Henry Porter has now completely discredited himself, with a shameful piece of luddite nonsense masquerading as a call for justice:

If indeed a new era of global responsibility has come into being with measures that actually restrain banks and isolate tax havens,

See this. The politics of sour grapes is alive and well at the grauniad. Irrational, illogical and destructive, like the rest of the ideas in this misguided, buggy whip cracking article.

it may be time for the planet’s dominant economic powers to focus on the destructive, anti-civic forces of the internet.

The greatest invention of the 21st century, equivalent in importance to the invention of the printing press, characterized as ‘destructive’ and ‘anti-civic’. The greatest force for empowering the little guy, thanks to which the playing field is made forever flatter; this is a ‘bad thing’. A set of devices and protocols that allow you to have a private conversation with anyone, anywhere in the world for free…and all the other myriad things it can do and will do. This is something ‘to be stopped’.

Only a total computer illiterate, luddite, anti-freedom, anti-human imbecile could believe such a thing.

Exactly 20 years after Sir Tim Berners-Lee wrote the blueprint for the world wide web, the internet has become the host to a small number of dangerous WWMs – worldwide monopolies that sweep all before them with exuberant contempt for people’s rights, their property and the past.

The internet and the World Wide Web are two separate things, as this commenter points out:

1) Tim Berners-Lee created the WORLD WIDE WEB, which is a distinctly different thing than the Internet. The World Wide Web is a layer on top of the internet that provides the websites that we see, but the largest portion of the internet is not visible, and does not interact with home computers. The internet is hardware, software, protocols, servers, undersea cables, standards, repeaters, satellites and so forth, all operating on the same protocols (IP, Internet Protocol). Tim Berners-Lee certainly created a revolution with the World Wide Web, but the creation of the Internet is an even grander achievement, which took decades, cost billions, and was mostly the responsibility of three groups: AT&T, Cisco Systems, and The United States Department of Defense.

In the strictest sense, the internet was born in 1971, just under 20 years before Sir Berner-Lee’s breakthrough, when many of the standards and theories that became Internet Protocol were developed.

2) Google is at the very center of the information-economy, and to say it produces nothing is ridiculous. They’re purpose is to effectively organize, catalog and make searchable the sum of the information of mankind. Everything they have constructed has been purposed about this goal, from their basic search engines to Google Earth.

One day we will live in a world where everything that is quantifiable knowledge will be contained and indexed by Google. And it will be a good day for mankind, because all that information will be equally available, so long as you speak the English language.

What Google does, to put it stiffly, is vastly more important than some novelist exploring how much the human condition absolutely sucks.

Thanks to the commenter called ‘Netwrk’.

Google is the most prominent WWM,

Is that something like WMD (Weapon of Mass Destruction) I wonder? Hmmmmmmm…. Guilt by acronym association!

but let’s start with an American site that is making a name for itself in straightforward misappropriation. Scribd.com offers free downloads of every kind of book, magazine, brochure, guide, research paper and pamphlet to 55 million readers every month. Many have been uploaded illegally. Last week the publishers of JK Rowling, Ken Follett and Aravind Adiga took action to remove books that had been illegally published on the site.

First of all, Scribd is a wonderful service. It is being used by the computer literate to disseminate knowledge. Only the completely ignorant, imagination-less luddites are against it.

Mr. Porter, you are on the wrong side of history. You need, as a matter of priority, to read ‘Against Intellectual Monopoly‘. The arguments you put forward against ‘piracy’ are from an imaginary world before the internet (like buggy whip salesmen before the motor car). The ‘community’ you speak of would be much better off living in a world without patents and copyrights, and Against Intellectual Monopoly proves it. The new services like Scribd, are clearly more beneficial than harmful, even with the present copyright regime in place. No matter how loud you shout, and complain, copyright, like alcohol prohibition is dead, and we are all better off for it.

To add injury to insult, your type of ‘thinking’ is disrupting the flow of materials that are out of copyright. Our own Scribd account was the subject of an attack from your lobby this last week.

On our Scribd account, I publish some of our works, and other historical works that are free of copyright. Because Scribd is under attack from mentally retarded luddites, we were sent the following:

Subject:

Copyright notification

From Jason Bentley, on 2009-04-03:

Message:

Dear Irdial-Discs,

We have removed your document “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations” because our text matching system determined that it was very similar to a work that has been marked as copyrighted and not permitted on Scribd.

Like all automated matching systems, our system is not perfect and occasionally makes mistakes. If you believe that your document is not infringing, please contact us at copyright@scribd.com and we will investigate the matter.

As stated in our terms of use, repeated incidents of copyright infringement will result in the deletion of your Scribd.com account and prohibit you from uploading material to Scribd.com in the future. To prevent us from having to take these steps, please delete from scribd.com any material you have uploaded to which you do not own the necessary rights and refrain from uploading any material you are not entitled to upload. For more information about Scribd.com’s copyright policy, please read the Terms of Use located at http://www.scribd.com/terms

Jason Bentley
Directory of Community Development
jason@scribd.com

People like you might believe that all works should be copyrighted forever no matter how old they are. The fact of the matter is that copyrights were originally tolerated in the belief that they served society, and rewarded the creators of content whilst promoting innovation and creativity. This is why the term of protection was short, so that the works would pass into the public domain, where they could spread and be of benefit to the public after the creators had reaped the benefit of protection via a state sanctioned monopoly over their ideas and how they could be used and copied.

The work in question above is by Adam Smith, published in 1776:

An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations is the magnum opus of the Scottish economist Adam Smith. It is a clearly written account of economics at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, as well as a rhetorical piece written for the generally educated individual of the 18th century – advocating a free market economy as more productive and more beneficial to society.

The work is credited as a watershed in history and economics due to its comprehensive, largely accurate characterization of economic mechanisms that survive in modern economics; and also for its effective use of rhetorical technique, including structuring the work to contrast real world examples of free and fettered markets.

[…]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations

In case you are unfamiliar with it.

I replied:

From Irdial-Discs,
on 2009-04-03:

Please restore this deleted document. It is in the public domain:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations

It would be an interesting project for Scribd to add the entire contents of the Project Guttenberg texts to your checking system, so that you can exclude documents like this from being flagged.

./akin
./irdial

Scribd.com complied:

Jason Bentley, Apr 04 10:33 pm:

Hi,

I’m sorry that our automated copyright protection system misidentified your document as infringing. We try very hard to protect the rights of authors, and sometimes our copyright robot get a little oversensitive.

I’ve restored your document and removed all references from your account.

Cheers,

Jason

***

Jason Bentley
Community Director and Copyright Agent
Scribd, Inc.

This is the sort of world Henry Porter wants; a world where everything is unavailable because of the incredibly small number of giant publishers and their prostitute luddite lackeys whining that the old days are over. At the very least, Porter is calling for a web where everything must be screened by copyright police before it is posted. This is the same voice that wants ‘civil liberties’; the very voice that is calling for a fascist regime to enforce the insanity of copyright transposed to the web.

Scribd.com complied, but what is interesting is the company’s institutional lack of guilt when the piracy was exposed.

‘Piracy’ (as it is defined today) only takes place when someone sells a book or movie; a ‘movie pirate’ is someone who copies movies onto DVDs and then sells them instead of buying discs from the manufacturer and re-selling them. People who copy movies are not ‘Pirates’, what they do is not ‘piracy’ and in fact the act of copying music, books and movies is beneficial to society even if they sell copies. Furthermore, the people who make movies, music and who write books are able to make a living without copyright laws (state enforced monopolies) in place. This might come as a shock to people like Henry Porter, who writes in the bosom of a nest of copyright brainwashed computer illiterate vipers, but it is a fact nonetheless. Against Intellectual Monopoly has some illuminating examples of why (in this case patents) are a bad thing:

In most histories, James Watt is a heroic inventor,responsible for the beginning of the industrial revolution. The facts above suggest a different interpretation. Watt is a clever inventor who, after getting one step ahead of the pack, remains ahead not by superior innovation, but by clever exploitation of the legal system. The fact that his business partner is a wealthy man with strong connections in Parliament, is not a minor help.

The evidence suggests that Watt’s efforts to use the legal system to inhibit competition set back the industrial revolution by a decade or two. The granting of the 1769 and, especially, of the 1775 patents likely delayed the mass adoption of the steam engine:innovation is stifled until his patents expire; and very few steam engines are built during the period of Watt’s legal monopoly. From the number of innovations that occur immediately after the expiration of the patent, it appears that Watt’s competitors simply waited until then before releasing their own innovations in an effort to avoid the fate of Hornblower. Also, we see that Watt’s inventive skills are badly allocated: we find him spending as much time engaging in legal action in an effort to establish and preserve a monopoly as he does in actual invention.

Indeed, this story contains most of the important elements of our argument Against Intellectual Monopoly. The sort of wasteful effort to suppress competition and obtain special privileges we have seen in Watt is one of the greatest dangers of monopoly. It is commonly referred to as rent-seeking behavior. Watt’s attempt to extend the duration of his 1769 patent is an especially egregious example of rent seeking: the patent extension is clearly unnecessary to provide incentive for the original invention, which had already taken place. On top of this, we see Watt using patents as a tool to suppress innovation by his competitors, such as Hornblower, Wasborough and others. Finally,there is the slow rate at which the steam engine was adopted be for the expiration of Watt’s patent. By keeping prices high and preventing other from producing cheaper steam engines, Boulton and Watt hampered capital accumulation and slowed economic growth. Intellectual property, as it is currently conceived, has other damaging social effects but the three listed here and exemplified in Watt’s story are the most serious ones: rent-seeking, innovation suppression, and slow-down in the process of economic growth. We shall see that Watt’s experience is the rule, not the exception.

[…]

Against Intellectual Monopoly

Anyone with even one brain cell can see the parallels between this story and the others in Against Intellectual Monopoly in the context of Google, Scribd, the services that run on the Bittorrent ecosystem and the other internet services today. The world, ‘the community’ that Porter is so eager to protect and serve would have been far better served if Watt had not been able to use government force to stop other inventors from improving the steam engine. As soon as Watt’s government granted monopoly ended, the efficiency and power of steam engines increased at a rate far greater than when Watt was able to stifle innovation with his patent, and what’s more, when his patent expired, Watt’s profits continued undiminished.

This is a very important lesson for everyone involved in any sort of creativity. We at Irdial knew instinctively that releasing our catalogue for free would benefit us more than keeping it locked up. That is why we freed our works for non commercial use in 1999. If we lived in a society where there were no copyrights at all we would gladly give up the commercial use rights in an instant.

Instead of fighting the reality, resisting the new tools and clinging on to broken models, it made sense to us to embrace it all and use it to get our works in as many places as possible. To us, it’s obvious. To people like Henry Porter, the future and its wondrous tools are a threat to be destroyed, and he doesn’t care about all the historical works that are burned in his insane quest to cleanse the internet of copyrighted works. We see the direct result of people like him in the erasure of Adam Smith’s work from Scribd.

Instead of admitting it and apologising, it issued a statement claiming Scribd possessed “industry-leading copyright management system which goes above and beyond requirements of Digital Millennium Copyright Act”.

So, Scribd should now apologize for innovating, for bringing millions of documents to millions of people, for nothing. They should apologize for having to invent a piece of filtering software thanks to lobbyist bought government pressure, which might never work accurately and which diverts time away from the software developers improving Scribd, and which diverts capital away from improving Scribd. This is totally insane, and exactly what is described in Against Intellectual Monopoly. Thanks to the luddites like Henry Porter and his distant cousin Watt, innovation is being retarded, as companies divert resources to satisfy monopolists.

That’s like a drunk driver protesting innocence because he’s covered by the best insurance company. What matters is the crime, the theft of someone else’s content, which has taken care, labour, money and expertise to publish.

This is wrong. What you are doing is protesting that the internet should not exist so that you can continue to collect a rent on your works at the expense of the entire world’s population and at the expense of the progress of mankind itself.

What matters here is that copying books is in no way ‘a crime’, is entirely beneficial to society, and in no way detracts from an authors ability to make money on the works that they have taken care, labour money and expertise to create. I have no doubt that some non-BLOGDIAL readers will not believe that this is even possible. Not only is it possible, but we have made money from giving our works away for free, and Against Intellectual Monopoly has examples in it where works that are not copyrighted have made millions for publishers; look at the case of the title The Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States where the publisher (Norton) printed this rather large book at a huge profit, despite there being no copyright on the text and it being downloaded world-wide by millions of people:

[…] To be clear: what Norton received from the government was the right to publish first, and the right to use the word “authorized” in the title. What they did not get was the usual copyright – the right to exclusively publish the book. Because it is a U.S. government document, the moment it was released, other individuals, and more important, publishing houses, had the right to buy or download copies and to make and resell additional copies– electronically or in print, at a price of their choosing

[…]

Assuming that St. Martin’s has some idea of how to price a book to avoid losing money, this suggests Norton made at the very least on the order of a million dollars. We also know that their contract with the government called upon them to donate their “profits” to charity – and we know that they did in fact “donate $600,000 to support the study of emergency preparedness and terrorism prevention.”

