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On The 100th Anniversary Of The Federal Reserve Here Are 100 Reasons To Shut It Down Forever

December 23, 2013 12:26 pm / Leave a comment

On The 100th Anniversary Of The Federal Reserve Here Are 100 Reasons To Shut It Down Forever.

The Federal ReserveDecember 23rd, 1913 is a date which will live in infamy.  That was the day when the Federal Reserve Act was pushed through Congress.  Many members of Congress were absent that day, and the general public was distracted with holiday preparations.  Now we have reached the 100th anniversary of the Federal Reserve, and most Americans still don’t know what it actually is or how it functions.  But understanding the Federal Reserve is absolutely critical, because the Fed is at the very heart of our economic problems.  Since the Federal Reserve was created, there have been 18 recessions or depressions, the value of the U.S. dollar has declined by 98 percent, and the U.S. national debt has gotten more than 5000 times larger.  This insidious debt-based financial system has literally made debt slaves out of all of us, and it is systematically destroying the bright future that our children and our grandchildren were supposed to have.  If nothing is done, we are inevitably heading for a massive amount of economic pain as a nation.  So please share this article with as many people as you can.  The following are 100 reasons why the Federal Reserve should be shut down forever…

#1 We like to think that we have a government “of the people, by the people, for the people”, but the truth is that an unelected, unaccountable group of central planners has far more power over our economy than anyone else in our society does.

#2 The Federal Reserve is actually “independent” of the government.  In fact, the Federal Reserve has argued vehemently in federal court that it is “not an agency” of the federal government and therefore not subject to the Freedom of Information Act.

#3 The Federal Reserve openly admits that the 12 regional Federal Reserve banks are organized “much like private corporations“.

#4 The regional Federal Reserve banks issue shares of stock to the “member banks” that own them.

#5 100% of the shareholders of the Federal Reserve are private banks.  The U.S. government owns zero shares.

#6 The Federal Reserve is not an agency of the federal government, but it has been given power to regulate our banks and financial institutions.  This should not be happening.

#7 According to Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, the U.S. Congress is the one that is supposed to have the authority to “coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures”.  So why is the Federal Reserve doing it?

#8 If you look at a “U.S. dollar”, it actually says “Federal Reserve note” at the top.  In the financial world, a “note” is an instrument of debt.

#9 In 1963, President John F. Kennedy issued Executive Order 11110 which authorized the U.S. Treasury to issue “United States notes” which were created by the U.S. government directly and not by the Federal Reserve.  He was assassinated shortly thereafter.

#10 Many of the debt-free United States notes issued under President Kennedy are still in circulation today.

#11 The Federal Reserve determines what levels some of the most important interest rates in our system are going to be set at.  In a free market system, the free market would determine those interest rates.

#12 The Federal Reserve has become so powerful that it is now known as “the fourth branch of government“.

#13 The greatest period of economic growth in U.S. history was whenthere was no central bank.

#14 The Federal Reserve was designed to be a perpetual debt machine.  The bankers that designed it intended to trap the U.S. government in a perpetual debt spiral from which it could never possibly escape.  Since the Federal Reserve was established 100 years ago, the U.S. national debt has gotten more than 5000 times larger.

#15 A permanent federal income tax was established the exact same year that the Federal Reserve was created.  This was not a coincidence.  In order to pay for all of the government debt that the Federal Reserve would create, a federal income tax was necessary.  The whole idea was to transfer wealth from our pockets to the federal government and from the federal government to the bankers.

#16 The period prior to 1913 (when there was no income tax) was the greatest period of economic growth in U.S. history.

#17 Today, the U.S. tax code is about 13 miles long.

#18 From the time that the Federal Reserve was created until now, the U.S. dollar has lost 98 percent of its value.

#19 From the time that President Nixon took us off the gold standard until now, the U.S. dollar has lost 83 percent of its value.

#20 During the 100 years before the Federal Reserve was created, the U.S. economy rarely had any problems with inflation.  But since the Federal Reserve was established, the U.S. economy has experienced constant and never ending inflation.

#21 In the century before the Federal Reserve was created, the average annual rate of inflation was about half a percent.  In the century since the Federal Reserve was created, the average annual rate of inflation has been about 3.5 percent.

#22 The Federal Reserve has stripped the middle class of trillions of dollars of wealth through the hidden tax of inflation.

#23 The size of M1 has nearly doubled since 2008 thanks to the reckless money printing that the Federal Reserve has been doing.

#24 The Federal Reserve has been starting to behave like the Weimar Republic, and we all remember how that ended.

#25 The Federal Reserve has been consistently lying to us about the level of inflation in our economy.  If the inflation rate was still calculated the same way that it was back when Jimmy Carter was president, the official rate of inflation would be somewhere between 8 and 10 percent today.

#26 Since the Federal Reserve was created, there have been 18 distinct recessions or depressions: 1918, 1920, 1923, 1926, 1929, 1937, 1945, 1949, 1953, 1958, 1960, 1969, 1973, 1980, 1981, 1990, 2001, 2008.

#27 Within 20 years of the creation of the Federal Reserve, the U.S. economy was plunged into the Great Depression.

#28 The Federal Reserve created the conditions that caused the stock market crash of 1929, and even Ben Bernanke admits that the response by the Fed to that crisis made the Great Depression even worse than it should have been.

#29 The “easy money” policies of former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan set the stage for the great financial crisis of 2008.

#30 Without the Federal Reserve, the “subprime mortgage meltdown” would probably never have happened.

#31 If you can believe it, there have been 10 different economic recessions since 1950.  The Federal Reserve created the “dotcom bubble”, the Federal Reserve created the “housing bubble” and now it has created the largest bond bubble in the history of the planet.

#32 According to an official government report, the Federal Reserve made 16.1 trillion dollars in secret loans to the big banks during the last financial crisis.  The following is a list of loan recipients that was taken directly from page 131 of the report…

Citigroup – $2.513 trillion
Morgan Stanley – $2.041 trillion
Merrill Lynch – $1.949 trillion
Bank of America – $1.344 trillion
Barclays PLC – $868 billion
Bear Sterns – $853 billion
Goldman Sachs – $814 billion
Royal Bank of Scotland – $541 billion
JP Morgan Chase – $391 billion
Deutsche Bank – $354 billion
UBS – $287 billion
Credit Suisse – $262 billion
Lehman Brothers – $183 billion
Bank of Scotland – $181 billion
BNP Paribas – $175 billion
Wells Fargo – $159 billion
Dexia – $159 billion
Wachovia – $142 billion
Dresdner Bank – $135 billion
Societe Generale – $124 billion
“All Other Borrowers” – $2.639 trillion

#33 The Federal Reserve also paid those big banks $659.4 million in “fees” to help “administer” those secret loans.

