5 Jul 2012

"The Secretive Gulag System that Britain has become in 2012" - Roger Hayes Arrested, Tried In Secret Court, Imprisoned

Roger HayesAt 0930 this morning (2-July), in scenes reminiscent of Stasi East Germany, 2 police cars and 4 policemen from Merseyside Police arrested British Constitution Group Chairman Roger Hayes at his Wirral home and drove away.
The first his family heard of him was at 18:30 this evening via a telephone call from a Warder in Liverpool prison, to say that Roger had been tried and sentenced to prison.
At no time were the family or any other members of the public informed of his arrest, and it is understood that he was tried in a secret court without a Jury.
Denied the right to argue his case, denied the right to a Jury, denied the right for the public to see justice being done, Roger was imprisoned in the secretive gulag system that Britain has become in 2012.
Roger's "crime" is that he has been refusing to pay his Council tax, because along with other state taxes, a proportion of the tax revenue gathered is being sent to the European Union, used to fund unlawful wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria, and promote terrorism right around the world. To pay tax under these circumstances is, at the very least, unlawful under Section 15(3) of the Terrorism Act 2000.
As such the present government of UK in Westminster is complicit to terrorist action and war crimes and therefore the payment of taxes to an unlawful, criminal regime is itself a criminal act - one in which Roger refused to participate.
The state has never forgiven him for the arrest of Judge Peake at Birkenhead court as part of this campaign.

Syriagate: WikiLeaks releases Syria Files, 2.5 mln emails to be published

The whistleblower website WikiLeaks has announced the release of almost 2.5 million emails derived from 680 Syria-related entities and domain names. They are said to be "embarrassing to Syria, but it is also embarrassing to Syria's opponents." Source

Guess who’s bailing out bankrupt western governments now…

: Fourteen years ago during the Asian financial crisis, Indonesia endured a currency collapse, a severe 2-year recession, and an embarrassing IMF bailout.
Western bureaucrats wagged their fingers incessantly at Indonesia, lecturing the country about the dangers of excess and fiscal irresponsibility.
How sweet the irony is. In a stunning rags-to-riches story, Indonesia contributed US$1 billion to the IMF last week in order to help bail out bankrupt Western nations.
As I’ve written before, unlike Japan, the US, and Europe — which all seem to think the answer to an economic bust brought on by a debt-binge is to borrow and spend even more money– Indonesia took its medicine when its economy collapsed back in 1998.
The government cut spending. The economy was de-regulated and thrown open to more foreign investment.
The banking system was restructured, and after a difficult and admittedly very painful two years, the foundation was laid for new economic expansion, which continues to this day.
To be sure, the 1998 collapse of the Indonesian economy cost the incumbent political elite here their cushy positions. President Suharto’s three-decade long iron-grip came to an ignominious end. There were riots in the streets, and he was literally turfed out of office.
But so what? That’s EXACTLY what was needed. Part of the renewal process should always be to ship out the dead wood.
Wandering the streets of Menteng this week, Jakarta’s most up-market residential suburb, it’s as though the Suharto era never existed. The street where he used to live is just another non-descript, quiet, residential street in this leafy inner-city suburb.
Ironically, US President Barack Obama spent some of his childhood in this same suburb of Jakarta.

Is Marxism Coming Back? - azizonomics

Aziz: It is true that as the financial and economic crises roll on, as more and more disasters accumulate, as more people are thrown into unemployment and suffering that more and more of us will question the fundamentals of our economic system. It is inevitable that many will be drawn to some of the criticisms of capitalism, including Marxism.
The Guardian today published a salutary overview of this revival:
In his introduction to a new edition of The Communist Manifesto, Professor Eric Hobsbawm suggests that Marx was right to argue that the “contradictions of a market system based on no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’, a system of exploitation and of ‘endless accumulation’ can never be overcome: that at some point in a series of transformations and restructurings the development of this essentially destabilising system will lead to a state of affairs that can no longer be described as capitalism”.
That is post-capitalist society as dreamed of by Marxists. But what would it be like?It is extremely unlikely that such a ‘post-capitalist society’ would respond to the traditional models of socialism and still less to the ‘really existing’ socialisms of the Soviet era,” argues Hobsbawm, adding that it will, however, necessarily involve a shift from private appropriation to social management on a global scale. “What forms it might take and how far it would embody the humanist values of Marx’s and Engels’s communism, would depend on the political action through which this change came about.”

The Keiser Technique: Bankers doing 'The Ultra-Violent' - with Stacy Herbert and Reggie Middleton

Max Keiser and fiance, Stacy Herbert, discuss bankers doing 'the ultra violent' on the global financial system and propose the Keiser Technique to remedy the asymmetric approach to financial justice. In the second half of the show Max talks to Reggie Middleton of BoomBustBlog about whether or not French banks are next to collapse and about the flashing fraud warnings on Libor that were always there in the credit default swaps market. Source

The Biggest Financial Scam In World History - Bill Black

Why Is the Libor Scandal So Important to You?
There have been numerous big banking scandals recently.
But the Libor scandal is the biggest financial scam in world history.  See this and this.
The former CEO of Barclays said today that banks across the world were fixing interest rates in the run-up to the financial crisis .
Professor of economics and law Bill Black notes:
It is the largest rigging of prices in the history of the world by many orders of magnitude.
Indeed, the scandal effects an $800 trillion dollar market – 10 times the size of the real world economy.
Matt Taibbi explains that this is the “mega scandal of all mega scandals”, because Libor is the “sun at the center of the financial universe”, and manipulating Libor means that “the whole Earth is built on quicksand.”
Homeowners, credit card holders, students, local governments, small businesses, small investors and virtually everyone else in the entire world has been impacted by the manipulation.

