The Bernank lies to Americans about inflation

"I think what we're witnessing today is the end stages of a grand experiment."
-Dr. Ron Paul

Congressman Paul asks the Bernank if he does his own shopping...since the Bernank says that there is no inflation.
LMAO!

I am not endorsing Ron Paul, but I can't help but notice that the mainstream media is pretending like he isn't running a very successful national campaign.
I would love to see Dr. Paul, an anti-Wall Street, anti-war Republican, go head-to-head against Obama, a pro-Wall Street, pro-war, pro-martial law Democrat.
Heads would explode.
Literally.

Weekly World Revolution Update

Ron Paul is pro-bankruptcy

Last week, Ron Paul introduced legislation to allow states to regulate their own marijuana industries. He is pro-decriminalization.
Not surprisingly, he's pro-bankruptcy too.
This week, the Texas Congressman and Presidential Candidate said that the US should stop paying it's debts and default.
Yes he did.
He'd settle for not paying the Fed, whom he wants to audit.

"We owe, like, $1.6 trillion because the Federal Reserve bought that debt, so we have to work hard to pay the interest to the Federal Reserve," Paul said. "We don't, I mean, they're nobody; why do we have to pay them off?"
-CNN

Iraq reconstruction theft may actually be $18 billion

So about that $6.6 billion "largest theft in US history," apparently it was actually more like $18.7 billion. That's almost ALL of the shrinkwrapped bricks of greenbacks that the Bush administration sent over to Iraq to reconstruct a compliant puppet regime in that country. A 2004 agreement established that the US would be responsible for safeguarding the $20 billion in cash that was allegedly sent over. Not surprisingly, almost all of it has disappeared without a trace. US officials have allegedly audited the money 3 times, but still have no clue where it is.

The cash came from an account at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, and was allegedly a combination of Iraqi oil revenue, surplus from the UN's oil for food programme, and sales of Iraqi assets.

The New York Fed is refusing to tell investigators how many billions of dollars it shipped to Iraq during the early days of the US invasion there, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction told CNBC Tuesday.
The Fed's lack of disclosure is making it difficult for the inspector general to follow the paper trail of billions of dollars that went missing in the chaotic rush to finance the Iraq occupation, and to determine how much of that money was stolen.
-CNBC

The Fed is claiming that the money belonged to the Iraqi people, and therefore, they aren't allowed to let anyone else know how much money actually went over to Iraq for reconstruction. However, since the Iraqi people never got the money, and they're wondering where the hell it went, it's a little hard to believe that the Fed can't get authorization from them to disclose how much of their money it allegedly shipped to them.
Clearly, the Fed just doesn't want anyone to know how much money was sent over, because then we'd know how much of it was stolen.

$6.6 billion in Iraqi reconstruction funds unaccounted for

Surprise, surprise. Another $6.6 billion of US reconstruction money has disappeared in Iraq.

Pentagon officials determined that one giant C-130 Hercules cargo plane could carry $2.4 billion in shrink-wrapped bricks of $100 bills. They sent an initial full planeload of cash, followed by 20 other flights to Iraq by May 2004 in a $12-billion haul that U.S. officials believe to be the biggest international cash airlift of all time.
This month, the Pentagon and the Iraqi government are finally closing the books on the program that handled all those Benjamins. But despite years of audits and investigations, U.S. Defense officials still cannot say what happened to $6.6 billion in cash — enough to run the Los Angeles Unified School District or the Chicago Public Schools for a year, among many other things.

For the first time, federal auditors are suggesting that some or all of the cash may have been stolen, not just mislaid in an accounting error. Stuart Bowen, special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, an office created by Congress, said the missing $6.6 billion may be "the largest theft of funds in national history."

The mystery is a growing embarrassment to the Pentagon, and an irritant to Washington's relations with Baghdad. Iraqi officials are threatening to go to court to reclaim the money, which came from Iraqi oil sales, seized Iraqi assets and surplus funds from the United Nations' oil-for-food program.
-LA Times

$61 billion of US taxpayer money has already been spent on reconstructing Iraq, a country that the US government bombed for over a decade prior to the 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation.
Since both the Iraqi puppet regime and the private contractors hired by the Pentagon to reconstruct the bombed-out nation are both corrupt and criminally incompetent, it is hard to say for sure who exactly stole all the money.
But even though we don't know where the money went, we know where all of that paper came from.

