Radical Change Needed in America

Imagine a few years into the future — you are returning home from a family visit over the Thanksgiving holiday when a deer runs into the road in front of you.

You slam on the brakes, but it is too late. You hit the deer and lose control of your car, which runs off the road, flips, and, in spite of your seat-belt, you die in the crash.

Your worries are over. For your survivors, the tragedy is just beginning.

In this hypothetical future, the growth of government has continued on its present course. Do you think your death was punishment enough? The State doesn’t think so.

After all the applicable estate taxes have been charged, and automatically deducted from your bank accounts and forfeited property, the real frenzy begins.

Your family gets a bill from the police who wrote up the accident report, along with surcharges for “emotional distress” due to seeing your tattered remains, and an “Obama-Care” fine on behalf of all “first responders” involved because they were exposed to potentially hazardous fumes and bodily fluids.

Your survivors are ticketed for the deer you killed without a license, and your family’s hunting weapon — one black-powder rifle per family being the only thing still legal — is confiscated for “poaching.”

Your car’s “black box” indicates you were over the speed limit by a tiny amount, so your estate is charged a fine for your speeding, as well, plus the fine is doubled because a couple of years ago when self-driving cars were made available, at great expense, you chose to forgo that new technology and keep doing the driving.

The EPA charges your loved ones the standard fee for the gasoline spill clean-up, even though your tank was almost empty and nothing spilled. Also, since there was a small fire, a fine for polluting the air is levied, as well as a fine for the bio-hazard created as your life-blood seeped into the soil, and one for littering due to all the car parts scattered around the crash site.

It gets worse. The autopsy confirms the presence of tryptophan, due to the recent turkey dinner, so your life insurance won’t pay out — it’s the law. You were “driving under the influence.”

Did you really think the zero tolerance and ever-tightening DWI laws would remain where they stood in 2013?

You may think this scenario is far-fetched. “It can’t happen here.”

It is already happening. Americans have a choice: radically change the path that is being followed, or “stay the course” to see where it leads.

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WAKE UP NOW!!!!!!            TOMORROW WILL BE TOO LATE!!!

 

How Obama Surrendered Sovereignty to the Criminal Banking Cartel

The U.S. government openly conceded that its sovereign authority to enforce its own laws is gone when Attorney General Eric Holder testified that the Justice Department’s failure to prosecute any big banks is based on anonymous “expert” opinions that prosecutions would destabilize the financial system.

This notion of “systemic importance” has been thoroughly discredited. According to Tim Geithner, it’s an intellectually bankrupt phrase.  What’s more, it’s been debunked both legally and empirically, which is likely one reason the DOJ’s (Department of Justice) “experts” wish to remain anonymous.

If it turns out that these “experts” are in fact agents of the big banks whose crimes are being immunized by the very entities whose discredited opinions the DOJ is relying on, then those “opinions” are nothing more than assertions of criminal sovereign immunity—a privilege that is legally limited to the President of the United States.

Since “the King can do no wrong”—the legal foundation of sovereign immunity—the real King here is the criminally immune cartel of banks, not the President, since real sovereigns don’t surrender the right to enforce their laws.  And following the long series of unprosecuted crimes by the cartel, in which the President’s own constituents are the undisputed victims, “surrender” is the most charitable description of the Obama’s acts before the banking cartel.

Inside The Criminal Banking Cartel

There are two very big and related clues as to the identity of the anonymous experts behind whose opinions U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder hides whenever explaining away his failure to prosecute big banks on the basis of their “systemic importance.”

The first, noted in an article last week by Golem XIV, is a list of international banks that parade under the rather obvious label of “Globally Systemically Important Financial Institutions,” or G-SIFIs. There are 28 banks in total, 9 of them headquartered in the U.S.:

Citigroup

Deustsche Bank

HSBC

JP Morgan Chase

Barclays

BNP Paribas

Bank of America

Bank of New York Mellon

Credit Suisse

Goldman Sachs

Mitsubishi UFJ FG

Morgan Stanley

Royal Bank of Scotland

UBS

Bank of China

BBVA

Group BPCE

Group Credit Agricole

ING Bank

Mizuho FG

Nordea

Santander

Societe Generale

Standard Chartered

State Street

Sumitomo Mitsui FG

Unicredit Group

Wells Fargo

This list of cartel members is updated annually by the Financial Stability Board, a collection of international organizations. The FSB is a global meta-body of bankers.

But the formal edifice, whether called the FSB or the NWO (hat tip Alex), really doesn’t matter, because, as Golem XIV states: “Guess which institutions provide the membership for all of the above international bodies? Yes, you got it—the big banks.”

These are the banks that are above the law in the U.S. In Part One, we mentioned four banks—Citigroup, Wells Fargo, HSBC, and UBS—whose massive crimes had been taxed at a de minimis rate by the Department of Justice rather than prosecuted. All four are on the list of G-SIFIs above.

So what, you may ask, that’s just a list compiled by some international convention of cokehead bankers, how do they make sure a rogue federal prosecutor doesn’t break ranks and haul a cartel member or two off to criminal trial?

Enter clue no. 2: Covington & Burling, the law firm from which both the head of the DOJ (Eric Holder) and the DOJ’s head of criminal enforcement (Lanny Breuer) were recruited. Actually, Breuer is no longer with the DOJ. Following a four-year stint in which “the enforcer” failed to prosecute a single big bank, Breuer has returned to Covington & Burling, where he will earn be rewarded with $4 million in annual compensation.

The significance of Covington & Burling lies in its list of current clients, which looks remarkably like the list of criminally immune cartel members above (particularly the more recognizable names): Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, UBS, Wells Fargo, and ING Bank.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Eric Holder and Lanny Breuer have the financial motivation not to prosecute their firm’s clients. In Breuer’s case, it turned out to be $4 million of motivation. Per year.

Under any functioning system of law, of course, both Holder and Breuer would submit to screening procedures at the DOJ to insulate them from prosecutorial decisions involving their former clients. We're sure they did the same thing under our impotent system as well. But so what? When laws against crimes are a dead letter, who in his right mind would put any trust in a conflict screen?

