Seminole

If I were the sarcastic type I might be tempted to say ACC types can spell prefer. But I am not going to do that. :lol:

Funny pic though. That looks a bit like Tebow on the right hand side.

I think this one is a bit beyond your scope skippy maybe you should sit this one out. Anyone who hasn't figurred out yet that Russia is now a capitalist country...well I don't think this will be too productive.



"Together with the Central Bank of Russia’s foreign reserves, Russian authorities have a currency reserve of $413 billion, the largest per capita foreign currency reserve of any major economy, including China’s. In an oil downturn, authorities could spend that reserve to protect the ruble. In the meantime, the reserve adds an aura of stability to the economy for investors. “Excluding a couple of oil countries where the money belongs to the local ruling family, which is something different, Russia has surpassed all the newly industrializing Asian countries,” in foreign currency reserves, Kenneth S. Rogoff, an economics professor at Harvard, said in a telephone interview.

Analysts say Russia’s underlying fundamentals are good, too.

First, oil exports are not the sole source of the ruble’s rise. That was the case before 2007, but now foreign investment has become a significant factor. Private capital flows into Russia increased roughly 360 percent in the first six months of this year, compared with the same period last year. Only about 30 percent is attributable to oil and other extractive industries, according to the State Statistics Committee. Analysts also point to what they call Russia’s sound macroeconomics. President Vladimir V. Putin’s government has managed inflation, though certainly not eliminated it. And through its tight control over politics and society, the regime has kept demands for social spending in check — a leadership approach reminiscent of the authoritarian “Asian model” of economic development."

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:lol:

quote:

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Russia is NOT capitalist!

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Skippy I am waiting patiently for you to come up with anything that is remotely correct.

"For years Western observers had assumed that as the transition from socialism to capitalism proceeded in the Soviet Union there would appear a gradual shift away from strict state control of production toward some form of market socialism. Some property and productive assets would move from collective to individual ownership, but not all that much. Market forces of supply and demand would take over some of the responsibilities of allocating resources, but the state would retain a dominant role in protecting the population from the excesses of capitalism. Russia would more or less fit itself into the Swedish model. The dynamic of capitalism would be safely subordinated to the imperatives of a welfare state. How could it be otherwise? After seven decades of collectivism, the people of Russia and the former Soviet republics must surely have lost all memory of commercial competitiveness.

In fact quite the opposite conclusion might be drawn. During the 70 years of the communist experiment the competitive impulse of Soviet man has not been extinguished at all, but rather has been channeled into the awkward mazes and blind alleys that ultimately led to abandonment of the Marxist-Leninist idea. Now freed of these constraints, it is easy to imagine these competitive impulses racing ahead of our Western form of corporate capitalism, which has grown flabby and slow. It is possible to imagine a future of Russian capitalism that asserts itself early in the 21st century as the envy of the world.

In this difficult time of Russia’s conversion from one system of political economy to another, it might seem sheer fantasy to present such a notion. The objective, as an alternative to the Swedish model, is worth considering, however. The Russian people are now engaged in nothing less than designing the basic architecture of a brand new country. Why not consider all possibilities? Why not design the Russian system of capitalism to be the best?"

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:lol:

"The city of Yakaterinburg, Russia’s largest east of the Urals, may become known not only as the death place of the tsars but of American hegemony too – and not only where US U-2 pilot Gary Powers was shot down in 1960, but where the US-centered international financial order was brought to ground.

Challenging America will be the prime focus of extended meetings in Yekaterinburg, Russia (formerly Sverdlovsk) today and tomorrow (June 15-16) for Chinese President Hu Jintao, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and other top officials of the six-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). The alliance is comprised of Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrghyzstan and Uzbekistan, with observer status for Iran, India, Pakistan and Mongolia. It will be joined on Tuesday by Brazil for trade discussions among the BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India and China).

The attendees have assured American diplomats that dismantling the US financial and military empire is not their aim. They simply want to discuss mutual aid – but in a way that has no role for the United States, NATO or the US dollar as a vehicle for trade. US diplomats may well ask what this really means, if not a move to make US hegemony obsolete. That is what a multipolar world means, after all. For starters, in 2005 the SCO asked Washington to set a timeline to withdraw from its military bases in Central Asia. Two years later the SCO countries formally aligned themselves with the former CIS republics belonging to the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), established in 2002 as a counterweight to NATO.