#34 During the last financial crisis, big European banks were allowed to borrow an “unlimited” amount of money from the Federal Reserve at ultra-low interest rates.

#35 The “easy money” policies of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke have created the largest financial bubble this nation has ever seen, and this has set the stage for the great financial crisis that we are rapidly approaching.

#36 Since late 2008, the size of the Federal Reserve balance sheet has grown from less than a trillion dollars to more than 4 trillion dollars.  This is complete and utter insanity.

#37 During the quantitative easing era, the value of the financial securities that the Fed has accumulated is greater than the total amount of publicly held debt that the U.S. government accumulated from the presidency of George Washington through the end of the presidency of Bill Clinton.

#38 Overall, the Federal Reserve now holds more than 32 percent of all 10 year equivalents, and that percentage is rising by about 0.3 percent each week.

#39 Quantitative easing creates financial bubbles, and when quantitative easing ends those bubbles tend to deflate rapidly.

#40 Most of the new money created by quantitative easing has ended up in the hands of the very wealthy.

#41 According to a prominent Federal Reserve insider, quantitative easing has been one giant “subsidy” for Wall Street banks.

#42 As one CNBC article recently stated, we are seeing absolutely rampant inflation in “stocks and bonds and art and Ferraris“.

#43 Donald Trump once made the following statement about quantitative easing: “People like me will benefit from this.”

#44 Most people have never heard about this, but a very interesting study conducted for the Bank of England shows that quantitative easing actually increases the gap between the wealthy and the poor.

#45 The gap between the top one percent and the rest of the country is now the greatest that it has been since the 1920s.

#46 The mainstream media has sold quantitative easing to the American public as an “economic stimulus program”, but the truth is that the percentage of Americans that have a job has actually gone downsince quantitative easing first began.

#47 The Federal Reserve is supposed to be able to guide the nation toward “full employment”, but the reality of the matter is that an all-time record 102 million working age Americans do not have a job right now.  That number has risen by about 27 million since the year 2000.

#48 For years, the projections of economic growth by the Federal Reserve have consistently overstated the strength of the U.S. economy.  But every single time, the mainstream media continues to report that these numbers are “reliable” even though all they actually represent is wishful thinking.

#49 The Federal Reserve system fuels the growth of government, and the growth of government fuels the growth of the Federal Reserve system.  Since 1970, federal spending has grown nearly 12 times as rapidly as median household income has.

#50 The Federal Reserve is supposed to look out for the health of all U.S. banks, but the truth is that they only seem to be concerned about the big ones.  In 1985, there were more than 18,000 banks in the United States.  Today, there are only 6,891 left.

#51 The six largest banks in the United States (JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley) have collectively gotten 37 percent larger over the past five years.

#52 The U.S. banking system has 14.4 trillion dollars in total assets.  The six largest banks now account for 67 percent of those assets and all of the other banks account for only 33 percent of those assets.

#53 The five largest banks now account for 42 percent of all loans in the United States.

#54 We were told that the purpose of quantitative easing is to help “stimulate the economy”, but today the Federal Reserve is actually paying the big banks not to lend out 1.8 trillion dollars in “excess reserves” that they have parked at the Fed.

#55 The Federal Reserve has allowed an absolutely gigantic derivatives bubble to inflate which could destroy our financial system at any moment.  Right now, four of the “too big to fail” banks each have total exposure to derivatives that is well in excess of 40 trillion dollars.

#56 The total exposure that Goldman Sachs has to derivatives contracts is more than 381 times greater than their total assets.

#57 Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has a track record of failure that would make the Chicago Cubs look good.

#58 The secret November 1910 gathering at Jekyll Island, Georgia during which the plan for the Federal Reserve was hatched was attended by U.S. Senator Nelson W. Aldrich, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Department A.P. Andrews and a whole host of representatives from the upper crust of the Wall Street banking establishment.

#59 The Federal Reserve was created by the big Wall Street banks and for the benefit of the big Wall Street banks.

#60 In 1913, Congress was promised that if the Federal Reserve Act was passed that it would eliminate the business cycle.

#61 There has never been a true comprehensive audit of the Federal Reserve since it was created back in 1913.

#62 The Federal Reserve system has been described as “the biggest Ponzi scheme in the history of the world“.

#63 The following comes directly from the Fed’s official mission statement: “To provide the nation with a safer, more flexible, and more stable monetary and financial system.”  Without a doubt, the Federal Reserve has failed in those tasks dramatically.

#64 The Fed decides what the target rate of inflation should be, what the target rate of unemployment should be and what the size of the money supply is going to be.  This is quite similar to the “central planning” that goes on in communist nations, but very few people in our government seem upset by this.

#65 A couple of years ago, Federal Reserve officials walked into one bank in Oklahoma and demanded that they take down all the Bible verses and all the Christmas buttons that the bank had been displaying.

#66 The Federal Reserve has taken some other very frightening steps in recent years.  For example, back in 2011 the Federal Reserveannounced plans to identify “key bloggers” and to monitor “billions of conversations” about the Fed on Facebook, Twitter, forums and blogs.  Someone at the Fed will almost certainly end up reading this article.

#67 Thanks to this endless debt spiral that we are trapped in, a massive amount of money is transferred out of our pockets and into the pockets of the ultra-wealthy each year.  Incredibly, the U.S. government spent more than 415 billion dollars just on interest on the national debt in 2013.

#68 In September, the average rate of interest on the government’s marketable debt was 1.981 percent.  In January 2000, the average rate of interest on the government’s marketable debt was 6.620 percent.  If we got back to that level today, we would be paying more than a trillion dollars a year just in interest on the national debt and it would collapse our entire financial system.

#69 The American people are being killed by compound interest but most of them don’t even understand what it is.  Albert Einstein once made the following statement about compound interest…

“Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it … he who doesn’t … pays it.”

#70 Most Americans have absolutely no idea where money comes from.  The truth is that the Federal Reserve just creates it out of thin air.  The following is how I have previously described how money is normally created by the Fed in our system…

When the U.S. government decides that it wants to spend another billion dollars that it does not have, it does not print up a billion dollars.

Rather, the U.S. government creates a bunch of U.S. Treasury bonds (debt) and takes them over to the Federal Reserve.

