$24.5 Trillion In US National Debt, $144 Trillion In Unfunded Liabilities In... 2015

 By now everyone has seen and played with the US debt clock via usdebtclock.org whereby anyone who so wishes, can find every little detail about America's current sad fiscal state. The fact that America currently has just under $14 trilllion in national debt should be no surprise to anyone who professes to having an even modest interest in the state of the US economy. Yet a new feature on the "debt clock", namely one which extrapolates future debt at current rates of advancement (instead of one based on the always completely inaccurate CBO estimates), and looks at US debt in the year 2015 will probably make many stop dead in the their tracks. If anyone thought that $14 trillion in 2010 debt is bad, just wait until we hit $24.5 trillion in total US national debt in 2015. And it gets even more surreal: total US Unfunded Liabilities are estimated at $144 trillion, roughly $1.2 million per taxpayer... Was that a pin dropping?

As Zero Hedge has long been predicting, we anticipate roughly $2 trillion in incremental debt per year. Surprisingly we are not far too off from where the "debt clock" sees US leverage in 5 years. At an estimated $24.5 trillion in federal debt, our $2 trillion per year run rate is spot on. Another thing that is spot on: our prediction that the US will need not one but two debt ceiling increases in 2011. And probably 6-8 over the next 5 years.

Some other observations for the US economy in 2015 simply assuming current conditions persist:

• Federal spending will be $3.3 trillion per year, and with federal revenue of $2.3 trillion (this number will be reduced as it also assumes $731 billion in payroll tax, a number which will likely be indefinitely reduced) the result is a budget deficit of $983.7 billion.
• Annual Medicare/Medicaid expenses will be just over $1 trillion
• US population: 326.8 million
• US workforce 131.3 million (and declining)
• Officially unemployed: 19.4 million
• Actual unemployed: 22.3 million
• State/Federal employees: 17.9 million
• People on SSN and other retirees: 72.6 million

And the most critical data:

• Food stamp recipients: 89.7 million
• Foreclosures: 2 million
• Social Security Liability: $19 trillion
• Medicare Liability: $99 trillion
• Total US Unfunded Liabilities: $144 trillion
• Gross Debt to GDP: 143%

Should one of the bolded predictions hit, the travails of Greek and Irish bondholders will be nothing compared to what those unlucky enough to be in possession of US debt in 2015 will have to go through.

Don’t shoot messenger for revealing uncomfortable truths

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 WIKILEAKS deserves protection, not threats and attacks.
IN 1958 a young Rupert Murdoch, then owner and editor of Adelaide’s The News, wrote: “In the race between secrecy and truth, it seems inevitable that truth will always win.”
His observation perhaps reflected his father Keith Murdoch’s expose that Australian troops were being needlessly sacrificed by incompetent British commanders on the shores of Gallipoli. The British tried to shut him up but Keith Murdoch would not be silenced and his efforts led to the termination of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign.
Nearly a century later, WikiLeaks is also fearlessly publishing facts that need to be made public.
I grew up in a Queensland country town where people spoke their minds bluntly. They distrusted big government as something that could be corrupted if not watched carefully. The dark days of corruption in the Queensland government before the Fitzgerald inquiry are testimony to what happens when the politicians gag the media from reporting the truth.
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Euro-Zone Debt Crisis Escalates

 The euro zone’s sovereign debt crisis escalated Friday as the market homed in on Spain as another potential weak spot, leaving officials scrambling to quell investors’ fears.
Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero moved to dispel the growing anxiety surrounding the country’s fiscal position Friday, saying there was “absolutely” no chance the euro zone’s fourth-largest economy would seek a bailout from the European Union. But his attempt to calm the markets had little effect, with the euro tumbling and the selloff in Spanish and Portuguese sovereign bonds continuing.
The Blind Side
“If we continue to see the recent trend in Spanish bond yields then the crisis is going to be taken to a completely new level, as Spain accounts for approximately 11.7% of euro-zone [gross domestic product] which is pretty much double the figure of Ireland, Portugal and Greece [combined],” said Gary Jenkins, head of fixed-income research at Evolution Securities.

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The Anniversary of 9/11

Don’t want to hear this?

