Me must see to it that no one but a beauty pageant is allowed to make money from their bodies.

After all, this is the land of the free. Impotents, unite!

That's new! Fanta is against of taxing any group for any purpose?

Aren't you supporting the taxing of the rich? Or you do not recognize them as a group? Or are we taxing them without any purpose?

How do we define a "ho" again?

I've finally seen her pictures. She qualifies.

What I don't get is why the big stink about what she thinks about gays? It is not like the thinking is her specialty, now, is it?

I can't find any boobied pix of her. Anyone got the good stuff?

I am sorry, I wasn't addressing anyone in particular. Just thinking out loud.

Is this the "boob-wind" picture everyone is talking about?



I kind of missed the whole story...

Hmm..

Basically, this means, that what I am trying to do, is useless. My avatar is a symbol of stupidity.

Seriously thinking about that, I have to admit, that this is probably true. Probably? Almost certainly.

And, so is your action of the same kind. Waste of time and opportunity. Think about it.

Then you'd understand.

Watched it. It appears that this warning has arrived a bit too late. This was said in 1985. By Bezmenov's estimates, we had just a few years left, when we could do something.

It's 2009. 24 years have passed. There is nothing that can be done anymore.

Interestingly, Bezmenov mentions exactly what we see now, that you could shower a person with facts, and you would still not be able to change his perception. Once common sense is killed in an individual, it can no longer be restored.

This is because the brainwashing doesn't deal with misrepresentation of facts, but instead, it trains a perception, a taste. Once an unnatural taste is trained, no fact can change that, as with a drug user, the knowledge that he is dying as a matter of fact, can not change his affections.

I can write one better, if you care to know.

If you wonder, feel like living in a dream, and are looking for answers, read between the lines here. This isn't a newspaper story, so, don't expect it to chew the gist up for you.

A Short History of the Gold Cartel



Governments want a low gold price to make national currencies look good. Gold is recognizable the world over as the ‘canary in the coalmine’ when it comes to money. A rising gold price blurts the unpleasant truth that a national currency is being poorly managed and that its purchasing power is being inflated.

This reality is made clear by former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker. Commenting in his memoirs about the soaring gold price in the years immediately following the end of the gold standard in 1971, he notes: “Joint intervention in gold sales to prevent a steep rise in the price of gold, however, was not undertaken. That was a mistake.” It was a mistake because a rising gold price undermines the thin reed upon which all fiat currency rests – confidence. But it was a mistake only from the perspective of a central banker, which is of course at odds with anyone who believes in free markets.

The US government has learned from experience and taken Volcker’s advice. Given the US dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency, the US government has the most to lose if the market chooses gold over fiat currency and erodes the government’s stranglehold on the monopolistic privilege that it has awarded to itself of creating ‘money’.

So the US government intervenes in the gold market to make the dollar look worthy of being the world’s reserve currency when of course it is not equal to the demands of that esteemed role. The US government does this by trying to keep the gold price low, but this aim is an impossible task. In the end, gold always wins, i.e., its price inevitably climbs higher as fiat currency is debased, which is a reality understood and recognized by government policymakers. So recognizing the futility of capping the gold price, they instead compromise by letting the gold price rise somewhat, say, 15% per annum. In fact, against the dollar, gold is actually up 16.3% p.a. on average for the last eight years. In battlefield terms, the US government is conducting a managed retreat for fiat currency in an attempt to control gold’s advance.

Though it has let the gold price rise, gold has risen by less than it would in a free market because the purchasing power of the dollar continues to be inflated and also because gold remains so undervalued notwithstanding its annual appreciation this decade. These gains started from gold’s historic low valuation in 1999. Gold may not be as good a value as it was in 1999, but it nevertheless remains extremely undervalued.