Yet the meeting has elicited only a collective yawn from the US and even European press despite its agenda is to replace the global dollar standard with a new financial and military defense system. A Council on Foreign Relations spokesman has said he hardly can imagine that Russia and China can overcome their geopolitical rivalry,1 suggesting that America can use the divide-and-conquer that Britain used so deftly for many centuries in fragmenting foreign opposition to its own empire. But George W. Bush (“I’m a uniter, not a divider”) built on the Clinton administration’s legacy in driving Russia, China and their neighbors to find a common ground when it comes to finding an alternative to the dollar and hence to the US ability to run balance-of-payments deficits ad infinitum.

What may prove to be the last rites of American hegemony began already in April at the G-20 conference, and became even more explicit at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum on June 5, when Mr. Medvedev called for China, Russia and India to “build an increasingly multipolar world order.” What this means in plain English is: We have reached our limit in subsidizing the United States’ military encirclement of Eurasia while also allowing the US to appropriate our exports, companies, stocks and real estate in exchange for paper money of questionable worth."

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Global Depression And Regional Wars
Reviewing James Petras' New Book - Part I
By Stephen Lendman
8-14-9

James Petras is Binghamton University, New York Professor Emeritus of Sociology. Besides his long and distinguished academic career, he's a noted figure on the left, a well-respected Latin American expert, and a longtime chronicler of the region' popular struggles. He's also a prolific author of hundreds of articles and dozens of books, most recently his new one titled, "Global Depression and Regional Wars" addressing America, Latin America and the Middle East.

Part I - Global Depression

Variety's famous October 30, 1929 headline is again relevant: "Wall Street Lays an Egg," or as economist Rick Wolff puts it: "Capitalism hit the fan" following a familiar pattern of boom and bust cycles punctuated by bubbles that always burst. Petras explains it this way:

"All the idols of capitalism over the past three decades have crashed. The assumptions and presumptions, paradigms and prognosis of indefinite progress under liberal free market capitalism have been tested and have failed. We are living the end of an entire epoch (and bearing witness to) the collapse of the US and world financial system."

Grim prospects are ahead:

-- a world depression with one-fourth of the labor force unemployed;

-- global trade in free fall;

-- a proliferation of bankruptcies with General Motors a metaphor for a decaying system;

-- free-market capitalism in disrepute; and

-- "planning, public ownership, nationalization(s and other) socialist alternatives have become almost respectable" because most sacred cow "truisms" and solutions have failed.

Today's global crisis reflects an unsustainable system - crisis-prone, unstable, anarchic, ungovernable, self-destructive, and eventually doomed to collapse. Its early death throes may now be audible - despite intense "psycho-babble" reengineering of facts to portray the current situation as a "failure of leadership....lack of understanding....willful ignorance of what markets need, (and) loss of confidence."

Samuel Boswell explained that "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel." Perhaps "psycho-babble" is its equivalent for "capitalist ideologues, academics, (self-styled) experts, and financial page editorialists, all of whom use "shoddy economic arguments" to pump life into a bankrupt ideology - one based on:

-- repeated boom and bust cycles;

-- unsustainable growth to stay viable;

-- direct foreign investment for the highest rates of return, producing a race to the bottom the result of some nations benefitting at the expense of others and all of them eventually losing out;

-- technological advances for "greater social and political power;"

-- pillaging countries, crushing labor, cutting wages, and limiting or ending social services;

-- privatizing "public enterprises, land, resources and banks;" and

-- reducing governments to servants of business with America the hub of the corporate universe.

Today's crisis is systemic - "embedded in the contradiction between impoverished labor and concentrated capital" gone wild. "The current world depression is a product of the 'over-accumulation' process of the capitalist system in which the crash of the financial system was the 'detonator' but not the structural determinant: the exploitation of labor" that sooner or later bites back. The longer capital interests pillage state resources at their expense, the less tolerant they'll be for mass unemployment, homes and savings lost, grim futures, and the end of the American dream. Then, watch out.

The World Depression: A Class Analysis

"It is a well-known truism that those who caused (today's) crisis are also (the) greatest beneficiaries of government largesse." Rulers create crises. Workers pay for them.

Since the early 1970s, capitalism went global at the expense of workers experiencing "a relative and absolute decline in (their) share of material income" and well-being. As business consolidated more power, it began "exercis(ing) near absolute control over the location and movements of capital" as well as the ability to exploit labor globally in newly industrialized countries like China, the Asian subcontinent, capitalist Russia, former Soviet republics, and undeveloped ones in Central America and elsewhere.

Huge profits came at the expense of growing inequality from wealth transfers to the rich. A race to the bottom cut wages and benefits, and lower living standards resulted from "the (permanent) conversion from high wage/high skill manufacturing jobs to lower-paid service" ones.

