Will there be a coup d’etat in the US during the next couple of weeks?

by Benjamin Fulford 10-22-12

The people in charge at the US agencies and military know the presidential election scheduled for November 8th [Kp note: U.S. elections take place on Nov. 6] will be a fraud and a sham no matter what the outcome. That is why many reliable sources are saying US militias and reserve troops were put on alert last week. They have either started to mobilize either to pre-empt the elections and put the Joint Chiefs of Staff in charge of an interim government or to get ready to act in anticipation of post-election violence and chaos, depending on who you talk to.

In any case, it is no coincidence that both the US and China will be selecting a new government on November 8th [Nov. 6 in U.S.] and there is a lot of plotting and speculation going on beneath the surface as that date approaches.

In Europe as well, there are signs of a fundamental struggle reaching a climax as the IMF and certain governments face off against the bankers over control of the process of money creation.
A lot of shadowy organizations have also now informed the White Dragon Society that, should they stand in the way, certain prominent individuals around the world are scheduled to die of stroke, heart attack, cancer or bullet wound over the coming weeks.

The murder of CIA “ambassador” Stevens in Libya, was a part of the ongoing battle. According to the gnostic illuminati, Stevens was murdered because of his role in smuggling the nuclear weapon into Japan that was used in the 311 tsunami and nuclear terror attack…

…It is true that there is a resemblance between the Stevens who was implicated in the nuclear attack on Japan and the one killed in Libya. However, the Stevens in Asia was supposed to be a British SAS trained former senior Hong Kong police official while the Stevens in Libya was CIA.

There is a deliberate fog of disinformation surrounding this death but what is clear from public statements is that the Obama faction failed to protect him and the Bush faction are furious about this fact. It is also well known that there was no US embassy in Benghazi and that Stevens was involved in some sort of violence related clandestine work.

This is also linked to the upcoming US “presidential election” farce. Plenty of insiders have forwarded information showing links between Romney’s Bain capital and drug money laundering, making it clear Romney is the Nazi candidate. On the other hand Obama is seen by many right wingers as the foreign born Muslim communist candidate. As mentioned before the Queen and the Pope have been funneling billions to Obama while the Bush folk finance Romney.
In either case, there is expected to be widespread violence and rioting if either Romney or Obama win.

The obvious answer to most intelligent observers is that neither of the two gangster front men should be put in charge of a United States government that desperately needs its biggest overhaul since 1776.
The next few weeks should show if the US military and agencies are staffed with men or mice.

In Europe as well, the signs of a major split between two powerful factions are everywhere to be seen. When even establishment worthies like UK Telegraph columnist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard start writing about IMF plans to eliminate debt and dethrone bankers,
http://removingtheshackles.blogspot.ca/2012/10/vital-update-imf-plan-to-dethrone.html
you know the struggle is taking place at the highest levels of power.

However, the Atlantic-centered debate between the people who want governments to print money and use that to eliminate all public and private debt, and those who say people must pay what they can to the bankers forever, forgets that the rest of the world is also involved.

In other words, plans like the Wanta-Mitterand protocols that call for the creation of trillions of dollars of government-controlled money forget that the Atlantic nations as a whole have been borrowing from the rest of the world for 30 years and will not be allowed to print their way out of that accumulated external debt. The solution cannot be made by North America and Europe without the agreement of their external creditors, especially in Asia.

The Chinese, for example, are being asked to buy US external debt and finance US consumer lifestyles but are being prevented from making job-creating direct investment in the US. This is not a realistic long term scenario.

The fact remains the Southern European nations need to abandon the Euro and the United States needs to issue a government greenback separate from the international US dollar. That is the economic reality.

Meanwhile, more information has emerged during the past week about the incoming new Chinese government’s plans. Essentially, the new regime will focus on increasing Chinese soft power and pushing for the right to allow Chinese companies to make major investments and acquisitions in Europe, the US and Japan.

In Japan the plan is to buy an ailing major company that is listed in the first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange and revitalize it as a way of getting a say inside the board-rooms of Japan Inc. If such a buyout attempt is rebuffed, the Chinese will retaliate against Japanese companies operating in China, according to a Chinese government agent.

It is likely that a similar approach will be made towards Europe and the US. In other words, the Chinese want to buy real things that exist in the real world and will not buy paper, government or otherwise.