Tough. Grow up.
9/11 Commissioners:

• The 9/11 Commission’s co-chairs said that the 9/11 Commissioners knew that military officials misrepresented the facts to the Commission, and the Commission considered recommending criminal charges for such false statements (free subscription required)

• 9/11 Commission co-chair Lee Hamilton says “I don’t believe for a minute we got everything right”, that the Commission was set up to fail, that people should keep asking questions about 9/11, and that the 9/11 debate should continue

• 9/11 Commissioner Timothy Roemer said “We were extremely frustrated with the false statements we were getting”

• 9/11 Commissioner Max Cleland resigned from the Commission, stating: “It is a national scandal”; “This investigation is now compromised”; and “One of these days we will have to get the full story because the 9-11 issue is so important to America. But this White House wants to cover it up”

• 9/11 Commissioner Bob Kerrey said that “There are ample reasons to suspect that there may be some alternative to what we outlined in our version . . . We didn’t have access . . . .” He also said that the investigation depended too heavily on the accounts of Al Qaeda detainees who were physically coerced into talking

• And the Senior Counsel to the 9/11 Commission (John Farmer) – who led the 9/11 staff’s inquiry – recently said “At some level of the government, at some point in time…there was an agreement not to tell the truth about what happened”. He also said “I was shocked at how different the truth was from the way it was described …. The tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public for two years…. This is not spin. This is not true.” And he said: “It’s almost a culture of concealment, for lack of a better word. There were interviews made at the FAA’s New York center the night of 9/11 and those tapes were destroyed. The CIA tapes of the interrogations were destroyed. The story of 9/11 itself, to put it mildly, was distorted and was completely different from the way things happened”

If even the 9/11 Commissioners don’t buy the official story, why do you?
Senior intelligence officers:

• Former military analyst and famed whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg said that the case of a certain 9/11 whistleblower is “far more explosive than the Pentagon Papers”. He also said that the government is ordering the media to cover up her allegations about 9/11. And he said that some of the claims concerning government involvement in 9/11 are credible, that “very serious questions have been raised about what they [U.S. government officials] knew beforehand and how much involvement there might have been”, that engineering 9/11 would not be humanly or psychologically beyond the scope of the current administration, and that there’s enough evidence to justify a new, “hard-hitting” investigation into 9/11 with subpoenas and testimony taken under oath (see this and this)

• A 27-year CIA veteran, who chaired National Intelligence Estimates and personally delivered intelligence briefings to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, their Vice Presidents, Secretaries of State, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and many other senior government officials (Raymond McGovern) said “I think at simplest terms, there’s a cover-up. The 9/11 Report is a joke”

• A 29-year CIA veteran, former National Intelligence Officer (NIO) and former Director of the CIA’s Office of Regional and Political Analysis (William Bill Christison) said “I now think there is persuasive evidence that the events of September did not unfold as the Bush administration and the 9/11 Commission would have us believe (and see this)

• A number of intelligence officials, including a CIA Operations Officer who co-chaired a CIA multi-agency task force coordinating intelligence efforts among many intelligence and law enforcement agencies (Lynne Larkin) sent a joint letter to Congress expressing their concerns about “serious shortcomings,” “omissions,” and “major flaws” in the 9/11 Commission Report and offering their services for a new investigation (they were ignored)

• A decorated 20-year CIA veteran, who Pulitzer-Prize winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh called “perhaps the best on-the-ground field officer in the Middle East”, and whose astounding career formed the script for the Academy Award winning motion picture Syriana (Robert Baer) said that “the evidence points at” 9/11 having had aspects of being an inside job

• The Division Chief of the CIA’s Office of Soviet Affairs, who served as Senior Analyst from 1966 – 1990. He also served as Professor of International Security at the National War College from 1986 – 2004 (Melvin Goodman) said “The final [9/11 Commission] report is ultimately a coverup”

If even our country’s top intelligence officers don’t buy the official story, why do you?
Congressmen:

• According to the Co-Chair of the Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 and former Head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Bob Graham, an FBI informant had hosted and rented a room to two hijackers in 2000 and that, when the Inquiry sought to interview the informant, the FBI refused outright, and then hid him in an unknown location, and that a high-level FBI official stated these blocking maneuvers were undertaken under orders from the White House (confirmed here)

• Current Democratic U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy said “The two questions that the congress will not ask . . . is why did 9/11 happen on George Bush’s watch when he had clear warnings that it was going to happen? Why did they allow it to happen?”