Financialization-caused speculative excesses were fueled by cheap credit and lax regulations. Bubbles resulted producing inevitable collapse. First felt "at the bottom of the speculative chain," they reached the biggest banks responsible for the crisis and major corporations as well - "all of which had been deeply engaged in leveraged buyouts and acquisitions" as well as other unsustainable excesses.

Depression indicators are everywhere, and the parallels to the early 1930s are ominous:

-- business bankruptcies up 64% from a year earlier; household ones up 33%;

-- according to the IMF, global banks must write down $4.1 trillion, two-thirds of which is yet to come; loss estimates will likely go higher given the state of world economies and enormity of their toxic asset portfolios -at yearend 2008, around $680 trillion, according to the Bank for International Settlements (BIS);

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And so why do our politicians keep running to China to borrow more money to stay afloat? Please don't tell me you are not aware of this.

We are the worlds most debtor nation. The U. S. borrows money from two countries Russia and China and they are moving away from the dollar.

To make this simple for you the dollar is going to collapse, soon.

The middle eastern countries, Saudi Arabia, Iran and others don't accept the dollar for oil any more neither does Venezuela one of the worlds largest oil producers. And yet you don't see the implications of this.

You are kind of asleep behind the wheel aren't you cowboy"

It was always about the money.

The Serving Armies of The Standing Bankers.


"One would be a fool to think that because they could see the delusions and denial of those around them that they were free of some degree of the same. You can’t occupy a human body with its sensory apparatus and be free of it. Even if you were free of delusions about the nature and operations of the manifest world you would not be free of delusions about yourself. Even an awareness of the world is a delusion because it indicates a state of dreaming that doesn’t exist, except as a projection upon a blank screen. The screen is real, the projection is not.


However, even if the pool a man is drowning in is not real, this does not mean you should not try to pull him out of it. His suffering is real to him, even if he is in denial about it.


I know that agents of the American and Israeli government were the authors of 9/11. I know this. Many others know this. Then there are those who buy the official line which is impossible. The very fact that no jets were scrambled during the event points to government complicity. The free fall of three buildings into their own footprints and the evidence of nano-thermite prove controlled demolition. Consider these things in a court of law.


Why then do seemingly intelligent people resist the obvious truth? Let’s give an example of a personality type. Let’s take a man who went to war in Vietnam or Iraq under the illusion that he was fulfilling some patriotic duty to a democratic country. We’ve since learned that the Vietnam War and the Iraq War, like nearly all wars, were the brain child of bankers who initiated them for profit. Let’s consider that the so-called democratic country is not, in fact, a democratic country but a serf nation in fealty to a collection of bankers called The Federal Reserve. All of the representatives of this serf nation are employed by the bank and serve at the pleasure of the bank. John Steinbeck illustrated the nature of the bank in his wonderful novel, “The Grapes of Wrath”. Today you see the reality of ‘the bank’ at work in wars for profit, in foreclosures and corporate thefts as well as the tightening of counterfeit, fiat currency flow into the economy.


This man who went to Vietnam has bought into his own sense of sacrifice and whatever idea of manhood he thought he got out of it. He even wallows in the injustice of his state, given how the war ended and the public’s view of it. It defines him to himself. He’s listening to Bruce sing, “Glory Days” on the bar stool of his dotage. He went from soldier to college graduate and into a field that relied on the serf nation for his employment. He bought into the system and served the system, continuing to believe that there are good wars and that his nation is a democratic one. He seeks justice in the system believing that the public interest is served. In reality, the poor usually go to jail and the rich stay out or spend their time in a country club. If he looks clearly at it he cannot justify his position with his conscience so he becomes philosophical and interprets everything that happens within a fantasy construct the same way he did with Vietnam.


Deep inside this man strives to believe that he is a hero. He rocks along with John Fogerty and never hears a word. All across this democratic land, there are men and women like him. They are lawyers and businessmen; politicos, doctors, engineers, teachers and whathaveyou and they all work for the system. The system allows only so much in the way of personal or reactive thought and action. When you’re heavily involved in it and in debt to it, it owns you… no matter what you tell yourself. It owns you. You can’t act outside of it and you can’t speak against it or yonder looms the highway and the sleeping bag under the overpass. This living state of compromise and hypocrisy in the service of a confined, personal survival is untenable to a real person. A real person doesn’t ask themselves the cost of truth. They pay the toll.


No one wants to have to accept that they went to war or that their children died in wars that existed only for the profit of bankers or the pressures of a foreign nation who control the banks that start the wars. No one wants to be put into the position where they jeopardize their position by speaking out against lies and hypocrisies, so they pretend they don’t exist while the very thing stares them in the face. This is how you die inside. This is how you lose your youthfulness and all of the finer qualities that made you who you think you are but no longer are because these finer qualities will not stay in the heart of a man who is false to himself.