The White House decided to use the money in the so-called Development Fund for Iraq, which was created by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to hold money amassed during the years when Hussein's regime was under crippling economic and trade sanctions.

The cash was carried by tractor-trailer trucks from the fortress-like Federal Reserve currency repository in East Rutherford, N.J., to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, then flown to Baghdad. U.S. officials there stored the hoard in a basement vault at one of Hussein's former palaces, and at U.S. military bases, and eventually distributed the money to Iraqi ministries and contractors.
-LA Times

Well, we can’t even honestly say that half of the money was distributed to Iraqi ministries and contractors, because no one can account for it.

World Revolution Update

Bernanke speaking did not help

Euro Pacific Capital CEO, long-time Fed critic, and "financial doomsayer" Peter Schiff thinks that the Fed is doing the wrong thing.

Schiff went right for the jugular. Noting that a Bloomberg article called Wednesday's Bernanke press conference a "success," Schiff said that, "As the Fed chairman spoke, the dollar was getting crushed, gold surged to a new high. How do you call that a success? That's like saying the Titanic had a successful crossing just because some passengers happened to make it to New York."
"[Bernanke is] lying," Schiff continued. "The more the Fed insists that inflation is transitory, the more its reputation becomes transitory."
-Yahoo! Finance

The Bernank claimed that he wants a strong dollar, but clearly, he is acting to destroy the dollar. He's either doing it willingly, or he is the biggest idiot to ever put on a monkey suit.

"I will say that in the race for the worst Fed Chairman ever, Ben Bernanke is giving Alan Greenspan a run for his money. He just might take the crown."
-Peter Schiff

That pyramid ain't made of paper...

Precious metals, which have been skyrocketing for quite some time now, reacted even more bullishly to the Bernank's press conference. It actually takes quite a bit of skill to reach record high after record high after record high for so long a period.

The gold price has made new record highs at over $1,530 per ounce, while silver has regained upward momentum following its descent from close to $50 per ounce on Monday. Although platinum and palladium are below their year highs set in February, both metals have been boosted by Bernanke’s comments. Platinum reached over $1,827 per ounce in late trading yesterday.
-GoldMoney

As a matter of fact, yesterday, Weiss Ratings gave the US a "C" rating for creditworthiness, putting the soon-to-be-former largest economy in the world below Mexico, it's neighbor the south (yes, the one whose citizens risk robbery, rape, and murder to sneak into the US...or at least they used to). That US rating actually ranks it 33rd in the world.

A C from Weiss is roughly equivalent to a BBB rating from the big rating agencies like Moody’s Investors Service, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch. That’s about two notches above non-investment grade, or junk, status.
-MarketWatch

The Con of the Millenium

So the basic outline of the Con is that private losses from the financialization of the U.S. economy were shifted to the public. Now to keep the Status Quo and Financial Plutocracy from imploding, the public is on the hook for $1.6 trillion in additional borrowing every year until Doomsday (around 2021 or so).
Having secured the backing of the Central Bank and Central State, the Plutocracy's only problem now is that it needs a risk-free source of high-yield income.
-Charles Hugh Smith

The US Teasury market is primarily dependent on one buyer: The Federal Reserve. If the Fed were to stop buying treasuries, rates would theoretically go up to try to induce anyone to buy them.
Well, then the Oligarchs would start buying up those suddenly higher-yield Teasuries...with all the money that they have been looting from the American people.
As rates increase, so will the demand for "austerity," (Would you care for some tea?) which should result in fewer bonds being issued, which should also result in a decline in rates, thereby boosting the value of the high-yield debt already purchased by the Oligarchs....with your tax money.


i.e. They're buying our country with our money, and we're getting nothing out of it but more and more debt.

This is the ultimate endgame of the financialization of the U.S. economy and the concentration of wealth and thus political power in the hands of those who skimmed the immense gains from that financialization.
-Charles Hugh Smith