The Chinese will continue to have a policy of strongly fighting any attempts at bullying while simultaneously offering win-win alternatives. Such Chinese investments should be welcomed so long as they benefit the people and governments of the host country involved.

The long term case studies for cooperation they are holding up as examples for others to follow are Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Vancouver and (to a lesser extent) Japan.

In Japan meanwhile, there are also many plans for fundamental change. The ruling Democratic Party of Japan is expected to lose most of its seats in the yet to be scheduled but soon promised general election. The Liberal Democratic Party is expected to get a big boost but fall short of a majority. That is expected to leave the new Japan Restoration Party as the king maker in a coalition government with a big reform mandate.

The Japanese underworld, for their part, are promising that any members of the old regime who try to block the reforms will begin to “suffer from strokes and heart attacks.”

The Japanese Imperial Household is planning to move to Kyoto as a part of a shift of some government functions to the Kansai area in Japan once the Atlantic power struggles settle down.
The new international economic planning agency is expected to be one of the center-pieces of the shift. Such an agency would help solve various nationalistic and historical problems by providing a neutral ground for elite government officials to make plans for the planet as a whole and not just their particular region.

It can also now be reported that the Chinese, the pentagon, the Japanese government and other groups all support the creation of the new international economic planning agency. Such an agency would work in harmony with existing international organizations.
We can also report that Neil Keenan is now in Asia working with the Dragon family on setting up the new international financial system.

 

[A subscription to Ben's full articles is only $8 per month ("Payments can... be made with a ‘PayPal’ [account]“), but Ben will allow anyone who can not pay this to subscribe for less (or free). On one page of his site he says, “All subscribers will agree to pay whatever monthly subscription price they can afford. Those who are really poor can get it for free.” In my mind, if you like the articles, and want to support Ben and his work, consider subscribing to his blog.

Ben may be contacted at any of the emails below which he provides on his websites:
benjaminfulford@hotmail.com, benjaminfulford@gmail.com, postmaster@benjaminfulford.com, benjaminoffice88@gmail.com]

£13 Trillion Hoard Hidden from Taxman by Global Elite

• Study estimates staggering size of offshore economy
• Private banks help wealthiest to move cash into havens

The Cayman Islands: a favourite haven from the taxman for the global elite.
Photograph: David Doubilet/National Geographic/Getty Images

Heather Stewart, business editor The Observer, 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/jul/21/global-elite-tax-offshore-economy

A global super-rich elite has exploited gaps in cross-border tax rules to hide an extraordinary £13 trillion ($21tn) of wealth offshore – as much as the American and Japanese GDPs put together – according to research commissioned by the campaign group Tax Justice Network.

James Henry, former chief economist at consultancy McKinsey and an expert on tax havens, has compiled the most detailed estimates yet of the size of the offshore economy in a new report, The Price of Offshore Revisited, released exclusively to the Observer.

He shows that at least £13tn – perhaps up to £20tn – has leaked out of scores of countries into secretive jurisdictions such as Switzerland and the Cayman Islands with the help of private banks, which vie to attract the assets of so-called high net-worth individuals. Their wealth is, as Henry puts it, "protected by a highly paid, industrious bevy of professional enablers in the private banking, legal, accounting and investment industries taking advantage of the increasingly borderless, frictionless global economy". According to Henry's research, the top 10 private banks, which include UBS and Credit Suisse in Switzerland, as well as the US investment bank Goldman Sachs, managed more than £4tn in 2010, a sharp rise from £1.5tn five years earlier.

The detailed analysis in the report, compiled using data from a range of sources, including the Bank of International Settlements and the International Monetary Fund, suggests that for many developing countries the cumulative value of the capital that has flowed out of their economies since the 1970s would be more than enough to pay off their debts to the rest of the world.

Oil-rich states with an internationally mobile elite have been especially prone to watching their wealth disappear into offshore bank accounts instead of being invested at home, the research suggests. Once the returns on investing the hidden assets is included, almost £500bn has left Russia since the early 1990s when its economy was opened up. Saudi Arabia has seen £197bn flood out since the mid-1970s, and Nigeria £196bn.

"The problem here is that the assets of these countries are held by a small number of wealthy individuals while the debts are shouldered by the ordinary people of these countries through their governments," the report says.

The sheer size of the cash pile sitting out of reach of tax authorities is so great that it suggests standard measures of inequality radically underestimate the true gap between rich and poor. According to Henry's calculations, £6.3tn of assets is owned by only 92,000 people, or 0.001% of the world's population – a tiny class of the mega-rich who have more in common with each other than those at the bottom of the income scale in their own societies.