For example, until the end of the 19th century, approximately 40% of the world’s money supply consisted of gold, and the remaining 60% was national currency. As governments began to usurp the money issuing privilege and intentionally diminish gold’s role, fiat currency’s role expanded by the mid-20th century to approximately 90%. The inflationary policies of the 1960s, particularly in the US, further eroded gold’s role to 2% by the time the last remnants of the gold standard were abandoned in 1971. Gold’s importance rebounded in the 1970s, which caused Volcker to lament the so-called mistakes of policymakers. Its percentage rose to nearly 10% by 1980. But gold’s percent of the world money supply thereafter declined, reaching about 1% in 1999. Today it still remains below 2%.

From this analysis it is reasonable to conclude that gold should comprise at least 10% of the world’s money supply. Because it is nowhere near that level, gold is undervalued.

So given the ongoing dollar debasement being pursued by US policymakers, keeping gold from exploding upward to a true free-market price is the first thing they gain from their interventions in the gold market. The other thing they gain is time. The time they gain enables them to keep their fiat scheme afloat so they can benefit from it, delaying until some future administration the scheme's inevitable collapse.

So how does the US government manage the gold price? They recruit Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase and Deutsche Bank to do it, by executing trades to pursue the US government’s aims. These banks are the gold cartel. I don't believe that there are any other members of the cartel, with the possible exception of Citibank as a junior member. The cartel acts with the implicit backing of the US government to absorb all losses that may be taken by the cartel members as they manage the gold price and further, to provide whatever physical metal is required to execute the cartel's trading strategy. How did the gold cartel come about?

There was an abrupt change in government policy circa 1990. It was introduced by then Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan in order to bail out the banks back then, which like now were insolvent. Taxpayers were already on the hook for hundreds of billions to bail out the collapsed ‘savings & loan’ industry, so adding to this tax burden was untenable. He therefore came up with an alternative.

Greenspan saw the free market as a golden goose with essentially unlimited deep pockets, and more to the point, that these pockets could be picked by the US government using its tremendous weight, namely, its financial resources for timed interventions in the free market combined with its propaganda power by using the media. In short, it was easier to bail out the insolvent banks back then by gouging ill-gained profits from the free markets instead of raising taxes.

Banks generated these profits by the Federal Reserve’s steepening of the yield curve, which kept long-term interest rates relatively high while lowering short-term rates. To earn this wide spread, banks leveraged themselves to borrow short-term and use the proceeds to buy long-term paper. This mismatch of assets and liabilities became known as the carry-trade.

The Japanese yen was a particular favorite to borrow. The Japanese stock market had crashed in 1990, and the Bank of Japan was pursuing a zero interest rate policy to try reviving the Japanese economy. A US bank could borrow Japanese yen for 0.2% and buy US T-notes yielding more than 8%, pocketing the spread, which did wonders for bank profits and rebuilding their capital base.

Gold also became a favorite vehicle to borrow because of its low interest rate. This gold came from central bank coffers, but they refused to disclose how much gold they were lending, making the gold market opaque and ripe for intervention by central bankers making decisions behind closed doors. The amount lent by central banks has been reliably estimated in various analyses published by GATA to be 12,000 to 15,000 tonnes, nearly one-half of central banks total holdings and 4-to-6 times annual new mine production of 2500 tonnes. The banks clearly jumped feet first into the gold carry-trade.

The carry-trade was a gift to the banks from the Federal Reserve, and all was well provided the yen and gold did not rise against the dollar because this mismatch of dollar assets and yen or gold liabilities was not hedged. Alas, both gold and the yen began to strengthen, which if allowed to rise high enough would force marked-to-market losses on those carry-trade positions in the banks. It was a major problem because the losses of the banks could be considerable, given the magnitude of the carry-trade.

So the gold cartel was created to manage the gold price, and all went well at first, given the help it received from the Bank of England in 1999 to sell one-half of its gold holdings. Gold was driven to historic lows, as noted above, but this low gold price created its own problem. Gold became so unbelievably cheap that value hunters around the world recognized the exceptional opportunity it offered, and demand for physical gold began to climb. As demand rose, another more intractable and unforeseen problem arose for the gold cartel.

The gold borrowed from the central banks had been melted down and turned into coins, small bars and monetary jewelry that were acquired by countless individuals around the world. This gold was now in ‘strong hands’, and these gold owners would only part with it at a much higher price. Therefore, where would the gold come from to repay the central banks?

