Jerome R. Corsi's Blog, page 346
November 11, 2013
Criminal terror charges filed against Obama
WASHINGTON –- Several prominent media sources in Egypt are now reporting that Egyptian lawyers have filed criminal terrorism charges in the International Criminal Court against President Obama in addition to the criminal terrorism charges previously filed in Egyptian courts against the president’s half-brother Malik Obama.
Malik Obama is quickly becoming a person of interest in Egypt for his alleged management of funds for a terrorist organization based in neighboring Sudan. A group of Egyptian lawyers, meanwhile have charged President Obama with crimes against humanity for his support of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.
The charges come as the criminal trial against former Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi is scheduled to begin in Egypt in January 2014. Morsi facing charges that he supported the Muslim Brotherhood in acts of violence directed against the Egyptian people.
President Obama is likely to be a subject in Morsi’s criminal trial because of evidence the Obama administration used the U.S. Embassy in Cairo to provide direct financial support to key Muslim Brotherhood political operatives, with the full knowledge and complicity of the Morsi government, as WND was first to report in August.
Criminal complaints filed at ICC
The Egyptian newspaper El Watan has reported a group of Egyptian lawyers has submitted a complaint to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, charging Obama with backing the group that incited widespread violence in Egypt both before and after what is known in Egypt as the “June 30 Revolution.” The Egyptian army coup d’état removed Morsi from the presidency July 3.
As first reported by CBN News, the complaint names several top-ranking Muslim Brotherhood leaders, beginning with the head of the organization, Muhammad Badie, as well as Mohamed al-Beltagy, Essam al-Erian and Safwat Hegazi.
The complaint charges that Obama coordinated, incited and assisted the armed elements of the Muslim Brotherhood in the commission of crimes against humanity in the period from March 7 through Aug. 18 in Egypt.
The complaint specifies the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt persecuted the country’s Christian minority, including the torching, destruction and plundering of some 85 Christian churches. The regime also scapegoated the Christian Copts in Egypt for their support of the June 30 Revolution and the removal of Morsi from the presidency, the complaint asserts.
The complaint alleges Muslim Brotherhood incitement against the Copts resulted in the murder of a 10-year-old girl who was shot and killed as she walked back from Bible class, the murder of a young Coptic priest who was shot in front of his church in the Egyptian Sinai with his body found mutilated and beheaded, and the murder of two girls, aged 8 and 12, who were riddled with bullets as they attended a Christian church wedding.
The complaint further alleges that since the Muslim Brotherhood denounced the Copts, entire towns and villages have been emptied of Christians. More than 100 Christian families, for example, have been driven from the North Sinai city of El Arish.
Muslim Brotherhood supporters are accused of extorting Copts by making them pay tribute money to Islamic overlords, while those unwilling to pay were attacked, with their wives and children being beaten or kidnapped.
In a YouTube video, CBN News contributor Raymond Ibrahim reported from Egypt details of alleged atrocities committed by Muslim Brotherhood members against Christians in Egypt.
Criminal complaints against Malik Obama
Former PLO member and native Arabic-speaker Walid Shoebat reported on his website that Youm7 television in Egypt has now confirmed Ahmed Nabil Ganzory – in his capacity as a lawyer and agent for Sadik Rauf Ebeid, a physician residing in the United States and an officer in the Egyptian Air Force – filed a criminal complaint against Malik Obama with Egyptian Attorney General Hisham Barakat.
WND reported in September that the complaint called for Malik Obama to be placed on Egypt’s terror watch list because of his involvement as an owner and investment adviser for the Sudan-based Islamic Dawa Organization, or IDO, and the organization’s umbrella group, the Muslim Brotherhood.
The following is a direct translation from Youm7:
Dr. Ahmed Nabil Ganzory, in his capacity as lawyer and agent for Dr. Sadik Rauf Ebeid, and resident in the United States of America, filed a complaint with Egypt’s Attorney General Hisham Barakat, against Malik Obama, accusing him of supporting terrorism in Egypt and for his involvement in managing the Islamic Da’wa Organization (IDO). The complaint also asks to include Chancellor Tahani Al-Gebali to substantiate claims against Obama. …
Complaint No. 1761 for the year 2013 reported to the Attorney General asked the Egyptian High Court to consider the suspicious activity of a group called the Islamic Da’wa Organization (IDO), which is owned and managed by Malik Obama. This group is now being investigated by international bodies and the attached evidence proves beyond a reasonable doubt that a close link exists between Malik Obama and some of the most notorious characters already wanted for their involvement in terrorism, as is consistent with the pictures and reports attached. …
The complaint also asks the court to bring in Malik Obama – a resident of the United States – to be questioned in regards to the terrorist groups in Egypt, whether by inciting or participating with or in any form of support punishable by law. It seeks permission to declare Obama a defendant in his right outside Egypt diplomatically, through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In the case of non-appearance and compliance for the investigation, the complainant requests monitoring [Mr. Obama] by including his name on all Egyptian airports and ports, and take the necessary legal steps. [emphasis placed by Walid Shoebat]
In August, WND reported Tahani Al-Gebali, chancellor of the Constitutional Court of Egypt, substantiated the claims made against Malik Obama. On a television news programs in Egypt, al-Gebali asked the court to bring Malik Obama to Egypt for questioning as “one of the architects” of investments made by the Muslim Brotherhood.
Ganzory, the attorney who filed the criminal complaint against Malik Obama, was identified in a recent interview on El-Balad TV in Egypt as an Egyptian constitutional law expert.
In the interview, Ganzory claimed he has “what it takes to convict Obama’s brother in financing terrorism.”
“Malik Obama will be brought to face justice in Egypt if and when these charges are proven,” he said.
In an email to WND, Dr. Sadek Raouf Ebeid, the U.S. resident who brought the criminal complaint in Egypt against Malik Obama, explained an attempt to serve the complaint to Malik in Kenya failed because he was not in the country at the time.
Ebeid further explained his attorney, Ganzory, is currently preparing to serve the complaint to Malik in the U.S.
Arguing that President Obama is complicit in advancing the activities of his half-brother, Ebeid said evidence WND has published suggests Malik Obama received unprecedented assistance from the White House through retroactive approval of tax-exempt status for the Barack H. Obama Foundation, a 501(c)3 organization created by Malik Obama in the U.S.
November 6, 2013
Reversed! Key claim to Warren Commission flipped
WASHINGTON – Fifty years after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Marina Oswald, the wife of the alleged sole assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, is making a claim different from what she told the Warren Commission.
Marina Oswald now insists that her husband was innocent of killing the president, a fundamental change of mind from her testimony to the Warren Commission in 1964 in which she said she believed her husband was guilty of both the JFK assassination and an attempt on the life of right-wing firebrand Gen. Edwin Walker.
Now a 72-year-old reclusive grandmother, Marina has lived with her second husband, Ken Porter, in Rockwell, Texas, since the mid-1970s.
Her reversal on the question of Oswald’s guilt came as a result of reading books and other material about the JFK assassination, according to a recent report by the London Daily Mail.
Marina told the London newspaper she still believes her telephone is being tapped by the Secret Service, and she lives in fear of being targeted and killed by the CIA.
But sorting out the truth about Marina Oswald has never been easy.