"These estimates reveal a staggering failure: inequality is much, much worse than official statistics show, but politicians are still relying on trickle-down to transfer wealth to poorer people," said John Christensen of the Tax Justice Network. "People on the street have no illusions about how unfair the situation has become."

TUC general secretary Brendan Barber said: "Countries around the world are under intense pressure to reduce their deficits and governments cannot afford to let so much wealth slip past into tax havens.
"Closing down the tax loopholes exploited by multinationals and the super-rich to avoid paying their fair share will reduce the deficit. This way the government can focus on stimulating the economy, rather than squeezing the life out of it with cuts and tax rises for the 99% of people who aren't rich enough to avoid paying their taxes."

Assuming the £13tn mountain of assets earned an average 3% a year for its owners, and governments were able to tax that income at 30%, it would generate a bumper £121bn in revenues – more than rich countries spend on aid to the developing world each year.

Groups such as UK Uncut have focused attention on the paltry tax bills of some highly wealthy individuals, such as Topshop owner Sir Philip Green, with campaigners at one recent protest shouting: "Where did all the money go? He took it off to Monaco!" Much of Green's retail empire is owned by his wife, Tina, who lives in the low-tax principality.

A spokeswoman for UK Uncut said: "People like Philip Green use public services – they need the streets to be cleaned, people need public transport to get to their shops – but they don't want to pay for it."

Leaders of G20 countries have repeatedly pledged to close down tax havens since the financial crisis of 2008, when the secrecy shrouding parts of the banking system was widely seen as exacerbating instability. But many countries still refuse to make details of individuals' financial worth available to the tax authorities in their home countries as a matter of course. Tax Justice Network would like to see this kind of exchange of information become standard practice, to prevent rich individuals playing off one jurisdiction against another.

"The very existence of the global offshore industry, and the tax-free status of the enormous sums invested by their wealthy clients, is predicated on secrecy," said Henry.

 

Kerry Cassidy Interviews "T-Man" of the White Hats Report

"You will see things that absolutely flabbergast you… 
you will literally be blown away." T-Man form the White Hats Report

Kerry Cassidy from Project Camelot interviews "T-Man", of the White Hats Report on Global Settlements, the Dinar Revaluation and their widely anticipated report #48 entitled "Pureheart Investments". This, according to T-Man, will be the largest report they have ever printed with many documents included to support their position.

In it, they will report the long line of Financial fraud from the "Cabal", otherwise known as the "Underworld" of the financial game in not only the US but the entire world. They will report on the US off-balance sheet where literally trillions of dollars have been funneled into the "rabbit hole" that go towards the space program, the secret space program and other off the record programs kept hidden from public accounts.

The White Hats are a group of people who have extensive backgrounds, many of the people they write about are their former employers… military, law enforcement, intelligence agencies. They get info at all levels, high, medium, low.




Other Highlights from T-Man:

• Within the next week or so, the world is going to be rather surprised as to whats going on

• Everything at this point regarding the system is fictitious, a bandaid. Their time is up, they are simply biding their time right now

• The checkmate of current system will be about people, who will win the battle of control. old guard or new guard

• US has already been bankrupt, we just haven't known about it.

• "MSN news ticker" US treasury has consumed the Federal Reserve

• There is a huge transition going on, a shift in the financial power of the world, and it undetermined to be good or bad at this point.

• Dinar RV is very real, not a scam, something that will happen. The reason it has not happened is political positioning.

• Global settlements are not a scam. They are here, available and all they need now is to be released. Funds freely given to keep the world strong. No debt, no obligation. To be used for the benefit of mankind. They are currently being held back by the Bush cabal and all the people they control. Everything is gold backed, responsible money from old sources. 

You can find a written transcript of the interview here: http://wethepeoplefree.com/mr-t-man-the-white-hats/

Official White Hats Report Site: http://tdarkcabal.blogspot.com

The End of the New World Order

The upheavals of the early 21st century have changed our world. Now, in the aftermath of failed wars and economic disasters, pressure for a social alternative can only grow

Culture shock ... the collapse of Lehman Brothers ushered in the deepest economic crisis
since the 1930s. Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian

Seumas Milne
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/19/new-world-order

In the late summer of 2008, two events in quick succession signalled the end of the New World Order. In August, the US client state of Georgia was crushed in a brief but bloody war after it attacked Russian troops in the contested territory of South Ossetia.