Now commentators are starting to point out where the slippery slope of sovereign immunity for criminal banks will lead.  Jim Chanos, who detected the fraud at Enron well before it destroyed the company and its shareholders, notes that not only are criminal cartel members now motivated to continue cheating and stealing, they have a fiduciary duty to do so. (Speaking of the Enron-ization of the U.S., Eric Holder is working to release CEO Jeff Skilling from prison early in yet another act of prostrate submission before his real masters, the criminal banks.)

As Golem XIV points out, immunity extends not only to criminal behavior, but to assets that a cartel member bank acquires through crime: “if by doing those illegal things [the bank] makes out-sized profits for its shareholders and staff, that money, those profits are also above the law.”

Cyprus Vs. MF Global: The Rule Of Law Is Dead

Thus, anyone who thinks account confiscation a la Cyprus can’t happen in the U.S. is dreaming of a bygone republic.  Not only is account seizure possible in the U.S., or even likely, it is guaranteed.  Just ask MF Global’s segregated account holders or GM senior bondholders if you have any doubts.

In the MF Global case, Jon Corzine "brazenly took liquid assets like Treasuries and warehouse receipts, but not cash which would have been more quickly missed, from customer accounts to post as illegal collateral for emergency funding with a lender who must have known that they were receiving stolen goods." The lender, of course, turned out to be JP Morgan--a prominent international cartel member. Jon Corzine was of course one of Obama's top fundraisers and an alumnus of Goldman Sachs--a cartel member.

In the GM bankruptcy, the age-old pecking order of creditor priority was turned upside down, literally "rewriting law," when senior unsubordinated secured creditors' claims were trumped by payouts to junior unsecured creditors in a patently political sop to Obama's perceived union supporters.

In both cases, the black letter law that's supposed to gird markets with trust and predictablity was trampled in favor of Obama's political allies. Now that Obama has altogether surrendered the DOJ's law enforcement functionality to the criminal international banking cartel, those dangerous precedents turn out to have been short-sighted in the extreme: there is nothing left to stop the plunder of customer accounts in Cyprus from crashing like a tidal wave across U.S. shores. The timing depends only on the restraint that the banking cartel elects to show.

There is no remedy in sight, only more financial crime as Americans are robbed deeper into serfdom.  The Executive Branch is merely an agent of the criminal banking cartel for the reasons given. That fact, in turn, has cut the Judiciary out of the equation altogether: a court cannot try criminals who are never brought before it to face charges.

That leaves Congress, which in theory could initiate impeachment proceedings. But how likely is success when the Senate, which would try any impeachment cases, couldn’t even obtain the names of the DOJ’s so-called experts in the first place?

As noted in Part One, Senator Grassley asked the DOJ for the experts’ names in a letter on January 29, 2013. Eric Holder testified on March 6, more than a month later. The issue of the experts’ identities was thus as ripe as could be, but rather than obtaining the names, the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee put on a clinic in how to conduct an incompetent examination:

Q. On January 29, Senator Sherrod Brown and I requested details on who these so-called 'experts' are. So far we have not received any information. Maybe you're going to but why have we not yet been provided the names of experts the DOJ consults as we requested on January 29? We continue to find out why we aren't having these high-profile cases.

A: We will endeavor to answer your letter, Senator. We did not, as I understand it, endeavor to obtain experts outside of the government in making determinations with regard to HSBC.

Just putting that aside for a minute though, the concern that you have raised is one that I, frankly, share. I'm not talking about HSBC here, that would be inappropriate. But I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if we do prosecute — if we do bring a criminal charge — it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy. I think that is a function of the fact that some of these institutions have become too large.

Again, I'm not talking about HSBC, this is more of a general comment. I think it has an inhibiting influence, impact on our ability to bring resolutions that I think would be more appropriate. I think that's something that we — you all [Congress] — need to consider. The concern that you raised is actually one that I share.

Note that Senator Grassley asked one question: why haven’t you answered our letter? Holder doesn’t answer it. Instead, he promises to supply the names later. At that point, Grassley should have put two questions to Holder. First, answer my question by explaining why you ignored our letter. Second, when will you supply the names of the “so-called experts”?

A mediocre first-year litigation associate would’ve gotten this information within seconds. But not Senator Grassley, who earned his masters degree during the Eisenhower Administration. Here is his completely irrelevant follow-up question:

Q: Do you believe that the investment bankers that were repackaging bad mortgages that were AAA-rated are guilty of fraud or is it a case of just not being aggressive or effective enough to prove that they did something fraudulent and criminal?

Huh? Not surprisingly, Eric Holder has been in no hurry to disclose the names of the “experts” retained by Covington & Burling’s clients since dancing around Grassley like a cigar store Indian. Holder has completely blown off the Senate, which has done nothing to follow up the issue.

Frankly this disgusting charade has surprised no one who’s paying any attention, coming, as it does, from the same august body that exempted itself from insider trading laws and has failed to pass any meaningful reform legislation since the 2008 meltdown, an even worse repeat of which is on its way.

On the contrary, both Congress and the Executive Branch are now just tools of fraud used by the criminal international banking cartel against the people, who for their part are drooling iDope dreams oblivious to their own last act, proving Edward Murrow right, a nation of sheep having begotten a government of wolves.

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Department of Defense Issues Instructions on Military Support of Civilian Law Enforcement

The Department of Defense has issued an instruction clarifying the rules for the involvement of military forces in civilian law enforcement.

Soldiers from the 3rd Battalion, 321st Field Artillery Regiment, XVIII Fires Brigade train last December to “respond to an escalating civil-disturbance situation caused by unhappy simulated hurricane victims.” According to an article produced by the 82nd Combat Aviation Brigade, the training was designed to prepare the soldiers “for their upcoming assignment as a quick reaction and rapid response force for U.S. Army North Command in support of emergencies in the United States.”

April 14th

The instruction establishes “DoD policy, assigns responsibilities, and provides procedures for DoD support to Federal, State, tribal, and local civilian law enforcement agencies, including responses to civil disturbances within the United States.”