There is evidence she was a KGB agent who was of sufficient threat to the CIA to warrant the CIA paying her a substantial bribe keep quiet about her status.
Then, there is Oswald’s mother, who despite Marina’s testimony at the time of the JFK assassination, maintained until she died that her son was an intelligence-double agent who was framed as the “patsy” in the JFK assassination. It’s exactly the claim Lee Harvey Oswald himself made before he was murdered by Jack Ruby.
Marina a KGB agent?
Ioan Mihai Pacepa, the highest ranking Soviet bloc intelligence officer ever to defect to the United States, has provided highly credible evidence and arguments that Oswald was a KGB operative sent back into the United States with a mission to assassinate JFK. Pacepa’s evidence indicates Marina was also a KGB agent, paired as an accomplice with Oswald in a KGB-arranged marriage.
On Nov. 22, 1963, when JFK was assassinated, Pacepa was living in his native Bucharest, one of three deputy chiefs of the Romanian espionage service, the Department of Foreign Intelligence, or DIE.
At that time, the DIE was a subsidiary of the Russian Soviet espionage service, the Pervoye Glavnoye Upravleniye, or PGU, the First Chief Directorate of the KGB.
In his 2007 book “Programmed to Kill: Lee Harvey Oswald, the Soviet KGB, and the Kennedy Assassination,” Pacepa traced a wealth of Soviet operational patterns visible throughout the material on Oswald that had been turned up by U.S. investigators. Pacepa said the American investigators lacked the experience and insider’s familiarity with Soviet intelligence operations to recognize the telltale signs that Oswald was a KGB agent.
“Eventually I developed an approach that has never before been used in any of the many studies of the Kennedy assassination,” Pacepa wrote in his book, describing his investigative methodology.
“Taking the factual material on Oswald developed by official and private U.S. investigators, I stacked it up against the operational patterns used in Soviet espionage – patterns little known to outsiders because of the utter secrecy endemic to that community.”
After many years of studying evidence accumulated regarding the JFK assassination, Pacepa found a wealth of information that dovetailed with Soviet operational patterns. He became convinced Oswald was recruited by the Soviets when he was a Marine stationed in Atsugi, Japan, outside Tokyo.
One of the more enigmatic characters in the JFK assassination saga is George DeMohrenschildt, who together with his wife, Jeanne, befriended Lee Harvey Oswald and Marina, when the couple returned to the Untied States and settled in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
Pacepa concluded DeMohrenschildt was Oswald’s KGB handler. Pacepa described DeMohrenschildt as “a long-time Soviet illegal officer whose biography had frequently changed in order to accommodate his Soviet intelligence tasks.”
In testimony to the Warren Commission, DeMohrenschildt was remarkably vague about how he and his wife met the Oswalds.
“I tried, both my wife and I, hundreds of times to recall how exactly we met the Oswalds,” he testified under oath. “But they were out of our mind completely, because so many things happened in the meantime. So please do not take it for sure how I first met them.”
Jeanne DeMohrenschildt was equally vague in her testimony.
“All of a sudden they arrived on the horizon,” she told the Warren Commission. “And actually, who discovered them for the first time, I don’t even know that.”
Her vagueness on recalling how she and her husband first met the Oswald strains credulity.
“I cannot even tell,” she said finally. “I would like to know, myself, now, how it came about.”
George DeMohrenschildt had a tendency to show up just where the CIA might have needed him. He was in Haiti just before a CIA-engineered effort by Cuban exiles to topple Duvalier and later in CIA training camps set up in Guatemala for Cuban exiles just before the Bay of Pigs invasion.
When Warren Commission attorney Wesley Liebeler asked Ruth Paine if Marina Oswald ever mentioned George DeMohrenschildt to her, she answered, “Well, that’s how I met her.”
Marina Oswald subsequently moved into Paine’s home as a roomer and was living there at the time of the assassination. The meeting occurred at a February 1963 party in Dallas that Paine attended especially to meet Marina, supposedly because she was looking for someone with whom to practice her Russian.
Later, Paine’s testimony would be particularly damaging to Oswald, describing him as a deeply disturbed individual, extremely unhappy with his life in the United States and potentially violent to his wife.
The evidence that DeMohrenschildt’s CIA connections were the magnet that drew him to Oswald is a strong and important counterweight to Pacepa’s suggestion DeMohrenschildt was a KGB agent assigned to be Oswald’s “handler” in Dallas.
Did the CIA influence Marina’s testimony?
In the aftermath of the JFK assassination, the CIA brokered a substantial financial pay-off to Marina Oswald. The broker in the deal was C.D. Jackson, who was the publisher of Life magazine.
The anti-communist journalist and author Isaac Don Levine befriended Marina Oswald shortly after the JFK assassination. In response to a request from former CIA director Allen Dulles, Jackson helped broker a $25,000 book deal with New York publisher Meredith Press to publish Marina’s life story, with Levine agreeing to be the ghostwriter.
The book was never written, and Marina Oswald reportedly ended up receiving over $200,000 in what has been described as a “payoff” that Levine arranged.
Both Jackson and Levine had extensive CIA ties. Frank Wisner, who had worked during World War II with Jackson in the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor to the CIA, had transitioned to become the director of counter-intelligence for the CIA.
In 1948, Wisner recruited Jackson to participate in Operation Mockingbird, a CIA project in which respected journalists were secretly paid by the CIA to publish stories favorable to the CIA. Jackson had had become managing director of Time-Life International in 1948.
Jackson subsequently became the publisher of Fortune magazine, another Henry Luce creation. In February 1953, Jackson was appointed as a special assistant to President Eisenhower in a role that included coordinating with the CIA and advising Eisenhower on Cold War planning and the tactics of psychological warfare.
As publisher of Life magazine, Jackson purchased the Zapruder film of the JFK assassination, from which he published only selected frames shown as still photographs. Jackson resisted making the Zapruder film available for the public to view, arguing it was too graphically violent for widespread distribution. None less than Carl Bernstein, the former Washington Post reporter of Watergate fame, dubbed C.D. Jackson as “Henry Luce’s personal emissary to the CIA.”
Levine was born in Russia and spoke Russian fluently. He spent an intensive week coaching Marina Oswald just prior to her first session before the Warren Commission on Feb. 3, 1964.
Since the end of World War II, Levine had become involved with what was then known as the China Lobby, a group of supporters for Nationalist China opposing Mao and the spread of communism into China.
Editing a magazine on behalf of the China Lobby called Plain Talk, Levine published a stream of articles analyzing the dangers to the United States from China after its fall to the communist Chinese following Mao’s revolution, which began in 1949.
Levine’s history as an anti-communist also included credits for encouraging Whittaker Chambers to speak out against Alger Hiss. James Herbert Martin, who was then acting as Marina Oswald’s literary agent and manager, believed that Levine’s motivation at the time was to tie Oswald in with the Communist Party by coaching Marina on what to say when she testified to the Warren Commission.
The second possible interpretation of Levine’s role was that he was “on the scene primarily for the purpose of gaining intelligence.”
This was the impression of some of the FBI agents who questioned Levine about his relationship with Marina Oswald, including FBI counter-intelligence head William Sullivan.