Against Intellectual Monopoly

[…]

The point is that even if Scribd removes books, it still allows individuals to advertise services for delivering pirated books by email, which must make it the enemy of every writer and publisher in the world. In effect it has turned copyright law on its head: instead of asking publishers for permission, it requires them to object if and when they become aware of a breach.

Advertising a service is everyone’s right. The right to publish (or ‘freedom of the press’) is not ‘the right of newspapers and journalists to write what they like without restriction’. In this case, ‘The Press’ means not ‘the press corps’ but THE PRINTING PRESS as in a device to disseminate writing to a large audience. Journalists always make this mistake; they go berserk when their newspapers face censorship, but when its Bloggers or individuals who claim their right to print and distribute whatever they like, then it’s another story. Shameful.

Scribd is the friend of every writer and publisher in the world, wether they know it or not. Copyright law needs to be abolished, not just turned on its head, and the internet has made this progress begin to happen. If it does not take place before hand, the deaths of the luddites like Henry Porter and his employers and their replacement by ‘The Pirate Generation’ will spell the end of copyright, and the removal of all related legislation from the statute books. As it is, if these laws remain on the books, hundreds of millions of people will be and are being criminalized at the behest of luddites, lobbyists and the corporations they serve…people like Henry Porter.

Google presents a far greater threat to the livelihood of individuals and the future of commercial institutions important to the community.

This is so absurd I actually LOL’d. Google makes it easy to find authors; easier than it has ever been before. It makes all sorts of research easier by orders of magnitude; every link on this page was found for me by Google. Henry Porter wants a world where this, the greatest research tool ever invented is deliberately broken, just like Scribd is being broken. This is the ‘benefit’ he wants to bring to ‘the community’, and it is laughable that he thinks that ‘commercial institutions’ work for the benefit of ‘the community’… only when they work for HIS benefit… which community PRECISELY is he talking about? I think it’s the community of published authors and publishing houses; the intellectual monopolists, who want to strangle innovation and hold humanity back.

One case emerged last week when a letter from Billy Bragg, Robin Gibb and other songwriters was published in the Times explaining that Google was playing very rough with those who appeared on its subsidiary, YouTube. When the Performing Rights Society demanded more money for music videos streamed from the website, Google reacted by refusing to pay the requested 0.22p per play and took down the videos of the artists concerned.

This is called ‘rent seeking‘; the artists concerned, Socialist Billy Bragg and his strange bedfellow, falsetto Robin Gibb, intellectual monopolists both, threatened Google that if they did not pay the rent for videos on YouTube they would face action. Google removes the videos, the infringement, and then is accused of ‘playing very rough’. Do they want their material infringed or do they not? They complained, and their wishes were acceded to; why are they complaining? The fact of the matter is that they want to collect rent. They would like their music to be posted and hosted on YouTube without them having to lift a finger, but they want the rent also. 22p per play is absolutely ridiculous, and if every rent seeker asked for and recieved this money, there would be no YouTube. YouTube is turning out to be one of the most potent political tools available from, the UK to Saudi Arabia. Henry Porter wants it killed so that his (completely irrational) rent seeking socialist friends can make money they do not deserve.

Socialists really are ridiculous creatures; they claim that they are for the masses being empowered, but when something comes along that gives them more power than anyone has ever had EVER, they are AGAINST IT, and want to DESTROY it. The fact is that Socialists are not for anyone other than themselves; they want to be the bosses, the controllers with absolute power. Billy Bragg is a perfect example of this. A luddite that would smash the internet so he can collect rent. Robin Gibb is at least consistent; he is a rich man who doesn’t want the party to end – at least he is honest.

It does this with impunity because it is dominant worldwide and knows the songwriters have nowhere else to go. Google is the portal to a massive audience: you comply with its terms or feel the weight of its boot on your windpipe.

This is total garbage. Google can in no way be characterized as putting a boot on anyone’s windpipe…though in the case of Billy Bragg, that would save us from hearing his ‘singing’.

Secondly, songwriters have everywhere else to go. This is because the internet is essentially infinite; they can set up their own site and sell their wares; they have had over a decade to do it, and have failed miserably to meet this new challenge. Instead of buying Napster, they destroyed it. Instead of working with Mininova and The Pirate Bay, they are trying to outlaw them. Even Apples iTunes store, where they were making money, met with fierce resistance from them. The fact of the matter is, these people, Henry Porter, Billy Bragg and the entertainment industry are collectively unintelligent and unimaginative. Were this not the case, they would have seen the opportunity for super-distribution of their works and embraced the internet at the beginning.

Despite the aura of heroic young enterprise that still miraculously attaches to the web, what we are seeing is a much older and toxic capitalist model – the classic monopoly that destroys industries and individual enterprise in its bid for ever greater profits.

That is incorrect; what we are seeing IS heroic young enterprise, being misunderstood and slandered by old rent seeking luddites, who are the REAL monopolists in this story, the Intellectual Monopolists. It is Henry Porter that is trying to destroy industry’s enterprise – new industries – Google, Scribd and all the other content services empower individual enterprise by allowing the creative to circumnavigate the luddite gatekeepers at the Guardian and the major record labels.

Google make profits and the entire world benefits from a tool unprecedented in human history, that no one has to pay for to use, and which helps authors and publishers make more money and reach more people than they ever dreamed possible. Only a total fool would be against it, and given the facts of the history and nature of copyright and patents, only the evil and utterly selfish would try to destroy it.

Despite its diversification, Google is in the final analysis a parasite that creates nothing, merely offering little aggregation, lists and the ordering of information generated by people who have invested their capital, skill and time.

This is covered by the comments on this very bad and revealing article:

2) Google is at the very center of the information-economy, and to say it produces nothing is ridiculous. They’re purpose is to effectively organize, catalog and make searchable the sum of the information of mankind. Everything they have constructed has been purposed about this goal, from their basic search engines to Google Earth.

[…]

To say that Google produces nothing is ridiculous. As many people have mentioned the search algorithms they have developed make the internet useful for millions. One might as well dismiss Dr Johnson for compiling a book of other people’s words.

Beyond search they have produced some of the easiest to use and most compelling software available. GMail, Google Maps, Google Docs and Google Calendar have reset expectations for what can be done in internet applications.

They may not be the perfect institution and I love to know if one ever existed. I want to live in a world of Newspapers and Google but if Newspapers don’t survive it won’t be Google’s fault.

[…]

“… Google is in the final analysis a parasite that creates nothing, merely offering little aggregation, lists and the ordering of information generated by people who have invested their capital, skill and time”.

This is utter blindness. It’s like arguing that the Ordinance Survey have never done anything useful, because everything on their maps was created by other people, or that Henry Ford added no value because he only shuffled around metals, wood and leather into different shapes.

Google have made searching on a vast scale incredibly easy, and they are the only company who has done so, covering everything from Ethiopian restaurants to the notebooks of Leonardo, at any time, from anywhere. In fact, for absolutely nothing, they provide me with a service worth several times more than any other company does, bar none. If this puts them in a position to earn a lot of money, good on them. If Billy Bragg would still prefer to be back in the workers’ paradise of the GDR, he’s welcome to it.

Closer to home, I note that 95+% of what the Guardian provides overlaps several times over with what is provided by the Daily Telegraph, the Irish Times, the Economist, etc, and that the marginal value of any one of these is minimal. The challenge for newspapers is to make themselves distinctively useful, (e.g. the New Yorker’s employment of Sy Hersh), rather than, like the Guardian, recycling a huge amount of content from the AP in manner that makes it, “in the final analysis, a parasite …”.

[…]

What a bitter and twisted load of oldschool, oldfashioned, defensive Fleet-Street-Journalist dinosaurian rubbish this article really is.

Just listen to the decription of the Internet and Google: “amoral”, “destructive, anti-civic”, “exuberant contempt”, “threat to livelihood of individuals”, “a parasite that creates nothing”, “delinquent”, “sociopathic”, “invaded the privacy of millions”, “needs to be stopped in its tracks”.

This is the typical rant of the dying newspaperman – yes, mate, your “power” as a “journalist” with your beholden readers IS on the wane, your influence IS falling, your role IS diminishing – I can understand why you see the Internet and Google as bad.

But this isn’t journalism – like so much we now see inthe papers against the Internet, it’s massively ill-informed, superficial, frightened, self-serving invective. I fear it will do nothing more than to confirm the authors as dinosaurs who have received the last rites.

[…]

And there you have it.

On the back of the labour of others it makes vast advertising revenues – in the final quarter of last year its revenues were $5.7bn, and it currently sits on a cash pile of $8.6bn. Its monopolistic tendencies took an extra twist this weekend with rumours that it may buy the micro-blogging site Twitter and its plans – contested by academics – to scan a vast library of books that are out of print but still in copyright.

Twitter, if they want to be bought by Google, is a private matter. It’spurchase will benefit the users of that service…in any case, that has nothing to do with the thrust of this article, intellectual monopoly. It does point however shine a light on Henry Porter’s hatred of the rich and innovative, his sour grapes politics. As for ‘contested by academics’, this is ‘some people say‘. That is the company that Henry Porter keeps.

One of the chief casualties of the web revolution is the newspaper business, which now finds itself laden with debt (not Google’s fault) and having to give its content free to the search engine in order to survive.

Newspapers are dying because they do not provide what people need. If the Guardian provided what people want, the truth, then it would be a thriving business. The fact of the matter is, as the commenter says above, the Guardian’s content overlaps with every other newspapers content. they run the same stories, from the same point of view, and everyone is sick of it. This is why readers have turned away from newspapers:

Definitely the most ill-informed piece of propaganda I have read in a very long time and a great example of why nobody wants to pay for newspapers

Well said commenter. This is an absurd article that flies in the face of reality and the truth; why should anyone PAY to be lied to when they can get the truth for free and unfiltered from the internets?

Newspapers can of course remove their content but then their own advertising revenues and profiles decline. In effect they are being held captive and tormented by their executioner, who has the gall to insist that the relationship is mutually beneficial. Were newspapers to combine to take on Google they would be almost certainly in breach of competition law.

Newspapers, if they were to remove their content, would be committing suicide. They should do this, and go out like an hero instead of whining like spoiled brats. They have executed themselves by prostituting their non advertising column inches for anyone with money, and the Guardian is the biggest whore of them all. Were newspapers to combine to take on Google no one would notice; the content in all the papers is the same, and so it is already like there is only one newspaper… no breach of competition rules is possible between those bird cage liners.

In 1787 Thomas Jefferson wrote: “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter.” A moment’s thought must tell us that he is still right: newspapers are the only means of holding local hospitals, schools, councils and the police to account, and on a national level they are absolutely essential for the good functioning of democracy.

I think this Thomas Jefferson quote is more appropriate:

“Knowledge is like a candle. When you light your candle from mine, my light is not diminished. It is enhanced and a larger room is enlightened as a consequence.” Thomas Jefferson

Quote found by Google of course.

Sharing knowledge is just like sharing a light from a candle; Henry Porter and the intellectual monopolists want us all to live in darkness.

If, at a time of profound challenges, newspapers fall out with Google, it could be pretty serious for British society, which is why I referred earlier to anti-civic forces.

British society is in trouble because the newspapers have utterly failed to raise the alarm about the police state. They have failed to rally the people into revolt. They have failed in the very task that Henry Porter believes is their raison d’etre and sacred duty. The internet has done more than any newspaper to galvanize inform and solidify the revolt against the police state, as we are well aware; even email circulars are more powerful than newspapers in properly informing the public. Then there are the Blogs which have changed the game entirely. And now, YouTube, which shamed television news into playing catch up on one of the most important speeches delivered in front of a sitting Prime Minster ever. That is a blog post, by the way, NOT a newspaper article. No, newspapers are an irrelevance now thanks to their prostituting their power, and this article, this shameless, vulgar piece of transparent propaganda, is a perfect example of it.

Of course the company founded by Sergey Brin and Larry Page in 1998 – now reckoned to be the world’s most powerful brand – does not offer any substitute for the originators of content nor does it allow this to touch its corporate conscience. That is probably because one detects in Google something that is delinquent and sociopathic, perhaps the character of a nightmarish 11-year-old.

The only delusional people in this story are Henry Porter and the lobby he represents and is shilling for. The only people without conscience are the ones who would retard or destroy man’s progress for their personal profit. It is Henry Porter who is acting like a breast fed 11-year-old, whining that the world is changing and he can no longer get his ‘bitty’….”I want my rent mummy!!! WAAAAH WAAAHHH WAHHHHH”

This particular 11-year-old has known nothing but success and does not understand the risks, skill and failure involved in the creation of original content, nor the delicate relationships that exist outside its own desires and experience.

Henry Porter is painfully unaware about the history and true nature of intellectual monopoly, and how it is damaging to society. He wants to prevent failure of fossilized and sclerotic businesses by strangling innovators so that methods can never change and business and culture remain in stasis.

There is a brattish, clever amorality about Google that allows it to censor the pages on its Chinese service without the slightest self doubt, store vast quantities of unnecessary information about every Google search, and menace the delicate instruments of democratic scrutiny.

Henry Porter perfectly conveys spoiled and ignorant immorality that poses as righteous indignation. He chastises Google for obeying the laws of other countries while whining that Google does not better obeying the insane laws of the UK. This is hypocrisy, but when it comes to China, all journalists at the Guardian are in the same boat.

