip apart financial regulation across the planet. When you see 26.3 percent unemployment in Spain, desperation and hunger in Greece, riots in Indonesia and Detroit in bankruptcy, go back to this End Game memo, the genesis of the blood and tears.

The Treasury official playing the bankers’ secret End Game was Larry Summers. Today, Summers is Barack Obama’s leading choice for Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, the world’s central bank. If the confidential memo is authentic, then Summers shouldn’t be serving on the Fed, he should be serving hard time in some dungeon reserved for the criminally insane of the finance world

The memo is authentic.

I had to fly to Geneva to get confirmation and wangle a meeting with the Secretary General of the World Trade Organisation, Pascal Lamy. Lamy, the Generalissimo of Globalisation, told me,

“The WTO was not created as some dark cabal of multinationals secretly cooking plots against the people... We don’t have cigar-smoking, rich, crazy bankers negotiating.”

Then I showed him the memo.