It wasn't always certain that the states would be as united as they are today. In An Empire Wilderness, Robert D. Kaplan explains that James Madison, one of the authors of the Federalist Papers, envisioned America as "an enormous geographical space with governance but without patriotism, in which the federal government would be a mere 'umpire,' refereeing competing interests."

The Fed is abandoning the printing presses (presumably) because China told Geithner to stop printing money or they'd sell their US Treasuries. It's a wake-up call to Bernanke that the power is shifting from Washington to Beijing.

The Fed is abandoning the printing presses (presumably) because China told Geithner to stop printing money or they'd sell their US Treasuries. It's a wake-up call to Bernanke that the power is shifting from Washington to Beijing.

That puts Bernanke in a pickle. If he stops printing; interest rates will skyrocket, stocks will crash and housing prices will tumble. But if he continues QE, China will dump their Treasuries and the greenback will vanish in a poof of smoke. Either way, the malaise in the credit markets will persist and personal consumption will continue to sputter.

If he stops printing; interest rates will skyrocket, stocks will crash and housing prices will tumble.

The basic problem is that consumers are buried beneath a mountain of debt and have no choice except to curtail their spending and begin to save.

If he stops printing; interest rates will skyrocket, stocks will crash and housing prices will tumble.

The Fed is abandoning the printing presses (presumably) because China told Geithner to stop printing money or they'd sell their US Treasuries. It's a wake-up call to Bernanke that the power is shifting from Washington to Beijing.

The combination of higher debt and lower saving enabled personal consumption expenditures to grow faster than disposable income, providing a significant boost to U.S. economic growth over the period. In the long-run, however, consumption cannot grow faster than income because there is an upper limit to how much debt households can service, based on their incomes. For many U.S. households, current debt levels appear too high, as evidenced by the sharp rise in delinquencies and foreclosures in recent years. To achieve a sustainable level of debt relative to income, households may need to undergo a prolonged period of deleveraging, whereby debt is reduced and saving is increased.

Going forward, it seems probable that many U.S. households will reduce their debt. If accomplished through increased saving, the deleveraging process could result in a substantial and prolonged slowdown in consumer spending relative to pre-recession growth rates." ("U.S. Household Deleveraging and Future Consumption Growth, by Reuven Glick and Kevin J. Lansing, FRBSF Economic Letter")

The Internet is abuzz with news about the construction of internment camps all across America. Of course, "mainstream" media outlets refuse to touch the subject; or if they do, they pooh-pooh the story; they do what Glenn Beck recently did: try to debunk the story as fallacious and impugn people who speak of it as "conspiracy nuts." The fact that the Becks, Hannitys, Limbaughs, and O'Reillys of the media circus refuse to deal with the construction of large numbers of internment camps does not make them disappear, however.

For starters, all anyone need do to begin a serious investigation of the subject of internment camps is Google the phrase "FEMA Camps." There is more than enough evidence in that search engine alone to keep one busy with some in-depth private investigation of the subject for quite a while.

Pope Proposes New Financial Order

Number one, create a new global reserve currency based on a basket of currencies.

Already before the G20, the GEAB, that European thinks tank we mentioned, they were projecting what may happen next: the system may disintegrate and global political dislocation (in other words, chaos) may be just around the corner.

Philip Giraldi discusses the Israel Lobby, Larry Franklin, the recent scandal involving Representative Jane Harman, the continuous erosion of our civil liberties, and much more.

Philip Giraldi is a former CIA and DIA counter-terrorism officer, member of the American Conservative Defense Alliance, and contributing editor at The American Conservative magazine.

1. Criminals
2. Victims
3. Not A or B 

1. Planning on and then executing the plan to injure innocent people for profit is a method of thinking and living, a method of abusing human power, whereby that choice of actions, that pre-meditated path of life, has a name, and the name is crime.
2. Not A

1. Criminal
2. Victim
3. Observer 

The remedy for the present economic situation, throughout the world, is to reverse these physical-economic trends, measured as both physical output per capita, and also capital-intensity, and energy-flux density of sources of power applied.

This urgently needed reform can be effected only by eliminating entirely the existing world monetary system, and replacing it with a general agreement on partnership among sovereign nation-states operating through a credit-system, rather than a monetary system. The role of the U.S.A. as presently a net debtor nation, but with a Hamiltonian tradition and a very large debt to work off, is the essential platform on which to base both a global fixed-exchange-rate credit-system and half-century uttering of debt as credit for the crash-program type of re-energizing the world economy.

Without such a reform now, the situation for every nation of the world is presently imminently a hopeless one. Therefore, end the existence of the British empire, now.

Since 1789, there have been only two leading financial-economic systems in the world. The one has been the European system, which has been dominated by the British Empire since the February 1763 Peace of Paris, and the challenger, the American System as designed under the leadership of Alexander Hamilton, an American System built into the relevant provisions of the U.S. Federal Constitution.