How is it that a man can think himself brave by going to war for bankers and not find himself capable of going to war for the very essence of what these false wars were presented as being about? All the phony medals and awards of this phony world are useless except in the company of other men and women who lie to themselves. They think they are honest yet they embrace dishonesty at every turn. They think they are brave yet they kneel in a moment before the oppressors of humanity. They think they are useful but they are all bad examples and willing servants of the engines of enslavement. They watch movies about people in dire peril who win the day because that’s how movies go. They think they are one of those people but they are given the same choices as the people in the movie and they turn away. They turn away.


No man can see the world as it is who does not look closely at himself. No one can know the meaning of anything if they do not know the meaning of themselves.


It is something to see; people who imagine they are standing forth and speaking the truth while hearing the roar of the crowd. One does not hear the roar of the crowd when one speaks the truth. One hears the rustling of chairs and the sound of people leaving the hall. Why is this? The people who are leaving are not leaving because of the speaker. They are leaving because what is inside them cannot accept the responsibility that comes with hearing the truth and failing to act.


Such an immensity of lies surround us that it threatens to block out the sun. It has certainly blocked out the light of introspection and objectivity within so many of us. Enshrined lies now have their own laws to protect them. The only time a purported truth needs protection is when it is concealing the lies contained within it. If something is true then further inquiry only proves it so."




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I predict this thread will go far.

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Chinese banks work for the people rather than the reverse. So says Samah El-Shahat, a presenter for Al Jazeera English who has a doctorate in economics from the University of London.

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Of course it is never the right link or source either. If you don't like the message, kill the messenger especially if he is one of them thar towel boys which are now taking the place of the huns, Russkies , commies and hippies.

Protecting the banker overlords has never been an easy job. You have to be disingenous or half asleep.

We don't really own our land either.


What You Didn't Know About Taxes & The 'Crown'

By Mark Owen

There are two Crowns operant in England, one being Queen Elizabeth II. Although extremely wealthy, the Queen functions largely in a ceremonial capacity and serves to deflect attention away from the other Crown, who issues her marching orders through their control of the English Parliament. This other Crown is comprised of a committee of 12 banks headed by the Bank of England (House of Rothschild). They rule the world from the 677-acre, independent sovereign state known as The City of London, or simply 'The City.'

The City is not a part of England, just as Washington is not a part of the USA. The City is referred to as the wealthiest square mile on earth and is presided over by a Lord Mayor who is appointed annually. When the Queen wishes to conduct business within the City, she is met by the Lord Mayor at Temple (Templar) Bar where she requests permission to enter this private, sovereign state. She then proceeds into the City walking several paces behind the Mayor. Her entourage may not be clothed in anything other than service uniforms.

In the nineteenth century, 90% of the world's trade was carried by British ships controlled by the Crown. The other 10% of ships had to pay commissions to the Crown simply for the privilege of using the world's oceans.

The Crown reaped billions in profits while operating under the protection of the British armed forces. This was not British commerce or British wealth, but the Crown's commerce and the Crown's wealth. As of 1850, author Frederick Morton estimated the Rothschild fortune to be in excess of $10 billion. Today, the bonded indebtedness of the world is held by the Crown.

The aforementioned Temple Bar is the juristic arm of the Crown and holds an exclusive monopoly on global legal fraud through their Bar Association franchises. The Temple Bar is comprised of four Inns of Court. They are; the Middle Temple, Inner Temple, Lincoln's Inn and Gray's Inn. The entry point to these closed secret societies is only to be found when one is called to their Bar.

The Bar attorneys in the United States owe their allegiance and pledge their oaths to the Crown. All Bar Associations throughout the world are signatories and franchises to the International Bar Association located at the Inns of Court of the Crown Temple.

The Inner Temple holds the legal system franchise by license that bleeds Canada and Great Britain white, while the Middle Temple has license to steal from America. To have the Declaration of Independence recognized internationally, Middle Templar King George III agreed in the Treaty of Paris of 1783 to establish the legal Crown entity of the incorporated United States, referred to internally as the Crown Temple States (Colonies). States spelled with a capital letter 'S,' denotes a legal entity of the Crown.

At least five Templar Bar Attorneys under solemn oath to the Crown, signed the American Declaration of Independence. This means that both parties were agents of the Crown. There is no lawful effect when a party signs as both the first and second parties. The Declaration was simply an internal memo circulating among private members of the Crown. Most Americans believe that they own their own land, but they have merely purchased real estate by contract. Upon fulfillment of the contract, control of the land is transferred by Warranty Deed. The Warranty Deed is only a 'color of title.' Color of Title is a semblance or appearance of title, but not title in fact or in law. The Warranty Deed cannot stand against the Land Patent.