The former Soviet republic was a favourite of Washington's neoconservatives. Its authoritarian president had been lobbying hard for Georgia to join Nato's eastward expansion. In an unblinking inversion of reality, US vice-president Dick Cheney denounced Russia's response as an act of "aggression" that "must not go unanswered". Fresh from unleashing a catastrophic war on Iraq, George Bush declared Russia's "invasion of a sovereign state" to be "unacceptable in the 21st century".

As the fighting ended, Bush warned Russia not to recognise South Ossetia's independence. Russia did exactly that, while US warships were reduced to sailing around the Black Sea. The conflict marked an international turning point. The US's bluff had been called, its military sway undermined by the war on terror, Iraq and Afghanistan. After two decades during which it bestrode the world like a colossus, the years of uncontested US power were over.

Three weeks later, a second, still more far-reaching event threatened the heart of the US-dominated global financial system. On 15 September, the credit crisis finally erupted in the collapse of America's fourth-largest investment bank. The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers engulfed the western world in its deepest economic crisis since the 1930s.

The first decade of the 21st century shook the international order, turning the received wisdom of the global elites on its head – and 2008 was its watershed. With the end of the cold war, the great political and economic questions had all been settled, we were told. Liberal democracy and free-market capitalism had triumphed. Socialism had been consigned to history. Political controversy would now be confined to culture wars and tax-and-spend trade-offs.
In 1990, George Bush Senior had inaugurated a New World Order, based on uncontested US military supremacy and western economic dominance. This was to be a unipolar world without rivals. Regional powers would bend the knee to the new worldwide imperium. History itself, it was said, had come to an end.
But between the attack on the Twin Towers and the fall of Lehman Brothers, that global order had crumbled. Two factors were crucial. By the end of a decade of continuous warfare, the US had succeeded in exposing the limits, rather than the extent, of its military power. And the neoliberal capitalist model that had reigned supreme for a generation had crashed.

It was the reaction of the US to 9/11 that broke the sense of invincibility of the world's first truly global empire. The Bush administration's wildly miscalculated response turned the atrocities in New York and Washington into the most successful terror attack in history.

Not only did Bush's war fail on its own terms, spawning terrorists across the world, while its campaign of killings, torture and kidnapping discredited Western claims to be guardians of human rights. But the US-British invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq revealed the inability of the global behemoth to impose its will on subject peoples prepared to fight back. That became a strategic defeat for the US and its closest allies.

This passing of the unipolar moment was the first of four decisive changes that transformed the world – in some crucial ways for the better. The second was the fallout from the crash of 2008 and the crisis of the western-dominated capitalist order it unleashed, speeding up relative US decline.

This was a crisis made in America and deepened by the vast cost of its multiple wars. And its most devastating impact was on those economies whose elites had bought most enthusiastically into the neoliberal orthodoxy of deregulated financial markets and unfettered corporate power.

A voracious model of capitalism forced down the throats of the world as the only way to run a modern economy, at a cost of ballooning inequality and environmental degradation, had been discredited – and only rescued from collapse by the greatest state intervention in history. The baleful twins of neoconservatism and neoliberalism had been tried and tested to destruction.

The failure of both accelerated the rise of China, the third epoch-making change of the early 21st century. Not only did the country's dramatic growth take hundreds of millions out of poverty, but its state-driven investment model rode out the west's slump, making a mockery of market orthodoxy and creating a new centre of global power. That increased the freedom of manoeuvre for smaller states.

China's rise widened the space for the tide of progressive change that swept Latin America – the fourth global advance. Across the continent, socialist and social-democratic governments were propelled to power, attacking economic and racial injustice, building regional independence and taking back resources from corporate control. Two decades after we had been assured there could be no alternatives to neoliberal capitalism, Latin Americans were creating them.

These momentous changes came, of course, with huge costs and qualifications. The US will remain the overwhelmingly dominant military power for the foreseeable future; its partial defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan were paid for in death and destruction on a colossal scale; and multipolarity brings its own risks of conflict. The neoliberal model was discredited, but governments tried to refloat it through savage austerity programmes. China's success was bought at a high price in inequality, civil rights and environmental destruction. And Latin America's US-backed elites remained determined to reverse the social gains, as they succeeded in doing by violent coup in Honduras in 2009. Such contradictions also beset the revolutionary upheaval that engulfed the Arab world in 2010-11, sparking another shift of global proportions.