• Current Republican Congressman Ron Paul calls for a new 9/11 investigation and states that “we see the [9/11] investigations that have been done so far as more or less cover-up and no real explanation of what went on”

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• Current Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich hints that we aren’t being told the truth about 9/11

• Current Republican Congressman Jason Chafetz says that we need to be vigilant and continue to investigate 9/11

• Former Democratic Senator Mike Gravel states that he supports a new 9/11 investigation and that we don’t know the truth about 9/11

• Former Republican Senator Lincoln Chaffee endorses a new 9/11 investigation

• Former U.S. Democratic Congressman Dan Hamburg doesn’t believe the official version of events

• Former U.S. Republican Congressman and senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, and who served six years as the Chairman of the Military Research and Development Subcommittee Curt Weldon has shown that the U.S. tracked hijackers before 9/11, is open to hearing information about explosives in the Twin Towers, and is open to the possibility that 9/11 was an inside job

If there is bipartisan questioning of the official story, why aren’t you questioning it?
Other government officials:

• U.S. General, Commanding General of U.S. European Command and Supreme Allied Commander Europe, decorated with the Bronze Star, Silver Star, and Purple Heart (General Wesley Clark) said “We’ve never finished the investigation of 9/11 and whether the administration actually misused the intelligence information it had. The evidence seems pretty clear to me. I’ve seen that for a long time”

• Former Deputy Secretary for Intelligence and Warning under Nixon, Ford, and Carter (Morton Goulder), former Deputy Director to the White House Task Force on Terrorism (Edward L. Peck), and former US Department of State Foreign Service Officer (J. Michael Springmann), as well as a who’s who of liberals and independents) jointly call for a new investigation into 9/11

• Former Federal Prosecutor, Office of Special Investigations, U.S. Department of Justice under Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan; former U.S. Army Intelligence officer, and currently a widely-sought media commentator on terrorism and intelligence services (John Loftus) says “The information provided by European intelligence services prior to 9/11 was so extensive that it is no longer possible for either the CIA or FBI to assert a defense of incompetence”

• The Group Director on matters of national security in the U.S. Government Accountability Office said that President Bush did not respond to unprecedented warnings of the 9/11 disaster and conducted a massive cover-up instead of accepting responsibility

• Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense under President Ronald Reagan (Col. Ronald D. Ray) said that the official story of 9/11 is “the dog that doesn’t hunt”

• The former director of the FBI (Louis Freeh) says there was a cover up by the 9/11 Commission

If top government officials are skeptical, why aren’t you?
Numerous other politicians, judges, legal scholars, and attorneys also question at least some aspects of the government’s version of 9/11.

New claims for unemployment aid reach 484K

 WASHINGTON (AP) -- The economy is looking bleaker as new applications for jobless benefits rose last week to the highest level in almost six months.
It's a sign that hiring remains weak and employers may be going back to cutting their staffs. Analysts say the increase suggests companies won't be adding enough workers in August to lower the 9.5 percent unemployment rate.
First-time claims for jobless benefits edged up by 2,000 to a seasonally adjusted 484,000, the Labor Department said Thursday. That's the highest total since February. Analysts had expected claims to fall.
Initial claims have now risen in three of the last four weeks and are close to their high point for the year of 490,000, reached in late January. The four-week average, which smooths volatility, soared by 14,250 to 473,500, also the highest since late February.
The report "represents a very adverse turn in the labor market, threatening income growth and consumer spending," Pierre Ellis, an economist at Decision Economics, wrote in a note to clients.
Even the lowest mortgage rates in decades are a gloomy sign for the economy. Average rates on 30-year fixed mortgages fell to 4.44 percent, Freddie Mac said Thursday. While that's good for people looking to refinance or buy a home, low rates haven't been enough to energize a struggling housing market.
And the drop suggests investors are losing confidence in the recovery. Mortgage rates track the yields on U.S. Treasurys. They are falling because investors are shifting more money away from stocks and into the safety of Treasurys, which forces those yields down.
Those yields were pushed even lower this week after the Federal Reserve downgraded its assessment of the economy on Tuesday and announced a program to buy more Treasurys to help lift the recovery.
The stock market has been falling since the Fed's more pessimistic outlook. The Dow Jones industrial average dropped 58 points on Thursday and is down more than 300 points for the week.
Economists closely watch weekly claims, which are considered a gauge of the pace of layoffs and an indication of employers' willingness to hire.
Crash Proof: How to Profit From the Coming Economic Collapse (Lynn Sonberg Books)
The government's July jobs report, released Friday, showed that the economy lost a net total of 131,000 jobs last month. Excluding the impact of the elimination of 143,000 temporary census jobs, the economy added a meager 12,000 positions, as layoffs by state and local governments almost canceled out weak hiring by businesses.
Thursday's report on jobless claims indicates that trend may not change soon. Claims fell steadily last year from their peak of 651,000, reached in March 2009. But they have mostly leveled out this year at or above 450,000. In a healthy economy with rapid hiring, claims usually drop below 400,000.
The rise in claims is a sign that private employers may be ramping up layoffs, which declined as recently as June, according to a separate government report released Wednesday.
States with the largest increases in claims two weeks ago cited rising layoffs in the construction and manufacturing industries. The state data lags the national report by one week.
Claims could also be rising because of large job cuts by state and local governments, which are struggling with unprecedented budget gaps. State and local governments cut 48,000 jobs in July, the most in a year.
Some economists speculate that many census workers whose jobs are finished are requesting unemployment benefits.
Another possibility is that small companies, facing tight credit, are still reducing their staffs, even as larger corporations slowly resume hiring.
The report comes after the Federal Reserve said Tuesday that "employers remain reluctant to add to payrolls." The central bank said the pace of economic recovery is likely to be more modest than anticipated.
And on Wednesday, the Commerce Department said June imports jumped while exports dropped. That pushed the trade gap to its widest point since October 2008. Many economists say that could reduce economic growth estimates in the April-to-June quarter to 1.2 percent -- half the 2.4 percent annual rate the government estimated last month.
That's a sharp slowdown from the 5 percent growth in the final quarter of 2009 and the 3.7 percent pace in the January-to-March quarter. That weakening could be prompting more employers to cut staff, or at least hold off on hiring.
The total number of people receiving benefits dropped 118,000 to 4.45 million, the department said. But that doesn't include another 5.3 million people receiving extended benefits paid for by the federal government, as of the week ending July 24, the latest data available.
Some companies are still cutting workers. Medical products manufacturer CareFusion Corp. said Wednesday it plans to eliminate 700 jobs, saving the company up to $120 million a year.