And, naturally, it did not exercise Google executives that Street View not only invaded the privacy of millions and made the job of burglars easier but somehow laid claim to Britain’s civic spaces. How gratifying to hear of the villagers of Broughton, Bucks, who prevented the Google van from taking pictures of their homes.

And yet, all the journalists who jumped on Google for Streetview, which everyone can use equally, did not make so much noise when the CCTV started to go up, which no one can access but the state. How is it that CCTV, ANPR etc is not as bad as Google Streetview? Henry Porter has been making the right noises about CCTV to be sure, but the newspapers as a whole have totally FAILED to make the right noises about CCTV. Google Streetview is NOTHING compared to the real-time CCTV and ANPR that the state has, and yet, where is the universal moral outrage? Where are the pig ignorant little Britain villagers taking down the surveillance cameras en masse? Oh, I remember, Henry Porter says:

Don’t get me wrong: I’ve always believed that the democratic state must be given power to act on behalf of us

[…]

http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=1499

which means that he is FOR CCTV as long as the democratic state is behind it, acting on behalf of us. Those villagers are FOR CCTV as long as its the government behind them! They are all as thick as two short planks.

We could do worse than follow their example for this brat needs to be stopped in its tracks and taught about the responsibilities it owes to content providers and copyright holders.

[…]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/05/google-internet-piracy?showallcomments=true

I am happy to say that articles like this are the death rattle of the pure evil that is newspaper journalism.

I am also happy to report that the majority of the comments on his article are entirely against it, for all the right reasons.

Farewell newspaper journalism, don’t let the door slam behind you.

1. We, the Leaders of the Group of Twenty, met in London on 2 April 2009.

This, we know.

2. We face the greatest challenge to the world economy in modern times; a crisis which has deepened since we last met, which affects the lives of women, men, and children in every country, and which all countries must join together to resolve. A global crisis requires a global solution.

FALSE. It is not true that all countries must join together to resolve this ‘crisis’, and it is also false that this ‘crisis’ reqires a global solution.

The adage ‘Think locally act globally’ applies here. Each country needs to have its own sovereign currency that is based on Gold coins. That is the long term solution to this problem.

3. We start from the belief that prosperity is indivisible;

FALSE. Prosperity is the byproduct of liberty. It is liberty that is indivisible.

that growth, to be sustained, has to be shared;

FALSE. Not only is the idea of sustained growth not an absolute, but the idea that it has to be shared is also absurd.

and that our global plan for recovery must have at its heart the needs and jobs of hard-working families, not just in developed countries but in emerging markets and the poorest countries of the world too; and must reflect the interests, not just of today’s population, but of future generations too.

If that is true, then priority number one must be the adoption of a monetary system where the hard earned work value of the people cannot be arbitrarily destroyed by the fallible leaders of the G20. If that is true, then no one anywhere should accept a fiat currency or legal tender laws that make it impossible for people to preserve their wealth and prosperity in the long run.

We believe that the only sure foundation for sustainable globalisation and rising prosperity for all is an open world economy based on market principles, effective regulation, and strong global institutions.

It is not at all agreed that ‘sustainable globalisation’ is a desirable outcome. Rising prosperity, for sure, many people on the earth are living lives that are not optimal; the question is what is the best way that they can serve their own interests. Market principles create the prosperity that the leaders of the G20 are now able to squander. ‘Effective regulation’ is code for total market regulation, which means the death of market principles. ‘Strong global institutions’ means global governance, anathema to the free market and a death blow to it.

4. We have today therefore pledged to do whatever is necessary to:

LIE. If this were the case, they would immediately cease and desist from interfering in the process of the market.

restore confidence, growth, and jobs;

They cannot do this. The market is more powerful than any of them or even 1000 of them.

repair the financial system to restore lending;

They cannot do this. They do not have the ability to do this. If they could do this, it would be the wrong thing to do because credit was the cause of this problem.

strengthen financial regulation to rebuild trust;

Trust is not the problem. More onerous regulation will not restore it; it will further damage the market.

fund and reform our international financial institutions to overcome this crisis and prevent future ones;

You do not have the money to fund and reform international financial institutions. You can only print money or tax citizens. You cannot tax any further without a global revolt, so you will steal the money by printing more fiat currency. This will worsen the ‘crisis’, hasten and increase the severity of the implosion.

promote global trade and investment and reject protectionism, to underpin prosperity; and

Global trade does not need promotion. Companies are very good at selling their wares world-wide. Investors do not need encouragement to find places to put their money. If you get out of the way and remove regulations and restrictions money will flow at the speed of light to where it is needed.

build an inclusive, green, and sustainable recovery.

These are weasel words, inserted to placate the adherents of the new secular religion ‘Environmentalism’.

By acting together to fulfil these pledges we will bring the world economy out of recession and prevent a crisis like this from recurring in the future.

And if you fail, will you all collectively resign and cease to interfere in matters beyond your understanding?

5. The agreements we have reached today, to treble resources available to the IMF to $750 billion, to support a new SDR allocation of $250 billion, to support at least $100 billion of additional lending by the MDBs, to ensure $250 billion of support for trade finance, and to use the additional resources from agreed IMF gold sales for concessional finance for the poorest countries, constitute an additional $1.1 trillion programme of support to restore credit, growth and jobs in the world economy.

Selling Gold? Anyone with common sense will see this as a great buying opportunity. The price of Gold (real money) is going to go down on this announcement, and then, once these insane measures fail to work, it will skyrocket.

This paragraph fails to say where the $1.1 trillion dollars promised is going to come from. It also does not say who is going to receive these fiat funds.

Together with the measures we have each taken nationally, this constitutes a global plan for recovery on an unprecedented scale.

LIE. This constitutes theft on a scale previously unknown to mankind. This $1.1 trillion has to come from somewhere. It can either come from the printing press, or the savings of a nation or from taxation. Either way, it is going to come from somewhere, and then it is going to be given to someone at the diktat of a small handful of people. This is more than insanity. It is criminal. We note that none of the citizenry of the G20 were asked to vote wether or not ‘their’ money was to be used in this way. This ‘solution’ was arrived at in secret and delivered as a fait accomplit. No one with any decency would accept such a thing. And to top it all off, this solution WILL NOT WORK.

6. We are undertaking an unprecedented and concerted fiscal expansion,

You cannot make something out of nothing. Value cannot be created out of nothing. Any fiscal expansion must come from the production of work; governments are unproductive – they cannot produce anything, they can only take from the productive and give to the unproductive. This is called ‘stealing’.

which will save or create millions of jobs which would otherwise have been destroyed, and that will, by the end of next year, amount to $5 trillion, raise output by 4 per cent, and accelerate the transition to a green economy. We are committed to deliver the scale of sustained fiscal effort necessary to restore growth.

This plan will not save or create real jobs. It will in fact, destroy real jobs and capital.

7. Our central banks have also taken exceptional action. Interest rates have been cut aggressively in most countries, and our central banks have pledged to maintain expansionary policies for as long as needed and to use the full range of monetary policy instruments, including unconventional instruments, consistent with price stability.

Central banks and fiat currency are the cause of this problem. They do not have perfect knowledge, and therefore are not able to set the interest rates correctly. Only the market can do that. It was the artificially low interest rates set by the Federal Reserve that started this crisis. The fact that you do not know this disqualifies you from being able to present a solution.

8. Our actions to restore growth cannot be effective until we restore domestic lending and international capital flows. We have provided significant and comprehensive support to our banking systems to provide liquidity, recapitalise financial institutions, and address decisively the problem of impaired assets. We are committed to take all necessary actions to restore the normal flow of credit through the financial system and ensure the soundness of systemically important institutions, implementing our policies in line with the agreed G20 framework for restoring lending and repairing the financial sector.

You cannot be for the market and also be for forcing people to lend money where they do not feel that it is prudent to do so. Trying to expand access to credit to people who had no business buying a house was one of the factors that caused this situation. When you get out of the way, money will begin to flow instantly. By standing together as you are, you are in fact acting like a dam, blocking the flow of capital. Money is like information; it wants to be free. When you finally give up your delusion that you understand economics and get out of the way, the dam will burst and money will flow and wash away this problem.

9. Taken together, these actions will constitute the largest fiscal and monetary stimulus and the most comprehensive support programme for the financial sector in modern times.

And it will fail spectacularly. Stimulus packages will not work, cannot work, and have never worked.

Acting together strengthens the impact and the exceptional policy actions announced so far must be implemented without delay.

Acting together intensifies the storm, increases its devastating power and will make everything 1000 times worse.

Today, we have further agreed over $1 trillion of additional resources for the world economy through our international financial institutions and trade finance.

What is the ultimate source of the money? It can only be tax or printing press or savings. Why is it that you cannot speak plainly? Say you are going to do one of the three!

10. Last month the IMF estimated that world growth in real terms would resume and rise to over 2 percent by the end of 2010.

They could not predict this crash, and yet, we are to believe that they can predict the future now?

We are confident that the actions we have agreed today, and our unshakeable commitment to work together to restore growth and jobs, while preserving long-term fiscal sustainability, will accelerate the return to trend growth.

And this is why you FAIL. Confidence is not enough; confidence does not get work done, it does not create value. What confidence DOES do, is deceive the confident into believing paper money is real, that it has value, and that by printing it, you create value out of thin air. Commitment to a false idea is suicide. In this case, that is a good thing. Long-term fiscal sustainability can only be had with gold coins as the money. The trend growth that you refer to was produced by the printing of fiat currency. Those graphs should be thrown out immediately, as they represent an unattainable goal.

We commit today to taking whatever action is necessary to secure that outcome, and we call on the IMF to assess regularly the actions taken and the global actions required.

If you want to fix this, you need to STOP TAKING ACTIONS. It is your taking of actions that has been and which is causing the problem!

11. We are resolved to ensure long-term fiscal sustainability and price stability and will put in place credible exit strategies from the measures that need to be taken now to support the financial sector and restore global demand.

Long term pice stability can only be had with a gold coin standard for money. Since gold cannot be printed, its value cannot be corrupted – the money cannot be debased. When denominated in gold, the price of almost everything has not changed in decades. Global demand is not your affair. You do not have the competence to engineer it, and everything you do to try and generate it causes more problems.

We are convinced that by implementing our agreed policies we will limit the longer-term costs to our economies, thereby reducing the scale of the fiscal consolidation necessary over the longer term.

People used to be convinced that the earth was flat. You are all in the same camp. You all believe that paper money has value, that you can control ‘the economy’, and that your insane spending measures will fix this, when every indicator says that it will make things worse. Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Albert Einstein.. What you are doing, is, by this definition, INSANE. It was debt that created this problem. You cannot borrow your way out of debt.

12. We will conduct all our economic policies cooperatively and responsibly with regard to the impact on other countries and will refrain from competitive devaluation of our currencies and promote a stable and well-functioning international monetary system.

The only way to create “a stable and well-functioning international monetary system” is to get out of the way and allow the market to determine what money should be and how it should work.

We will support, now and in the future, to candid, even-handed, and independent IMF surveillance of our economies and financial sectors, of the impact of our policies on others, and of risks facing the global economy.

The IMF did not see this crisis coming. They are not omniscient. They do not have the ability or the right to supervise the private affairs of nations.

Strengthening financial supervision and regulation

13. Major failures in the financial sector and in financial regulation and supervision were fundamental causes of the crisis.

This is a LIE.

Confidence will not be restored until we rebuild trust in our financial system.

This is FALSE.

We will take action to build a stronger, more globally consistent, supervisory and regulatory framework for the future financial sector, which will support sustainable global growth and serve the needs of business and citizens.

This is NONSENSE.

Global consistency means the absence of a free market, where the individual can choose the best jurisdiction to do business. A world run by incompetents at the IMF and the G20 is a world where innovation and business will be stifled. The needs of business and citizens are best served by each of the two groups acting without onerous regulation laid down by incompetent people.

14. We each agree to ensure our domestic regulatory systems are strong.

They already are strong. So strong in fact, that people spend all their time thinking up ways to get around the regulations so that they can make a profit. No one would put their money into risky derivatives if there was a less risky alternative that paid the same returns. The fact of the matter is that the already overburdened regulatory and taxation system makes it very hard to earn a profit; this is the true mother, the genesis of the exotic financial products.

But we also agree to establish the much greater consistency and systematic cooperation between countries, and the framework of internationally agreed high standards, that a global financial system requires.

The ‘global system’ does not require this. Greater consistency means a playing field where no one has the incentive to win, much less step out onto the field.

Strengthened regulation and supervision must promote propriety, integrity and transparency; guard against risk across the financial system; dampen rather than amplify the financial and economic cycle; reduce reliance on inappropriately risky sources of financing; and discourage excessive risk-taking.

Regulation cannot promote propriety or integrity. Regulation in fact, promotes and exacerbates the tactics of evasion. Transparency already exists in the place that it matters; between the client and the entity that offers a financial product. You cannot “risk across the financial system” AND be in favor of fiat currencies and fractional reserve banking, the latter being the most dangerous. The economic cycle (which is actually The Business Cycle) is the creature of governments with their bad money, regulations and interference in the market. The state cannot decide what is and is not inappropriate. Only individuals can make this determination. When the state involves itself in legislating risk-taking, moral hazard is the result.