However, treasonous, post-Franklin Roosevelt developments within the U.S. political-economic system, prepared the way for the post-1968 developments since the catastrophic developments, led by the United Kingdom during the 1968-1973 interval. By March 1, 1968, the U.S. dollar was already degenerating, under the influence of the Trilateral Commission, into a mere auxiliary of the Anglo-Dutch-Saudi international monetarist system based on the long-standing role of the hegemonic, London-created petroleum spot market. The ensuing wrecking of the U.S. economy and dollar under David Rockefeller's Trilateral Commission sabotage of 1977-1981, as combined with the lunatic and ruinous "green" policies launched during the 1970s, destroyed the U.S.A. in its former role as a true sovereign nation-state, and turned it into an increasingly decadent role as a pawn of London, via London's Wall Street swindlers.

CARACAS - PRESIDENT Hugo Chavez on Sunday bridled at US plans to use military bases in Colombia, asserting that Venezuela was the top US target in the region and that Venezuelans should prepare for war.

Speaking in his weekly live radio and television broadcast, Chavez also chided US President Barack Obama for accusing leftist Latin leaders of 'hypocrisy' for demanding that Washington intervene more forcefully to reinstate Honduras' ousted President Manuel Zelaya.

Mr Obama 'is lost in the clouds. I think he is entering a terrible labyrinth', Mr Chavez said. 'Obama doesn't understand. He needs to study a bit more. He is a young man, full of good intentions.'

'Obama, we are not asking you to intervene in Honduras. To the contrary, we are asking that the empire remove its hand from Honduras and that the empire remove its claws from Latin America,' he said.

In 1798, the legislatures of Virginia and Kentucky approved resolutions that affirmed the states' right to resist federal encroachments on their powers. If the federal government has the exclusive right to judge the extent of its own powers, warned the resolutions' authors (James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, respectively), it will continue to grow - regardless of elections, the separation of powers, and other much-touted limits on government power. The Virginia Resolutions spoke of the states' right to "interpose" between the federal government and the people of the state; the Kentucky Resolutions (in a 1799 follow-up to the original resolutions) used the term "nullification" - the states, they said, could nullify unconstitutional federal laws.

The anti-liberty mindset would also explain how Americans quietly bear government taxation that consumes over half of what they make each hour, and each year. At this point, logic tells us that no future generation will be able to pay the obligations taken on by our government. But an anti-liberty mindset certainly explains why Americans tend to believe that our children somehow will be willing to try!

It seems to me that the anti-liberty mindset is the most serious challenge facing America today - even beyond the ongoing catastrophe of our fiat-money system that continues to enable the corporate state. The fiat-money system will eventually crash the state - but we will still be battling the anti-liberty mindset in the smoking ruins.

1. You love our home grown Nazis
2. You don't love Nazis past or present  

However, the anti-liberty mindset may be itself vulnerable to collapse.

Is there a natural anti-liberty mindset? No, there is not. Children want to ask questions, to explore, to experiment, and to think.

With the world's population forecasted to surpass nine billion by 2050, and successful speculators such as George Soros frantically getting their hands on as much land as possible, these countries are acting perfectly logically in attempting to safeguard their future.

Millions of hectares have been sold in the most deprived parts of the world

Land-grabbing can also lead to exploitation. After a Norwegian biofuels company sought to turn a vast area of forest in northern Ghana, where the locals earn their livings by foraging for shea nuts, into a jatropha plantation, they were accused of deceiving an illiterate chief into signing away 38,000 hectares with his thumbprint.

It seems certain, that where the new landowners don't charm locals by providing an improved quality of life, and where foreign workers, earning what they would back home, retreat into the safety of gated compounds, that this land-grabbing will lead to widespread resentment. If, as in Madagascar, a government is seen to side with the foreigners, it polarizes society on wealth lines and provides populist leaders - whether they be charismatic leftists like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, or right-wing nationalists - with the chance to campaign with the rhetoric of 'us versus them' divisions.

For a worst case scenario, one need only look at the Central American 'banana republics', and the conflicts that pitted the United Fruit Company against the local poor. Or the current violent hostility in the Niger Delta between oil multinationals, supported by the Nigerian government, and an angry, violent guerrilla resistance. Or simply back to last April, when people all around the world took to the streets in unprecedented numbers, because they were starving.

1. Accurate stuff
2. Inaccurate stuff
3. False stuff

1. Accurate stuff
2. Inaccurate stuff
3. False stuff

• 1. Division of labor
• 2. Specialization
• 3. Economies of scale

On a 106-degree May afternoon in 2003, government agents raided several establishments belonging to Southern Nevada businessman Robert "Bobby" Kahre. With guns drawn, officials held more than 20 handcuffed workers in the sun without water as agents collected records and other materials.