Peter Schiff: “We’re in the Early Stages of a Depression”

 In August 2006, Peter Schiff, president of Euro Pacific Capital, offered what many considered to be an outlier prognosis for the economy: The exuberance would end, real estate prices would crash back down to earth, and consumers would revert to saving from spending. In short, a deep recession was in the works.
As outlandish as he may have sounded at the time, he was right. Four years and the worst recession since the Great Depression later, Schiff stands alone again with a bleaker diagnosis for the economy: an inflationary depression.
In an interview, Schiff, president and chief global strategist of Euro Pacific Capital, a candidate for U.S. Senate in Connecticut, and author of the new book How an Economy Grows and Why It Crashes, said he thinks the government’s policies — massive fiscal stimulus and a zero interest-rate policy — have put the U.S. on a track for a collision course.
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As such, to protect one’s wealth, Schiff recommends divesting U.S. assets and dollar-denominated debt in favor of emerging markets. He likes natural resources economies like Australia, Norway, and Canada.
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Food stamp use hit record 40.8m in May

 WASHINGTON — The number of Americans who are receiving food stamps rose to a record 40.8 million in May as the jobless rate hovered near a 27-year high, the government reported yesterday.
Recipients of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program subsidies for food purchases jumped 19 percent from a year earlier and increased 0.9 percent from April, the US Department of Agriculture said in a statement on its website.
The Malacca Conspiracy

Participation has set records for 18 straight months.

Unemployment in July may have reached 9.6 percent, according to a Bloomberg News survey of analysts in advance of the Aug. 6 release of last month’s rate. Unemployment was 9.5 percent in June, near levels last seen in 1983.

An average of 40.5 million people, more than an eighth of the population, will get food stamps each month in the year that began Oct. 1, according to White House estimates.

The figure is projected to rise to 43.3 million in 2011.

Alan Greenspan: "The Financial System Is Broke"

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Recovery

Details of 100 million Facebook users published online

 The personal details of 100 million Facebook users have been collected and published online in a downloadable file, meaning they will now be unable to make their publicly available information private.

However, Facebook downplayed the issue, saying that no private data had been compromised.

The information was posted by Ron Bowes, an online security consultant, on the Internet site Pirate Bay.

Bowes used code to scan the 500 million Facebook profiles for information not hidden by privacy settings. The resulting file, which allows people to perform searches of various different types, has been downloaded by several thousand people.

This means that if any of those on the list decide to change their privacy settings on Facebook, Bowes and those who have the file will still be able to access information that was public when it was compiled.

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Keiser Report №63: Markets! Finance! Scandal!

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Wikileaks’ War Logs Highlight Global Intelligence Facade Of ‘War On Terror’

CIA funds ISI – ISI funds Taliban, Al Qaeda

 The Wikileaks Afghanistan War Logs, publicly released today, highlight and corroborate what we already know about the “war on terror” – it is a vast and decompartmentalised intelligence operation.