Oswald’s mother: ‘My son was a double-agent’
“Lee Harvey Oswald, my son, even after his death, has done more for his country than any other living human being,” Marguerite Oswald insisted, speaking to reporters at the gravesite of her son at Rose Hill Cemetery in Fort Worth, Texas, in late 1963.
Testifying to the Warren Commission, Marguerite told them she asked her son why he came back to the United States. She knew he had a good job in Russia because he sent her expensive gifts, and he was married to a Russian girl.
“He said, ‘Mother, not even Marina knows why I have returned to the United States.’ And that is all the information I ever got out of my son.”
Until the day she died, Marguerite Oswald insisted her son was innocent. She believed he died in the service of his country – the United States of America – and that he laid down his life playing out his assigned counter-intelligence role as a loyal secret agent, whatever precisely that role may have been.
Note: Media wishing to interview Jerome Corsi, please contact us here.
November 5, 2013
Reporters in Dallas with JFK recall assassination
Jim Lehrer and Bob Schieffer at the National Press Club Monday night (WND photo).
WASHINGTON – Four journalists who covered the JFK assassination in Dallas recalled their experiences in a two-hour panel Monday evening at the National Press Club attended by a near full-house of more than 300.
In the discussion, none of the voiced any dispute with the Warren Commission conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin.
“No one has ever presented to me evidence that proved anyone else other that Lee Harvey Oswald was the shooter,” said Bob Schieffer, CBS News senior correspondent, “even though we still have no rational explanation why Lee Harvey Oswald did it.”
When asked about research concluding there were other shooters, Schieffer expressed concern that social networking on the Internet permitted citizen journalists to report eyewitness accounts that were not validated by a second source.
“It’s incredible what people will put on television,” Schieffer scoffed when asked about a documentary currently being broadcast on Reelz TV arguing JFK was killed by a shot fired accidently by a Secret Service agent riding in the “Queen Mary” Secret Service car trailing JFK’s limo.
In 1963, Schieffer was a cub reporter for the Fort Worth Star Telegram when he answered a phone call from Lee Harvey Oswald’s mother, Marguerite Francis Claverie, saying she just learned her son had been arrested for the murder of President Kennedy and she needed a ride to Dallas.
“To see a young and vigorous man like JFK gunned down by bullets fired by a madman registered an impact on my psyche,” Schieffer said.
Schieffer interviewed Oswald’s mother while driving her from Fort Worth to the Dallas Police. He said she complained throughout the ride that she and her son were “nobody” and that their story would be ignored in the sympathy that was certain to pour out from the nation for the rich JFK and his glamorous wife, Jackie.
“In my story I didn’t report everything she said,” Schieffer explained. “It was all so hard to grasp. I was in grief and much of what Oswald’s mother was saying was incredible to me, very self-pitying, almost incomprehensible.”
‘I might have saved JFK’s life’
On Nov. 22, 1963, PBS NewsHour anchor Jim Lehrer, then a reporter for the Dallas Times Herald, was assigned to cover the arrival of Air Force One at Love Field in Dallas.
“I guess I might be responsible for getting the bubble-top removed from the limo,” Lehrer recalled, explaining how he was asked by his editor to find out at Love Field whether JFK’s limo would have the bubble-top on for the motorcade to Dallas, or not.
“I went over to the limo and saw that the limo did have the bubble-top on,” Lehrer explained. “It had been raining that morning in Dallas, but the rain had stopped.
Going over to the Secret Service agent guarding the limo, Lehrer asked whether the bubble-top was going to remain on the limo. The agent called supervisors on his two-way radio.
Receiving the order to remove the bubble-top, the agent went to work immediately.
“I’ve often thought that if I never asked about that bubble-top, I might have saved JFK’s life,” Lehrer said. “Who knows, maybe the bubble-top would have diverted Oswald’s bullets, or maybe Oswald would not have shot at all, had he seen the bubble-top was yet on the limo.”
Marianne Means, Sid Davis, Jim Lehrer and Bob Schieffer covered the JFK assassination in Dallas (WND photo).
Sid Davis, a radio correspondent for Westinghouse, ended the day JFK was shot serving as a pool reporter on Air Force One. He witnessed Lyndon Baines Johnson taking the oath of office.
At Parkland Hospital after JFK had been pronounced dead, Davis asked Johnson if he was going to return to Washington immediately.
“I began, ‘Mr. President,’ and Johnson looked surprised,” Davis said. “I guess it was the first time anyone had called LBJ ‘Mr. President,’ and he just looked stunned.”
Davis told how Secret Service agents rushed LBJ out of Parkland Hospital once JFK had been pronounced dead.
“At that time, we didn’t know how many shooters there were,” Davis explained.
On board Air Force One, Davis told the audience the temperature inside the airplane was extremely hot because the airplane had not been started and there was no air conditioning.
“It must have been 100 degrees in there,” Davis recalled. “I counted 28 people who were crowded in that small space to watch LBJ take the oath of office.”
Davis observed Johnson was “in total control” as he placed phone calls to Attorney General Robert Kennedy and Assistant Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, both of whom, Davis said advised him to take the oath of office before Air Force One left Dallas.
“Once back on Air Force One, LBJ took charge, and he did it resolutely, with compassion toward Mrs. Kennedy,” Davis said.
Davis recalled that as the oath of office was being administered, Jackie Kennedy was on LBJ’s left and his wife was on his right.
It took 28 seconds to administer the oath, Davis remembered. LBJ kissed Mrs. Kennedy on her cheek and he embraced Evelyn Lincoln, JFK’s secretary, but he warded off various Texas politicians, including Congressman Albert Thomas, who wanted to congratulate LBJ.
“LBJ didn’t want to turn the ceremony into a celebration,” Davis said. “Jackie had her wits about her, but she was very wide-eyed and unblinking.”
Davis explained Johnson had sent his secretary to the back of the airplane to ask Mrs. Kennedy if she would join him for the swearing in. She agreed, deciding she would remain in the bloodstained clothes she had worn during the assassination.
“Jackie said, ‘Let them see what they have done,’” Davis recalled, explaining why Jackie did not change clothes.
The fourth panelist, Marianne Means, a retired Hearst columnist who was the only female reporter on Press Bus No. 1 when Kennedy was shot, said very little.
In a wheelchair and speaking with difficulty, Means commented she observed JFK’s brain matter splattered as “little white dots” mixed with his blood in the back of the limo parked at Parkland Hospital.
“Half of Kennedy’s head was blown off,” she said, referring to the massive head wound that killed JFK.
Lehrer first to ask: ‘Did you shoot JFK?’
Among the other points of interest during the panel discussion, Lehrer disclosed that he was the first reporter at the Dallas Police Department on the evening of Nov. 22, 1963, to ask Oswald if he shot JFK.
Jim Lehrer at the Dallas Police Department headquarters, where Lee Harvey Oswald was in custody (KRLD-TV, KDFW Collection)
“It was when Oswald was in the halls of the police station,” Lehrer recalled. “Oswald replied, ‘I didn’t kill anybody.’”
During questions-and-answers at the end of the program Monday night, Lehrer was asked if he believed Oswald when he denied shooting JFK.
“It wasn’t my job to believe him or to disbelieve him,” Lehrer answered. “I just reported what he said.”