The Federal Reserve creates a billion dollars out of thin air and exchanges them for the U.S. Treasury bonds.

#71 What does the Federal Reserve do with those U.S. Treasury bonds?  They end up getting auctioned off to the highest bidder.  But this entire process actually creates more debt than it does money…

The U.S. Treasury bonds that the Federal Reserve receives in exchange for the money it has created out of nothing are auctioned off through the Federal Reserve system.

But wait.

There is a problem.

Because the U.S. government must pay interest on the Treasury bonds, the amount of debt that has been created by this transaction is greater than the amount of money that has been created.

So where will the U.S. government get the money to pay that debt?

Well, the theory is that we can get money to circulate through the economy really, really fast and tax it at a high enough rate that the government will be able to collect enough taxes to pay the debt.

But that never actually happens, does it?

And the creators of the Federal Reserve understood this as well.  They understood that the U.S. government would not have enough money to both run the government and service the national debt.  They knew that the U.S. government would have to keep borrowing even more money in an attempt to keep up with the game.

#72 Of course the U.S. government could actually create money and spend it directly into the economy without the Federal Reserve being involved at all.  But then we wouldn’t be 17 trillion dollars in debt and that wouldn’t serve the interests of the bankers at all.

#73 The following is what Thomas Edison once had to say about our absolutely insane debt-based financial system…

That is to say, under the old way any time we wish to add to the national wealth we are compelled to add to the national debt.

Now, that is what Henry Ford wants to prevent. He thinks it is stupid, and so do I, that for the loan of $30,000,000 of their own money the people of the United States should be compelled to pay $66,000,000 — that is what it amounts to, with interest. People who will not turn a shovelful of dirt nor contribute a pound of material will collect more money from the United States than will the people who supply the material and do the work. That is the terrible thing about interest. In all our great bond issues the interest is always greater than the principal. All of the great public works cost more than twice the actual cost, on that account. Under the present system of doing business we simply add 120 to 150 per cent, to the stated cost.

But here is the point: If our nation can issue a dollar bond, it can issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good makes the bill good.

#74 The United States now has the largest national debt in the history of the world, and we are stealing more than 100 million dollars from our children and our grandchildren every single hour of every single day in a desperate attempt to keep the debt spiral going.

#75 Thomas Jefferson once stated that if he could add just one more amendment to the U.S. Constitution it would be a ban on all government borrowing….

I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution. I would be willing to depend on that alone for the reduction of the administration of our government to the genuine principles of its Constitution; I mean an additional article, taking from the federal government the power of borrowing.

#76 At this moment, the U.S. national debt is sitting at$17,251,528,475,994.19.  If we had followed the advice of Thomas Jefferson, it would be sitting at zero.

#77 When the Federal Reserve was first established, the U.S. national debt was sitting at about 2.9 billion dollars.  On average, we have been adding more than that to the national debt every single day since Obama has been in the White House.

#78 We are on pace to accumulate more new debt under the 8 years of the Obama administration than we did under all of the other presidents in all of U.S. history combined.

#79 If all of the new debt that has been accumulated since John Boehner became Speaker of the House had been given directly to the American people instead, every household in America would have been able to buy a new truck.

#80 Between 2008 and 2012, U.S. government debt grew by 60.7 percent, but U.S. GDP only grew by a total of about 8.5 percentduring that entire time period.

#81 Since 2007, the U.S. debt to GDP ratio has increased from 66.6 percent to 101.6 percent.

#82 According to the U.S. Treasury, foreigners hold approximately 5.6 trillion dollars of our debt.

#83 The amount of U.S. government debt held by foreigners is about 5 times larger than it was just a decade ago.

#84 As I have written about previously, if the U.S. national debt was reduced to a stack of one dollar bills it would circle the earth at the equator 45 times.

#85 If Bill Gates gave every single penny of his entire fortune to the U.S. government, it would only cover the U.S. budget deficit for 15 days.

#86 Sometimes we forget just how much money a trillion dollars is.  If you were alive when Jesus Christ was born and you spent one million dollars every single day since that point, you still would not have spent one trillion dollars by now.

#87 If right this moment you went out and started spending one dollar every single second, it would take you more than 31,000 years to spend one trillion dollars.

#88 In addition to all of our debt, the U.S. government has also accumulated more than 200 trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities.  So where in the world will all of that money come from?

#89 The greatest damage that quantitative easing has been causing to our economy is the fact that it is destroying worldwide faith in the U.S. dollar and in U.S. debt.  If the rest of the world stops using our dollars and stops buying our debt, we are going to be in a massive amount of trouble.

#90 Over the past several years, the Federal Reserve has been monetizing a staggering amount of U.S. government debt even though Ben Bernanke once promised that he would never do this.

#91 China recently announced that they are going to quit stockpiling more U.S. dollars.  If the Federal Reserve was not recklessly printing money, this would probably not have happened.

#92 Most Americans have no idea that one of our most famous presidents was absolutely obsessed with getting rid of central banking in the United States.  The following is a February 1834 quote by President Andrew Jackson about the evils of central banking….

I too have been a close observer of the doings of the Bank of the United States. I have had men watching you for a long time, and am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the Bank. You tell me that if I take the deposits from the Bank and annul its charter I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves. I have determined to rout you out and, by the Eternal, (bringing his fist down on the table) I will rout you out.

#93 There are plenty of possible alternative financial systems, but at this point all 187 nations that belong to the IMF have a central bank.  Are we supposed to believe that this is just some sort of a bizarre coincidence?

#94 The capstone of the global central banking system is an organization known as the Bank for International Settlements.  The following is how I described this organization in a previous article…

An immensely powerful international organization that most people have never even heard of secretly controls the money supply of the entire globe.  It is called the Bank for International Settlements, and it is the central bank of central banks.  It is located in Basel, Switzerland, but it also has branches in Hong Kong and Mexico City.  It is essentially an unelected, unaccountable central bank of the world that has complete immunity from taxation and from national laws.  Even Wikipedia admits that “it is not accountable to any single national government.”  The Bank for International Settlements was used to launder money for the Nazis during World War II, but these days the main purpose of the BIS is to guide and direct the centrally-planned global financial system.  Today, 58 global central banks belong to the BIS, and it has far more power over how the U.S. economy (or any other economy for that matter) will perform over the course of the next year than any politician does.  Every two months, the central bankers of the world gather in Basel for another “Global Economy Meeting”.  During those meetings, decisions are made which affect every man, woman and child on the planet, and yet none of us have any say in what goes on.  The Bank for International Settlements is an organization that was founded by the global elite and it operates for the benefit of the global elite, and it is intended to be one of the key cornerstones of the emerging one world economic system.