The new instruction titled “Defense Support of Civilian Law Enforcement Agencies” was released at the end of February, replacing several older directives on military assistance to civilian law enforcement andcivil disturbances.  The instruction requires that senior DoD officials develop “procedures and issue appropriate direction as necessary for defense support of civilian law enforcement agencies in coordination with the General Counsel of the Department of Defense, and in consultation with the Attorney General of the United States”, including “tasking the DoD Components to plan for and to commit DoD resources in response to requests from civil authorities for [civil disturbance operations].”  Military officials are to coordinate with “civilian law enforcement agencies on policies to further DoD cooperation with civilian law enforcement agencies” and the heads of the combatant commands are instructed to issue procedures for “establishing local contact points in subordinate commands for purposes of coordination with Federal, State, tribal, and local civilian law enforcement officials.”

In addition to defining responsibilities for military coordination with local law enforcement, the instruction describes circumstances in which direct participation in civilian law enforcement is permissible.  Under the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, U.S military personnel are generally prohibited from assisting in civilian law enforcement functions such as search and seizure, interdiction of vehicles, arrest and interrogation, surveillance or using force except for in self-defense. Though the Posse Comitatus Act originally referred only to the Army, it was extended in 1956 to include the Air Force. Subsequent DoD regulations prevent the use of the Marine Corps or Navy for civilian law enforcement functions.  In 1981, this principle was further codified in 10 USC § 375 which directs the Secretary of Defense to ensure that military activities do “not include or permit direct participation by a member of the Army, Navy, Air Force, or Marine Corps in a search, seizure, arrest, or other similar activity unless participation in such activity by such member is otherwise authorized by law.”

Though the Posse Comitatus Act is the primary restriction on direct DoD involvement in law enforcement functions, it does not prevent military personnel from participating in circumstances “authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress.”  This includes circumstances involving “insurrection, domestic violence, or conspiracy that hinders the execution of State or Federal law” as well as actions “taken under express statutory authority.”  The DoD’s instruction includes a list of more than a dozen “laws that permit direct DoD participation in civilian law enforcement” including many obscure statutes that are more than a hundred years old.  For example, a law passed in 1882 and codified under 16 USC § 593 allows for the President to use land and naval forces to “prevent the felling, cutting down, or other destruction of the timber of the United States in Florida.”  Likewise, the Guano Islands Act of 1856 enables the President to use land and naval forces to protect the rights of a discoverer of an island covered by the Act.

Military commanders also have “emergency authority” to use military forces in civilian law enforcement functions “in extraordinary emergency circumstances where prior authorization by the President is impossible and duly constituted local authorities are unable to control the situation, to engage temporarily in activities that are necessary to quell large-scale, unexpected civil disturbances”.  This authority is limited to actions “necessary to prevent significant loss of life or wanton destruction of property and are necessary to restore governmental function and public order” and “provide adequate protection for Federal property or Federal governmental functions.”  In fact, an enclosure to the DoD instruction describing requirements for support of civil disturbance operations states that military commanders “shall not take charge of any function of civil government unless absolutely necessary under conditions of extreme emergency.”  According to the instruction, any “commander who is directed, or undertakes, to control such functions shall strictly limit DoD actions to emergency needs and shall facilitate the reestablishment of civil responsibility at the earliest time possible.”

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Obama Approves Raising Permissible Levels of Nuclear Radiation in Drinking Water. Civilian Cancer Deaths Expected to Skyrocket

Civilian Cancer Deaths Expected to Skyrocket Following Radiological Incidents

The White House has given final approval for dramatically raising permissible radioactive levels in drinking water and soil following “radiological incidents,” such as nuclear power-plant accidents and dirty bombs. The final version, slated for Federal Register publication as soon as today, is a win for the nuclear industry which seeks what its proponents call a “new normal” for radiation exposure among the U.S population, according Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).

Issued by the Environmental Protection Agency, the radiation guides (called Protective Action Guides or PAGs) allow cleanup many times more lax than anything EPA has ever before accepted. These guides govern evacuations, shelter-in-place orders, food restrictions and other actions following a wide range of “radiological emergencies.” The Obama administration blocked a version of these PAGs from going into effect during its first days in office. The version given approval late last Friday is substantially similar to those proposed under Bush but duck some of the most controversial aspects:

In soil, the PAGs allow long-term public exposure to radiation in amounts as high as 2,000 millirems. This would, in effect, increase a longstanding 1 in 10,000 person cancer rate to a rate of 1 in 23 persons exposed over a 30-year period;

• In water, the PAGs punt on an exact new standard and EPA “continues to seek input on this.” But the thrust of the PAGs is to give on-site authorities much greater “flexibility” in setting aside established limits; and
• Resolves an internal fight inside EPA between nuclear versus public health specialists in favor of the former. The PAGs are the product of Gina McCarthy, the assistant administrator for air and radiation whose nomination to serve as EPA Administrator is taken up this week by the Senate.
• Despite the years-long internal fight, this is the first public official display of these guides. This takes place as Japan grapples with these same issues in the two years following its Fukushima nuclear disaster.

“This is a public health policy only Dr. Strangelove could embrace. If this typifies the environmental leadership we can expect from Ms. McCarthy, then EPA is in for a long, dirty slog,” stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch, noting that the EPA package lacks a cogent rationale, is largely impenetrable and hinges on a series of euphemistic “weasel words.”

“No compelling justification is offered for increasing the cancer deaths of Americans innocently exposed to corporate miscalculations several hundred-fold.”

Reportedly, the PAGs had been approved last fall but their publication was held until after the presidential election. The rationale for timing their release right before McCarthy’s confirmation hearing is unclear.

Since the PAGs guide agency decision-making and do not formally set standards or repeal statutory requirements, such as the Safe Drinking Water Act and Superfund, they will go into full effect following a short public comment period. Nonetheless, the PAGs will likely determine what actions take place on the ground in the days, weeks, months and, in some cases, years following a radiological emergency.