Lehrer also added he felt very confused at that time.
“It was a mix of emotions I felt that night. I felt grief, and I struggled to believe that JFK was really dead.”
Lehrer told the group that it was his story in the Dallas Times Herald reporting JFK’s motorcade route that Oswald had in his possession when he was arrested.
Lehrer also commented that an editor at the newspaper saved Lehrer’s career when the decision was made to hold for verification an erroneous story Lehrer had telephoned in to the newspaper. Lehrer had reported that an FBI agent at the Dallas Police Station told him a Secret Service man had been killed in the shooting that day in Dealey Plaza.
“That taught me getting the story right is more important than getting the story first,” Lehrer said.
Partying with the Secret Service
Schieffer recalled that the night of Nov. 21, 1963, JFK’s last night alive, he and a group of other reporters had been joined until the early hours of the morning by Secret Service agents from JFK’s detail at The Cellar, an after-hours coffee shop in Fort Worth where the waitresses danced suggestively, wearing only their underwear.
“I was home in Fort Worth, asleep in bed, when JFK was killed at 12:30 p.m. local time in Dallas,” Schieffer told the group, noting that after the late night at The Cellar with the Secret Service agents, he needed rest.
Davis explained that at Parkland Hospital he first learned JFK was dead when he heard a Catholic priest say, “He’s dead alright. I just administered Extreme Unction (the Catholic Church’s “last rites”), and I told Jackie that I thought his soul had not yet left his body when I got there.”
Davis also confirmed that at Parkland Hospital he observed Secret Service agents cleaning up the blood and debris from the back of the JFK limo, actions that in effect destroyed valuable evidence that could have been preserved had the limo been treated as a crime scene under current law enforcement standards.
When the four panelists were asked if reporting on the JFK assassination had a positive effect on their subsequent careers, Marianne Means piped up: “It didn’t hurt.”
Note: Media wishing to interview Jerome Corsi, please contact us here.
October 30, 2013
Report: NSA spied on pope
“Data-gate” is the name the Vatican has unofficially given to allegations breaking in Rome that the NSA intercepted telephone conversations of Pope Benedict XVI and of Pope Francis when he was still Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the archbishop of Buenos Aires.
The weekly news Italian news magazine Panorama disclosed the allegations are scheduled to be published as a lead article Thursday.
The magazine reports suspicions that among the Vatican telephone calls intercepted by the NSA were conversations March 12 involving bishops and cardinals participating in the papal conclave. The Catholic leaders were staying at the Domus Internationalis Paulus VI, the hotel residence established by the Vatican for visiting clergy, where Bergoglio resided prior to being selected as pope.
The NSA issued a statement insisting it “does not target the Vatican.”
“Assertions that NSA has targeted the Vatican, published in Italy’s Panorama magazine, are not true,” the agency said.
The Panorama article reported suspicion the NSA monitoring of Bergoglio may date back to 2005. The article noted that U.S. State Department cables leaked by Wikileaks indicated Bergoglio was first placed under U.S. intelligence in 2005 when the U.S. Vatican Embassy reported to Washington that he was considered one of 16 candidates to succeed Pope John Paul II.
The Panorama article alleges that among the NSA intercepts were telephone conversations of Pope Benedict XVI in the last few weeks of his papacy.
Panorama charged the NSA intercepted the incoming and outgoing telephone calls of Pope Benedict XVI and other Vatican officials concerning one of Benedict’s last official acts, , a German aristocrat and industrialist, to head the Vatican Bank, which was announced Feb. 15.
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Panorama reported the information obtained by the NSA intercepts were divided into four categories: “information intentions,” “threats to the financial system,” “foreign policy objectives” and “human rights.”
The magazine also suggested the NSA intercepted communications regarding the 2012 “Vatileaks” scandal involving Paolo Gabriel, Pope Benedict’s butler, who was caught stealing related to corruption within the Catholic Church.
Panorama charges the NSA spying was conducted from the annex of the U.S. Embassy in Rome, in via Sallustiana 49, a facility that supposedly houses a highly classified information collection service staffed by a nucleus of technical experts from the NSA and the CIA.
October 23, 2013
Obama plotting to suspend popular item?
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Evidence has surfaced indicating the Obama administration was prepared to suspend all food-stamp payments beginning Nov. 1 in a political move to pressure Republicans in Congress to reopen the government and agree to continued deficit spending.
On Oct. 11, while the government shutdown was in force, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service, FNS, notified state directors of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, SNAP, commonly known as the food stamp program, to suspend transmission of food stamp funds to the Electronic Benefit System, or EBS.
If the Obama administration were willing to issue such a directive in October, will it do so again when the debate over stopping the government and raising the debt ceiling is scheduled to resume in Congress in about three months?
The USDA shutdown letter, dated Oct. 11, first appeared on the website of the Crossroads Urban Center in Salt Lake City and was confirmed as authentic by the Fox affiliate in Salt Lake City in a report published on its website Oct. 14.
“This is going to create a huge hardship for the people we serve here in our food pantry,” Bill Tibbits, the associate director at Crossroads Urban Center told the station.
“What this means if there’s not a deal, if Congress doesn’t reach a deal to get the federal government back up and running, in Utah about 100,000 people won’t get food stamp benefits,” Tibbits said.
“In other words, tens of thousands of Utah families may not be able to feed their children come November,” the station concluded.
The Obama administration instructed state directors of the SNAP program to take the steps even though the likely consequences were that low-income households with children might not be able to buy food, with the added risk that a sudden suspension of food stamp payments might incite unrest across the nation.
Michigan state budget director John Nixon expressed his alarm to ABC 10 in Ishpeming, Mich. He said that also on the slate for suspension in the case of a government shutdown extending beyond Oct. 15 were food programs in the Woman, Infants and Children feeding program, or WIC, the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, or TANF, cash-assistance program and the school-lunch program.
Nixon told ABC 10 that he expected WIC would be the first of the nutrition programs to be affected by the government showdown, with Michigan having to suspend nutritional benefits and education for around 200,000 Michigan women and children.
Approximately 20 percent of all American households on food stamps, amounting to 23.1 million households and 47.6 million individuals were recorded to be on the SNAP program as of July.
As WND reported yesterday, chaos erupted in two Louisiana Wal-Mart stores on Oct.14 when a temporary power outage caused the EBT to malfunction.
The computer glitch that affected food stamp shoppers in Louisiana evidently spread across 17 states, leaving millions without “funding” with which to purchase food.
WND also reported yesterday that according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service, the benefit increase granted by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 to help people adversely affected by the recession is scheduled to expire Nov. 1.
The USDA projects that the average monthly food stamp payment of approximately $272 per household will decline in November by $36 for a family of four.
This week, the Federal Business Opportunities website posted a notice that the Federal Protective Service of the Department of Homeland Security was seeking to spend $80 million on hiring private armed guards to protect IRS and other government buildings in upstate New York during evidently anticipated “public demonstrations” and “civil disturbances.”
While DHS did not identify why the request was made, the agency is preparing for potential public protests against the IRS and other government facilities in upstate New York.
According to estimates drawn from the Congressional Budget Office and the Office of Management and Budget, approximately 83 percent of government operations continued, with the shutdown affecting only approximately 17 percent of the federal funds scheduled to be spent during the time the “shutdown” was operative.