By then, Bush's war on terror had become such an embarrassment that the US government had to change its name to "overseas contingency operations". Iraq was almost universally acknowledged to have been a disaster, Afghanistan a doomed undertaking. But such chastened realism couldn't be further from how these campaigns were regarded in the western mainstream when they were first unleashed.

To return to what was routinely said by British and US politicians and their tame pundits in the aftermath of 9/11 is to be transported into a parallel universe of toxic fantasy. Every effort was made to discredit those who rejected the case for invasion and occupation – and would before long be comprehensively vindicated.

Michael Gove, now a Tory cabinet minister, poured vitriol on the Guardian for publishing a full debate on the attacks, denouncing it as a "Prada-Meinhof gang" of "fifth columnists". Rupert Murdoch's Sun damned those warning against war as "anti-American propagandists of the fascist left". When the Taliban regime was overthrown, Blair issued a triumphant condemnation of those (myself included) who had opposed the invasion of Afghanistan and war on terror. We had, he declared, "proved to be wrong".

A decade later, few could still doubt that it was Blair's government that had "proved to be wrong", with catastrophic consequences. The US and its allies would fail to subdue Afghanistan, critics predicted. The war on terror would itself spread terrorism. Ripping up civil rights would have dire consequences – and an occupation of Iraq would be a blood-drenched disaster.

The war party's "experts", such as the former "viceroy of Bosnia" Paddy Ashdown, derided warnings that invading Afghanistan would lead to a "long-drawn-out guerrilla campaign" as "fanciful". More than 10 years on, armed resistance was stronger than ever and the war had become the longest in American history.

It was a similar story in Iraq – though opposition had by then been given voice by millions on the streets. Those who stood against the invasion were still accused of being "appeasers". US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld predicted the war would last six days. Most of the Anglo-American media expected resistance to collapse in short order. They were entirely wrong.

A new colonial-style occupation of Iraq would, I wrote in the first week of invasion, "face determined guerrilla resistance long after Saddam Hussein has gone" and the occupiers "be driven out". British troops did indeed face unrelenting attacks until they were forced out in 2009, as did US regular troops until they were withdrawn in 2011.

But it wasn't just on the war on terror that opponents of the New World Order were shown to be right and its cheerleaders to be talking calamitous nonsense. For 30 years, the west's elites insisted that only deregulated markets, privatisation and low taxes on the wealthy could deliver growth and prosperity.

Long before 2008, the "free market" model had been under fierce attack: neoliberalism was handing power to unaccountable banks and corporations, anti-corporate globalisation campaigners argued, fuelling poverty and social injustice and eviscerating democracy – and was both economically and ecologically unsustainable.

In contrast to New Labour politicians who claimed "boom and bust" to be a thing of the past, critics dismissed the idea that the capitalist trade cycle could be abolished as absurd. Deregulation, financialisation and the reckless promotion of debt-fuelled speculation would, in fact, lead to crisis.
The large majority of economists who predicted that the neoliberal model was heading for breakdown were, of course, on the left. So while in Britain the main political parties all backed "light-touch regulation" of finance, its opponents had long argued that City liberalisation threatened the wider economy.

Critics warned that privatising public services would cost more, drive down pay and conditions and fuel corruption. Which is exactly what happened. And in the European Union, where corporate privilege and market orthodoxy were embedded into treaty, the result was ruinous. The combination of liberalised banking with an undemocratic, lopsided and deflationary currency union that critics (on both left and right in this case) had always argued risked breaking apart was a disaster waiting to happen. The crash then provided the trigger.

The case against neoliberal capitalism had been overwhelmingly made on the left, as had opposition to the US-led wars of invasion and occupation. But it was strikingly slow to capitalise on its vindication over the central controversies of the era. Hardly surprising, perhaps, given the loss of confidence that flowed from the left's 20th-century defeats – including in its own social alternatives.
But driving home the lessons of these disasters was essential if they were not to be repeated. Even after Iraq and Afghanistan, the war on terror was pursued in civilian-slaughtering drone attacks from Pakistan to Somalia. The western powers played the decisive role in the overthrow of the Libyan regime – acting in the name of protecting civilians, who then died in their thousands in a Nato-escalated civil war, while conflict-wracked Syria was threatened with intervention and Iran with all-out attack.