The London Guardian reports:

“A stream of U.S. military intelligence reports accuse Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy agency of arming, training and financing the Taliban insurgency since 2004, the war logs reveal, bringing fresh scrutiny on one of the war’s most contentious issues.”

The reports are said to have been mostly collated by junior officers relying on informants and Afghan officials, prompting one senior U.S. intelligence officer to describe them as a mixture of “rumours, bullshit and second-hand information”.

However, it has been common knowledge for years that the ISI created the Taliban and Al Qaeda as we now know them, acting in its capacity as a direct front for U.S. intelligence.

Before 9/11, Pakistan worked directly with the CIA to create the Taliban in Afghanistan. Selig Harrison from the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars stated:

“The CIA made a historic mistake in encouraging Islamic groups from all over the world to come to Afghanistan. The U.S. provided $3 billion for building up these Islamic groups, and it accepted Pakistan’s demand that they should decide how this money should be spent.

The old associations between the intelligence agencies continue. The CIA still has close links with the ISI (Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence).

Today that money and those weapons have helped build up the Taliban, Harrison said. The Taliban are not just recruits from ‘madrassas’ (Muslim theological schools) but are on the payroll of the ISI. The Taliban are now “making a living out of terrorism.”
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Harrison confirmed that the creation of the Taliban had been “actively encouraged by the ISI and the CIA and that Pakistan had been building up Afghan collaborators who would “sustain Pakistan”.

Al Qaeda was a joint CIA/ISI intelligence database of mujahudeen fighters they had recruited in the late 70s and eighties to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

It was later revealed via de-classified Defence Intelligence Agency documents of 2001 that the DIA was aware that the ISI was sponsoring the Taliban and Al Qaeda, but the Bush Administration chose to ignore its findings.

B Raman, former additional secretary in the Cabinet Secretariat, analysed three recently de-classified DIA documents of 2001 relating to the Taliban and Al Qaeda and said, “From these documents, it is clear that the DIA knew of the ISI’s role in sponsoring not only the Taliban, but also the Al Qaeda.”
No surprise then that in 2003 two senior members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Richard G. Lugar, Republican of Indiana, and Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democrat of Delaware (now vice president), went on record to state that Pakistan’s ISI was sheltering Taliban fighters along the border, thus undermining the stability of Afghanistan.
The Senators told the New York Times that there was evidence that ISI might be helping the Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives along the border infiltrate into Afghanistan.
Then in 2005 CIA officer Gary Schroen, who spearheaded U.S.’ search for Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan, stated that ISI officials are very well aware of the whereabouts of the leadership of Al Qaeda, including Bin Laden himself.
The veteran CIA officer said that regardless of how much reward money America offers, “Bin Laden would not be captured and handed in” because the leadership of Pakistan, including Musharraf, are afraid of the internal political consequences.
Two days before 9/11, the leader of the Afghan Northern Alliance, Commander Ahmad Shah Masood, was assassinated. The Northern Alliance informed the Bush Administration that the ISI was allegedly implicated in the assassination, stating:

“A `Pakistani ISI-Osama-Taliban axis’ [was responsible] of plotting the assassination by two Arab suicide bombers…. `We believe that this is a triangle between Osama bin Laden, ISI, which is the intelligence section of the Pakistani army, and the Taliban,”

Thus the Afghans that would be fighting on the side of the U.S. in the upcoming war after 9/11 are on record with their belief that the ISI and Al Qaeda are intimately connected. Yet the Bush administration began operating with Pakistan and the ISI as an ally.
Not even the corporate media could whitewash these facts and so explained it away by alleging that U.S. officials had sought cooperation from Pakistan because it was the original backer of the Taliban, the hard-line Islamic leadership of Afghanistan accused by Washington of harboring Bin Laden.
Then the so called “missing link” came when it was revealed that the head of the ISI was the principal financier of the 9/11 hijackers.
In various terror attacks, alerts and foiled plots since 9/11, further links between Al Qaeda, the ISI and U.S. and British Intelligence have emerged.
As Professor Michel Chossudovsky has pointed out in his excellent expose, all these links are even corroborated by the House of Representatives International Relations Committee. A Statement in 2000 by Rep. Dana Rohrbacher, Hearing of The House International Relations Committee on “Global Terrorism And South Asia” highlighted that U.S. support funneled through the ISI to the Taliban and Osama bin Laden has been a consistent policy of the U.S. Administration since the end of the Cold War:

…[T]he United States has been part and parcel to supporting the Taliban all along, and still is let me add… You have a military government [of President Musharraf] in Pakistan now that is arming the Taliban to the teeth….Let me note; that [U.S.] aid has always gone to Taliban areas… We have been supporting the Taliban, because all our aid goes to the Taliban areas. And when people from the outside try to put aid into areas not controlled by the Taliban, they are thwarted by our own State Department… At that same moment, Pakistan initiated a major resupply effort, which eventually saw the defeat, and caused the defeat, of almost all of the anti-Taliban forces in Afghanistan.