October 22, 2013
New domestic threat: Food-stamp riots
WASHINGTON, D.C. – With 20 percent of all American households on food stamps, amounting to 23.1 million households and 47.6 million individuals in July, an across-the-board cut in food-stamp benefits is scheduled to go into effect in November, even though most recipients know nothing about the coming change.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service, the benefit increase granted by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 to help people adversely affected by the recession is scheduled to expire Nov. 1.
The USDA projects that the average monthly food stamp payment of approximately $272 per household will decline in November by $36 for a family of four.
Will the resulting drop in benefits prompt riots? A WND investigation has found the problem of abuse in income-transfer programs for low-income individuals and families is not limited to the USDA food stamp, or SNAP, program.
In the EU, austerity programs on government programs designed to transfer income to the poor has resulted in riots.
Food-stamp riot in Louisiana
On Oct. 14, when a temporary power outage caused the Electronic Benefits Transfer system, or EBT, that allows people on government assistance to buy food using a digital card with a set spending limit to go down in two Louisiana Walmart stores, chaos resulted when shoppers suddenly found their food stamp debit cards could not be used to buy food.
When Walmart corporate headquarters allowed people with food stamp debit cards to buy food anyway, shoppers in the Wal-mart stores Springhill and Mansfield, La., shoppers stripped stores bare, with the result that
Local law enforcement had to be called in when the EBT cards were once again turned on and Wal-Mart discovered shoppers with as little as cents on their food stamp debit cards were found attempting to steal as much as $700.
Customers turned ugly as overflowing grocery carts were left abandoned in the aisles.
According to an ABC News report, the Louisiana Department of Children and Family services ruled Wal-Mart would be responsible for paying for unauthorized purchases because the retailer chose not to adhere to procedures limiting sales to $50 per cardholder during emergencies.
IRS paid out billions in bogus tax credits
The food-stamp program is not the only federal transfer payment program to the poor that may meet adverse public reaction if payments are reduced due to increased efficiency in administering the system.
An internal IRS audit showed the IRS paid as much as $13.6 billion in bogus claims for the Earned Income Tax Credit, or EITC, last year. Overpayments as large as $132.6 billion were paid out over the last decade, despite an executive order President Obama signed in 2009 instructing federal agencies to devise ways to reduce improper payments.
EITC payments, designed to transfer money to the working poor through the tax system, were found to account for between 21 percent and 25 percent of all EITC claims. Somewhere between $11.6 billion and $13.6 billion was misspent.
‘The IRS met with the Office of Management and Budget on July 12, 2013, to discuss proposed supplemental measures,” Pamela J. LaRue, the IRS’ chief financial officer explained. “We will continue to work with them to finalize these measures and to obtain written concurrence that the IRS is meeting reporting expectations.”
The IRS did not speculate on consequences should tighter enforcement procedures result in denied or reduced EITC payments to applicants, or whether collection efforts would be initiated to recover overpayments identified in previous years.
IRS pays illegals to stay
According to a recent Center for Immigration Studies report, the Treasury Department’s Inspector General for Tax Administration estimates that $4.2 billion in payments were sent to families of illegal aliens under the Additional Child Tax Credits, or ACTC, in the tax processing year 2010. Many of the payments went for non-existent children, or for dependent children found living outside the United States.
The ACTC program, first initiated in 1997, is an income-transfer program for low-income families that offers up to $1,000 per child per year to all resident families, including evidently those of illegal aliens.
Unlike the EITC program in which the filer and his dependents must have Social Security numbers to obtain a tax-credit refund, the ACTC program has no such requirements.
“Since earned income is taxable whether or not the worker is legally in the country, the IRS had to create a system to identify individuals who had tax obligations even though they were not here legally,” the CIS report noted.
“Hence the Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN). But the IRS also decreed that ITINs can be used to identify dependents when SSNs are not legally obtainable.”
A person must be a legal resident of the United States to get a Social Security number legally. The ACTC program operates for those filing income-tax returns with an ITIN in a manner comparable to the way the EITC program operates for those filing income-tax returns with a Social Security Number.
Bob Segall, a senior investigative reporter for WTHR-TV in Indianapolis, first aired a report on April 26, 2012, detailing widespread abuse with the ACTC program. Lax enforcement by the IRS has resulted in illegal immigrant families applying for ACTC payments of as much as $1,000 per year for as many as a dozen claimed dependents.
An additional problem is that many illegal immigrant families claimed ACTC payments for nieces and nephews who live in countries outside the United States, including Mexico.
If the IRS attempts rigid administration of the ACTC program, many families currently receiving ACTC tax-credit refunds may not receive comparable benefits in the future.
Austerity riots in the EU
For the past two years, austerity riots have swept across many countries in the European Union.
On Nov. 14, millions of workers went on strike across Europe to protest against cuts in government spending, as labor unions coordinated general strikes in Spain and Portugal, while calling for workers in Greece and Italy to walk out in sympathy with the protest.
The Guardian in London reported the European Day of Action and Solidarity was designed to send a message to government leaders urging them to abandon programs of increasing tax rates implemented while cuts were made in social welfare benefits.
The European Trade Union Confederation organized the European Day of Action and Solidarity, with the slogan, “For Jobs and Solidarity in Europe. No to Austerity.”
The anticipated cutbacks in the USDA SNAP program planned for November is widely anticipated as a test if EU-like austerity riots are likely to follow attempts in the U.S. to tighten what has been a generous flow of social welfare benefits in the first five years of the Obama administration.
October 19, 2013
Bishop: Pope leading church to 'disaster'
Citing the famous prophecies of Fatima, traditionalist Roman Catholic Bishop Bernard Fellay warned in an address in Kansas City that Pope Francis is precipitating the church’s decline and could be a herald that the world is entering the age of the Antichrist.
Fellay, who leads a society that has no canonical status in the Roman Catholic Church, said the “modernist views” professed by the pontiff are at odds with traditional Catholic teaching.
“The situation in the Catholic Church is a real disaster and the present pope is making it 10,000 times worse,” Fellay charged Oct. 12 at the Angelus Press Conference in Kansas City.
Fellay is superior general of the Society of St. Pius X, whose ministers, according to the Vatican, do not legitimately exercise ministry in the church.
Fellay, in his address, drew heavily from the Third Secret of Fatima, which many Catholics believe was given by the Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus, to Lucia Santos, one of three poor children who claimed to experience a series of six apparitions of Mary in Fatima, Portugal, between May and October in 1917.
The Third Secret centers on an apocalyptic vision in which an unidentified future pope is seen going up a steep mountain. At the top is a rough-hewn cross. The pope passes through a city in ruins, only to be killed at the foot of the cross by a group of soldiers who fire a barrage of bullets and arrows that wound the bishops, priests and believers of various ranks and positions accompanying the pope.
Fellay noted that when Sister Lucia was asked what the Third Secret of Fatima predicted, she pointed to chapters 8 through 13 of the Apocalypse, referring to the final book of the New Testament, also known as “The Revelation of St. John the Divine.”
Observing that chapter 8 of the Apocalypse speaks of the coming of the Antichrist, Fellay noted that Pope St. Pius X said at the beginning of his pontificate the “son of perdition” may already be on earth.