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Lawyer: New Connecticut Gun Law Not Legal

A Branford attorney has uncovered a legal and legislative technicality that he says has rendered the state’s new gun law null and void. In an exclusive interview set to air Sunday on “Face the State with Dennis House” on WFSB-TV, Peter Sachs says state lawmakers made a key mistake in their rush to get a bill passed, that he claims will leave them no legal choice but to begin the whole process over again.

Sachs also works as a private investigator and generally remains behind the scenes, until now. He is well known to government authorities for his work in helping track down fugitive killer Adam Zachs in Mexico, who was captured in 2011 after 20 years on the run. 

Relying on a stack of documents, Sachs told me when leadership in the general assembly brought the measure to lawmakers they did so by emergency certification, which is meant to speed up the process to pass a bill when an emergency calls for it. According to Sachs, state statute requires the speaker of the house and senate president to provide the facts in writing as to why an emergency certification is needed, something Sachs says Brendan Sharkey and Donald Williams never did. 

“I believe what they (lawmakers) are going to have to do is start from scratch…the law was not valid. In my opinion the governor basically signed a blank piece of paper,” Sachs said....

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America : Freedom to Fascism - Watch The FULL Video Here

Although unproven, as most of the Elite's crimes, Aaron Russo died for producing and Submitting "America - Freedom to Fascism" He was an American entertainment businessman, film producer and director, and political activist. He was best known for producing such movies as Trading Places, Wise Guys, and The Rose.

The true enemies of liberty and all modern societies and people are the central bank counterfeiters. The largest counterfeiter in the history of the world consists of the Federal Reserve banking scheme, which counterfeits American dollars through fiat currency and fractional reserve banking.

This is the last movie he made before his untimely death.  He was a true hero that died while trying to preserve America's Freedom!

AMERICA: FREEDOM TO FASCISM...

The true enemies of liberty and all modern societies and people are the central bank counterfeiters. The largest counterfeiter in the history of the world consists of the Federal Reserve banking scheme, which counterfeits American dollars through fiat currency and fractional reserve banking.

America Freedom to Fascism exposes the fraud and deceit of the Federal Reserve Banks (Fed), the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the 16th Amendment, the income tax, the Federal Reserve System, national ID cards (REAL ID Act), human-implanted RFID tags (Spychips), Diebold electronic voting machines, New World Order (globalization), Big Brother, taser weapons abuse, and the use of terrorism by government as a means to diminish the citizens' rights.

You can buy the full quality Director's cut DVD here: http://freedomtofascism.com

Full Transparency Needed to Close Down Tax Havens and Massive Fraud - Remember Iceland.....

...The amount of money hidden away in tax havens could be as much as $32 trillion. That's 10 to 15 percent of global wealth. 

Transcript:

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Baltimore.

The recent release of work by a collaboration of journalists around the world about tax havens--and one estimate: the amount of money hidden away in tax havens could be as much as $32 trillion. That's 10 to 15 percent of global wealth.

Now joining us to talk about this is James Henry. He's a leading economist, attorney, investigative journalist. He served as chief economist at the international consultancy firm McKinsey & Company. He's now chair of the Global Alliance for Tax Justice.

Thanks very much for joining us.

JAMES HENRY, ECONOMIST, LAWYER, AND INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST: Quite welcome.

JAY: So this isn't new. I mean, anyone who's been out collecting taxes, if you work for a government, a journalist that follows this even a modicum knows that this has been happening, this tax haven thing has been happening for years. You rarely hear it talked about in official circles, all the discourse in the United States back and forth about closing loopholes, both from President Obama and even from some Republicans. You almost never heard a word about closing down individual tax havens. You heard a little bit about corporate. Not much. But this is a massive scale. So, first of all, this release of the thousands of names of people using these tax havens has given us another new glimpse into this world. But are we even yet seeing the scale of it all?

HENRY: Well, this was a good snapshot. I think it's the largest release we've ever had collectively. And the importance of it is that it spans many different countries at once. This release by ICIJ, the journalist collaborative, has brought together 86 journalists in 46 countries, last count. And they're coming up with really juicy stuff from the Suhartos in Indonesia to the daughter of Marcos in the Philippines, to Denise Rich in the United States, who actually has now become a citizen of Austria. But she had a trust worth something reportedly on the order of $144 million in the '90s. Canadian senator who, it turned out, had a Cook Islands trust.

JAY: Apparently there's 450 Canadians on this list.

HENRY: Yeah. So, all told, there's about 130,000 client accounts here and millions of pieces of data that they've been analyzing for 18 months and they're still analyzing. So for the next--.

JAY: Why aren't there more American names on this list? There's Denise Rich--Mark Rich's ex-wife is there, I think maybe a couple other names.

HENRY: Yeah. I mean, this isn't random.

JAY: [crosstalk] you're seeing from other countries.

HENRY: Right. This is not a random sample of the world's offshore haven clients. This came from two corporate registry service providers in--one of them in the BVI, another one from Singapore. So most Americans would not be using Singapore or Tortola for their offshore companies and trusts, let alone their bank accounts. As we saw in the UBS case, you know, that was a big Swiss bank, the largest Swiss bank, coming directly to the United States and recruiting very wealthy clients to go directly to Switzerland with their secret stashes abroad. So, you know, many Americans would bank more directly with banks in other countries rather than putting money in BDI or Singapore. So I don't think it's a random sample. We still have 4,000 American names that turned up on this list just for those two havens. And there's about 73, 75 offshore havens on the planet, so this should be looked upon as just, you know, relatively small sample of the total population. But it is evidence that the estimates we've been making for the size and growth of this industry have some firm support at the investigative level.

JAY: And this is--the estimates you were doing were somewhere between $22 trillion and $32 trillion [crosstalk]

HENRY: Twenty-one to thirty-two trillion of financial wealth as of the year end 2010. And it's been growing since then. And that excludes a lot of crossborder wealth like real estate, which is held often through offshore companies. I mean, you have--much of the City of London is held through British companies, offshore companies.

JAY: And many of these tax havens are actually under British control--the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, Isle of Man. Britain plays a big role in all of this industry.