While yen is a fiat currency and can be created out of thin air by the Bank of Japan, gold in contrast is a tangible asset. How could the banks repay all the gold they borrowed without causing the gold price to soar, further worsening the marked-to-market losses on their remaining positions?

In short, the banks were in a predicament. The Federal Reserve’s policies were debasing the dollar, and the ‘canary in the coalmine’ was warning of the loss of purchasing power. So Greenspan's policy of using interventions in the market to bail-out banks morphed yet again.

The gold borrowed from central banks would not be repaid because obtaining the physical gold to repay these loans would cause the gold price to soar. So beginning this decade, the gold cartel would conduct the government’s managed retreat, allowing the gold price to move generally higher in the hope that, basically, people wouldn’t notice. Given its ‘canary in a coalmine’ function, a rising gold price creates demand for gold, and a rapidly rising gold price would worsen the marked-to-market losses of the gold cartel.

So the objective is to allow the gold price to rise around 15% p.a., while at the same time enable the cartel members to intervene in the gold market with implicit government backing in order to earn profits to offset the growing losses on its gold liabilities. Its trading strategy to accomplish this task is clear. The gold cartel reverse engineers the black-box trend-following trading models.

Just look at the losses taken by some of the major commodity trading managers on their gold trading over the last decade. It is hundreds of millions of dollars of client money lost, and gained for the gold cartel to help offset their losses from the gold carry-trade. All to make the dollar look good by keeping the gold price lower than it should be and would be if it were allowed to trade in a market unfettered by government intervention.

There are only two outcomes as I see it. Either the gold cartel will fail in the end, or the US government will have destroyed what remains of the free market in America. I hope it is the former, but the continuing flow of events from Washington, D.C. and the actions of policymakers suggest it could be the latter.

Great links, thanks, Atlantis.

You know, who is the interviewer?
G.E. Griffin, I think!

I did drink in two times in my life, because I was thirsty and there was noting else to drink. I hated the taste, but, I had no choice.

It feels like something unnatural to me. I can compare it to eating "vines". It tastes like plastic. I could just as well munch on zip-ties.

Could? You've got to be kidding. They must, in order to survive. Their duty is not to keep "the wild" clean, but only the computers of their clients. So, there is nothing amoral about it.

I think this is a great thing to do. I was thinking of this myself as well. It is not a problem to get the PC to run remotely, I've done it numerous times as well, the problem is to get paid.

I was thinking that you must offer two stages, evaluation and repair. Evaluation is free, and repair is paid for.

In an evaluation stage you get the access and do your homework, finding the problem and testing the ways that are going to be available for you, such as a possibility of a file transfer, authentications, etc.

Once you're ready, you tell them what it is going to take in dollars, and in time (approximate time of repair). If they agree, then they make a payment and you do it. The key here is that the client doesn't pay for the time. He pays a price for getting back to normal. Guaranteed.

As for you, the trick is to be able to be efficient, so that the evaluation and repair doesn't take more of your hourly rates than paid for.

To charge, the best is to figure out some ways of not being on the books. For instance, there is a company in Germany, that provides a charge service by phone. I.e. your client calls a number and holds certain number of minutes to pay according to a rate you set up. Just an idea.

Best of luck.

Taxing soda seems like a very fair use of tax law. I am for it. I don't drink soda, never did before, and not planning to start anytime soon.

Well, since the majority has no problem taxing me (just to be fair, they say), I see no problem with taxing the fat.

For one, since I have about the same body fat percentage as when I was 20 y.o., it wouldn't apply to me, but it would apply to a majority that has evidently way easier life than I do. So, that's cool. For once!

And secondly, as I have already said before, the only way to stop the socialism is to help it to achieve it's terminal stage. So, let's do it.

Yeah, right...

You're tempting me, right? I just love an intelligent woman.

Are these workers from Davey Resource Group really that dumb, that they need portable computers to supplement their arithmetic skills? Can they not do it with a notepad?