Fellay cited Cardinal Luigi Ciapi, the papal theologian of all popes from Pope Pius XII through Pope John Paul II, who said the Third Secret warned the apostasy within the church would begin at the top.
In 2000, the Vatican released what was declared to be the complete text of the Third Secret of Fatima, accompanied with a commentary authored by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI.
Fellay stressed the “end times” nature of Sister Lucia’s vision by referring to a famous 1957 interview in which Lucia stressed that when the Third Secret is fulfilled “various nations will disappear from the face of the earth” and the “devil will do all in his power to overcome souls consecrated to God.”
‘Very scary times’
Fellay attacked Francis for advancing a new format for the Catholic Mass, following in the path of Vatican II, and for suggesting the Catholic Church condemns homosexuality, but not homosexuals, and that even atheists might achieve salvation if they live according to conscience.
Claiming these are “very scary times,” Fellay spoke of abortion as a sin that cries to Heaven for vengeance. He characterized same-sex marriage as an “unnatural re-definition of marriage and related sins.”
Praying for a return to traditional Catholic values and practices, Fellay reiterated Sister Lucia’s plea for Catholics to recite the Rosary and to apply themselves to the Devotion of the Immaculate Heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary as the last remedies God has given to mankind.
Insisting there is “definitely a material chastisement of the world in sight,” Fellay warned of a coming catastrophe.
“How? When?” Fellay asked. “I have no idea. But if you put everything together, it is clear that God has had enough of the sins of man.”
Fellay’s Society of St. Pius X, or SSPX, was founded in 1970 by French archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who strongly opposed communists and “Catholic socialists” who he believes hijacked Vatican II to abandon traditional Catholic practices and beliefs, including replacing the Latin Mass with a modern format in the vernacular of local cultures.
In 1988, in an apostolic letter titled “Ecclesia Dei,” or “The Church of God,” Pope John Paul II officially excommunicated Fellay because he was consecrated by Lefebvre in an act the Vatican characterized as “unlawful” and “schismatic.”
In 2009, the Congregation for Bishops, on instructions from Pope Benedict XVI, rescinded Fellay’s excommunication, while stressing that the SSPX has no canonical status in the Catholic Church and that any minister established by the SSPX has no right to exercise its ministry in the church.
Pope Francis, born Jorge Mario Beroglio, has been identified with “liberation theology,” a Marxist revolutionary version of Christianity, ever since he was appointed Archbishop of Buenos Aires in 1998.
In a meeting with priests from the Diocese of Rome, Francis made an effort to distance himself from the version of liberation theology practiced by Peruvian priest Father Gustavo Gutierrez, author of the 1988 book “A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, an
October 10, 2013
Immigration bill to give Dems White House grip
NEW YORK – Are centrist Republican senators supporting passage of comprehensive immigration-reform legislation playing the role of unwitting dupes in a Democratic Party plan to control the White House with a tidal wave of Hispanic immigration?
The question is being asked increasingly by conservative Republicans as S. 744, the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act, backed by Republican Sens. John McCain, Lindsay Graham and Marco Rubio, gets ready to follow the debt-ceiling debate to the floor of Congress.
Democratic strategists believe the bill will add more than enough Hispanic immigrants to U.S. voters rolls to give the Democratic Party the electoral majority needed to win the White House the next two decades, starting with 2016 and continuing for the next five scheduled presidential elections.
The Washington-based Center for Immigration, CIS, released Thursday a study that should trouble knowledgeable Republican Party presidential hopefuls.
Based on projections published by the Congressional Budget Office, the CIS study estimates that should S. 744 become law, more than 17 million new potential voting-age citizens would be added to U.S. voting rolls by 2036, in addition to the nearly 15 million that current levels of legal immigration will add by 2036.
“Current immigration policy is adding millions of new voters each decade,” pointed out Steven Camarota, the CIS director of research. “The Gang of Eight bill will add millions more. This is one of the most important consequences of immigration. Will it result in voters who need or want more government services? Or, will it reshape American foreign policy? There has been almost no discussion of the impact on the electorate.”
But the trend has not escaped John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira, the authors of the 2002 book “The Emerging Democratic Majority.” They join a growing group of demographers and political scientists who continue to advise Democratic Party politicians that a growing Hispanic population marks the dawning of a new progressive era, assuring the Democratic Party control over presidential elections for the foreseeable future. It would replicate if not surpass the hold the Democratic Party had on the White House in the last century, beginning with FDR’s victory in the 1932 presidential election.
Obama’s hold on Hispanic voters
Hispanics voted for Obama over Romney by 71 percent to 27 percent, according to the Pew Research Hispanic Center.
It represented a gain in Hispanic supporters for Obama since 2008, when Hispanics voted 67 percent for him, compared to 31 percent for McCain.
George W. Bush registered the strongest Republican share of the Hispanic vote since 1980 when in 2004, he drew 40 percent of the Hispanic vote, versus 58 percent for John Kerry.
Clearly, the support George W. Bush showed for U.S. relations with Mexico and the support he and McCain gave to passing comprehensive immigration reform legislation during Bush’s second term cut into the historic affinity Hispanics have had for the Democratic Party.
The Pew Research data also supported the contention that Obama’s national vote share among Hispanic voters was the highest seen by a Democratic candidate since 1996, when President Bill Clinton won 72 percent of the Hispanic vote.
Moreover, the Hispanic vote represented 10 percent of the electorate in 2012, up from 9 percent in 2008 and 8 percent in 2004.
The data also showed Hispanic support for Obama was key to victory in several swing states:
In Florida, Obama carried the Hispanic vote 60 percent to 39 percent, an improvement over 2008, when Obama won 57 percent of the Hispanic vote, compared to 42 percent for McCain;
In Colorado, Obama carried the Hispanic vote by a wide margin, 75 percent to 23 percent, again bettering his performance in 2008, when Obama won the Hispanic vote in Colorado by 61 percent to 38 percent;
In Nevada, Obama won the Hispanic vote 70 percent to 25 percent, doing less well than in 2008, when Obama won the Hispanic vote by a 76 percent share.
In 2012, Hispanics made up 17 percent of the vote in Florida, 14 percent in Colorado and 18 percent in Nevada. Obama also won 68 percent of the Hispanic vote in North Carolina, 65 percent in Wisconsin, 64 percent in Virginia and 53 percent in Ohio.
Combining African-Americans at approximately 13 percent of the electorate in 2012 and Hispanics at 10 percent of the electorate, Obama had a solid advantage on 23 percent of the electorate, virtually 1 of every 4 voters.
So, in the 2012 presidential election, with roughly 110 million votes likely to be cast, Obama ended up gaining from African-American voters 95 percent of the 14.3 million votes they cast, for a total of 13,585,000 votes.
From Hispanics, Obama ended up gaining 71 percent of the 11 million votes cast, for a total of 7,810,000. In 2012, Obama gained approximately 62 million votes, meaning that approximately 40 percent of the votes he needed for victory came from a combination of African-American and Hispanic voters alone.
Put another way, Mitt Romney could well have begun the presidential election campaign against Obama calculating he would get very little support from one quarter of the electorate, almost regardless of his campaign message.