Regulators and supervisors must protect consumers and investors, support market discipline, avoid adverse impacts on other countries, reduce the scope for regulatory arbitrage, support competition and dynamism, and keep pace with innovation in the marketplace.

Regulators failed to spot Madhof (the scapegoat). They are incapable of protecting consumers, even if it was appropriate for them to do so, which it is not. Markets are self disciplining, just like the weather. No doubt you at the G20 would like to control that also. Avoiding adverse impacts is also impossible. If it were possible to do it, the IMF would have stepped in to stop the current crisis from emerging.

You cannot,”support competition and dynamism” and also be FOR regulation and the sort of fine grained supervision you are advocating. We understand what you mean by ‘keep pace with innovation in the marketplace’; stop any and all new internet based payment systems from taking root and supplanting the ossified, corrupt, sclerotic financial system over which you preside, or pretend to preside.

15. To this end we are implementing the Action Plan agreed at our last meeting, as set out in the attached progress report. We have today also issued a Declaration, Strengthening the Financial System. In particular we agree:

to establish a new Financial Stability Board (FSB) with a strengthened mandate, as a successor to the Financial Stability Forum (FSF), including all G20 countries, FSF members, Spain, and the European Commission;

Pointless.

that the FSB should collaborate with the IMF to provide early warning of macroeconomic and financial risks and the actions needed to address them;

This will never work. The IMF did not see this crisis coming, the biggest ever in world history, and they will not see the next one, if there is going to be a next one.

to reshape our regulatory systems so that our authorities are able to identify and take account of macro-prudential risks;

This will be used to blackmail institutions that are the personal enemies of the insiders.

to extend regulation and oversight to all systemically important financial institutions, instruments and markets. This will include, for the first time, systemically important hedge funds;

Total control by incompetent unproductive over the productive.

to endorse and implement the FSF’s tough new principles on pay and compensation and to support sustainable compensation schemes and the corporate social responsibility of all firms;

This is UTTER NONSENSE. There is no such thing as a ‘sustainable compensation scheme’, and executive remuneration has nothing to do with this problem. The fact that this childish, sour grapes scapegoating language is in this document demonstrates your complete lack of understanding of the problem, its root cause and the steps that need to be taken. It proves that you are incompetent, dull witted and doomed to failure.

to take action, once recovery is assured, to improve the quality, quantity, and international consistency of capital in the banking system.

recovery will not be assured by this plan, and even if it were possible, by what metric are you going to declare that it has happened? Improving the international consistency of capital in the banking system means a global currency. We are not stupid!

In future, regulation must prevent excessive leverage and require buffers of resources to be built up in good times;

It is not the place of the state to say what is or is not excessive leverage. Banking is a private business. So is risk. Neither is the business of government.

to take action against non-cooperative jurisdictions, including tax havens.

Tax ‘havens’ have nothing to do with this crisis. You would do better to ask why it is that money is fleeing your jurisdictions; once you address that problem, no one will have the incentive to remove their money from your shores. As for non co-operative jurisdictions, this means that the G20 is now going to act as if it is the de-fact world government, and there will be no more national soverignty. People will not be able to choose places to invest based on thier own requirements, and nations will not be able to organize their affairs as they see fit. All laws will now pass through the filter of G20, and if you do not agree, you will be listed as an ‘outlaw nation’. This will be the case even if the country, through the democratic process, decides that it wants nothing to do with the G20 and its absurd and destructive policies.

We stand ready to deploy sanctions to protect our public finances and financial systems.

This is a non sequitur. You do not use sanctions to protect YOUR public finances, you use YOUR LAWS to do that. Sanctions are used to disrupt OTHER PEOPLE’S finances and financial systems. The money in sovereign nations is not YOURS it is the property of the OWNERS of that money, and the responsibility of the sovereign nation where the funds are stored.

The era of banking secrecy is over. We note that the OECD has today published a list of countries assessed by the Global Forum against the international standard for exchange of tax information;

None of this has anything to do with the financial crisis. Banking secrecy has no effect on anything, other than the ability of the venal government’s ability to steal the wealth from its beleaguered citizenry. You are using this crisis to extend your reach into places where you have no business being.

to call on the accounting standard setters to work urgently with supervisors and regulators to improve standards on valuation and provisioning and achieve a single set of high-quality global accounting standards; and

None of this will work. You will not have enough time to roll it out; the collapse will see to that. Barring the collapse, there will be a ground-swell of rage that will permanently scupper your plans.

to extend regulatory oversight and registration to Credit Rating Agencies to ensure they meet the international code of good practice, particularly to prevent unacceptable conflicts of interest.

16. We instruct our Finance Ministers to complete the implementation of these decisions in line with the timetable set out in the Action Plan. We have asked the FSB and the IMF to monitor progress, working with the Financial Action Taskforce and other relevant bodies, and to provide a report to the next meeting of our Finance Ministers in Scotland in November.

The only confilct of interest that matters here is the prevalence of financial insiders in the corrupt governments.

17 to 24, snipped, as it is repetitive and refuted.

Ensuring a fair and sustainable recovery for all

25. We are determined not only to restore growth but to lay the foundation for a fair and sustainable world economy. We recognise that the current crisis has a disproportionate impact on the vulnerable in the poorest countries and recognise our collective responsibility to mitigate the social impact of the crisis to minimise long-lasting damage to global potential. To this end:

The state cannot determine what is ‘fair’ and what is not ‘un-fair’. Global potential, like gravitational potential energy, is storable. Sound money stores value; it is called capital (potential to invest). If you want to minimise long terme damage to global potential, sound money must replace fiat currencies that can be printed and debased at the will of incompetents.

we reaffirm our historic commitment to meeting the Millennium Development Goals and to achieving our respective ODA pledges, including commitments on Aid for Trade, debt relief, and the Gleneagles commitments, especially to sub-Saharan Africa;

Others haver written about this, Google them.

the actions and decisions we have taken today will provide $50 billion to support social protection, boost trade and safeguard development in low income countries, as part of the significant increase in crisis support for these and other developing countries and emerging markets;

Where is this money coming from, for the thousandth time, and is this not giving fish to people instead of teaching them how to fish?

we are making available resources for social protection for the poorest countries, including through investing in long-term food security and through voluntary bilateral contributions to the World Bank’s Vulnerability Framework, including the Infrastructure Crisis Facility, and the Rapid Social Response Fund;

More failure on the cards.

we have committed, consistent with the new income model, that additional resources from agreed sales of IMF gold will be used, together with surplus income, to provide $6 billion additional concessional and flexible finance for the poorest countries over the next 2 to 3 years. We call on the IMF to come forward with concrete proposals at the Spring Meetings;

Who is going to buy this gold, and what will they give in exchange for it? Gold is money. The people who want to buy it have fiat currency. People who want to protect the value of their money will line up for this bargain price gold, hand over their worthless dollars and euros and then sit back and watch the spectacle unfold.

we have agreed to review the flexibility of the Debt Sustainability Framework and call on the IMF and World Bank to report to the IMFC and Development Committee at the Annual Meetings; and

we call on the UN, working with other global institutions, to establish an effective mechanism to monitor the impact of the crisis on the poorest and most vulnerable.

A waste of money.

26. We recognise the human dimension to the crisis. We commit to support those affected by the crisis by creating employment opportunities and through income support measures.

How is this going to be paid for?

We will build a fair and family-friendly labour market for both women and men.

It is not the place of the state to build labour markets. While we are at it, a ‘family-friendly’ labour market would be one where the mother gets to raise her children full time, instead of being forced to earn money because the prices of houses is so great (which is a direct result of interference in the market by the state).

We therefore welcome the reports of the London Jobs Conference and the Rome Social Summit and the key principles they proposed. We will support employment by stimulating growth,

Growth cannot be stimulated.

investing in education and training, and through active labour market policies, focusing on the most vulnerable. We call upon the ILO, working with other relevant organisations, to assess the actions taken and those required for the future.

More nonsense.

27. We agreed to make the best possible use of investment funded by fiscal stimulus programmes towards the goal of building a resilient, sustainable, and green recovery. We will make the transition towards clean, innovative, resource efficient, low carbon technologies and infrastructure. We encourage the MDBs to contribute fully to the achievement of this objective. We will identify and work together on further measures to build sustainable economies.

28. We reaffirm our commitment to address the threat of irreversible climate change, based on the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities, and to reach agreement at the UN Climate Change conference in Copenhagen in December 2009.

Utter, unscientific garbage.

Delivering our commitments

29. We have committed ourselves to work together with urgency and determination to translate these words into action. We agreed to meet again before the end of this year to review progress on our commitments.

It is the prayer of every free man on this planet that you meet with TOTAL FAILURE.

Anti G20 ‘Rioters’ display total ignorance, impotence, incompetence, idiocy and irrationality:

A comment from The Times:

To be fair to the protesters, one this occasion they have paid for the damages in advance.
David Masu, Zürich, Switzerland

And check this out:

I have a better idea chubby: Why don’t you get yourself out of the government’s economy??!?!

And of course, the police agent provocateurs were in full force:

Snarfed from The Daily Mail.

Now for some common sense:

NEW WORLD DISORDER

The G-20 meeting begins this week in England. Here, political leaders from 20 major nations meet to share ideas on how to solve an international financial crisis that their central banks created, following the lead of Alan Greenspan’s FED. They never saw it coming. Not any of them – not the central bankers, not the politicians, not the regulators. They were all caught flat-footed.

Then they assemble at a meeting and send out press releases. These press releases are designed to assure the investing public that they, the creators of this crisis, know what went wrong – they don’t – and that by discussing the causes of the crisis, which they don’t understand, they will be able to come up with a joint solution that does not involve either (1) mass inflation or (2) a worldwide depression that lasts for years.

It is a song and dance. It is shuck and jive. It is bait and switch. It is Custer’s last stand.

These people don’t know what to do. If they did, there would be two or three well-defined, fully documented proposals out there, each with national co-sponsors. All of them would have major flaws. They would be mutually exclusive. Economists of various schools of opinion would be mobilizing behind one or another program.

Instead, there are no published plans. There are no working papers. There are only vague promises of joint action. Like what?

There are no detailed plans out of which this team of egomaniac politicians might conceivably hammer into an acceptable plan.

There is no centralized international planning agency.

There is no international enforcement agency. There is no agreement among central bankers.

There is no unanimity to do anything.

There is not going to be, either. The G-20 meeting will issue some sort of bland statement of hope, and everyone will go home.

They refuse to adopt the only system that every brought unity to governments and central banks: an international gold coin standard. The politicians and central bankers could not control the movements of gold out of inflating nations and into non-inflating nations, 1815–1914. They resented the ability of common people to exercise control over domestic monetary policy simply by going down to a bank and demanding payment in gold coins. They all took away this authority in the summer of 1914, when World War I broke out.

These deal-doers, these politicians, these seekers of power don’t trust each other. That is the famous bottom line. They do not trust the common people, which means that they do not trust a gold coin standard. But they do not trust each other.

They are trapped by the dollar standard. They have told their voters that their nations can get rich by exporting to the United States. They have not explained that in order to export lots of goods to the United States, their central banks must create fiat money to buy depreciating dollars at a favorable rate of exchange. They have not told the voters that modern mercantilism depends on lending tax money and central bank fiat money to the U.S. government, which will not pay back the loans. Ever.

[…]

http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north700.html

All BLOGDIAL readers know why this protesting and violence is pointless / futile / stupid /.

That which is seen …. if you have the right equipment.

That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen

If you have the right equipment.

A member of Congress is warning the Obama administration to keep its hands off the U.S. dollar’s status as the world’s international currency.

U.S. Rep. Michelle Bachmann, R-Minn., has introduced a resolution that would bar the U.S. from recognizing any other currency than the dollar as its reserve currency.

Her action comes in response to suggestions from China, Russia and the United Nations that another currency be explored. Even U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner has admitted he would be open to the idea, although he quickly backtracked when the stock market plunged on his announcement.

“During a Financial Services Committee hearing, I asked Secretary Geithner if he would denounce efforts to move towards a global currency and he answered unequivocally that he would,” Bachmann said. “And President Obama gave the nation the same assurances. But just a day later, Secretary Geithner has left the option on the table. I want to know which it is. The American people deserve to know.”

Although Title 31, Sec. 5103 USC prohibits foreign currency from being recognized in the U.S., the president has the power to engage foreign governments in treaties, and the president is principally responsible for the interpretations and implementation of those treaties according to the Constitution, according to the congresswoman.

As a result, legislation prohibiting the president and Treasury Department from issuing or agreeing that the U.S. will adopt an international currency would need to come in the form of a Constitutional Amendment differentiating a treaty used to implement an international currency in the U.S. from other types of treaty agreements, she said.

“If we give up the dollar as our standard, and co-mingle the value of the dollar with the value of coinage in Zimbabwe, that dilutes our money supply. We lose control over our economy. And economic liberty is inextricably entwined with political liberty. Once you lose your economic freedom, you lose your political freedom,” Bachmann told the Glenn Beck program on the Fox News Channel today.