And while neoliberalism had been discredited, western governments used the crisis to try to entrench it. Not only were jobs, pay and benefits cut as never before, but privatisation was extended still further. Being right was, of course, never going to be enough. What was needed was political and social pressure strong enough to turn the tables of power.

Revulsion against a discredited elite and its failed social and economic project steadily deepened after 2008. As the burden of the crisis was loaded on to the majority, the spread of protests, strikes and electoral upheavals demonstrated that pressure for real change had only just begun. Rejection of corporate power and greed had become the common sense of the age.

The historian Eric Hobsbawm described the crash of 2008 as a "sort of right-wing equivalent to the fall of the Berlin wall". It was commonly objected that after the implosion of communism and traditional social democracy, the left had no systemic alternative to offer. But no model ever came pre-cooked. All of them, from Soviet power and the Keynesian welfare state to Thatcherite-Reaganite neoliberalism, grew out of ideologically driven improvisation in specific historical circumstances.

The same would be true in the aftermath of the crisis of the neoliberal order, as the need to reconstruct a broken economy on a more democratic, egalitarian and rational basis began to dictate the shape of a sustainable alternative. Both the economic and ecological crisis demanded social ownership, public intervention and a shift of wealth and power. Real life was pushing in the direction of progressive solutions.

The upheavals of the first years of the 21st century opened up the possibility of a new kind of global order, and of genuine social and economic change. As communists learned in 1989, and the champions of capitalism discovered 20 years later, nothing is ever settled.

This is an edited extract from The Revenge of History: the Battle for the 21st Century by Seumas Milne, published by Verso. Buy it for £16 at guardianbookshop.co.uk

Poofness – Something BIG is Happening!!!! No Hair on Fire…needed.

October 21, 2012

Greetings and Salutations:

For years we have heard the words ‘October Surprise’ about one thing or another. Now, who picked out October for the month to surprise, I don’t know…but expect one. Keep your feet on the ground and take no wooden nickels. By now, most know, the political parties are the opposite sides of the same coin and it’s about money. Hold all things in common, is the wisdom as old as dirt. Yes, it can be hard, with emotions and other points of view banging on your head all the time. That’s where your own state of peace needs to be guarded as the most precious to you…never mind, the loudest voice in the room or the ‘internets’. When what we’re all waiting for happens, I will tell you in advance, seek the silence. The world will be skidding sideways and you’ll need to find your bearings. There’s no repeat of the past happening here so unfamiliarity will be the norm for a while until you get used to the new ‘norm’. At this point even the dogs and cats know, something is different and are acting accordingly. 

http://www.veteranstoday.com/2012/10/15/breaking-romneys-bain-capitol-drug-front-for-bush-cartel-video/ 

 

Find something funny, learn to laugh in the middle of this, you still have a humor button don’t you?

 

Be a centrist and tic everybody off..lolol I got no handles, man. 

May the road rise up to meet you.
May the wind always be at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face,
and rains fall soft upon your fields.
And until we meet again,
May God hold you in the palm of His hand. 

Hit me if you need a consultation.

Love and Kisses,

Poofness

IMF's epic plan to conjure away debt and dethrone bankers

So there is a magic wand after all. A revolutionary paper by the International Monetary Fund claims that one could eliminate the net public debt of the US at a stroke, and by implication do the same for Britain, Germany, Italy, or Japan. 

The IMF reports says the conjuring trick is to replace our system of private bank-created money.

 

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/9623863/IMFs-epic-plan-to-conjure-away-debt-and-dethrone-bankers.html

One could slash private debt by 100pc of GDP, boost growth, stabilize prices, and dethrone bankers all at the same time. It could be done cleanly and painlessly, by legislative command, far more quickly than anybody imagined.

The conjuring trick is to replace our system of private bank-created money -- roughly 97pc of the money supply -- with state-created money. We return to the historical norm, before Charles II placed control of the money supply in private hands with the English Free Coinage Act of 1666.

Specifically, it means an assault on "fractional reserve banking". If lenders are forced to put up 100pc reserve backing for deposits, they lose the exorbitant privilege of creating money out of thin air.

The nation regains sovereign control over the money supply. There are no more banks runs, and fewer boom-bust credit cycles. Accounting legerdemain will do the rest. That at least is the argument.