The emerging Democratic majority
In their 2002 book “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” journalist Judis and sociologist Teixeira predicted a fundamental realignment of the voters to produce a new emerging Democratic majority that they say based on progressive values and a post-industrial view of America.
The Democratic majority would bring together the following demographic groups: white working class and middle class Democrats; minorities, including blacks, Hispanics and Asian-American voters; women voters, especially single, working and highly educated women; and professionals, including highly educated tech specialists.
“These are products of a new postindustrial capitalism, rooted in diversity and social equality, and emphasizing the production of ideas and services rather than goods,” Judis and Teixeira wrote. “And while some of these voters are drawn to the Democratic Party by its New Deal past, many others resonate strongly to the new causes the Democrats adopted during the sixties.”
The new causes included lifestyle issues such as support for abortion, acceptance of same sex marriage and “a new postindustrial metropolitan order in which men and women play equal roles and in which white America is supplanted by multiracial, multiethnic America.”
On page 70 of their book, the authors produced an electoral map of the United States in which the configuration of the states looks remarkably like the battleground between Obama and McCain in 2008 and between Obama and Romney in 2012.
Supporting the contention that a new Democratic majority is emerging, Obama won both elections by margins sufficiently large that the GOP did not contest the elections on issues of voter fraud.
The disappearing white voter
The demographic reality is that the white population of America will be a minority population within the next 30 years.
The white portion of the population is expected to peak in 2024, at 199.6 million, with the non-Hispanic white population projected to fall by nearly 20.6 million from 2024 to 2060.
Meanwhile, the Hispanic population is expected to more than double, from 53.3 million in 2012 to 128.8 million in 2060.
The black population is expected to increase from 41.2 million in 2012 to 61.8 million by 2060, growing from 13.1 percent of the population in 2012, to 14.7 percent in 2060.
The Asian population is expected to double from 15.9 million in 2012 to 34.4 million in 2060, moving from 5.1 percent of the population to 8.2 percent of the population in that period.
The total minority population, comprising approximately 37 percent today, is projected to increase to 57 percent in 2060.
White Americans are expected to be a minority for the first time in 2042. While the non-Hispanic white population will remain the nation’s largest group, no group will make up a majority.
In the immediate future, increased Hispanic immigration into the Southwest is likely to make the Western states of Idaho, Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico increasingly Democrat-voting blue states.
Demographers with progressive political opinions have viewed the demographic changes enthusiastically, believing “the potential for true progressive government is greater than at any point in decades,” with the electorate making a commitment to a progressive vision of government, international values, and economic and political policies “that could transform the country in a way that has not been seen since FDR and the New Deal.”
Writing of Obama’s reelection in 2012, Teixeira, one of the first to identify a new emerging Democratic majority, and his colleague John Halpin, both currently senior fellows at the Center for American Progress, wroteimmediately after the election, on Nov. 8, 2012: “Obama’s strong progressive majority – built on a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, cross-class coalition in support of an activist government that promotes freedom, opportunity, and security for all – is real and growing and it reflects the face and beliefs of the United States in the early part of the 21st Century.”
In glowing terms, Teixeira and Halpin credited Obama’s win to a message that “everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same rules.” Teixeira and Halpin praised Obama for the stimulus bill, for the bailout of the auto and financial sectors, for passing Obamacare and for expanded rights for women, Latinos, and gay and lesbian families.
Making their message clear, Teixeira and Halpin added a warning for the Republican Party: “The GOP must face the stark reality that its voter base is declining and its ideology is too rigid to represent the changing face of today’s country.”
October 9, 2013
Fed-chief pick means Obama to keep printing cash
NEW YORK – The nomination of Janet Yellen to replace Ben Bernanke as head of the Federal Reserve encourages international financial markets to assume Obama administration has no intention of stopping the printing of money anytime in the near future.
“The Fed will be looser for longer,” wrote Ambrose Evans-Prichard, the international business editor in London for the Telegraph on the prospect of Yellen’s nomination. “The FOMC (Federal Open Market Committee) will continue to print money until the U.S. economy creates enough jobs to reignite wage pressures and inflation, regardless of asset bubbles, or collateral damage along the way.”
The Federal Reserve’s balance sheet has grown from an asset base of less than $1 trillion prior to the recession to a current level of $3.6 trillion. the increase is largely due to the purchase of U.S. Treasury and U.S. agency debt, principally mortgage-backed securities in nature, in a debt-buying program known as “quantitative easing,” or QE.
Currently, the Fed holds more than $1.2 trillion in MBS and other federal agency debt and over $2 trillion in U.S. Treasury debt – the largest amount of federal debt the Federal Reserve has held since its founding in 1913.
Since September 2012, when the Fed announced its current round of quantitative easing, the Fed has been adding some $85 billion a month in U.S. Treasury and MBS debt, depressing interest rates with the aim of reducing the cost of borrowing generally and to the U.S. Treasury in particular.
Evans-Prichard expressed unease about Yellen taking over the Fed.
“We are surely past the point where we can keep using QE to pump up asset prices,” Evans-Prichard wrote. “My view is that emergency stimulus should henceforth be deployed only to inject money directly into the veins of the economy as an adjunct to the U.S. Treasury, by fiscal dominance, as deemed necessary.”
With this, Evans-Prichard is suggests the solution to U.S. economic woes may not be to continue printing money, as he fears Yellen will do, but to get fiscal policy under control, either by raising taxes or cutting federal spending, or perhaps even by doing both.
Critics characterize QE as “monetizing the debt,” a term that suggests inflation and a continued depreciation in the purchasing power of the dollar are inevitable consequences of having the Federal Reserve purchase trillions of dollars of U.S. debt.
Yet, progressive politicians and short-term Wall Street investor remain enthusiastic that aggressive QE policies will stimulate the economy, create jobs and keep stock market prices high.
On the eve of the Yellen nomination, Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Fla., has suggested the Federal Reserve should simply cancel all federal debt held on the Fed’s balance sheet since “the government owes this money to itself.”
Grayson believes that if the Fed were to cancel by a simple accounting adjustment the $3.6 trillion in federal debt on its balance sheet, the debt ceiling crisis would end. The Obama administration then could continue running annual deficits of $1 trillion or more without worry.
“While canceling the Treasury debt held on the Federal Reserve balance sheet might be considered unorthodox, it is no more unorthodox than the quantitative easing that has added much of this debt to the Fed’s balance sheet,” Grayson wrote.
He added that he has already written Bernanke asking him to cancel the federal debt on the Fed’s balance sheet before he leaves office.
Debt doubled under Bernanke
In December 2012, Bernanke reached a new milestone, doubling the magnitude of U.S. debt since the day he became Federal Reserve chairman in 2006
The numbers are as follows: On Feb. 1, 2006, U.S. national debt totaled $8.183 trillion; on Dec. 12, 2012, it was $16.366 billion.
On Dec. 12, 2012, the Federal Reserve officially announced the launch of Quantitative Easing 4, known among economists as “QE4.” It amounted to a fourth annual round in which the Federal Reserve buys U.S. debt, including both U.S. Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities bonds commonly issued by investment firms and commercial banks.