HENRY: Yeah. It's called the spider net among people who've been studying this, the British havens, I think, almost as a conscious policy. In 1950s and '60s, Britain had all these islands around the planet. They couldn't support them anymore from the home country. They decided, what are they going to do? Well, let's make them into tax havens and let them generate income from laundering money or setting up providing trusts and companies. So you have some of the original leaders in this industry, like the Cayman Islands and Bermuda and BVI, Hong Kong, Singapore, Cyprus, are all former British colonies. But I don't think we should ignore the fact that the other major destination havens, players like Switzerland and indeed New York also make a big living out of this enterprise. So it's a pretty competitive business, but it's a global industry that's [crosstalk]

JAY: New York being a tax haven not for Americans but for Mexicans or people from other countries.

HENRY: That's right. If you're a nonresident alien, you have the ability to live in New York up to, you know, at least three months a year. And if you're investing here in bonds or in stocks or in bank deposits, the U.S. tax law has been made very friendly. So you're not going to pay much, if anything, in the way of income tax on those offshore deposits, and the U.S. Treasury is not going to tell Mexican tax authorities. Mexico does have a worldwide income tax, but we're not going to tell them what your interest and dividends income is here.

We just signed a tax treaty, actually with Mexico that tries to--you know, promises down the road to provide more information to the Mexican tax authorities. Back in November that was signed. But it's going to take a long time before they actually start realizing any of this data.

JAY: I mean, that's part of the point, isn't it? Like, the United States has global income laws. You're supposed to declare your income from all sources and declare even if you own companies outside the United States. But if the banking institutions in the various countries that are the tax havens don't have any obligation to tell the various governments who's got their money stuck there, there's hardly any way for the IRS to know. And [crosstalk]

HENRY: Well, the U.S. has been moving toward insisting on what's called automatic information exchange by major financial--foreign financial institutions that do business here and have American clients. And so we have this kind of schizophrenic attitude. If you're a wealthy Mexican, we're not going to tell the Mexican tax authorities, but we want foreign banks that are--you know, like UBS, who are doing business in the United States to report in on what their U.S. clients are being paid. So what's going to happen now that the United States has insisted on this kind of reporting for Americans is that, as the prime minister of France just spoke up and said that he wanted that extended to all of Europe. So there would be basically the same requirement for American banks in Europe. It's called the FATCA requirement. So a European FATCA is probably on the horizon here. In general, we need to do much more in the way of automatic information exchange across countries to make sure that this income on all this offshore wealth is not falling through the cracks, because it's really unfair given the fact that most of it belongs to a tiny fraction of the world's population. We're talking about the top 0.1 percent of the world's population owning most of this offshore capital.

JAY: I mean, if countries were to try to claw back the taxes that should have been paid on all of this wealth, one would think it'd go a long way to paying down deficits and debt.

HENRY: Well, the U.S. Treasury estimates they lose about $100 billion a year of revenue just to individual offshore tax evasion. On the corporate side, we also see major players like Google and Microsoft and Pfizer, you know, offshoring their intellectual property to places like Bermuda and dramatically reducing corporate income tax. So if we get those practices under control, I think it's worth at least a couple of hundred billion a year, potentially, to the U.S. Treasury. And even a fraction of that would help us with the--you know, avoid things like sequestration, you know, which is worth about $85 billion this year. So, yeah, we're talking about an activity that does need more attention on the part of the G20 and the G8. Both of those are meeting in the next three months. I think all these titillating cases are wonderful entertainment, you know, to find out that someone had a foreign bank account. But basically at the end of the day it's kind of the same old story. And we know enough--we've known enough, actually, for a very long time to come up with some very specific policies that fix this problem.

JAY: Now, if the IRS is saying $1 billion they're losing in tax revenue as a result of offshore tax havens--.

HENRY: Hundred billion.

JAY: A hundred billion.

HENRY: Yeah.

JAY: Well, if it's $100 billion, is that mean that's $150 billion of fraud? Because if you're an American, you're supposed to be declaring it.

HENRY: Well, as Dennis Healey once said, the difference between tax evasion and avoidance is the width of a prison wall. I mean, these games that people are playing are in most cases, I think, clearly illegal. You know, it's illegal for Americans to have foreign bank accounts and now offshore companies without declaring them to the IRS. It's illegal not to pay income tax on your worldwide income. And so, you know, there's really no such thing as an offshore trust for an American that doesn't owe income tax. So, you know, this is--I think the journalists involved here have been reluctant to say that what the people they've identified are doing is illegal, but that's probably for libel reasons. I think in general most of this activity does involve outright illegality where the home country has a worldwide income tax, like we do have in the United States, like Mexico has, like Greece has. So that's a pretty clear situation.

JAY: Alright. Thanks for joining us, James.

HENRY: You're welcome.

JAY: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.

End

DISCLAIMER: Please note that transcripts for The Real News Network are typed from a recording of the program. TRNN cannot guarantee their complete accuracy.

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Obama's "Cat Food" Social Security Reform

Michael Hudson: Obama's "bargain" on social security reform will push more retirees into poverty in exchange for a minor increase in high end income tax - a class that receives most revenue from capital gains

Transcript:

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay.

President Obama released his budget, and the most controversial piece of it is he wants to make some cuts to Social Security. Now here's a little bit of what he said: "Most economists agree that the chained CPI provides a more accurate measure of the average change in the cost of living." This chained CPI is at the heart of the controversy, 'cause critics are saying this is in fact a cut to Social Security benefits in the future.

Why is President Obama doing all this? Well, the logic for it is given more or less by The New York Times in their report on the budget. Here's what they wrote. Social Security benefits would increase from $860 billion next year, less than the projected $743 billion in payroll tax revenues for the program, to $1.4 trillion in 2023 fiscal year, about equal to the entire amount of discretionary spending, Medicare and Medicaid, which would total $504 billion and $267 billion, respectively, next year. Each would be nearly double those amounts in 2023, and interest on the federal debt, projected to be $222 billion next year, would be four times that in 2023.