Her proposal, H.J.R. 41, isn’t complicated:

It is titled: “Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States to prohibit the president from entering into a treaty or other international agreement that would provide for the United States to adopt as legal tender in the United States a currency issued by an entity other than the United States ”

Already with several dozen sponsors, it states:

Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled (two-thirds of each House concurring therein), That the following article is proposed as an amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which shall be valid to all intents and purposes as part of the Constitution when ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States within seven years after the date of its submission for ratification:”

It would add to the Constitution:

The president may not enter into a treaty or other international agreement that would provide for the United States to adopt as legal tender in the United States a currency issued by an entity other than the United States.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the latest voice to endorse an “alternative” to the dollar was the head of a U.N. expert panel discussing solutions to the financial crisis.

“The president may not enter into a treaty or other international agreement that would provide for the United States to adopt as legal tender in the United States a currency issued by an entity other than the United States.”

[…]

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=93086

Incredible.

These people can smell that something is wrong, but are not sure what it is. They feel that they have to protect ‘their currency’, but they are not sure what it is that they need to do.

This amendment, as tabled, would actually outlaw the Dollar as it exists today.

The Federal Reserve is not ‘the United States’; it is a private bank. That means that ‘US Dollars’ are not issued by the United States, but by an entity other than the United States.

If this amendment is added to the Constitution, the US Dollar, AKA Federal Reserve Notes, will instantly cease being legal tender.

Interesting.

Are these people smarter than they appear to be, and are they trying to kill the Federal Reserve and its worthless fiat currency by a checkmate maneuver?

I doubt it.

It is more likely that they do not understand the nature of the money in their pockets; I would bet that Michelle Bachmann doesn’t know anything about the dollar, the Federal Reserve, fiat currency, commodity money, or anything about any of the real issues behind the problem at the center of what she is clumsily trying to address.

Until you understand the nature of money and currencies, it is impossible to draft legislation (or in this case, REMOVE LEGISLATION) that will permanently fix the problem.

FAIL.

I first heard these words on an Album by ‘The Pop Group’, called ‘For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder …‘. It is by The Last Poets, and it is called ‘E Pluribus Unum’.

Reading it again today, you could mistake the writers of these inspiring, insightful and brilliant words for a group of Austrian Economists:

Selfish desires are burning like fires
among those who hoard the gold
As they continue to keep the people asleep
and the truth from being told
Racism and greed keep the people in need
from getting what’s rightfully theirs
Cheating, stealing and double dealing
as they exploit the peoples fears

Now, Dow Jones owns the people’s homes
and all the surrounding land
Buying and selling their humble dwelling
in the name of the Master Plan

Cos paper money is like a bee without honey
with no stinger to back him up
and those who stole the people’s gold
are definitely corrupt

Credit cards, master charge, legacies of wills
real-estate, stocks and bonds on coupon paper bills

Now the US mints on paper prints, millions every day
and use the eagle as their symbol cos it’s a bird of prey

The laurels of peace and the arrows of wars
are clutched very tightly in the eagles claws
filled with greed and lust,
and on the back of the dollar bill,
is the words IN GOD WE TRUST

But the dollar bill is their only God
and they don’t even trust each other
for a few dollars more they’d start a war
to exploit some brother’s mother

Now ANNUIT means and endless amount stolen over the years
and COEPTIS means a new empire of vampire millionaires
And NOVUS is a Latin word meaning something new
an ORDO means a way of life chosen by a few
SECLORUM is a word that means to take from another
knowledge, wisdom and understanding stolen from the brother

Now there are thirteen layers of stone of the pyramid alone
an unfinished work of art
for thirty-three and a third is as high as a mason can go
without falling apart

Thirteen stars in the original flag!
Thirteen demons from the Devil’s bag!
Thirteen berries and thirteen leaves!
Thirteen colonies of land-grabbing thieves!
Thirteen arrows in the eagle’s claws!
Sixty-seven corporations wage the Devil’s wars!
Thirteen stripes on the eagle’s shield!
And these are the symbols on the US seal!

Now on the front of the dollar bill
to the right of Washington’s head
is a small seal in the shape of a wheel
with the secret that’s been left unsaid
The symbols in the middle represent the riddle
of the scales, the ruler and the key;
the square rule is a symbol
from the craft of masonry
The scales represent Libra
the balance of the seventh sign
They also represent the Just-Us
which you and I know is blind
The key unlocks the mysteries
of the secrets of the seal
So that only the Govern-u-men
would know what they reveal

The four words apart form the last parts of
the secrets of the seal
and tells how they fooled the people
into thinking paper money was real!

Now, THESAUR means the treasury
where they store the gold they stole
and AMER means to punish
like the slaves they bought and sold
Then SEPTENT means seven
like seventeen-seventy-six
when the thirteen devils gathered
to unleash their bag of tricks
The SIGEL means the images
they’ve created to fool the world
like the colors on Old Glory
the flag that they unfurled

Now the red was the color of the Indian man
White was the devil’s who stole the land
Blue was the eyes that hypnotized
with the tricks and traps they sprung
and even to this very same day
they all speak with forked tongue!

And so the power is in the hand of the ruling classes
playing god with the fate of all the masses
so the people don’t get any in the land of the plenty
'cause E PLURIBUS UNUM means 'One Out Of Many'

[…]

I fear that the attempts to speed up and deepen integration and to move decisions about the lives of the citizens of the member countries up to the European level can have effects that will endanger all the positive things achieved in Europe in the last half a century. Let us not underestimate the fears of the citizens of many member countries, who are afraid, that their problems are again decided elsewhere and without them, and that their ability to influence these decisions is very limited. So far, the European Union has been successful, partly thanks to the fact that the vote of each member country had the same weight and thus could not be ignored. Let us not allow a situation where the citizens of member countries would live their lives with a resigned feeling that the EU project is not their own; that it is developing differently than they would wish, that they are only forced to accept it. We would very easily and very soon slip back to the times that we hoped belonged to history.

This is closely connected with the question of prosperity. We must say openly that the present economic system of the EU is a system of a suppressed market, a system of a permanently strengthening centrally controlled economy. Although history has more than clearly proven that this is a dead end, we find ourselves walking the same path once again. This results in a constant rise in both the extent of government masterminding and constraining of spontaneity of the market processes. In recent months, this trend has been further reinforced by incorrect interpretation of the causes of the present economic and financial crisis, as if it was caused by free market, while in reality it is just the contrary – caused by political manipulation of the market. It is again necessary to point out to the historical experience of our part of Europe and to the lessons we learned from it.

Many of you certainly know the name of the French economist Frédéric Bastiat and his famous Petition of the Candlemakers, which has become a well-known and canonical reading, illustrating the absurdity of political interventions in the economy. On 14 November 2008 the European Commission approved a real, not a fictitious Bastiat’s Petition of the Candlemakers, and imposed a 66% tariff on candles imported from China. I would have never believed that a 160-year-old essay could become a reality, but it has happened. An inevitable effect of the extensive implementation of such measures in Europe is economic slowdown, if not a complete halt of economic growth. The only solution is liberalisation and deregulation of the European economy.

[…]

http://klaus.cz/klaus2/asp/clanek.asp?id=88EY96UW9zlp

I KNEW this man would be good!

It seems like the pressure is increasing on a daily basis. Look at this clip from the floor of the NYSE:

The seething anger is leaking out. Soon, the default action will be to say, “No”, and the REALLY angry people will be taking up arms.

It’s about BLOODY TIME.

California is broke.
Kansas is about to go broke.
New York is trying to tax everything under the sun to avoid going broke (it won’t work Mr. Bloomberg).

And in the EU, we read that the Telegraph printed a story about how

European banks may need £16.3 trillion bail-out, EC document warns

Only to immediately delete the story on orders so that bank runs would not be triggered.

Now, as we have been saying, if a bank does not operate a fractional reserve, it doesn’t matter if all the depositors come to get their money out at the same time; the money is actually there, unlike in today’s banks, where the money is NOT there.

Bit I digress a little.

The EU is, with any luck, FINISHED. When the euro collapses it will be the death blow to the EU. Each country is going to go back, re-launch their national currencies, tear up the bogus treaties and enslaving agreements that have made up this bad deal that betrays the hearts of nations and steals from the pockets and spirits of men.

No nation is going to ever again accept this extremely dangerous monetary monoculture. Think about it; why should the Italians suffer the wiping out of all their savings because some Germans made mistakes with the centrally controlled monolithic currency? If you are going to have your hard earned money wiped out, at least let it be by the act of other Italians; then you can string them upside down and shoot them for satisfaction; at least then you have someone to blame.

With the EU president chiseling from the top and all the citizens rioting from the base, the whole structure will fracture and shatter into a quadrillions pieces that will never be put back together again, and any future attempt will not look like the debacle that has been forced upon everyone today.

As for America, they are actively preparing for civil unrest. Google it for yourself. Like I have been saying for many years; if there is one country on earth that can turn itself around from the precipice it is the United STates of America. Only the men of that country have the balls (and the guns) to make the magic happen. I really do hope that they act as an example to the whole world once again. Either way, there is no going back. There is not enough money in the world to pay off the US debt. Europe cannot find the $25 trillion (twice the size of the gross domestic product of European Union) they need to ‘save’ themselves.

BOOM!

md wrote:
nagapie wrote:
Brixton’s getting it’s own currency.

Is it going to be made out of a precious metal (i.e. either gold or silver)?

I can’t pretend to even understand, let alone agree with, the various long term bug bears of the small Irdial group of bloggers, but fiat currency is an issue they post about frequently, and they vehemently support the set up of independent currencies based on precious metals.

http://irdial.com/blogdial/index.php?s=fiat

They keep contradicting themselves though. First they bang on about the reintroduction of the gold standard and then they say this:

We then went on to discuss why trans-national currencies ‘Currency Monocultures’ like the Euro are a bad thing.

Imagine that the Euro never happened, and each European country had kept its own currency. Each country would be able to formulate its own response to bank failures, and their currency would suffer or gain depending on their response. Each person with savings could hold a basket of currencies to protect themselves from being wiped out by inflation.

But if you have a gold standard then the value of your currency is pegged to the value of gold, so you CANNOT formulate a response to bank failures! Your money supply is constant (or rather, tied to current world reserves of gold) which robs you of your main tool for controlling inflation and unemployment. Moreover, if everyone adopts the gold standard then exchange rates are effectively fixed (because if any country’s currency began to depreciate, everyone else would buy it, convert it into gold and then convert the gold back into their own currency). And that’s the biggest `currency monoculture’ imaginable. Tin hat vibes.

Now, lets go through this slowly:

But if you have a gold standard then the value of your currency is pegged to the value of gold, so you CANNOT formulate a response to bank failures!

[…]

http://disception.net/lk/viewtopic.php?t=8117&start=25

No, this is incorrect.

First of all, Gold IS money. Sound economies are based on gold as the means of exchange. Government cannot create the money out of thin air when it is made of gold, they cannot print it. Gold is scarce and the amount of it in circulation cannot be arbitrarily increased.

Bank failures (bank runs) happen because of fractional reserve banking. Banks, when they are given a license to do business, are allowed to ‘print money’. When you deposit £10,000 in your account, the government allows your bank to loan out say, 40 times that amount to other people. Those people then pay interest on the money that is loaned to them. If you or I were to do this, it would be called ‘counterfeiting’ but because its a licensed bank, its called ‘banking.

The system ‘works’ as long as everyone who holds an account at the bank does not ask for their deposits back at the same time (a bank run). Since the banks run fractional reserves, they literally do not have the money to pay back their depositors.

Centuries ago, when people used gold for money in every day transactions, the danger of theft was ever present. Banks used to hold deposits, and since they were trustworthy, would issue I.O.U.s to their depositors. People began to trade these I.O.U.s because they knew that the money was in the bank and redeemable at any time. This is the origin of gold backed paper money.

The bankers realized that they could print I.O.U.s for gold that they did not have on deposit. As long as the I.O.U.s did not all come back at once, they could gain interest on gold they did not have in their vaults.

Pure Genius!

Modern banking runs exactly the same way, only the ‘money’ is Fiat Currency; money that is given value by order of the government by legal tender laws. It is paper, a fiction, worthless. And of course, the government has the printing press that can create ‘value’ out of nothing.

Lets say you earn £500 pounds a week. If there are only £2,000,000 paper pounds in the whole world, then the amount that you can buy with your £500 remains the same, week on week, year on year. But, lets now imagine that the government has doubled the money supply. There are now £4,000,000 paper pounds in existence. That means that the scarcity of paper pounds has been reduced by half. There is twice as much money in circulation. This means that your £500 is now worth half as much as it was when there were only £2,000,000 paper pounds in circulation.

You have just been cheated out of half of the value of your money.

Now, if there is one currency, and you cannot vote for the government who controls it, and it is a fiat currency, you are essentially giving the printing press for that money to someone who you cannot elect. They can destroy the value of your savings. If however, you have a paper currency and it is under the control of your own elected officials, if they debase the money, you can vote them out and the next government can destroy some of the money supply and restore the value of your savings.

If the money you use is gold, then no government, no matter who runs it, can print your money. It actually is your money, literally. The pound is not ‘your money’; it belongs to the government. They control its supply, they control its value.

Inflation is just what I described; the money supply increasing because of the printing press. If we had a gold standard, we would have no inflation by definition. Take a look at this YouTube video which demonstrates how the value of gold has not changed over time.