Obama, Assange and the President of Eritrea - Double Standards, Afshin Rattansi

We travel to Washington to talk to President Obama and we get the latest on wikileaks from Julian Assange. We also interview the president of Eritrea about the decline of western hegemonic powers. These and much more are all reviewed in this edition of Double Standards with Afshin Rattansi. Source

Exposure of Banker Corruption - Jim Willie

Few observers make the connection, but the current LIBOR scandal is a middle inning of two important events. The first is the demise of the Western banker leadership crew. The executives from the most powerful banks will be last to be deposed, all sharing an ethnic strain. The second is the open fracture of the Western financial system. Over the past few years, to be sure a great many people have grown tired of Jackass descriptions of corruption within the banking sector and financial system in general. Well, hear this: TOLD YA SO! The London Interbank Offered Rate scandal will erupt into an uncontrollable firestorm, hitting one chamber and then the next, with rapid contagion. The Bank of England and the US Federal Reserve are both implicated, but they will skate until the end game. They control the prosecutors and the news networks. Few yet connect the LIBOR rigged prices to the important parts of the financial kingdom run by the harried banker elite. The supposedly informed experts point to the rigged low rates for adjustable rate mortgages, for credit cards, and for student loans. Only the ARM rate is important among these, since it kept and housing bubble going. If truth be told, the LIBOR anomalies have persisted since late 2008. The intrepid first class forensic bond analyst Rob Kirby linked the sordid trails and mismatched discrepancies of the LIBOR to the JPMorgan monster, the US Federal Reserve syndicate ring leader, and the USDept Treasury (haven for Goldman Sachs lieutenants). See his 2008 article on Financial Sense (CLICK HERE). Regulators have done nothing for four years. It was not fully appreciated at the time, like it might be today. The LIBOR should match the settled EuroDollar contract, but it has not for years. The evidence for price rig has been glaring for years. The big banks have skimmed the difference for profit for years. Imagine selling milk or concrete with a variation in price at the wholesale level, enabling vast profits from skimming. It has been permitted for the big banks, a grand blemish on an already scarred sector.

Matt Taibbi: LIBOR Banking Scandal Deepens; Barclays Releases Damning Email, Implicates British Government

This Libor-manipulation story grows crazier with each passing minute. We have officially disappeared now down the rabbit-hole of the international financial oligarchy.
Former Barclays CEO Bob Diamond is testifying before parliament in London today, and that's sure to bring some shocking moments. But there's already been one huge stunner. In advance of that testimony, Barclays released an email from October 29, 2008, written by Diamond to then-Chairman John Varley and COO Jerry del Messier (who also stepped down yesterday). The email from the CEO to the other two senior Barclays execs purports to detail the content of the conversation Diamond had with Bank of England deputy governor Paul Tucker that same day.
In the email, Diamond essentially tells the other two execs that he has been given permission by Tucker – encouraged, actually – to rig Libor rates downward. What’s even worse is that Diamond’s email suggests that Tucker was only following orders, i.e. that Tucker had received phone calls from "a number of senior figures within Whitehall" – that is, the British government – expressing concern about Barclays' high Libor rates. Tucker in this version of events was acting as a middleman for the British government, telling Diamond to fake his borrowing rates in order to preserve the appearance of financial stability, for the good of Queen and country as it were.
RED email
Again: Libor, the London Interbank Exchange Rate, is the rate at which banks borrow from each other. A huge percentage of the world’s variable-rate investments are pegged to Libor.

Syria's Military Strength - From Syrian

If NATO messes with Syria - It will be the End of NATO
Syrian brings us up to date on the Military frontThere is a fair bit of footage from Syria inside this video. Source

Warning: A Global Coup is Underway

Can Americans Escape the Deception? - Paul Craig Roberts

Hot Air Day is upon us. On July 4 hot air will spew forth all over the country as dignitaries deliver homilies to our “freedom and democracy” and praise “our brave troops” who are protecting our freedom by “killing them over there before they come over here.”
Not a single one of these speeches will contain one word of truth. No speaker will lament the death of the US Constitution or urge his audience to action to restore the only document that protects their liberty. No speaker will acknowledge that in the 21st century the Bush/Obama Regime, with the complicity of the Department of Justice, federal courts, Congress, presstitute media, law schools, bar associations, and an insouciant public have murdered the Constitution in the name of the “war on terror.”
As in medieval times, American citizens can be thrown into dungeons and never accounted for. No evidence or charges need be presented to a court. No trial is required, and no conviction.
As in tyrannies, US citizens can be executed at the sole discretion of the despot in the Oval Office, who sits there drawing up lists of people to be murdered.
Protestors exercising their constitutionally guaranteed rights to freedom of speech and freedom of association are attacked by armed police, beaten, tasered, tear-gassed, pepper sprayed, and arrested.
Whistleblowers who report the government’s crimes are prosecuted despite the statute that protects them.

"The Banks are Afraid of Capitalism!" Matt Taibbi explains illegal LIBOR fixing by the banksters at NATGAT + ‘The mob learned from Wall Street’: Matt Taibbi/Eliot Spitzer on the ‘cartel-style corruption’ behind Libor scam

Matt Taibbi the Rolling Stone reporter who coined the term "Vampire Squid" in reference to the infamous investment bank Goldman Sachs breaks down how LIBOR rates were illegally rigged by big banks, and what the consequences to the public are for this criminal behavior.

Barclays, Libor, Bob Diamond, Bank of England and Cameron- Max Goes BALLISTIC!! on Al Jazeera