The Crown was granted Land Patents in North America by the King of England. Colonials rebelled at the usurious Crown taxes, and thus the Declaration of Independence was created to pacify the populace.

Another method used to hoodwink natural persons is enfranchisement. Those cards in your wallet bearing your name spelled in all capital letters means that you have been enfranchised and have the status of a corporation. A 'juristic personality' has been created, and you have entered into multi-variant agreements that place you in an equity relationship with the Crown.

These invisible contracts include: birth certificates, citizenship records, employment agreements, driver's licenses and bank accounts. It is perhaps helpful to note here that contracts do not now, nor have they ever had to be stated in writing in order to be enforceable by American judges. If it is written down, it is merely a written statement of the contract.

Tax protestors and (the coming) draft resistors trying to renounce the parts of these contracts that they now disagree with will not profit by resorting to tort law (fairness) arguments as justification. Judges will reject these lines of defense as they have no bearing on contract law jurisprudence. Tort law governs grievances where no contract law is in effect.

These private agreements/contracts that bind us will always overrule the broad general clauses of the Constitution and Bill of Rights (the Constitution being essentially a renamed enactment of English common law). The Bill of Rights is viewed by the Crown as a 'bill of benefits,' conferred on us by them in anticipation of reciprocity (taxes). Protestors and resistors will also lose their cases by boasting of citizenship status. Citizenship is another equity agreement that we have with the Crown. And this is the very juristic contract that Federal judges will use to incarcerate them. In the words of former Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, "Equity is brutal, but we are merely enforcing agreements." The balance of Title 42, section 1981 of the Civil Rights Code states, ".citizens shall be subject to like punishment, pains, penalties, taxes, licenses, and exactions of every kind"

What we view as citizenship, the Crown views as a juristic enrichment instrumentality. It also should be borne in mind that even cursory circulation or commercial use of Federal Reserve Notes effects an attachment of liability for the payment of the Crown's debt to the FED. This is measured by your taxable income. And to facilitate future asset-stripping, the end of the 14th amendment includes a state of debt hypothecation of the United States, wherein all enfranchised persons (that's you) can be held personally liable for the Crown's debt.

The Crown views our participation in these contracts of commercial equity as being voluntary and that any gain accrued is taxable, as the gain wouldn't have been possible were it not for the Crown. They view the system of interstate banks as their own property. Any profit or gain experienced by anyone with a bank account (or loan, mortgage or credit card) carries with it - as an operation of law - the identical same full force and effect as if the Crown had created the gain.

Bank accounts fall outside the umbrella of Fourth Amendment protection because a commercial contract is in effect and the Bill of Rights cannot be held to interfere with the execution of commercial contracts. The Crown also views bank account records as their own private property, pursuant to the bank contract that each of us signed and that none of us ever read.

The rare individual who actually reads the bank contract will find that they agreed to be bound by Title 26 and under section 7202 agreed not to disseminate any fraudulent tax advice. This written contract with the Crown also acknowledges that bank notes are taxable instruments of commerce.





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This one disappears off some sites.

When your banking system is not under the non-federal federal reserve property of London bankers it is very hard to steal from you.

“The banks -- hard to believe in a time when we’re facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created -- are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. They frankly own the place.”

-- U.S. Senator Dick Durbin, Democratic Party Whip, April 30, 2009

We now have a situation in the world where we have a global capitalist crisis. Everywhere, consumption is down. Everywhere, people are buying fewer goods, including goods from China. How is it possible that in that society, so dependent on the world economy, they could now have an explosive growth? Their stock market is now 100 percent higher than at its low -- nothing remotely like that hardly anywhere in the world, certainly not in the United States or Europe. How is that possible? In order to believe what the Chinese are saying, you would have to agree that in a matter of months, at most a year, no more, they have been able to transform their economy from an export-based powerhouse to a domestically focused industrial engine. Nowhere in the world has that ever taken less than decades.”

"How can China’s stimulus plan be working so well, when ours is barely working at all? The answer may be simple: China has not let its banking system run roughshod over its productive economy. Chinese banks work for the people rather than the reverse. So says Samah El-Shahat, a presenter for Al Jazeera English who has a doctorate in economics from the University of London. In an August 10 article titled “China Puts People Before Banks,” she writes:"

What a novel idea putting people ahead of banks. I wonder if we will ever try that one?

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