#95 The borrower is the servant of the lender, and the Federal Reserve has turned all of us into debt slaves.

#96 Debt is a form of social control, and the global elite use all of this debt to dominate all the rest of us.  40 years ago, the total amount of debt in our system (all government debt, all business debt, all consumer debt, etc.) was sitting at about 2 trillion dollars.  Today, the grand total exceeds 56 trillion dollars.

#97 Unless something dramatic is done, our children and our grandchildren will be debt slaves for their entire lives as they service our debts and pay for our mistakes.

#98 Now that you know this information, you are responsible for doing something about it.

#99 Congress has the power to shut down the Federal Reserve any time that they would like.  But right now most of our politicians fully endorse the current system, and nothing is ever going to happen until the American people start demanding change.

#100 The design of the Federal Reserve system was flawed from the very beginning.  If something is not done very rapidly, it is inevitable that our entire financial system is going to suffer an absolutely nightmarish collapse.

The truth is that we do not have to have a Federal Reserve.  The greatest period of economic growth in U.S. history was when we did not have a central bank.  If we are ever going to turn this nation around economically, we are going to have to get rid of this debt-based financial system that is centered around the Federal Reserve.  On the path that we are on now, there is no hope.  Please share this article with as many people as you can.  It is imperative that we try to wake the American people up while we still have time.

 

Kennedy Conspiracy Theories Go Mainstream … 50 Years After Assassination Washington’s Blog

November 21, 2013 7:58 am / Leave a comment

Kennedy Conspiracy Theories Go Mainstream … 50 Years After Assassination Washington’s Blog.

The CIA and FBI Hid Information from the Warren Commission

Preface: Some “conspiracy theories” are true, and some are false. Each must be judged on its own merits.

A solid majority of Americans have always believed that John F. Kennedy’s assassination involved a conspiracy.

But now that view is starting to be discussed by mainstream power players.

Current Secretary of State John Kerry said recently:

To this day, I have serious doubts that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. I certainly have doubts that he was motivated by himself.

Watergate reporter Bob Woodward long ago became a mainstream, establishment journalist.

But Woodward – and long-time CBS news anchor Bob Schieffer – agree that the CIA and FBI refused to give information to the Warren Commission, and so that Commission was in the dark as to what might actually have happened:

And CBS News reports:

It has long been known that the Warren Commission, the blue ribbon panel of public officials appointed by former President Lyndon Johnson to investigate the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy, was flawed in ways that led to generations of conspiracy theories about what happened on Nov. 22, 1963. A forthcoming book from former New York Times reporter Philip Shenon digs into exactly what the commission got wrong, both by intentional concealment, or, in Shenon’s view, extensive attempts by both the CIA and FBI to withhold just how much they knew about Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald in the weeks and months before he killed the president.

“In many ways, this book is an account of my discovery of how much of the truth about the Kennedy assassination has still not been told, and how much of the evidence about the president’s murder was covered up or destroyed – shredded, incinerated, or erased – before it could reach the commission,” Shenon writes in the prologue to A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination, which draws its title from the first sentence of the commission’s report. “Senior officials at both the CIA and the FBI hid information from the panel, apparently in hopes of concealing just how much they had known about Lee Harvey Oswald and the threat that he posed.”

In fact – as the Washington Post reports – official investigators have long said there was a conspiracy and a cover up:

The Church Committee, a Senate-led investigation in 1976 into the CIA and FBI, concluded that the 888-page Warren Report may have been insufficiently thorough and suppressed key evidence, giving legs to the persistent belief that a cover-up was involved.

By 1979, the U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations determined that the assassination was “probably” the result of a conspiracy. Indeed, four years after that report, public perceptions of a conspiracy hit their peak at 80 percent.

(Similarly, it is well-documented that the 9/11 Commission was deceived by the U.S. military and other branches of the government. No wonder even the Commissioners themselves are calling for a new investigation.)

 

John F. Kennedy Helped Torpedo Canada Tories Under John Diefenbaker

November 20, 2013 7:48 am / Leave a comment

John F. Kennedy Helped Torpedo Canada Tories Under John Diefenbaker.

WASHINGTON – John F. Kennedy’s personal pollster came to Canada with an assumed name, the blessing of the president and a secret objective: help defeat the Diefenbaker Tories.

Canadians might be surprised by the extent to which political events in this country were shaped by the charismatic U.S. leader, famously assassinated 50 years ago this week.

Helping to elect the Pearson Liberals, for starters, who would go on to introduce a new national flag, expand the welfare state and create medicare, the old-age pension system, and the royal commission on bilingualism.

The Liberals got tactical support, with state-of-the-art polling. Diplomatic rockets rained down on their opponents. And in the heat of an election campaign, the opposition leader was invited to the White House as an honoured guest.

The perceived interference became so acute that a fuming John Diefenbaker eventually took the extraordinary step of recalling Canada’s ambassador to the U.S.

That diplomatic riposte failed to stop the Diefenbaker Conservatives from disintegrating, through internal divisions and a non-confidence motion that focused specifically on relations with the U.S.

Did Kennedy play a determining role?

“I think he played a very major role in Canadian history,” John English, Pearson’s biographer and a one-time Liberal MP, said in an interview.

“He definitely influenced Canadian history through the 1962-63 election period. There’s no doubt that his animosity to Diefenbaker made his position very difficult not only with the broader public, but within his own party.”

The Kennedy-Diefenbaker relationship was born in a toxic swamp and never emerged.

Before their first meeting, the new president angered his interlocutor by twice mispronouncing his name as “Diefen-bawker.” Things didn’t get any sunnier with the conclusion of that first meeting, as Diefenbaker learned immediately afterward that his mother had died.

There were the pettiest slights. The two men, different in age, temperament, and world view, even managed to get under each other’s skin when comparing fishing stories. They had ‘son-of-a-something’ nicknames for each other, too.

Then there were the more substantive differences.

Kennedy was keen to draw Canada deeper into the American sphere. Diefenbaker, who held the more traditional attachment to Britain, balked at the invitation to join the Organization of American States.

So Kennedy went right over his head and spoke directly to the Canadian people.