Some readers may already have seen the IMF study, by Jaromir Benes and Michael Kumhof, which came out in August and has begun to acquire a cult following around the world.

Entitled "The Chicago Plan Revisited", it revives the scheme first put forward by professors Henry Simons and Irving Fisher in 1936 during the ferment of creative thinking in the late Depression.

Irving Fisher thought credit cycles led to an unhealthy concentration of wealth. He saw it with his own eyes in the early 1930s as creditors foreclosed on destitute farmers, seizing their land or buying it for a pittance at the bottom of the cycle.

The farmers found a way of defending themselves in the end. They muscled together at "one dollar auctions", buying each other's property back for almost nothing. Any carpet-bagger who tried to bid higher was beaten to a pulp.

Benes and Kumhof argue that credit-cycle trauma - caused by private money creation - dates deep into history and lies at the root of debt jubilees in the ancient religions of Mesopotian and the Middle East.

Harvest cycles led to systemic defaults thousands of years ago, with forfeiture of collateral, and concentration of wealth in the hands of lenders. These episodes were not just caused by weather, as long thought. They were amplified by the effects of credit.

The Athenian leader Solon implemented the first known Chicago Plan/New Deal in 599 BC to relieve farmers in hock to oligarchs enjoying private coinage. He cancelled debts, restituted lands seized by creditors, set floor-prices for commodities (much like Franklin Roosevelt), and consciously flooded the money supply with state-issued "debt-free" coinage.

The Romans sent a delegation to study Solon's reforms 150 years later and copied the ideas, setting up their own fiat money system under Lex Aternia in 454 BC.

It is a myth - innocently propagated by the great Adam Smith - that money developed as a commodity-based or gold-linked means of exchange. Gold was always highly valued, but that is another story. Metal-lovers often conflate the two issues.

Anthropological studies show that social fiat currencies began with the dawn of time. The Spartans banned gold coins, replacing them with iron disks of little intrinsic value. The early Romans used bronze tablets. Their worth was entirely determined by law - a doctrine made explicit by Aristotle in his Ethics - like the dollar, the euro, or sterling today.

Some argue that Rome began to lose its solidarity spirit when it allowed an oligarchy to develop a private silver-based coinage during the Punic Wars. Money slipped control of the Senate. You could call it Rome's shadow banking system. Evidence suggests that it became a machine for elite wealth accumulation.

Unchallenged sovereign or Papal control over currencies persisted through the Middle Ages until England broke the mould in 1666. Benes and Kumhof say this was the start of the boom-bust era.
One might equally say that this opened the way to England's agricultural revolution in the early 18th Century, the industrial revolution soon after, and the greatest economic and technological leap ever seen. But let us not quibble.

The original authors of the Chicago Plan were responding to the Great Depression. They believed it was possible to prevent the social havoc caused by wild swings from boom to bust, and to do so without crimping economic dynamism.

The benign side-effect of their proposals would be a switch from national debt to national surplus, as if by magic. "Because under the Chicago Plan banks have to borrow reserves from the treasury to fully back liabilities, the government acquires a very large asset vis-à-vis banks. Our analysis finds that the government is left with a much lower, in fact negative, net debt burden."

The IMF paper says total liabilities of the US financial system - including shadow banking - are about 200pc of GDP. The new reserve rule would create a windfall. This would be used for a "potentially a very large, buy-back of private debt", perhaps 100pc of GDP.

While Washington would issue much more fiat money, this would not be redeemable. It would be an equity of the commonwealth, not debt.

The key of the Chicago Plan was to separate the "monetary and credit functions" of the banking system. "The quantity of money and the quantity of credit would become completely independent of each other."

Private lenders would no longer be able to create new deposits "ex nihilo". New bank credit would have to be financed by retained earnings.

"The control of credit growth would become much more straightforward because banks would no longer be able, as they are today, to generate their own funding, deposits, in the act of lending, an extraordinary privilege that is not enjoyed by any other type of business," says the IMF paper.
"Rather, banks would become what many erroneously believe them to be today, pure intermediaries that depend on obtaining outside funding before being able to lend."

The US Federal Reserve would take real control over the money supply for the first time, making it easier to manage inflation. It was precisely for this reason that Milton Friedman called for 100pc reserve backing in 1967. Even the great free marketeer implicitly favoured a clamp-down on private money.

The switch would engender a 10pc boost to long-arm economic output. "None of these benefits come at the expense of diminishing the core useful functions of a private financial system."