In July 2007, Tom Fingar of the office of the Director of National Intelligence told a Congressional hearing that he believed the Bush administration was allowing the leadership of Al Qaeda to operate freely in Pakistan and had chosen not to disrupt its activities.
“It’s not that we lack the ability to go into that space, but we have chosen not to do so without the permission of the Pakistani government.” Fingar said.
Fingar’s claims were supported by the revelation that a secret military operation in early 2005 to capture senior members of Al Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal areas was aborted at the last minute after top Bush administration officials decided it was too risky and could jeopardize relations with Pakistan.
“The U.S. has provided $5.6 billion in coalition support funds to Pakistan over the past five years, with zero accountability,” said Congressman Patrick Murphy, D-Pa., at the hearing.
“Why is Pakistan still being paid these large sums of money, even after publicly declaring that it is significantly cutting back patrols in the most important border area?” he asked.
Pakistan and the ISI is the go between of the global terror explosion. Pakistan’s military-intelligence apparatus, which literally created and sponsored the Taliban and Al Qaeda, is directly upheld and funded by the CIA. These facts are not even in dispute, neither in the media nor in government.
These facts were also recently highlighted by Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari, who admitted that the CIA and his country’s ISI together created the Taliban and are still providing support.
The Taliban’s spread into Pakistan has also been connected to intelligence driven plots to Balkanize the middle East.
When a whistleblower, Qari Zainuddin, a tribal leader of the South Waziristan, who defected from the Pakistani Taliban claimed that the group was working with U.S. intelligence to destabilize the country, he was assassinated just days later.
Last November, the LA Times, citing current and former U.S. officials, reported that the CIA has paid millions of dollars to the ISI since 9/11, accounting for as much as one-third of the foreign spy agency’s annual budget, and that the funding, initiated covertly under Bush, has continued under Obama.
A major London School of Economics study, released last year, also highlighted the ongoing relationship between the ISI and the Taliban.
The Pakistani ISI is a CIA front and controls terror cells at the discretion of the highest levels of the U.S. military-industrial complex.
There is a great need to perpetuate the mythical war on terror in order to maintain the pretext for the geopolitical genocide currently being undertaken by globalist advances into the middle east “rogue” (independent) nations.
As our governments assert that they are doing everything in their power to dismantle the global terror network, the reality is the exact opposite. The criminal intelligence networks assembled it, they sponsored it and they continue to fund it using our tax dollars. As any good criminal should, they have a middleman to provide plausible deniability. That middleman is the ISI and the military dictatorship of Pakistan.

Gold Coin Sellers Angered by New Tax Law

 Those already outraged by the president’s health care legislation now have a new bone of contention — a scarcely noticed tack-on provision to the law that puts gold coin buyers and sellers under closer government scrutiny.
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The issue is rising to the fore just as gold coin dealers are attracting attention over sales tactics.
Section 9006 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will amend the Internal Revenue Code to expand the scope of Form 1099. Currently, 1099 forms are used to track and report the miscellaneous income associated with services rendered by independent contractors or self-employed individuals.

Full article here

The real value of gold - $52,831 an ounce?

 In a rather convoluted article on the real value of gold GATA's Adrian Douglas, writing in www.marketforceanalysis.com has calculated that in terms of U.S. dollar convertibility, the real price of gold now stands at $52,381 an ounce!
In producing this figure Douglas goes back to President Nixon's ‘temporary' removal of the convertibility of the dollar for gold in 1971, when the U.S. money supply was valued at $35 an ounce, to the current money supply/price situation.

The Shrinking Middle Class: Why America is becoming a Two-Class Society

Today, Douglas avers, with $13.789 trillion in circulation and a gold price of around $1200 an ounce, if one wanted to return to a gold-backed dollar, the U.S. government would need to hold 11.5 billion ounces - it actually admits to only having 261.5 million ounces (although some believe it may in reality hold even less).  Thus in terms of simple mathematics the gold price - to make the dollar convertible again, would have to be the aforesaid $52,381. And, with the U.S. money supply growing by the day this figure should probably actually be even higher already.
For those who look to a return to the gold standard as a solution to global economic ills, this is the kind of figure at which gold would need to be revalued - a gold bug's dream and financial disaster for short sellers - and which is thus, in reality, almost completely unlikely to happen.  But it does give a pointer to the real devaluation of the U.S. dollar - and other currencies too - since the Nixon removal of the direct tie.
For those who see this effective reduction in value of the U.S. dollar as an actual pointer to where the gold price is going, they may be living in cloud-cuckoo land - perhaps in the same part of the virtual world that looks for the gold:silver ratio to return to around 10:1.  Even so, like the current gold:silver ratio it does suggest that current valuations for both metals are still a long way below where they perhaps ought to be and may ultimately end up.  Yet another bullish indicator for precious metals.