Your money supply is constant (or rather, tied to current world reserves of gold) which robs you of your main tool for controlling inflation and unemployment.

Like I say above, gold IS money. In a gold standard currency system you use gold as money, not paper that is linked or tied to anything.

There is no ‘world reserve of gold’ central banks of separate sovereign nations have their own reserves of gold, like the gold at Fort Knox. When the dollar (for example) was backed by gold before the Bretton Woods agreement, you used to be able to go to the bank and redeem gold (and silver) for paper dollars which were certificates that represented actual physical gold and silver. When you say ‘your’ main tool, who exactly are you talking about? That ‘your’ is the same ‘you’ that destroys the value of ‘your’ savings by printing money. The people who run central banks are not able to set interest rates correctly or control unemployment, for the record. Only the market can do this. But that’s more typing.

if everyone adopts the gold standard then exchange rates are effectively fixed

There are no exchange rates, because everyone would be using real money (gold coins) to do their business with. Did you know that in Viet Nam, people buy and sell land in gold? There is nothing strange about it at all; what is strange is that people think its acceptable that government can steal your savings from you without even going into your bank!

(because if any country’s currency began to depreciate, everyone else would buy it, convert it into gold and then convert the gold back into their own currency)

This line demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of what money is. When you say that a county’s currency starts to depreciate, what EXACTLY do you mean? If you mean that it loses its value, this can only happen if someone has access to the printing press that allows people to create money out of thin air. A gold currency cannot be printed, so any country using it would not suffer from inflation (which is actually what you are describing, NOT depreciation which is what your car does ten minutes after you have bought it). Take a look at this to understand what the word inflation really means in this context.

And that’s the biggest `currency monoculture’ imaginable. Tin hat vibes.

Try gold hat :)

Apart from having a gold standard, fractional reserve banking needs to be understood (note how I do not say ‘banned’) by depositors. If you are crazy enough to deposit your gold money in a bank that lends out many multiples of the amount of deposits, you are taking a big risk; they had better be paying you big interest rates. You and the bank had better be insured against bank runs. As we have seen there are moves afoot to run clean banks.

I assume that you are not in favor of war and the recent mass murdering. The war machine is financed by fiat currency running off of government printing presses. Gold currency forces discipline on governments. This alone is a reason why it should be adopted; everything else would be a great bonus.

You should also look up the Totnes Pound, which is an interesting development. Also, California is issuing its own Currency in the form of I.O.Us. They are not saying its a currency but of course, if they start exchanging them around LA, it will be a currency by definition.

Finally, if you want to watch a really fascinating documentary about this subject and educate yourself so that you can understand a little of what BLOGDIAL publishes on this subject, you could do worse than The Money Masters. When you can understand why a stick of wood with grooves in it was one of the longest running currencies ever, then you will have arrived!

UPDATE!

Added reciprocal facepalm.

This is one of Alun’s comments, that simply had to be promoted to a full post:

“Martin Barnes, chief executive of the think tank DrugScope, who sits on the advisory council, said it was crucial that a rigorously independent body was entrusted with this type of research. […]

Mr Barnes added that when no other drug was involved, ecstasy accounted for between 10-17 deaths a year. ”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7882708.stm

For comparison:

http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=1091

“Figures on alcohol-related deaths in 2007 indicate a levelling-off of the trend, following rapid increases since the early 1990s. There were 8,724 alcohol-related deaths in 2007, lower than 2006, but more than double the 4,144 recorded in 1991. The alcohol-related death rate was 13.3 per 100,000 population in 2007, compared with 6.9 per 100,000 population in
1991.”

Back to the report and responses to it:

“The Police Superintendents’ Association of England and Wales has expressed opposition to suggestions that ecstasy should be downgraded to a Class B drug.

Ian Johnston, president of the association, told the BBC the downgrade could be dangerous.

He said: “This is not some academic or scientific exercise, this is dealing with people’s lives. If we downgrade ecstasy, we are in danger of sending mixed messages out to young and vulnerable people.”

Last month, the Home Office restored cannabis from Class C to Class B, against the wishes of the advisory council.

Ministers are now set to resist the council’s recommendation on ecstasy. “[…]

So, what exactly is the mixed message?
That heroin is as ‘good’ as E, or that E is as ‘bad’ as heroin?
That 30 deaths from an untaxed substance is bad, but 8724 deaths from a heavily taxed substance is acceptable?
That independent, expert advice is necessary, but worthless?
That arses and elbows are identical in Jacqui Smiths head?

Or that while HMG claims to know “What is Right and Wrong for You”, HMGs response to this report yet again only demonstrates why only idiots submit to governmental control over what goes in their body?

A vigilant lurker writes:

I had to send you this abstract. Unfortunately I don’t have access to the full article. 

1: Am J Public Health. 2009 Feb 5. [Epub ahead of print] Links

The Moral Justification for a Compulsory Human Papillomavirus Vaccination Program.

Balog JE.

The College at Brockport, State University of New York.

Compulsory human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination of young girls has been proposed as a public health intervention to reduce the threat of the disease. Such a program would entail a symbiotic relationship between scientific interests in reducing mortality and morbidity and philosophical interests in promoting morality. This proposal raises the issue of whether government should use its police powers to restrict liberty and parental autonomy for the purpose of preventing harm to young people. I reviewed the scientific literature that questions the value of a HPV vaccination. Applying a principle-based approach to moral reasoning, I concluded that compulsory HPV vaccinations can be justified on moral, scientific, and public health grounds.

One can contact him here:

Joseph E. Balog, PhD

State University of New York, College at Brockport
Health Science
350 New Campus Drive
19 Hartwell Hall
Brockport NYUSA
14420
Email: jbalog@brockport.edu

And if you want a laugh, take a look at his ‘justifications’ in the presentation linked at this page…
http://apha.confex.com/apha/135am/techprogram/paper_152993.htm

This reminds me of a certain Joseph Mengele:

Who also justified his human experimentation on the grounds that he was doing it for the ‘greater good’ and ‘in the name of science’.

Morality should NEVER be legislated, and it is not the job of scientists to determine what is or is not moral on behalf of anyone. It is even more of an outrage that this modern Mengele

wants to use his ‘scientific’ method to create a moral position that will be translated into a law that will cause millions to be injected with this worthless vaccine.

Here are some of the links on Gardasil from BLOGDIAL:

http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=1256
http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=490
http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=846
http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=838
http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=831

While we are at it, HPV is not a public health issue, it is a personal health issue because HPV is an STD. In order to become infected with it, you have to have sex with someone. That is a private act that has nothing to do with the state.

HPV cannot be sneezed onto someone, cannot cause an epidemic resulting in millions of deaths due to casual contact. It is quite different from the other highly contagious diseases, and even with those, vaccination is not compulsory in civilized countries.

It’s one thing to develop a product (Gardasil) and then use corruption, fear-mongering and the perversion of statistics to influence people to choose to have it shot into themselves by the millions; it is quite another to try and engineer a fallacious malignant morality wrapped in the authoritative voice of ‘science’ as a pretext for new law that will compel parents to violate their children.

Treatises on morality should never appear in a scientific paper. They should be published in the appropriate place. Publishing a tract justifying the morality of something in a scientific journal or paper is wrong because science is about facts and evidence only; it is not about making a personal judgement.

When we mix science with morality the former lends its power, the power of facts that can be proven and all the results that have flowed from that to create all the great tools that we enjoy today, to the latter, which is purely subjective. Balog believes that all girls should be shot with Gardasil. This is not a scientific fact, or at least the question of wether or not they should be shot with it is not a fact. What he believes applies only to him, and his twisted sick morality, whereas scientific truth applies to everyone like it or not.

And for the record, by ‘scientific truth’ I do not mean what any scientist knows or does not know, or what is written in peer reviewed journals. What scientists know is a number, when all the facts of the universe are taken into account, indistinguishable from zero. I am talking about gravity. Gravity ‘holds you down’ no matter what you think or like, or what its true nature is. Homeopathic medicine works, wether you like it or not. Gardasil is junk. Get shot with it if you like, but no one should be forced to be injected with it. The same goes for all other vaccines; they should never be injected into people by force, for any reason.

Finally, monsters like this man are a part of the concerted effort to dismantle the family as the center of human culture. They want to replace the family with the state and themselves as the ultimate authority over all life on this planet.

Gabby Swank was a straight-A student and cheerleader.

But that was before she became very ill following the standard dose of three Gardasil vaccinations, Attkisson reports.

You know the commercial. It showed teenage girls saying “I want to be one less” who gets the HPV virus, which is linked to cervical cancer.

“It was like a big hype among my friends, because we’re like, ‘we’re gonna get it’ because we felt almost pressured by the commercials,” Gabby said.

Gabby got sicker after each shot, progressing to seizures, strokes and heart problems. It was her neurologist who suspected Gardasil was to blame.

“I think there are too many people having serious long-term side-effects,” said neurologist Dr. Dwight Lindholm.

Last fall, the government and vaccine maker Merck concluded there’s no link between Gardasil and serious adverse events like Gabby’s. But a new analysis calls that finding into question.

The National Vaccine Information Center, a private vaccine-safety group, compared Gardasil adverse events to another vaccine, one also given to young people, but for meningitis. Gardasil had three times the number of Emergency Room visits – more than 5,000. Reports of side effects were up to 30 times higher with Gardasil.

“If I’d have known, we never would have gotten the shot,” said Emily Tarsell, whose daughter, Chris, died three weeks after her third Gardasil shot. She was one of the 29 fatalities reported in two years. “And she’d be here to hug.”

Barbara Loe Fisher, co-founder of the NVIC, said: “Now we know from this report that there are more reactions and deaths associated with Gardasil than with another vaccine given in the same age group. It’s irresponsible not to take action.”

Merck, the FDA and CDC question the value of the new analysis, say they continue to review the data, Gardasil remains safe and effective, and its benefits outweigh the risks.

Those who believe the vaccine hurt them aren’t convinced. Gabby isn’t cheering anymore and is too sick to even attend school.

“I struggle with guilt a lot, because I made the choice to get the shot for her,” said Gabby’s mom, Shannon Swank.

Meantime, Merck has asked the FDA to approve it for boys, who can pass on the cancer causing virus to girls, meaning the number of people getting Gardasil may double.

[…]

CBS News

We.
Told.
You.
So.

The true character of a man is revealed when he is under pressure…so they say.

The riots in Paris and the demonstrations against foreign work forces being used at British oil refineries and a power station seemed to be a presentiment of widespread civil disturbance, especially in this country. We are, after all, only at the beginning of a slump which is predicted by the IMF to hit Britain more seriously than any other developed nation. It will be longer and deeper and we can already see the hardship, the bills accumulating.

We need this civil disobedience. I hope that some of the people who plan destruction have the sense to trash only the systems and places that they use to ruin everyone’s lives. Smashing McDonalds and Starbucks is just STUPID.

In the last week, it seems that I have hardly had a conversation that has not dwelled on the economic crisis and how we arrived at a position where we are paying to bail out the bankers, who are still claiming vast bonuses, and face finding another £20bn each year in taxes or losing that amount in services.

And it is a safe bet that in none of these conversations did the phrase ‘fiat currency’ ever pass anyone’s lips. Another safe bet would be that ‘fractional reserve banking’ was never uttered. The fact is that no one who writes for the Guardian knows why this ‘crisis’ happened. None of them understand what money is. All of them are whining about banker bonuses as if that had anything at all to do with this problem. Jealousy politics is alive and well and serving its purpose to divert thinking people away from the true causes of their misery. The fact of the matter is that government is STEALING from the public to disburse money inefficiently, if not fraudulently. In any case, it is certainly immoral. These banks should not be bailed out by any government. Period.

If it had been a matter of straight theft

It IS straight theft; from YOU to the STATE to the BANKERS.

– ie the damage done was equal to every bonus –

this is nonsense maths. The bonuses are IRRELEVANT.

the world economy could easily absorb the hit,

There is no ‘world economy’. This is a matter of YOUR money being stolen and redistributed to bankers. There is no collective entity that you can call a ‘world economy’. This is loose english at its best.

but there is a vast multiple involved between the amount taken in bonuses and the bail-out received from governments. Figures to be published in Vanity Fair next week show that the bail-out in the US is anything up to 900 times the bonuses paid to the top five executives of leading American banks. At Citicorp, bonuses equalled $54m in 2007 while the bail-out was $45bn. This ratio doesn’t capture anything like the economic consequences of greed on both sides of the Atlantic. They are incalculable. The crime is nearly the equivalent to poisoning of the world’s water supply. If the banking industry and advocates of unregulated market capitalism expect a return to normal service after the slump they are gravely mistaken.

The only people who are ‘gravely mistaken’ are those who think that bonuses have any meaning, and that there ever has been a place where unregulated market capitalism has been running. Once again, there is no such thing as ‘the world’s water supply’ there is no one world anything. Constantly referring to things in these terms is simply absurd, and it is part of the problem.

It is fortunate for the hedge fund managers and derivative traders in Britain that the London mob does not materialise at moments like this to drag them from their spruced-up homes and limousines as regularly happened in the 18th century.

Yes indeed, that would help! If hedge fund managers and derivative traders lose their money, what do you care if your money is sound and in a bank that is not exposed? If you owned your own money and kept it safely, you would not have a problem at all.