Bolstered by the strength of his own personal popularity in Canada, Kennedy arm-twisted Diefenbaker in a speech to the House of Commons that is otherwise remembered for the line, “Geography has made us neighbours. History has made us friends.” Kennedy’s blunt public push came just one day after he’d been told by his host that the idea was a no-go.

Meanwhile, the president got along swimmingly with Pearson.

Jean Chretien, who was first elected as an MP in the Liberals’ victorious 1963 campaign, believes Pearson endeared himself to Kennedy with his encyclopedic knowledge of baseball.

But he’s skeptical the Kennedy relationship is what won the election. Chretien said he believes the Diefenbaker government was accumulating enough political damage on its own, without help from the neighbour to the south.

In an interview, the former prime minister said the move to oust the head of the Bank of Canada, James Coyne, harmed the Conservatives more than anything Kennedy did.

“I don’t think (Kennedy made the difference),” Chretien told The Canadian Press. “Mr. Diefenbaker had a lot of problems with his administration.”

However, as it turned out, the Diefenbaker Tories had enough life left in them to eke out a minority in the 1962 election, then hold the Liberals to a minority in the two that followed.

It was in the first of those three elections that Pearson received an almost inconceivably rare political gift for an opposition leader: he was invited, by a popular president, to appear at the White House during a campaign.

Weeks before the election call, the Canadian opposition leader was asked to attend a White House dinner for 49 Nobel Prize winners, with virtually all the others born in the U.S. or living there.

Not only was that invitation not rescinded upon the election call — Pearson wound up getting treated to a starring role. The president held a private 20-minute meeting with the visiting Canadian politician.

And in his speech to his distinguished guests, Kennedy referred specifically to only one of them — the baseball-loving native of Newtownbrook, Ont.

“I want to welcome you to the White House,” his speech began. “Mr. Lester Pearson informed me that a Canadian newspaperman said yesterday that this is the president’s ‘Easter egghead roll on the White House lawn.’ I want to deny that!”

Then, in the next breath: “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”

The Tories lost nearly 100 seats a few weeks later. Their historic majority was whittled down to a 116-seat minority.

Relations soured further when Diefenbaker challenged Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban missile crisis. Finally, there was the Bomarc dispute, where Diefenbaker resisted plans to store nuclear warheads in Ontario and Quebec, under NORAD auspices.

The pressure on him was unrelenting. The retiring head of NATO came to Canada during his farewell tour and accused the Canadian government of shirking its responsibilities.

Diefenbaker later suggested he’d received private assurances from Kennedy that nuclear expansion would not be necessary. The response from the State Department was swift and devastating.

In a 1963 news release, the U.S. government denied Diefenbaker’s version and, in one final indignity, it said the Canadians had failed to contribute a sufficient policy for North American defence.

Existing divisions in the Diefenbaker cabinet suddenly deepened. A handful of ministers began plotting a coup against the boss. The defence minister resigned and, after the Tories were defeated in a non-confidence vote, two of his colleagues followed.

A few weeks later, the Liberals went on to win their first of five straight elections.

Meanwhile, the Liberals had a secret ally, dating back to the previous year’s campaign. Kennedy’s personal pollster, Lou Harris, a trailblazer in his profession, hired 500 women to make phone calls in the most extensive public-opinion research operation ever seen at that point in Canadian politics.

“They showed the campaign committee how polling was done,” said Jim Coutts, who was a young campaign operative at the time and went on to serve in the Pearson-Trudeau PMOs.

“Not just (polls about) who was ahead, and who was leading… They showed us different ways to ask questions.”

The American visitor went by the name Lou Smith, his mother’s maiden name. Kennedy had previously forbidden his pollster from helping British Labour leader Harold Wilson. But to help Pearson — and harm Diefenbaker — he gave his consent.

Could any of this — the subterfuge, the public shaming, the diplomatic strong-arming — have been appropriate?

Even Diefenbaker’s opponents at the time thought the Kennedy administration had gone too far, with its 1963 media statement. The NDP’s Tommy Douglas quipped that the Americans were treating Canada like Guatemala or Cuba.

Diefenbaker, for his part, called it an “unprecedented” intrusion. As his government was going down to defeat, he told the House of Commons: “Canada is determined to remain a firm ally but that does not mean she should be a (U.S.) satellite.”

Pearson’s biographer agrees it was inappropriate.

“An American president should not interfere in Canadian elections,” English said. “And there’s no doubt that Kennedy did, and he did not treat a Canadian prime minister appropriately. I think even perhaps Lester Pearson would agree with that, in retrospect.”

But did it make a difference?

Two former Pearson aides said in interviews they probably could have won without Kennedy’s intervention. But those aides — Coutts and Dick O’Hagan, Pearson’ onetime press secretary — agreed it helped.

“It’s hard to say. It really is. Because all one is doing is sort of guessing, or making suppositions,” O’Hagan said. “I think it was helpful, but not a determinant.”

English cites his own family as evidence that it indeed swung votes.

He supported the Conservatives as a boy. His father had supported them his whole life, but those allegiances shifted during the spat with Kennedy on defence issues.

“I can speak personally and say it did affect votes, in my own family.”

Kennedy also impacted Canadian politics in other ways, he said.

Canadians had seen their prime minister, Diefenbaker, mocked in an unflattering Newsweek profile and were looking for more flamboyant leadership. Pierre Trudeau’s 1968 Liberal leadership win, he said, would “not have been possible without John Kennedy.”

In the end, perhaps Diefenbaker never stood much of a chance. His principal adversary had managed to get on Kennedy’s good side, even before he was president.

In 1959, Pearson had written a glowing piece in the Saturday Review about Kennedy’s book, “Profiles In Courage.”

“(And) nothing makes an author happier than a favourable review,” English said.

Dallas’ JFK Assassination Sites

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Yellenomics – or the Coming Tragedy of Errors |

November 3, 2013 8:42 pm / Leave a comment

Yellenomics – or the Coming Tragedy of Errors |. (source)

Keynesian Paradigm to Be Revived

We have come across a recent article at Bloomberg that discusses the philosophical roots of Janet Yellen’s economics voodoo. This seems in many ways even more appalling than the Bernanke paradigm (which in turn is based on Bernanke’s erroneous interpretation of what caused the Great Depression, which he obtained in essence from Milton Friedman).