Shilling Discusses Outlook for Euro, Treasury Market

Will Thousands Of Police Layoffs Unleash Chaos And Anarchy Across America?

 Thousands of police officers have been laid off all across America since the current economic crisis began.  Thousands more are getting ready to be laid off.  So could we be on the verge of a new era of chaos and anarchy in America as crime runs wild and there are just far too few police to respond to it all?  That is the message that one blood-smeared billboard in Stockton, California is trying to get across.  Paid for by the Stockton, California police union, the message of the billboard is chillingly clear: “Welcome to the 2nd most dangerous city in California. Stop laying off cops.”  As state, city and local governments across the United States continue to be devastated by the ongoing economic crisis, budget cuts are becoming much deeper and police forces have suddenly become a very popular target.
Officer Steve Leonesio, the president of the Stockton Police Officers Association, has announced that the police union plans to spend approximately $20,000 on at least 20 more billboards.
Why is the union putting up all of these billboards?
Well, it turns out that Stockton has been considering a plan to lay off 53 police officers in an effort to eliminate a $23 million budget deficit.
But law enforcement in Stockton has already been cut to the bone.  Recently, the Stockton Police Department dropped this bombshell….
“We absolutely do not have any narcotics officers, narcotics sergeants working any kind of investigative narcotics type cases at this point in time.”
Do you think drug dealers will be flocking to Stockton after they hear that?
But the truth is that so many of these local governments around the nation are just flat broke at this point.
Even major cities are having to admit that they have accumulated such large debts that they cannot even afford to provide the most basic services any longer.
In Oakland, California the battle over police layoffs has made national headlines over the past couple of weeks.  Oakland has laid off 80 police officers, and now the police chief says that there are some crimes that his department simply will not be able to respond to.
In fact, Chief Anthony Batts has compiled a list of exactly 44 situations, including grand theft, burglary, car wrecks, identity theft and vandalism, that his officers will not be available to handle any longer.
What in the world?
Once upon a time in America you could get a police officer to come out for just about anything – including for getting a cat down out of a tree.
But those days are long gone.
Today it is very hard to get a police officer to come out for anything short of murder.

The following is a partial list of crimes that police officers in Oakland will no longer be responding to….

• burglary
• theft
• embezzlement
• grand theft
• grand theft: dog
• identity theft
• false information to peace officer
• required to register as sex or arson offender
• dump waste or offensive matter
• discard appliance with lock
• loud music
• possess forged notes
• pass fictitious check
• obtain money by false voucher
• fraudulent use of access cards
• stolen license plate
• embezzlement by an employee (over $ 400)
• extortion
• attempted extortion
• false personification of other
• injure telephone/power line
• interfere with power line
• unauthorized cable tv connection
• vandalism