The Fed announced it would enter 2013 with a plan to purchase $45 billion a month of U.S. Treasury securities and $40 billion a month of mortgage-backed securities. The combined purchases total $85 billion a month as part of a continuing Fed plan to depress long-term interest rates and encourage, borrowing, spending and investing, as the Wall Street Journal reported.
With the December 2012 announcement, the Fed set specific targets, announcing an intention to keep short-term interest rates near zero into 2015, or until unemployment fell to 6.5 percent or lower, and as long as inflation forecasts remain near the Fed’s 3 percent target.
Significantly, the Fed is now actively running both monetary and fiscal policy, because it is in the business of funding nearly 100 percent of all the new government deficit spending in 2013, concluded Chris Martenson of Peak Prosperity.
“And it is pumping a bit more than $1 trillion of hot, thin-air money into the economy as it does so,” he said.
In the five years he has been in the White House, President Obama has increased the U.S. national debt by approximately 70 percent, from approximately $10 trillion when President George W. Bush left office, to nearly $17 trillion today.
The current U.S. government shutdown prompted by the determination of House Republicans to delay the full implementation of Obamacare, has pivoted into the debate over raising the federal debt limit. Democrats insist the federal government will run out of money to pay its bills by Oct. 17 unless Congress votes an increase to the current debt level.
On Wednesday, however, Moody’s Investor Services circulated a memo on Capitol Hill sharply disagreeing with President Obama’s recent argument that Republicans in Congress are holding the “full faith and credit” of the U.S. government as hostage by forcing a U.S. debt default if the debt ceiling is not raised prior to the deadline.
“We believe the government would continue to pay interest and principal on its debt even in the event that the debt limit is not raised, leaving its creditworthiness intact,” the Moody’s memo said.
“The debt limit restricts government expenditures to the amount of its incoming revenues; it does not prohibit the government from servicing its debt,” Moody’s said. “There is no direct connection between the debt limit (actually the exhaustion of the Treasury’s extraordinary measures to raise funds) and a default.”
Related stories:
Fed-chief pick means Obama to keep printing cash
‘Thuggery’ sparks talk of impeachment
Democratic congresswoman declares ‘martial law’
Obama seen as Chicken Little on default
Related commentary:
Shutdown message: Don’t trust government by Joseph Farah
Democrats to America: We own the government! by Ann Coulter
Obama’s a dictator – what more evidence do we need? by Erik Rush
Let’s make shutdown permanent by Robert Ringer
Is the tea party anti-government? by Chuck Morse
Concern about runaway spending is ‘anarchy’? by Larry Elder
Prince Barry’s scam by Mike Lester
October 8, 2013
Yes, feds can take your deposits
NEW YORK – Can the federal government confiscate all the deposits in an American citizen’s FDIC-insured bank account?
The answer is “Yes.”
As WND reported, the Dodd-Frank bill allows the federal government to confiscate bank deposits in an unlimited “bail-in” for banks “too big to fail,” provided the account holder gets equity in exchange for the deposits.
In March, Cyprus agreed to confiscate 10 percent of all deposits in Cypriot banks, calculated to result in a 10 billion euro “bail-in” as a condition of obtaining an emergency Eurozone bail-out of 10 billion euros.
The question increasingly getting asked in international banking circles is this: Was the “Cyprus Experiment” in which the government confiscated bank deposits a first step toward what may well become a global trend over the next few years?
EU proposes deposit grab
Anyone who thinks the scenario is merely academic must realize that the European Parliament already is in the process of passing new regulations adopting the recommendation of its Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee. The panel recommends that a deposit guarantee funds should not protect a deposit of funds in a “guaranteed account” can be siezed when financial difficulties call for rescuing a troubled financial institution.
The text of the EU’s Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee recommendation calls for ruling out using deposits below 100,000 euros and specifies that confiscating deposits above 100,000 euros should be a last resort.
A European Parliament press release dated May 21 specified the “bail-in” scheme proposed by the EU’s Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee should be up and running by January 2016.
With the EU moving to codify procedures for confiscating depositor funds in a bank “bail-in,” the confiscation of deposits last March in the Mediterranean island nation of Cyprus may have only been a dry run for future bank crises anticipated by EU financial experts.
Are private retirement assets safe?
WND reported Sept. 9 that Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk announced a government decision in September to transfer to ZUS, the government pension system, all bond investments in privately held pension funds within the state-guaranteed system.
With the U.S. and the EU struggling with a debt crisis caused by slow economic growth and massive growth in social welfare programs, WND has previously reported that all private assets, including IRA and 401(k) retirement assets, may not be immune from one form or another of government takeover, even if new federal regulations that require a percentage of all private retirement assets in the U.S. be invested in federal government IOUs, including U.S. Treasury debt.
WND has reported government officials continue to eye the multi-trillion dollar private retirement savings market, including IRAs and 401(k) plans, seeing the opportunity to redistribute private retirement savings to less affluent Americans and to force the retirement savings out of the private market and into government-controlled programs investing in government-issued debt.
The ‘bail-in’ strategy
The possibility bank deposits could get confiscated by the federal government caused a firestorm of controversy following a WND story indicating Greece is considering confiscating corporate deposits to pay social security contribution shortfalls in the country.
“How is this possible?” many posting on Twitter and Facebook asked after the WND article was published.
The answer is provided in a little-noticed Dec. 10, 2012, memorandum published by the FDIC in the United States and the Bank of England in the United Kingdom titled “Resolving Globally Active, Systemically Important Financial Institutions.”
This paper redefines “too big to fail” companies as “Globally Active, Systemically Important, Financial Institutions,” or G-SIFIs, in the terminology of international banking.
The goal of the paper is to find a way to save big banks that are facing a financial crisis without having to utilize taxpayer funds to “bail out” the bank with what amounts to either a federal government loan or a federal government equity injection resulting in the government owning some percentage of the bailed-out bank.
The “bail-in” strategy under which some or all private bank deposits are confiscated to resolve a financial crisis was made possible because of powers granted the federal government in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010.
In banking terms, the strategy creates a single receivership at a top-tier holding company and assigns losses to shareholders and unsecured creditors of the holding company. The aim is to transfer the sound operating bank subsidiaries that emerge from the restructuring to a new solvent entity or entities.
Put simply, bank deposits are considered under Dodd-Frank to be “owned” not by the despositor but by the bank, such that the bank has a contingent liability to owner regarding the deposits.
But that contingent liability can either be honored by the bank giving the account holder back his deposits when requested or giving bank stock should the bank need to confiscate the deposits to make up for a deficiency in the legal reserves required to operate or in any other financial crisis the bank faces.
The stock the account holder receives might not be in the bank where the money was deposited. It could be in the new bank entity or subsidiary that emerges after the “bail-in” has been accomplished.
Under Dodd-Frank, depositors are an unsecured creditor to the bank. The federal government under “Orderly Liquidation Authority” outlined in the legislation can seize any financial firm, not simply the largest ones, if the Federal Reserve, the secretary of the Treasury and the FDIC determine a particular bank failure may cause instability in the U.S. financial system.
A creative alternative to giving account holders bank equity after confiscating their deposits to “bail-in” a troubled financial institution may be to offer a special-issue U.S. Treasury instrument that may only be sold over a five-year period.
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