Now joining us to talk about all of this is Michael Hudson. He's a distinguished research professor of economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. His two newest books are The Bubble and Beyond and Finance Capitalism and Its Discontents.

Thanks very much for joining us, Michael.

MICHAEL HUDSON, RESEARCH PROF., UMKC: Thank you, Paul.

JAY: So first of all let's start with the New York Times quote, where they give a fairly--what's the word?--apocalyptic sense of where we're heading in terms of debt and Social Security and Medicare, Medicaid not being able to be paid for. What do you make of that?

HUDSON: Well, it's sort of like The Hound of the Baskervilles, where Sherlock Holmes said the important thing is that the dogs didn't bark. When the government printed $13 trillion to give to the banks after the 2008 breakdown, nobody complained at all about the fact that the government can simply print the money, pour it into the economy, and do something. Nobody's complaining about the increased war spending that we're doing, the waste that the Pentagon [incompr.] war.

Why is it that all these complaints are only focused on one particular small part of the budget, Social Security and medical care and health care? And the reason is this is pure, naked class war. There's no other word for it. You can't believe that people are being honest when they don't talk about the whole budget or the overall economy when they're singlemindedly tunnel-visioned, focused only on how do we pay retirees less, so that we can give the bankers more when President Obama continues the bank deregulation he's doing. You have the idea that they're cutting back pensioners, cutting back Social Security, in order to be able for the next big bank bailout.

JAY: So what do you make of this, the prediction that the deficit, the spending on the deficit, the interest on the debt could be four times what it is now? I mean, isn't that some kind of danger?

HUDSON: It's never been considered a danger by economists in the past for this simple reason: when these people talk about the debt, first of all, they're talking about $16 trillion in debt. But of this, a huge amount, like, $4 trillion, is owed by the government to the Federal Reserve, and another $2 trillion owed to the Social Security fund.

Now, the fact is that the government is paying interest to itself. So all of this interest that it pays to itself is simply a bookkeeping accounting fiction. This is not really paying interest. This is not paying interest to the economy or to bondholders. When people talk about these numbers, you know that they're not being honest.

JAY: Well, is the argument that they would give, that when the Fed gives money to the banks, as you were talking about in the bailout--as you say, they punch these numbers in one ledger and then it shows up in the banks' ledger. But they do eventually get paid back, don't they? And in a sense it doesn't create more debt. That's the argument they give, whereas these payments on Social Security--.

HUDSON: Every government's debt grows steadily upwards over time. The Federal Reserve has never reduced its debt to the United States government. The debt is--this does not involve banks. The Federal Reserve and the Treasury can simply create money on their own computer keyboards, just like banks can do electronically. It doesn't cost a penny for them to do it.

The debt is never paid back. Two hundred years ago, already in 1776, Adam Smith wrote that no government ever has repaid its debt. So the government doesn't--the debt doesn't have to be repaid. It's not like a private-sector account book where you have to--if you run into debt, you have to keep paying the banks more and your credit card and your bank loan. This is zero interest money. And so the zero interest will go up from zero to zero. That's really what's happening. And you've had Bill Black on your show explaining this. You've had the University of Missouri-Kansas City people explaining this.

When people refuse to acknowledge what every university teaches in its courses, you know that they're just pulling a con job on you.

JAY: There's two sides to this. There's the side of the money the Fed just simply creates. And then there's the part where they go and--the Federal government borrows money from outside sources. They borrow money from--they sell T-bills. And at the moment, that borrowed money is practically costing the government nothing, but that could change is the point.

HUDSON: It could, in which case there would probably be a shift away from borrowing from the public to simply monetizing it, which is what the U.S. government has always done, the British government, the Chinese government. Any government that has a central bank has the option of doing that. So this is a--to pretend that the debts to the banks and the bondholders are the whole thing just avoids looking at the overall budget situation.

And it also assumes that, okay, we're going to be paying the rich--we know that the bondholders, the 1 percent, own maybe 75 percent of all the bonds. So if the government pays them a lot more interest and doesn't tax them, then this is a pure giveaway to the 1 percent.

So what they're really saying, The New York Times and the others, is we're running a probability of giving a huge amount of money to the wealthiest 1 percent in the future. In order to pay them, in case we have to pay them more, we really have to screw the Social Security recipients, screw the Medicare recipients, screw Medicaid. We have to squeeze the 99 percent more to pay higher interest to the 1 percent that are the bondholders.

JAY: Now, President Obama in this budget proposal wants to raise taxes on the wealthy, he says. Anyone over making more than $1 million he wants to pay, I think, a minimum of 30 percent tax. Is that something?

HUDSON: No, for the following reason. Yes. It is a fraud. It is doubletalk. Rich people don't make income. Income is for the little people, as Leona Helmsley said. Rich people make capital gains.

So Obama's going to say, folks, when you fill out your tax returns, don't say you're earning income. Say you're earning capital gains. We'll cut the taxes for you on that. So what he's doing is simply flimflam. Don't believe it when he talks about income and rich people. And the Congressional Budget Office has shown that the wealthy people get their money in capital gains, not income. He's not making a peep about that. So that is absolute straight dishonesty.

JAY: So the other argument I guess you hear from Obama supporters is that he's dealing with a Republican-controlled House, and if he doesn't do this--New York Times, I think even their headline of the coverage of this was President Obama's budget meant to engage the Republicans, that this is more about the politics than it is about the economics.

HUDSON: Well, when you say engage the Republicans, what it means is that Mr. Obama says, I'm a follower of Rubinomics, of Robert Rubin at Citibank. I'm going to do something that the Democrats don't like, I'm going to do something the voters don't like, but I'm going to blame it on the Republicans. So he's engaging them in order just to put the blame on them.

JAY: So just quickly dig into this CPI thing, this chained cost of living. Why are people criticizing this, and what does it mean?

HUDSON: Well, because it's not a cost of living index. It's the cost of lower living standards index. It's the--some people call it the cat food index.

Here's what it does. Suppose that you have to switch away from eating steak or eating meat or eating fish to eating canned tuna fish or canned beans. That's considered a price reduction.