Not that Oakland wasn’t already a mess, but now how long do you think it will be before total chaos and anarchy reigns on the streets of Oakland?
But Oakland is far from alone.
The sheriff’s department in Ashtabula County, Ohio has been slashed from 112 to 49 deputies, and there is now just one vehicle remaining to patrol all 720 square miles of the county.
So what are the citizens of that county supposed to do to protect themselves?
Well, when asked about what they should do, Judge Alfred Mackey gave this stunning piece of advice….
“Arm themselves.”
So is that what we are left with?
Is American society degenerating into a “Road Warrior-style” wasteland where we are all left to fend for ourselves?
It gets really frightening when you start considering just how many police are actually being laid off across the United States….
*Acting State Police director Jonathon Monken has announced that the Illinois State Police will lay off more than 460 troopers and close five regional headquarters by this fall.
*Atlantic City Mayor Lorenzo Langford has proposed a plan to lay off 40 police officers.
*The police department in Vallejo, California will temporarily suspend its K-9 and SWAT programs at the end of the month in a move to delay officer layoffs.
*Last year, 18 special police units in Toledo, Ohio - including the gang task force and the mounted patrol – were eliminated or downsized in an effort to replace the 130 patrol officers who were laid off because of a $20.7 million budget deficit.
*Of 315 municipalities the New Jersey State Policemen’s union canvassed, more than half indicated that they were planning to lay off police officers.
*Four police officers in one town in New Jersey were greeted at work this past Monday morning with notices informing them that they will be laid off on August 31st.
*Police in Phoenix, Arizona have been told that more than 400 officers could be impacted by layoffs if “the worst case scenario” plays out.
*Police and firefighters in Flint, Michigan decided that layoffs were preferable to taking a 15 percent pay and benefits cut.
*The city of Maywood, California laid off all 68 of its employees July 1st and is now “contracting out” police services.
*In Colorado Springs, dozens of police positions are going unfilled and the police helicopters were put up for sale on the Internet.
The sad thing is that as local police forces across America are being stripped down or dismantled, many communities are opening their arms wide to increased federal law enforcement “assistance”.
In recent years, we have seen a large number of examples where the U.S. military is being used for domestic law enforcement, which is supposed to be against the law.  In addition, federal government agencies are increasingly taking over the financing, training and even command of local police.
But is this “federalization” of local law enforcement a good thing?
Of course not.
Unfortunately we live at a time when almost everything is being centralized under federal government control.  Of course this is completely contrary to everything that our founders intended, but most of our “officials” don’t seem too concerned about actually following the Constitution these days.
So what are you seeing in your own local community?  Is the police force being slashed where you live?  Is crime on the rise?  Feel free to leave a comment with your opinion….

The big crash — America plunges into Depression

 It’s the worst of times. America is plunging back into Depression. Only one out of every two Americans of working age has a job. Forty years ago that would have been okay. Dad went to the factory. Mom stayed at home to mind the kids. These days, just to keep the show on the road, mom and pop both work and the kids go to daycare.
Start looking for work now and on average it will take till next April for you to find something. Across the last two months, more than a million Americans simply gave up seeking employment, even as benefits are running out. Ironically, if you quit looking for work you count as officially “discouraged”, and don’t figure in the official unemployment stats, which is the only reason that number hasn’t shot up to record highs.
Somewhere near 10 million Americans without work aren’t getting any kind of cheque. One in every five children is living below the poverty line, sometimes by as much as 50 per cent – classed as “extreme poverty”. Across America, in state after state the till is empty. Barack Obama’s home state of Illinois is effectively bankrupt. So is California. Forty-six of the 50 states are buried under huge deficits.
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CNBC Guest Says Absent Plunge Protection Team Stepping In, Market Would Fall

A highly amusing exchange occurred earlier on CNBC when guest Damon Vickers of Nine Points Capital had an unexpected moment of truthiness and turned some heads when he said that “unless the plunge protection team comes in over the next couple of days, the markets are looking very dicey here.” When a disgusted Joe Kernan asks if Vickers was making a joke about the PPT, the response is “absolutely not – it’s common knowledge that the government steps in and does things to step on the gas and buy stock here and there.” To which Byron Wien has a strong retort: “I don’t believe it.” All that and much more in the clip below. In the meantime, the market is sure having a field day with stocks as once again bad news are discarded and the smallest glimmer of positivity serves as a springboard for yet another ramping short covering spree.

Up to 400,000 Layoffs Expected at State, Local Level

 Here’s another headwind for a sputtering job market: State and local governments plan many more layoffs to close wide budget gaps.
Up to 400,000 workers could lose jobs in the next year as states, counties and cities grapple with lower revenue and less federal funding, says Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Economy.com.
The development could slow an already lackluster recovery. Friday, the Labor Department said employers cut 125,000 jobs, mostly because 225,000 temporary U.S. Census workers completed their stints. The private sector added 83,000 jobs, fewer then expected, as the jobless rate fell to 9.5% from 9.7%.
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Dow Repeats Great Depression Pattern: Charts

 The Dow Jones Industrial Average is repeating a pattern that appeared just before markets fell during the Great Depression, Daryl Guppy, CEO at Guppytraders.com, told CNBC Monday.
“Those who don’t remember history are doomed to repeat it…there was a head and shoulders pattern that developed before the Depression in 1929, then with the recovery in 1930 we had another head and shoulders pattern that preceded a fall in the market, and in the current Dow situation we see an exact repeat of that environment,” Guppy said.
The Dow retreated 457.33 points, or 4.5 percent last week, to close at 9,686 Friday. Guppy said a Dow fall below 9,800 confirmed the head and shoulders pattern.
The Shanghai Composite is seeing a very rapid collapse, falling below 2,500, which suggests the major fall in the Dow, he added.
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Max Keiser and Michael Hudson on Super Imperialism & War Spending