Janet Yellen, so Bloomberg informs us, was a student of the Keynesian James Tobin at Yale, the economist whose main claim to fame these days is that a tax is named after him. Tobin, like other Keynesians, was an apologist for central economic planning, which made him eligible for the central bank-sponsored Nobel Prize in Economics. He was undoubtedly a man after the heart of the ruling class. It is therefore not a big surprise that one of his students gets to run the Federal Reserve, which is one of the main agencies, if not the main agency, by which the rule of money power and central economic planning are perpetuated. It should be noted that the inflationist who runs the central bank of Argentina, Mercedes Marco del Pont, was also trained in Yale. Marcos del Pont once asserted sotto voce in a speech that the enormous ongoing plunge in the purchasing power of the Argentine peso was not a result of her incessant massive money printing. Since she didn’t deign to explain what actually causes it then (foreign speculators perhaps? Just guessing here…), it presumably is just a case of ‘sh*t happens’. This just as a hint as to what can be expected from economists trained at Yale.

From the Bloomberg article:

“When James Tobin joined President John F. Kennedy’s administration in 1961, the U.S. economy was struggling to recover from its third recession in seven years. As a member of Kennedy’s Council of Economic Advisers, the Yale University professor put his theoretical research on asset markets to work in fashioning a novel strategy — nicknamed Operation Twist — to reduce long-term interest rates.

Now, more than half a century later, two of Tobin’s Ph.D. students — Janet Yellen, nominated to be the next chairman of the Federal Reserve, and Koichi Hamada, a special adviser to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe — are applying some of those same concepts in their efforts to boost their respective countries’ economies.

Tobin’s work on asset markets with fellow Yale professor William Brainard “is essentially the backbone of quantitative easing,” said Edwin Truman, a former Fed official who taught at the school in New Haven, Connecticut, from 1967 to 1972.

The portfolio-balance theory found that policy makers had the ability to affect the prices of individual assets by altering their supply and demand in the financial markets. And that in turn would have an impact on the economy.

The research won Tobin the Nobel Prize in economics and formed the justification for the late economist’s strategy to twist the bond market’s yield curve in 1961 by selling shorter-dated securities and buying longer-term ones.”

(emphasis added)

Naturally, the Bloomberg article neglects to mention that Tobin’s toxic advice to Kennedy laid the foundation for the later Nixon gold default and the roaring ‘stagflation’ of the 1970s.

What is not surprising though is that one of the witch doctors advising Shinzo Abe on his hoary inflationist policies also turns out to be a Yalie indoctrinated by Tobin. The only good thing we have to say about this particular circumstance is that it will accelerate the inevitable collapse in Japan, and thus perhaps bring forward the moment in time when unsound debt and malinvestments in Japan are finally liquidated.

Unfortunately it is to be expected that this will involve massive theft from Japan’s savers and bring misery and misfortune to millions, as the statists will no doubt try everything to save the present system. The eventual confiscation of the citizenry’s wealth is undoubtedly high on their agenda for dealing with ‘fiscal emergencies’  (for proof, see the recent proposals by the IMF, which are more than just idle thought experiments. They are the blueprint for what we must expect to happen down the road).

Tobin

Keynesian economist James Tobin – he looks harmless enough, but was a wolf in sheep’s clothing. There is no government intervention in the economy he didn’t like or recommend. His work was directly responsible for the catastrophic ‘stagflation’ of the 1970s.

(Photo via AFP / Author unknown)

The Economic Illiteracy of the Planners

Bloomberg also  brings us a brief excerpt from a speech Ms. Yellen delivered on occasion of a reunion of the Yale economics department. The excerpt perfectly encapsulates her and the department’s philosophy (which is thoroughly Keynesian and downright scary):

“Fed Vice Chairman Yellen laid out what she called the “Yale macroeconomics paradigm” in a speech to a reunion of the economics department in April 1999.

“Will capitalist economies operate at full employment in the absence of routine intervention? Certainly not,” said Yellen, then chairman of President Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers. “Do policy makers have the knowledge and ability to improve macroeconomic outcomes rather than make matters worse? Yes,” although there is “uncertainty with which to contend.”

(emphasis added)

She couldn’t be more wrong if she tried. We cannot even call someone like that an ‘economist’, because the above is in our opinion an example of utter economic illiteracy.

First of all, the premise she proposes is completely mistaken. The unhampered market economy is the only economic system that can guarantee maximum employment. Only in an economy where there is no intervention in prices and wages at all will all those who want to work actually find work. It is precisely because the state intervenes in the economy and fixes wages and prices that perpetual institutional unemployment exists. In other words, she has things exactly the wrong way around. Of course, we may concede that in a complete command economy, unemployment can be made to disappear as well – along with all traces of freedom, human dignity and wealth. There was no unemployment under Stalin, but we doubt that his army of slave laborers such as that he forced into digging the Baltic-White Sea canal was particularly happy.

Of course Ms. Yellen’s contention that the class of philosopher kings to which she belongs “has the knowledge and ability to improve macroeconomic outcomes rather than make matters worse”, must be answered with a resounding ‘No’!

The historical record of interventionism speaks for itself: it is a history of constant, recurring failure, that quite possibly has thrown back economic and technological progress by decades, perhaps even centuries.

It can not be otherwise; if it were otherwise, then socialism would work, but socialism demonstrably cannot work. The same problem that makes socialism a literal impossibility – the calculation problem identified by Mises in 1920 – applies in variations to all attempts at economic planning. Central banks are a special case of the socialist calculation problem as it pertains to the modern financial and monetary system (see also J.H. De Soto’s work on this point). Similar to the planners of a putative socialist economy in which the means of production have been nationalized and where therefore prices for the means of production no longer exist, the interventionists populating central banks cannot ‘calculate’.

They cannot gauge the opportunity costs involved in their actions and compare them to the outcomes, as they are not subject to the market test –  the categories of profit and loss have no meaning for them. There is in fact nothing on which such a calculation could be based. It is an absolute certainty that their interventions will result in precisely what Yellen asserts will not happen: they will “make matters worse”. It is simply not possible for a central economic planning agency to ‘improve’ on a market-derived outcome. The Federal Reserve’s handful of board members cannot ‘know’ what the ideal level of interest rates for the entire market economy is. Only the market itself can determine the state of society-wide time preference, and thereby establish the natural interest rate. The interventions of the central bank are intended to impose an interest rate that deviates from the natural rate, on the absurd theory that a gaggle of bureaucrats ‘knows more’ than the entire market!