If the chained index is done properly, you can cut Social Security by 50 percent. And here's how. If people stop taking cabs and begin to take buses, that's considered a lower cost of living. Well, what if they buy a bicycle? All Obama has to say is, look, folks, if you really want to save money, get a bike. That's what Margaret Thatcher said. That was one of her campaign slogans, get a bike. So all of a sudden, the transportation in the cost of living goes down to zero. People pay between 25 percent and 40 percent of their income on rent. Let them live out on the street. Let them live in a homeless shelter [crosstalk]

JAY: Because the point of this chained--.

HUDSON: --about 15 percent of their income on medicine. Let them do what George Bush said. Go to the emergency ward.

If people--if the living standards are ground down and down and down because people are poor, then all of a sudden the government can say, look, because you're getting poorer and poorer, your living standards have declined, so we don't have to pay you so much to live. This is no longer a price index. This is an index of declining living standards.

JAY: And that's because the concept behind this chained CPI is that people are finding cheaper ways to do things, and that supposedly not being reflected in the current system.

HUDSON: That's right. People are having to walk to work instead of taking buses. They're having to eat tuna fish and canned beans instead of buying fresh food on the table. Of course they're finding cheaper ways. We call that declining living standards.

And the start of the budget is: how can we screw the Social Security recipients, how can we pay them less to pay our clientele, our campaign contributors, the 1 percent more? You have to start with where they do, with the class wars back in business. And how do they sugar coat it? By calling it a price index instead of a cat food index or a declining living standards index. This is absolute slimy politics.

JAY: Alright. Thanks for joining us, Michael.

HUDSON: Okay.

JAY: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.

End

DISCLAIMER: Please note that transcripts for The Real News Network are typed from a recording of the program. TRNN cannot guarantee their complete accuracy.

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FBI Sued Over Secretive Mass Surveillance Program

A privacy watchdog group is suing the FBI over the agency’s failure to fulfill Freedom of Information Act requests for documents involving a secretive and expansive database that could be used to track down anyone, anywhere and at any time.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) filed the complaint [PDF] in United States District Court for the District of Columbia on Monday, suing the Federal Bureau of Investigation for failing to comply with a pair of FOIA request placed more than six months ago.

Last September, EPIC asked the FBI to explain their “Next Generation Identification,” or “NGI” program, a system that’s been building a database of biometric data such as DNA profiles, mug shots and iris scans in order to give law enforcement the ability to track down suspects without relying on more archaic methods. In 2012 the FBI said NGI is already more than 60 percent complete, and Assistant Director Tom Bush of the agency’s Criminal Justice Information Services Division said it will be “bigger, faster, and better” than the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS) currently in place.

“Bigger,” the FBI wrote on their website in 2009, “because it will increase the capacity of our fingerprint storage plus house multimodal biometrics records like palm prints and iris scans,” all the while leaving room to accommodate for tracking methods that have yet to be perfected, such as voice analysis. Once the program is fully rolled out, the FBI says they should be able to narrow in on suspects in a matter of only 10 minutes.

The FBI doesn’t want NGI to pull data from just criminal databases, though. Because the agency wants NGI to work with public and private surveillance cameras around the country — of which EPIC estimates there are around 30 million in use at this time — the targets of investigation might not necessarily be the bad guys.

“The Department of Homeland Security has expended hundreds of millions of dollars to establish state and local surveillance systems, including CCTV [closed-circuit television] cameras that record the routine activities of millions of individuals,” EPIC writes. “The NGI system could be integrated with other surveillance technology, such as Trapwire, that would enable real-time image-matching of live feeds from CCTV surveillance cameras.”

Trapwire, a spy system uncovered by RT last year while analyzing emails hacked emails obtained from the Stratfor private intelligence firm, has already been sold to cities across the US including Washington, DC and New York, and lets customers scan the faces of people caught on surveillance cameras in only seconds.

“TrapWire is a technology solution predicated upon behavior patterns in red zones to identify surveillance. It helps you connect the dots over time and distance,” the company said.

And although the FBI publically disclosed their NGI program for the first time nearly a decade ago, the agency has been unwilling this far to honor EPIC’s request for information. The NGI system will include facial recognition capabilities and will include photographs and biometric identified of millions of individuals who are neither criminals nor suspects, EPIC says, and the FBI has already been attempting to import human statistics pulled from the driver’s license profiles of residents in a number of states.

“The NGI database will include photographic images of millions of individuals who are neither criminals nor suspects,” write the attorneys for EPIC.

When EPIC attorney Ginger McCall sat down with Thom Hartmann in 2011 to discuss the NGI program on RT’s The Big Picture, she warned of what could happen when the FBI accumulates vast troves of data on people who, in some cases, aren’t even considered suspects in crimes.

“The way that this new database will be set up, it will allow for information to be input from state and local law enforcement,” McCall said. “That information could be brought in from commercial services; it could be brought in from covert surveillance.”

“In the past,” added McCall, “the FBI has had a bit of a problem. They’ve been putting in peaceful protesters and classifying them — misclassifying them — as terrorists. So there’s a lot of problems with these sorts of databases.”

Now half a year since EPIC first filed FOIA requests for records relating to NFI as well as any contracts with commercial entities and technical specifications, they are suing the FBI in order to force them to follow through.

“Defendant has failed to comply with statutory deadlines, has failed to grant expedited review of EPIC's FOIA Requests, and has failed to disclose a single record. EPIC asks the Court to order immediate disclosure of all responsive records and to provide other appropriate relief as it may determine,” EPIC attorneys McCall, Marc Rotenberg and David Brody write in the complaint, dated April 8, 2013.

“It’s very problematic from a privacy standpoint and a freedom of expression standpoint,” McCall told Hartmann in 2011. “There’s a real chilling effect on freedom of expression when you feel that you’re constantly being surveilled by the government.”