Simons and Fisher were flying blind in the 1930s. They lacked the modern instruments needed to crunch the numbers, so the IMF team has now done it for them -- using the `DSGE' stochastic model now de rigueur in high economics, loved and hated in equal measure.

The finding is startling. Simons and Fisher understated their claims. It is perhaps possible to confront the banking plutocracy head without endangering the economy.

Benes and Kumhof make large claims. They leave me baffled, to be honest. Readers who want the technical details can make their own judgement by studying the text here. 
 
The IMF duo have supporters. Professor Richard Werner from Southampton University - who coined the term quantitative easing (QE) in the 1990s -- testified to Britain's Vickers Commission that a switch to state-money would have major welfare gains. He was backed by the campaign group Positive Money and the New Economics Foundation.

The theory also has strong critics. Tim Congdon from International Monetary Research says banks are in a sense already being forced to increase reserves by EU rules, Basel III rules, and gold-plated variants in the UK. The effect has been to choke lending to the private sector.

He argues that is the chief reason why the world economy remains stuck in near-slump, and why central banks are having to cushion the shock with QE.

"If you enacted this plan, it would devastate bank profits and cause a massive deflationary disaster. There would have to do `QE squared' to offset it," he said.

The result would be a huge shift in bank balance sheets from private lending to government securities. This happened during World War Two, but that was the anomalous cost of defeating Fascism.

To do this on a permanent basis in peace-time would be to change in the nature of western capitalism. "People wouldn't be able to get money from banks. There would be huge damage to the efficiency of the economy," he said.

Arguably, it would smother freedom and enthrone a Leviathan state. It might be even more irksome in the long run than rule by bankers.

Personally, I am a long way from reaching an conclusion in this extraordinary debate. Let it run, and let us all fight until we flush out the arguments.

One thing is sure. The City of London will have great trouble earning its keep if any variant of the Chicago Plan ever gains wide support.

How Many People Have Had Encounters with “Angelic Light” About “Something Big Coming”?

“There is something coming and the fabric of space and time is getting thin and things are coming through. ... I think it’s going to be either time travelers or other-dimensional beings.”

- Shane Elam, Commercial Real Estate, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

Shane Elam's conscious encounter with “angelic” blue-white light in September or
October 2010, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma:  “I was inside the light and at first,
it was a misty, murky white. And then an electric blue spark started at like
the center of my vision and grew outward, almost like a cold fire.”

Shane Elam, Commercial Real Estate Planner, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma: “I remember hearing a sound, what I believe was a thud. And I turned to look in the direction of the sound and at first I felt my body go rigid! And then I began to see this white light enveloped my vision. I was inside the light and at first, it was a misty, murky white. And then an electric blue spark started at like the center of my vision and grew outward, almost like a cold fire. In my mind’s eye, it was like I was inside of something. I was enveloped in it and the feeling came over me of total peace. It was like I was being connected into something. And I remember feeling at first a warmth come over me. It was almost like being – I could feel a pressure against my body - like a warm, silky liquid almost – enveloped my body. I could feel it all around me. I think I was floating a little bit. It was something I never encountered before."

...

"When I came to, an hour and a half to two hours of time were missing. And I remember when I came out of it, I realized I was weeping. But these were not tears of sadness. These were tears of joy because I had just experienced something that I took to mean angelic. I felt like I had been visited by higher power, like an angel and now my life was worth something – that I had work to do. And this message kept coming back to my mind:  ‘The sleeper must awaken.’"

...

Link with Universal Mind Coming?

The more I think about it, it’s almost like a forgotten knowledge. It’s like a Universal Mind, perhaps like a telepathic link that all humans share. Even animals have some sense of danger for an earthquake. We hear about birds flying away or animals running away knowing that something is coming. And I think we’ve been dumbed down!

You know, I think that our ancestors – they did not have all of this noise in their lives. And I think that somehow we’ve lost that link. And I think that somehow, it’s coming back. And it might be the fact that people are waking up to all the lies!

For so many years, we’ve let Washington, D. C. do what they do and other world leaders do what they do and continue to run things as usual. I don’t know if it’s some sort of thinning of space and time? Something is causing people to wake up and something is allowing us to link up to this Link!”

...

To read the full article, plus an mp3 audio interview, visit:
http://www.earthfiles.com/news.php?ID=2018&category=Environment

© 2012 by Linda Moulton Howe