The reality of what they know and don’t know is amply demonstrated by the outcomes of their policies: the recurring booms and busts that have consistently damaged the economy structurally, and which have finally led to a situation where the economy found itself actually worse off when the last boom ended than it was on the eve of the boom. This demonstrates a rare gift for destruction, as normally credit booms cannot crimp the progress of capitalist economies completely. With the Fed at the helm, it has however apparently become possible now to actually enter a cycle of economic regression. Not only are we worse off than we would have been otherwise, we are now worse off in absolute terms as well. These people know less than nothing, which is to say, they do possess knowledge, but it is in a sense negative knowledge, due to the destruction it brings.

Here is Ms Yellen at a post 2008 bust hearing – from a report in the NYT that was dug up by Zerohedge a while ago (here is a link to the audio recording):

“Ms. Yellen told the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in 2010 that she and other San Francisco Fed officials pressed Washington for new guidance, sharing the problems they were seeing. But Ms. Yellen did not raise those concerns publicly, and she said that she had not explored the San Francisco Fed’s ability to act unilaterally, taking the view that it had to do what Washington said. “For my own part,” Ms. Yellen said, “I did not see and did not appreciate what the risks were with securitization, the credit ratings agencies, the shadow banking system, the S.I.V.’s — I didn’t see any of that coming until it happened.” Her startled interviewers noted that almost none of the officials who testified had offered a similar acknowledgment of an almost universal failure.”

(emphasis added)

Robert Wenzel among others already reported on Ms. Yellen’s absolutely dismal forecasting record. The reason why we are bringing this point up is that it has to be contrasted with the picture painted of her in the mainstream press, where she is regularly portrayed as a veritable Cassandra who foresaw the crash taking before anyone else did – but curiously did absolutely nothing about it, in spite of her position as a Fed governor. For another excellent and very detailed deconstruction of the myth that Ms. Yellen ever knew what she was doing, here is a video by Peter Schiff, who has dug into all the evidence (these days it is luckily very easy to fact-check and expose the lies the media want us to believe). Note that although Schiff is obviously philosophically opposed to Ms. Yellen and everything she stands for, his assessment is very fair. Even so, it is utterly damning:

Peter Schiff on the myth that Ms. Yellen has ‘forecast the crisis’. She forecast absolutely nada.

What To Expect

It will probably be best to prepare the funeral rites for the US economy. The seemingly inexorable lurch toward socialism is going to be taken up another notch with Ms. Yellen’s nomination to Fed chair.  From the Bloomberg article we learn that Anglo-Saxon central banking socialism is indeed going global these days – and that Ms. Yellen is one of its foremost proponents:

“Janet was a force — perhaps ‘the’ force — behind the FOMC’s decision to move to an even more accommodative policy last December,” said Laurence Meyer, a former Fed governor who is now a senior managing director at St. Louis-based Macroeconomic Advisers LLC.

Hamada, who retired from Yale this year after a 27-year tenure, also has been aggressive in pushing for more monetary stimulus in Japan, going so far as to publicly criticize his former star pupil Masaaki Shirakawa for not doing enough to lift growth when Shirakawa headed the central bank from 2008 to March of this year.

That was “a little bit of stepping out of the Japanese character,” said Richard Cooper, who taught Hamada at Yale and is now professor of international economics at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “It shows the American influence.”

The 77-year-old Hamada is one of the architects of the reflationary policies known as Abenomics and played a role in choosing Haruhiko Kuroda to replace Shirakawa as governor of the Bank of Japan. Under Kuroda, the BOJ is buying more than 7 trillion yen ($71.3 billion) in bonds a month in a bid to spur growth in the world’s third largest economy. The central bank today maintained its unprecedented easing and forecast that inflation will reach its target, even as some board members cautioned the price outlook was too optimistic.

The BOJ program “is an extension of the Yale Tobin-Brainard approach,” Hamada said in an interview. The Japanese central bank is “enhancing activity in asset markets” to “activate the real, stagnated economy.”

(emphasis added)

That ‘American influence’ is certainly pernicious and we should perhaps add here that the whole idea that central economic planning and money printing are panaceas for economic ills is at its root actually deeply un-American. The leftist ivory tower economists who propagate it are certainly not representative of the American spirit, which was always oriented toward liberty, including of course economic liberty. These people are the anti-thesis of this spirit, but we can offer some consolation: before all of this is over, central banks will be utterly discredited and be among the most reviled institutions ever.

Bloomberg offers the views of a sole critic (in the interest of ‘fairness’)– a proponent of the Friedmanite Chicago School. In other words, a school of thought that as recently as in the 1940s was regarded as part of the ‘leftist fringe’ as Hans-Hermann Hoppe once pointed out, is brought up as the lone spokesman against central planning a la Keynes and Tobin. These views are then curtly brushed off as irrelevant:

“The lessons Yellen and Hamada learned from Tobin back then aren’t producing the intended results today, said Brendan Brown, who attended the University of Chicago in the 1970s and is now executive director of Mitsubishi UFJ Securities in London.

Echoing some of Friedman’s skepticism, Brown argues the Fed’s effort to boost bond and stock prices artificially won’t help the economy because investors and companies realize the run-up won’t last and so will hold back on spending.

Rather than stepping up capital investment, companies are responding to the rise in stock prices by buying back shares or increasing dividends, he said. Orders for U.S. equipment such as computers and machinery fell 1.1 percent in September, according to the Commerce Department in Washington.

“QE is not working,” said Brown, author of “The Global Curse of the Federal Reserve.”

Former central bank official Joseph Gagnon takes issue with that assessment. He supports the Fed’s actions and said the economy has been restrained by households paying off debts, the on-again off-again crisis in the euro region and a “massive” fiscal squeeze.”

(emphasis added)

It is not surprising that a ‘former central bank official’ takes issue with Mr. Brown’s entirely correct assertion that ‘QE is not working’. We also take issue with it – not only is it ‘not working’, it is positively destructive. It will leave the economy’s capital structure extremely distorted and misaligned with consumer preferences. The bust that will follow in the wake of this huge policy error is going to be one for the history books.

Bloomberg then quotes Gagnon further:

“This is just Operation Twist redone,” said Gagnon, who taught at the University of California’s Haas School of Business in Berkeley in 1990 and 1991 when Yellen was a professor there. “And what we now know is that Operation Twist did work. They just needed to do more.”

(emphasis added)

Really? Is that what we ‘know’ today? That ‘Operation Twist’ somehow worked in spite of not working, and that it actuallywould have worked if only they ‘had done more’?  It is emblematic dear readers that the article closes out with the standard Keynesian excuse fore why Keynesian policies never seem to work:

“They haven’t done enough of it”

The logic behind this excuse is quite baffling, to say the least. Something that doesn’t work will work if only more of it is done? Has not Japan demonstrated conclusively by now that ‘doing more’ of the same only ends with government finances in tatters and on the brink of crisis?