In one way, it is also regrettable, because then the mob, which, incidentally, is a shortening of mobile vulgus, affected the conduct of politics and on several occasions changed things for the better.

That may be so, but until people understand what money is, all the mobs and rioting in the world will never solve this problem. You need to watch (as a beginning) The Money Masters to understand what is really happening, and how value is being stolen from you. Unless you are willing to do the small amount of work it takes to understand economics and money, you will NEVER be able to understand what is going on.

It was not made up of the depraved and violent underclass found in most historical accounts, but of groups of young working men and apprentices who, while demonstrating for Protestantism and against foreign workers, also played their part in supporting liberty.

You cannot have liberty without money that actually belongs to you. Misunderstanding this is why you FAIL.

Something of their voice was heard last week outside the refineries where foreign workers have been employed en masse instead of British workers, but in London, everything is – for the moment – quiet.

Those people are not ‘foreign’ they are from the EU, which Guardian types are all for. You cannot open up to the EU and then expect them NOT to come here and work when they have the RIGHT to do so. If you did not want Italians working here, you should never have joined the EU o Great Britain. Once again, the brainless demonstrators show just how STUPID they are; they should be protesting British membership of the EU (the cause of those workers coming here) and not the workers…its like treating acne by putting on a topical cream instead of weaning the teenager off of his diet of Tizer and crisps. Not very smart!

We are slower to anger than the French, although I must say that if I were a member of my children’s generation I would very much feel like hurling the odd carton of milk at politicians and bankers of the older generation.

Once again, this is why you FAIL. Your position as a writer could be used, right now, to direct people to the correct information about this problem; unsound money, fractional reserve banking, and regulation. Sadly this will not happen. Or will it? Who knows?

For the people who are going to pay for the lunatic exuberance of the last decade are not its perpetrators – largely the baby boomers born between 1945 and 1965 – but those born after 1985 and, by the way, several succeeding generations.

The people who are going to pay for the bailouts are the suckers. Everyone who knows what is really happening will not pay a penny. The people who are not helping are the ones who are steadfastly persisting in bad thinking and willful ignorance.

To put it crudely, my generation has stolen from its children and grandchildren.

That is a lie. It is ASTONISHING how the pundits and spin masters have turned this crisis around so that the INNOCENT now believe that they are THE GUILTY PARTY in this. How they did it should be studied by everyone everywhere.

It is they who will be affected by £20bn per annum shaved off services and for as long as anyone can predict.

Once again, only the suckers will be paying for this nonsense. As for services, their degradation was always inevitable. To understand why, you have to understand money (what money really is) and economics. You could try Googling ‘Social security Ponzi Scheme’ to find out why degradation was always going to happen.

And this crisis means that we are about to fail in that other important obligation of providing jobs for people coming out of university and school.

Once again, total and complete FAIL.

There is no collective obligation to provide jobs for anyone, so to say ‘we’ are about to fail is nonsense. You cannot be FOR liberty on the one hand and ALSO FOR collective responsibility and accountability of the type that is the driving philosophy behind bailing out banks. Then again, being able to hold two contradictory thoughts in the mind simultaneously is a required skill these days is it not?!

Last Friday, it was reported that unemployment among 16- to 24-year-olds has risen to 16.1%, which is above the European average of 15.9%. That figure is bound to grow over the next two years.

Water always finds it’s own level.

Look coldly at my generation, the one that’s has been claiming every sort of entitlement since the Who sang about it, and you realise that we have been criminally irresponsible.

It is criminally irresponsible to not try and understand what is really happening, and then to perpetuate it by claiming that there are collective responsibilities to provide jobs and every other sort of nonsense. It is criminally irresponsible to prop up that system, and to not try and inform people of its true nature. At the very least, since you cannot throw stones, you would be able to say, “I tried to warn everyone. I did what I could do”.

We are leaving the people born after 1985 not just with the bills for this economic mess, but we also expect them to pay for an increase in the cost of state pensions for us, a rise of benefits and soaring pensioner health costs, which has been clear in demographic studies for some time.

You can expect anything you like. Your pension is TOAST. No one is going to foot the bill for it, there will be no money for it. You were robbed. Deal with it. Start saving NOW…saving REAL MONEY.

How young people are going to get started in paying for our old age without jobs and with a credit crunch and a frozen property market is anyone’s guess.

That is an astonishing statement. The concern is not how young people are going to get started paying for YOU, the concern is how are they going to LOOK AFTER THEMSELVES and THEIR children! The selfishness, corruption, immorality and thievery never ends!

Consider the political classes of today, the people who clustered round Tony Blair – born a month after me in 1953 – and who have been in charge for more than a decade. What have they done to make politics and the business of Parliament responsive to the widely appreciated needs of this century?

That is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is who destroyed the money, who stole it, and what are you going to do about it. Note how I do not say, “who destroyed our money”. I am not under the delusion that the pounds in your pocket belong to you. They do not.

Though there are many well-intentioned politicians, politics probably hasn’t been held in such low esteem since the time of the London mob. It simply fails to deliver. Even in the good years, the government spent vast amounts on education and health, but failed to secure a proportionate rise in standards and productivity.

People who are for liberty hold politicians in low esteem by default, reflexively. They also do not expect government to deliver. They do not expect government to secure standards and productivity. People who are for liberty understand that not only is that not the proper role of government, but they also understand that government is incapable of doing these things, and if they do try, they do it inefficiently and immorally.

I won’t try your patience with my generation’s failure on rights and liberty,

We already gave up on you years ago…where have you been?! Not on the internets clearly.

its casual erosion of the privileges that were passed to us by our parents,

THIS IS WHY YOU FAIL. Rights are not a PRIVILEGE that is handed to you; you are BORN WITH THEM.

or its bewildering ignorance of history,

I am no historian, but honestly, when it comes to the history of money ignorance is absolutely EVERYWHERE. Even when there is a crisis people are too thick to try and find out what is really happening. That is the unforgivable sin. Even when people know some history, they sit there and stupidly repeat the mistakes of the past over and over, and then whine when things are getting worse. Knowing history is not enough. You need to know what your place is, what your rights are, what rights are and how to solve problems.

but it is important to understand that at the heart of the deterioration is Parliament and in this sense politics, rather than society, is broken.

This is completely wrong. Parliament is not at the heart of the problem. The heart of the problem is in a generation of people who do not understand their place in the world, who do not understand what Liberty is, what Rights are, the very nature of man and why it is he owns things. Parliament is the pimple, its corruption and arrogance a symptom of a disease. The people are sick and stupid and brainwashed. They are not even able to frame their thoughts properly so that they can address these problems. That is why they talk about ‘our’ money, and ‘our’ democracy and all the other backwards, wrong headed nonsense that we read over and over again.

Last week, a friend said that what he found so frustrating in the scandal involving peers allegedly offering to influence laws for cash, as well as the apparent immunity of bankers, was the absence of justice.

You tolerate Parliament, put them at the centre of your life and philosophy and so therefore, the problem is YOU and you perception of your place in the world. There will always be corrupt people, and politics normally attracts the corrupt…morally corrupt that is…the bankers, once again, are not the problem, and focusing on them is very stupid, pointless and childish.

None of the 3,000 offences introduced by Labour apparently caters for lords and multi-millionaires.

And yet, you have, “always believed that the democratic state must be given power to act on behalf of us all”. That is the result of your belief. Total enslavement and impoverishnemt. The problem is YOU.

But this is minor compared with the crisis in the way laws – often designed to serve the political classes of my generation – are drafted and passed without proper scrutiny.

The problem is that they are passing them at all. They need to be REMOVING legislation, not adding it. And you need to stop looking to them like a sheep and to start disobeying.

My generation wanted everything – good food, cheap travel, large disposable incomes, luxury and security – and we have had them all, but at a great cost.

Bollocks. All of those things come at a price. If the next generation wants those things, then they can have them. All they have to do is pay the price and TAKE them. Your generation needs to be cut loose, your pensions cancelled and the debt defaulted on. Then we can start from a clean slate with sound commodity money and none of the collectivist illusions that have so befuddled and corrupted the men of this land.

We knew about climate change a long time ago, yet our government all but ignored it until the Tories made the running

There you go again. Global Warming Kool Aid nonsense AND saying ‘our government’ in a SINGLE SENTENCE!

We knew that bankers had not discovered the secret of limitless wealth creation, but we failed to regulate.

Bankers do not create wealth. Regulation destroys peoples ability to do it. You people will NEVER learn. And ‘we’ do not regulate. There is no ‘we’ in this debacle. THEY your ENEMY regulates and destroys and murders, and no, it is not on ‘our behalf’ either.

He let it slip, “It’s not your money!”.

And now if my children’s generation demonstrates, we will deploy a newly equipped and trained riot police to protect us. You see we have been expecting trouble.

[…]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/01/henry-porter-recession

The trouble will be far deeper and more widespread than you can possibly imagine. No riot squad will be able to contain it. At the end of this process, you and the government you cherish so deeply, even as it flays the flesh from your back with a cat o nine tails, will be utterly defeated. The people who truly understand freedom, liberty and rights will ensure that your world and its vile illusions never returns.

Some of the commenters on this article are beginning to see the light:

Sure Henry – and if you were twenty years older you’d be dead. Our confrontation with the political and business classes does not require youth, we are not throwing rocks and burning tyres – we have a series of modifications that we require of the commercial system to ensure it operates fairly in future. These are not for debate or modification – they are our requirements.

1/ We will restore some measure of value to our currency so that it will be known to us in the same way the length of a metre and the weight of a kilogram are known to us.

You see? The penny has dropped.

Sound money is the NUMBER ONE priority of everyone who understands this problem. Everything flows from it, all conditions are influenced by it.

A lurker who saw this same article says:

I don’t think the UK has the right culture for properly directed riots, a la Belle France for example. There is a small hardcore of politicised activists, such as seen in the poll tax riots, anti-fox-hunting and so on… but no mass body of free-thinking students (for example) with the will to put their high brows in the line of fire. Most other people have kids and would place family safety first. I just don’t see a proper riot as getting anywhere. Not reflective of the will of the general populace, too abstract in a way, and just a fight against police when what we need is a fight against HMG et al. The Iraq demo, and possibly BBC license fee avoidence – that’s what appeals to the middle-england masses. Other people (Sun/Mirror readership?) with job losses and SkyOne to pay for… will they act, and how? Will the miners strikes return in another guise? There is the real power in numbers. Get the two halves together and it could be special…

I just went off in a daydream where a crowd the size of the Iraq demonstration massed on parliament and took it over by mass of numbers, no violence required. Sky news offices next, and Buck House, followed by all the financial institutions of which the public own a slice. Gordon Brown makes one last public address, apologising for his sins and commits seppuku on live TV. The entire Labour front bench follow suit. A nation rejoices, shame is banished and national pride restored. The Tories are too yellow to take power following this and a new system of decentralised government is brought in…

10cm snow here, and more coming. Its gorgeous!

A little snow, and Britain is shut down.

When the people of Britain are ready, they will whip up a blizzard that will erase the evil once and for all. Like the Soviet Union, the Britain of the past will be a memory, and in its place will rise the sort of country that we used to love.

Only TEN THOUSAND TIMES BETTER!

The Blogdial stance on the ‘independence’ of the BBC is well documented.

Two things crossed my path in the last few days regarding the BBC. Firstly, I read a ‘story’, actually a magazine piece, about Darwin and his attitude to slavery. The piece appeared to suggest that it was his anti-slavery stance which resulted in the theory of evolution clicking into place in Darwins thought processes.

This was on the front page of the BBC website, and in your face on the Science subsection. And all it is is a glorified puff-piece for a book, full of conjecture and nothing more.

We read that…

[…] new evidence suggests that Darwin’s unique approach to evolution – relating all races and species by “common descent” – could have been fostered by his anti-slavery beliefs.

And this new evidence? Nowhere to be found. Everything said in this piece I already knew from reading the excellent Darwin biography published by these same authors in 1992.

So why is the BBC plugging this cash-cow as part of their Darwin season? It is nothing but another example of licence fee money wasted. The BBC is riddled with these pieces; non-news, non-attributed, non-stories of no discernible benefit to licence fee payers.