Kahre hadn't committed a crime. He had upset the Internal Revenue Service by paying his workers based on the face value of gold and silver coins, versus the market value in the Federal Reserve system (the value of the coins in U.S. paper dollars). Even though the coins were in circulation, displayed a face value, and were regulated by Congress, the IRS's confusing and endless tax code did not determine how to handle these gold and silver coins if used for payroll. The tax code only references dollars. It does not distinguish between coined money and paper money.

The IRS was supposed to notify the judge in late October if the agency intended to retry the five defendants on the charges that resulted in a hung jury. The government waffled, indicating they would pursue another grand jury and issue superceding indictments. More information will be known by mid-November.

For more than six hundred years - that is, since Magna Carta, in 1215 - there has been no clearer principle of English or American constitutional law, than that, in criminal cases, it is not only the right and duty of juries to judge what are the facts, what is the law, and what was the moral intent of the accused; but that it is also their right, and their primary and paramount duty, to judge the justice of the law, and to hold all laws invalid, that are, in their opinion, unjust or oppressive, and all persons guiltless in violating, or resisting the execution of, such law.

Unless such be the right and duty of jurors, it is plain that, instead of juries being a "palladium of liberty" - a barrier against the tyranny and oppression of the government - they are really mere tools in its hands, for carrying into execution any injustice and oppression it may desire to have executed.

But for their right to judge the law, and the justice of the law, juries would be no protection to an accused person, even as to matters Of fact; for, if the government can dictate to a jury any law whatever, in a criminal case, it can certainly dictate to them the laws of evidence. That is, it can dictate what evidence is admissible, and what inadmissible, and also what force or weight is to be given to the evidence admitted. And if the government can thus dictate to a jury the laws of evidence, it can not only make it necessary for them to convict on a partial exhibition of the evidence rightfully pertaining to the case, but it can even require them to convict on any evidence whatever that it pleases to offer them.

That the rights and duties of jurors must necessarily be such as are here claimed for them, will be evident when it is considered what the trial by jury is, and what is its object.

"The trial by jury," then, is a "trial by the country" - that is, by the people - as distinguished from a trial by the government.

It was anciently called "trial per pais" - that is, "trial by the country." And now, in every criminal trial, the jury are told that the accused "has, for trial, put himself upon the country; which country you (the jury) are."

The object of this trial "by the country," or by the people, in preference to a trial by the government, is to guard against every species of oppression by the government. In order to effect this end, it is indispensable that the people, or "the country," judge of and determine their own liberties against the government; instead of the government's judging of and determining its own powers over the people. How is it possible that juries can do anything to protect the liberties of the people against the government; if they are not allowed to determine what those liberties are?

Any government, that is its own judge of, and determines authoritatively for the people, what are its own powers over the people, is an absolute government of course. It has all the powers that it chooses to exercise. There is no other - or at least no more accurate - definition of a despotism than this.

It would be easy for Congressman Frank to hold hearings on the bill. This would allow Dr. Paul to bring in expert witnesses on the FED to make the case for an independent audit. It would get a lot of YouTube play.

1. Few people have the power to add zeros to their personal banking accounts and do so without accountability for that creation of that growing account (and it does grow larger every time that power is held by a few people over many people).
2. Those few people abuse that power to transfer wealth from the many to them.
3. Those few people will lose that power once the victims realize their eventual fate (to be tortured and murdered eventually)
4. The power to add zeros is a monopoly power, and not, specifically not, a competitive power INTERNALLY. 

1. American "STATE" financed by a legal currency monopoly (few people adding numbers to their own personal accounts)
2. Chinese "STATE" financed by the same type of monopoly (an external competitor)  

The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History

Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century

The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism

Paris - Wind is the fastest growing renewable energy in Europe - making up a third of new energy here, with 20 turbines added every working day in 2008, according to EU statistics.

It's a far cry from a $100,000 Tesla, but a new electric car concept from Volkswagen has people charged up.

The diminutive E-Up! is just 125.6-inches long - a Mini Cooper is 20 inches longer - and isn't going to haul four kids to soccer practice. And its 11.3 second 0-60 time won't win any drag races. Any in-seat DVD screens, heated leather seats, and drowsiness-sensing lane-departure warning systems? Nope. But none of that gets to the point. If all goes as planned, by 2013, E-Up! will be a mass-produced all-electric car from a major automaker, accessible to the average person. Volkswagen is even calling it the Beetle of the 21st century.

Introduced Tuesday ahead of the press preview day at Frankfurt's International Auto Show, the E-Up! has a 500-lbs lithium-ion battery pack stored in the floor. Supplementing that is a 15-square-foot roof-mounted solar array, as well as another three square feet of solar cells mounted on the back of the vehicle's sun visors. All told, Volkswagen says the big coppertop packs enough juice for about a 62-mile range between five-hour charges.