Anyway, after reading this paean to Yellen and her teacher Tobin (we haven’t quoted from the article’s extensive praise of Tobin, but it is as uncritical, unreflected and flattering as such portrayals ever get), we conclude that one must fear the worst. If you thought that after Greenspan and Bernanke things couldn’t possibly get worse, you are probably in for a surprise.

AP_janet_yellen_tk_131009_16x9_608

Keynesian central planner Janet Yellen: believes the free market doesn’t work and needs utterly clueless people like her to function ‘better’.

(Photo via AP / Author unknown)

Are Conspiracy Theories The Biggest Threat To Democracy? | Zero Hedge

November 2, 2013 8:42 am / Leave a comment

Are Conspiracy Theories The Biggest Threat To Democracy? | Zero Hedge. (source)

What is the common element between Liborgate, the Fed manipulating capital markets, China hoarding gold, and the recent ubiquotous NSA spying revelations? At one point, before they became fact, they were all “conspiracy theories” as were the Freemasons, the Illuminati, McCarthy’s witch hunts, 9/11, and so many more. The same theories, which – don’t laugh – are now part of a Cambridge University study titled Conspiracy and Democracy,  which looks at the prevalence of conspiracy theories and what they tell us about trust in democratic societies, about the differences between cultures and societies, and why conspiracy theories (ostensibly before they become fact) appear at particular moments in history. But, at its core, whether conspiracy theories will, as the BBC summarizes, it, eventually destroy democracy.

Because, supposedly, it is not the corruption at the top echelons of government, the ultimate usurpation of power by assorted globalist money groups “never letting a crisis go to waste”, that plunder wealth from what is left of the middle class and hands it over, via latent inflation, asset bubbles and capital appreciation to the 1% peak of society’s wealth pyramid (in the US), or kleptofascist, unelected bureaucratic groups seeking the “greater good” despite the complete tear of the social fabric (in Europe) that is a threat to democracy.

No – you see it is evil conspiracy theories and the theorists that spin them that are the biggest threat to the “democratic” way of life.

The BBC has more on this amusing, if potentially troubling, avenue:

“The reason we have conspiracy theories is that sometimes governments and organisations do conspire,” says Observer columnist and academic John Naughton. It would be wrong to write off all conspiracy theorists as “swivel-eyed loons,” with “poor personal hygiene and halitosis,” he told a Cambridge University Festival of Ideas debate. They are not all “crazy”. The difficult part, for those of us trying to make sense of a complex world, is working out which parts of the conspiracy theory to keep and which to throw away.

Mr Naughton is one of three lead investigators in a major new Cambridge University project to investigate the impact of conspiracy theories on democracy.

The internet is generally assumed to be the main driving force behind the growth in conspiracy theories but, says Mr Naughton, there has been little research into whether that is really the case. He plans to compare internet theories on 9/11 with pre-internet theories about John F Kennedy’s assassination.

Like the other researchers, he is wary, or perhaps that should be weary, of delving into the darker recesses of the conspiracy world.

“The minute you get into the JFK stuff, and the minute you sniff at the 9/11 stuff, you begin to lose the will to live,” he told the audience in Cambridge.

Like Sir Richard Evans, who heads the five-year Conspiracy and Democracy project, he is at pains to stress that the aim is not to prove or disprove particular theories, simply to study their impact on culture and society.

Impact on culture and society… and then judge: because if heaven forbid the fabled institution of higher learning that is Cambridge – the progenitor of many a statist thinkers – finds that conspiracy theories are a danger to fine, upstanding, democratic society… then what?

Why are we so fascinated by them? Are they undermining trust in democratic institutions?

No, but a far better question is do conspiracy “theories”, at least until confirmed, simply provide the beholder with a far more skeptical view of a world than the one spoon fed by a complicit media, whose sole purpose is to perpetuate and multiply – hence enrich – the advertising dollars of the status quo? And is the long overdue questioning of everything that emanates from institutions of power a bad thing, or were people simply too lazy to think for themselves and let the government do it, at least until said “cognitive outsourcing” led to the second great depression of 2008?

David Runciman, professor of politics at Cambridge University, the third principal investigator, is keen to explode the idea that most conspiracies are actually “cock-ups”.

“The line between cock-up, conspiracy and conspiracy theory are much more blurred than the conventional view that you have got to choose between them,” he told the Festival of Ideas.

“There’s a conventional view that you get these conspirators, who are these kind of sinister, malign people who know what they are doing, and the conspiracy theorists, who occasionally stumble upon the truth but who are on the whole paranoid and crazy. “Actually the conspirators are often the paranoid and crazy conspiracy theorists, because in their attempt to cover up the cock-up they get drawn into a web in which their self-justification posits some giant conspiracy trying to expose their conspiracy.

“And I think that’s consistently true through a lot of political scandals, Watergate included.”

Such a “complex” and profoundly introspective theory – truly something only a Cambridge professor could come up with.

[Runciman] is also examining whether the push for greater openness and transparency in public life will fuel, rather than kill off, conspiracy theories.

“It may be that one of the things conspiracy theories feed on as well as silence, is a surfeit of information. And when there is a mass of information out there, it becomes easier for people to find their way through to come to the conclusion they want to come to.

“Plus, you don’t have to be an especial cynic to believe that, in the age of open government, governments will be even more careful to keep secret the things they want to keep secret.“The demand for openness always produces, as well as more openness, more secrecy.”

You mean… like the NSA spying on everyone to be abreast of just what everyone knows?

Or does that mean that the Fed’s faux transparency affair is nothing but a red herring designed to redirect attention from the Fed’s true intentions somewhere else?

Unpossible.

That said, having been accused of a conspiratorial bent on a few occasions, we kinda, sorta see where this is going, and will go so far as to venture that in a few years, the Cambridge study’s conclusions (which certainly will cast all paranoid and crazy conspirators in a culpable light and worth of “social isolation”), will be escalated to enforce that anyone found of harboring “conspiratorial” thoughts will be bound and shackled in whatever WIFI-free dungeon the local host Big Brother government has created precisely for this ulterior subclass of humans.

But for now – conspire away… and upon exposing the deep lies beneath the surface of “democracy” – since the mainstream media simply refuses to be painted in the same paranoid and crazy brush – remember to promptly depart for the “evil undemocratic empire” that is Russia…

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