There I am, glad once again that I do not pay the licence fee, and wondering why those who do pay allow the BBC to get away with such behaviour when this hits my inbox…

>>> -------- Original Message --------
>>> Subject:     Re: Fwd: Re: BBC Gaza appeal ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!
>>> Date:        Tue, 23 Jan 2009 10:25:26 -0000 (GMT)
>>> To:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> To all British TV viewers,
>>>
>>> We have all seen the terrible devastation of lives in Gaza. Without
>>> thinking about the causes for the moment, we can all, as human
>>> beings, feel empathy for the children that are being maimed and
>>> killed there.
>>>
>>> The BBC who are financed by our money, have refused to show, quite
>>> absurdly and cold heartedly, a humanitarian request for aid to help
>>> alleviate the suffering.
>>>
>>> This is the last straw.
>>>
>>> The BBC works for us, on our behalf. It is completely wrong that all
>>> the people of the UK, the license payers, should have their views
>>> ignored and their money spent in ways that they do not consent to.
>>>
>>> In any other circumstance, if you were not given what you wanted when
>>> you handed over money for a service, you would be able to switch and
>>> pay for a different service or stop receiving the service altogether.
>>>
>>>
>>> Can you in good conscience support the BBC with your money, when they
>>> are so clearly under the influence of people to the extent that they
>>> would refuse an appeal for aid to help children in a crisis?
>>>
>>> There have been other crisis appeals and the BBC has transmitted
>>> appeals immediately and in full. It is clear that this is a blatant
>>> case of bias. The question now is, what are the other things that the
>>> BBC has not shown that should have been? It is clear that we can no
>>> longer trust them; if they can sit in their studios and watch
>>> children die and refuse to even read out an address to help dying
>>> children, they do not deserve our respect and certainly they do not
>>> deserve our money.
>>>
>>> I therefore am calling on all license payers to boycott the BBC
>>> license fee on a permanent basis. It is no longer acceptable that
>>> they should be able to use the force of law to take money from us
>>> when they are so fundamentally out of touch with us and the rest of
>>> humanity.
>>>
>>> If the BBC is going to carry on in any form, they must rely on fees
>>> from people who want to watch their entertainment, news and their
>>> opinions. Now that TV is digital, they can encrypt their signals like
>>> SKY does and ask people to pay for their programming. If people want
>>> what they have to offer, they will pay for it.
>>>
>>> The BBC will then have to respond directly to its audience or cease
>>> to exist because no one will pay for their programming. It will no
>>> longer be an option for them to say, essentially, that they do not
>>> care about what the audience wants or thinks, and that they are a law
>>> unto themselves with no accountability to anyone.
>>>
>>> If you are outraged at the BBC's refusal to show the appeal for Gaza,
>>> if you think that it is time for the BBC to grow up and join the real
>>> world, and that they should face the consequences of angering their
>>> audience, if you are tired of being forced to pay for an organization
>>> that doesn't care a whit for your opinion, and acts like you simply
>>> do not matter, please forward this to someone you know.
>>>
>>> Thanks in advance.
>>>
>>> An Ex TV License payer.

CLANG!

A penny drops.

And somebody, somewhere, finally realizes that money talks. Somebody, somewhere realizes that non-compliance IS an option. Not only that, but non-compliance is the RIGHT option.

Somebody, somewhere has had enough, and I’m surprised it has taken so long. I’m disappointed that it has taken something like the Gaza Appeal Fracas to get them moving, but so what, they are moving.

Without the accompaniment of the sounds of heart strings being plucked, here is the distilled version:

To all British TV viewers,
The BBC who are financed by our money.
The BBC works for us, on our behalf. It is completely wrong that all
the people of the UK, the license payers, should have their views
ignored and their money spent in ways that they do not consent to.

In any other circumstance, if you were not given what you wanted when
you handed over money for a service, you would be able to switch and
pay for a different service or stop receiving the service altogether.

It is clear that we can no longer trust them; they do not deserve
 our respect and certainly they do not deserve our money.

I therefore am calling on all license payers to boycott the BBC
license fee on a permanent basis. It is no longer acceptable that
they should be able to use the force of law to take money from us.

If the BBC is going to carry on in any form, they must rely on fees
from people who want to watch their entertainment, news and their
opinions. Now that TV is digital, they can encrypt their signals like
SKY does and ask people to pay for their programming. If people want
what they have to offer, they will pay for it.

The BBC will then have to respond directly to its audience or cease
to exist because no one will pay for their programming. It will no
longer be an option for them to say, essentially, that they do not
care about what the audience wants or thinks, and that they are a law
unto themselves with no accountability to anyone.

If you think that it is time for the BBC to grow up and join the real
world, and if you are tired of being forced to pay for an organization
that doesn't care a whit for your opinion, and acts like you simply
do not matter, please forward this to someone you know

Without going on too much longer, lets reinforce the message with a little substitution…

>>> HMG will then have to respond directly to its employers or cease to exist because no one will pay for their idiocy. It will no longer be an option for them to say, essentially, that they do not care about what the public wants or thinks, and that they are a law unto themselves with no accountability to anyone.
>>>
>>> If you are outraged at HMGs behaviour regarding [war x, y or z; ID cards, NIR, corruption, nepotism], if you think that it is time for HMG to grow up and join the real world, and that they should face the consequences of angering their EMPLOYERS, if you are tired of being forced to pay for an organization that doesn’t care a whit for your opinion, and acts like you simply do not matter, please forward this to someone you know.

Get the message. And get the message out.

Thanks to Travis at Ron Paul News for this, who wrote, “This should make you smile…” He knows that we have written before about Cargo Cult effects in relation to that other subject that we all know and love so well.

Cargo Cult Economics
In a recent email exchange about our larger social situation Robert Klassen used a term that simply jumped off the computer screen at me.

Cargo Cult.

It may not hit you the same way, but it sure raised the wattage of the lights in my world. I turned to Wikipedia for a few details and didn’t need to even page down to see all that I needed.

Members, leaders, and prophets of cargo cults maintain that the manufactured goods (“cargo”) of the non-native culture have been created by spiritual means, such as through their deities and ancestors, and are intended for the local indigenous people, but that, unfairly, the foreigners have gained control of these objects through attraction of these material goods to themselves by malice or mistake.

Now let me rewrite that passage from the standpoint of politicians, reporters, most academic economists, executive branch administrators, and quite a few heads of corporations:

Members, leaders, and prophets of the government-regulated economy cults maintain that the manufactured goods (productive economy) of the Free Market have been created by spiritual or ideological means (Gaia or egalitarian socialism/Keynesian-monetarist policy, respectively), and are intended for the cult’s members, but that, unfairly, the Free-Market capitalists have gained control of these objects through attraction of this wealth to themselves by malice and greed.

Like Cargo Cultists in New Guinea, truly these people don’t know any better. Even highly placed and widely quoted professional economists are as ignorant of the source of economic wealth as were stone age tribesmen whose first contact with technology was with people landing airplanes in the jungle.

The cultists’ spending on (or cheering for) the bailouts, stimulus payments, and infrastructure “investments” is based on the belief that it is money that causes economic prosperity, just like cargo cultists thought that if they built straw models of airplanes and recreated airstrips the “cargo” would return.

When I go to the store to buy something with money, the only reason I have money to spend is because someone paid me to produce what it is I do at work. My job lasts only so long as I produce in value for my employer more than I cost to employ, and my job’s security exists only so long as my employer’s production is profitable.

As I see it, it is production that makes the human world go around and supports our wonderful standard of living. Money is a useful accounting of that production, unless fraud is involved (e.g. fractional reserve banking and central bank operations as a whole).

Why do Cargo Cult Economists cling so tightly to the notion that spending alone can solve the problems of the day?

I think part of the answer is that they have no way to define productivity. Instead of seeing productivity as action that yields something that can be sold profitably on the free market, they appear to cling to the Labor Theory of Value where labor alone defines value produced.

They seem to think that all it takes to make a job is a worker and someone to pay him. If no employer stands ready to do so, the manager of a government program can hire him to dig a ditch and fill it in. A job is a job.

In the news recently was an employee sit-in at defunct Republic Windows in Chicago. The company lost its credit line from Bank of America and a major investor recently wrote off a twelve million dollar investment in the company as valueless.

The employees are demanding severance and accrued vacation pay as mandated by federal law. Apparently unbeknownst to them, their work was producing nothing of value, defined as things sold at a profit. The company produced losses, not profits, which revealed that anyone working there was engaged in unproductive work, no matter how many windows they made.

Politicians with the state of Illinois and city of Chicago threatened to end their business ties with Bank of America if the bank didn’t somehow help the employees get what they wanted. In this microcosm we see that membership in Cargo Cult Economics is nearly universal. Jobs aren’t endeavors that produce economically viable goods and services, they’re just something that takes up time, requires some kind of effort, and results in a paycheck. All that matters is work, not that what is produced is economically viable. The idiotic Labor Theory of Value is clearly part and parcel of Cargo Cult Economics.

Spending on make-work jobs and economically non-viable production generates nothing but waste. It wastes the money of those people taxed (extorted) to pay for it and it wastes the time of those doing the work when they should be out developing new skills in other jobs that, when so employed, produce profits. Such spending also steals money from the suppliers of goods and services taxpayers would have preferred to purchase; society as a whole gets poorer with every cycle.

Instead of progress we get regress.

Welcome to Obamanomics, a sect of the Keynesian denomination of Cargo Cult Economics.

[…]

http://www.lewrockwell.com/calderwood/calderwood24.html

We have already seen Cargo Cult behavior in the form of UFO cults and the absurd designs for man made flying discs that totally misunderstand the principles of real UFOs.

This Cargo Cult effect in economics is directly related to the ostrich posturing surrounding UFOs as detailed in the excellent paper ‘UFOs, Sovereignty and Politics‘(PDF). There is a developing taboo against saying that allowing the free marked to solve problems is the best way to ‘organize’ the economy. We can see some of this effect in this CNN clip. It doesn’t seem to matter to the presenters and the delusional german that the Austrians have been right for decades and that they have a complete theory of economics that can not only predict the future but offer real solutions; these ideas are to be irrationally marginalized for purely psychological reasons based around mostly around pity and a poorly thought out desire to help their fellow man.

I am daily astounded by the amazing ignorance of the pundits and ‘experts’ when it comes to economics. It is not just a matter of philosophy, but a profound lack of knowledge about the fundamentals. The worst offenders are the people at CNN and MSNBC who are not only clueless, but who are actually hostile to the facts.

In the end, everyone must come to the same conclusion, wether the subject be economics or UFOs; there is only one reality, and we are all faced with it wether we like it or not. Your choice as a rational human being should be to face the facts and then deal with them whatever they may be.

These three videos go together.

Do you know why?

In the age of ‘teh inernetz’ it is always a safe bet that someone, somewhere, is thinking the same thing that you are thinking.

It seems that the Lakota Sioux have taken the initiative and are starting a clean, no fractional reserve, no Federal Reserve Note bank. The word about this is spreading like wildfire; this is because everyone is slowly coming to the conclusion that the only real money is Gold, Silver and other precious metals, and that Fractional Reserve Banking is fundamentally immoral and a form of legalize counterfeiting and that the best sort of bank for your savings would be one that only held gold that you deposited.

Consent of the Governed does the hard work:

Remember my blogpost about the Liberty Dollar? Those are still available – but now the People of Lakota are launching a Private Bank for Only Silver and Gold Currencies; and you can convert your US Dollars for their Gold and Silver. You don’t even have to be an honorary Sioux to participate.

In a stunning development, the Free & Independent People of Lakota announced today the introduction of the world’s first non-reserve, non-fractional bank that accepts only silver and gold currencies for deposit.

“Today is a great day for us, a day that we begin to exercise our rights as a sovereign people with strength and pride,” comments Canupa Gluha Mani, Tetuwan Council Judicial Member of the Cante Tenza “Strong Heart” Warrior Society. Mani’s 2500 member warrior society has contracted to provide private security services for the Free Lakota Bank.

“We invite people of any creed, faith or heritage to unite in an effort to reclaim control of wealth. It is our hope that other tribal nations and American citizens recognize the importance of silver and gold as currency and decide to mirror our system of honest trade.” Mani, also known as Duane Martin Sr, is a member of the delegation that declared Lakota independence on December 17th, 2007.The Free Lakota Bank issues an American Open Currency Standard Approved currency, making it readily accepted for trade by over 10,000 merchants and businesses across the continent; this is similar to the Liberty Dollar.

The announcement about this also mentioned that:

The launch of the Free Lakota Bank is also an incredible victory for StrikeForce Technologies, the access control experts providing depositor Out-of-Band Authentication. As the Free Lakota Bank does not require a name, photo identification or social security number to transact, StrikeForce’s technology met the challenge of limiting fraud without requiring controversial biometric technology.

They are using some security software for deposits and withdrawals, and since people have become used to doing banking online even with institutions that don’t have physical “branches” like ING, this is nothing new.

It looks like the Native Americans are flexing their position of sovereignty to create gold and silver backed currency – I sure wish the United States would do the same. Instead the US is just printing up gobs of fiat money that shows signs of eventual collapse. I’ll bet the Lakota’s website and phones will be very busy.

The People of Lakota invite depositors to establish accounts and invest in the Free Lakota Bank’s General Investment Fund, the fund it uses to develop profitable free-market enterprise inside Lakota territory. Mani comments that the nation despises donations and charity, and instead insists instead on “earning our wealth by creating value for those that place their faith and trust in our system.”

Let’s hope that the Feds don’t raid them and steal all their Gold and Silver like they did to the Liberty Dollar folks.

“Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion…when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing…when you see your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you…when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice…you may know that your society is doomed.” – Ayn Rand – “Atlas Shrugged”

[…]

Consent Of The Governed

If the Lakota Sioux are indeed a sovereign people, then the Feds cannot go there and raid this bank. What they might do however, is order a Gold and Silver confiscation, and make it illegal for you to take your money off of Lakota Sioux land. We shall see.

I do not think that this will be the first bank of this kind. The more people wake up, the greater the demand will be for a no Fractional Reserve bank that keeps your savings in something other than Federal Reserve Notes.

I have to read their privacy page. If they keep your affairs 100% private no matter what, then they have ‘the total package’.