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New York State Police Admit Wrongly Confiscating Guns Under New Laws

State police in Erie County, New York have admitted a huge mistake in confiscating a man’s guns under newly passed gun control laws, saying they identified the wrong person. Erie County Clerk Chris Jacobs has said that police called him to clarify that they had wrongly enforced a pistol permit suspension on a local gun owner under the NY SAFE Act.


The confiscation order came following a warning suggesting the man was using anti-anxiety medication prescribed by his doctor Under provisions in the new legislation, anyone identified as suffering from a mental health condition can have their firearms seized by police.

Jacobs said that during the phone call he was told troopers had forwarded incorrect information, and that police had made an error. Jacobs also indicated that this case highlighted serious flaws in the new legislation.
“I think that first and foremost, it stems from a flawed law that was passed so quickly without forethought on how something would be implemented.” Jacobs told WGRZ News. “Certainly, I am disappointed on the fact that we were given information from State Police that this was an individual that we needed to act immediately on.”

“Previously we received correspondence from the State Police that a pistol permit holder in our County had a mental health condition that made them a potential harm to themselves or others, a provision in the NY SAFE Act that requires suspension of their pistol permit license,” said Jacobs.

Jacobs said that he had referred the item and all supporting documentation to the State Supreme Court Judge in charge of issuing pistol permits. After reviewing the information from State Police, the judge issued a suspension of the permit pending a hearing.

“When the State Police called to tell us they made a mistake and had the wrong person…it became clear that the State did not do their job here, and now we all look foolish.”

“Until the mental health provisions are fixed, these mistakes will continue to happen,” says Jacobs.

The gun owner in this case, David Lewis, a 35-year-old college librarian who owns seven pistols and is a regular target shooter, is said to be taking legal action. His attorneys have noted that protections should have been in force under The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act Privacy Rule, which establishes national standards to protect individuals’ medical records and other personal health information, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

“We were flummoxed by this whole matter,” Jim Tresmond of the Tresmond Law Firm in Hamburg, New York said. “The HIPPA act is supposed to prevent this kind of thing from happening. It’s a gross invasion of our privacy rights.”

Mr Lewis still has not had his guns returned and will be required to attend a hearing in front of a judge in order to get them back, according to his attorney, who stated “It’s negligence on either the State Police or Erie County Clerk’s Office. Someone was negligent if my client has been put through this ringer.”

New York State Police have refused to answer questions from local reporters or to conduct an interview.
Section 9.46 of the NY SAFE Act of 2013 authorizes therapists, doctors, nurses and social workers to report patients they determine may engage in conduct that may result in harm to self or others. If a determination is made that the person in question poses a threat, the provision permits the government to confiscate firearms. The provision is a direct violation of the Fourth Amendment and the legal standard of probable cause.

Legal experts believe many mental health providers will likely ignore the provision. NY SAFE was passed by the New York State Legislature on January 15, 2013, and was signed into law by Governor Andrew Cuomo the same day.

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IRS Violates Fourth Amendment

Wealth confiscation agency believes it is above and beyond the Constitution

The Internal Revenue Service believes it is not beholden to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and can read your email without a warrant, according to documents released to the American Civil Liberties Union under a Freedom of Information Act request.

The documents reveal that the wealth confiscation agency thinks it’s OK to poke around in the electronic version of your papers and effects if you store them in an email cloud service like Google Mail.

The IRS argues it has the right to violate the Fourth Amendment under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986. The act unconstitutionally permits government agencies to obtain emails older than 180 days without a warrant.

One IRS document released by the ACLU claims that “the government may obtain the contents of electronic communication that has been in storage for more than 180 days” without a warrant.

According a Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in 2009, however, email enjoys “strong protection under the Fourth Amendment” and the government cannot simply demand access without a court-issued search warrant.

The agency has bent over backwards to justify its violation of the Fourth Amendment. In 2009, it produced a “Search Warrant Handbook” that stated it is not obliged to follow the Constitution and obey the law.
The IRS Criminal Tax Division’s general counsel said “the Fourth Amendment does not protect communications held in electronic storage, such as email messages stored on a server, because internet users do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy.”

Earlier this year, Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah and Democrat Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont introduced legislation to revamp the outdated Electronic Communications Privacy Act and require law enforcement and government agencies to acquire a search warrant instead of a subpoena when attempting to gain access to private electronic communications.

“Just think about the contents of your text messages and how much sensitive, personal and valuable information is contained there,” said Chris Calabrese, legislative counsel in the Washington office of the ACLU said after the move by Lee and Leahy. “Imagine the government turning that into a permanent log that they, or private investigators or divorce attorneys, could look at any time in the future.”

Or, for that matter, the IRS snooping around looking for taxable income.

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Italian Supreme Court President Blames Bilderberg For Terrorist Attacks

Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com

Honorary President of the Supreme Court of Italy and former Senior Investigative Judge Ferdinando Imposimato, the man who prosecuted the case involving the assassination attempt against Pope John Paul II, has sensationally accused the Bilderberg Group of being behind terrorist attacks in Europe.

In an interview with the ArticoloTre website, Imposimato, who was also involved in the case involving the kidnapping and murder of former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro, said that he “found a document that left me appalled” implicating the Bilderberg Group in conspiring with the far right organization Ordine Nuovo to commit terror attacks.

Speaking of unsolved murders in Italy and the document in his possession, Imposimato stated, “When it comes to slaughter it also speaks of the Bilderberg Group. I believe this document. I did some tests and I can say that behind the strategy of tension and the slaughters there is also the Bilderberg group, a sort of Big Brother is over, maneuvering, using terrorists and Masons. “

The “strategy of tension” refers to a policy under the auspices of Operation Gladio, a NATO cold war “stay behind” project that sought to create an expedient political climate in Europe by having its agents carry out terror attacks which were then blamed on both far left and far right political groups.

Gladio was designed to demonize political opposition and “force the public to turn to the state to ask for greater security,” according to the testimony of former Gladio agent Vincenzo Vinciguerra. In 2000, an Italian parliamentary investigation found that the 1980 Bologna train bombing, which killed 85 people, was carried out by “men inside Italian state institutions and … men linked to the structures of United States intelligence.”

“You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game,” Vinciguerra explained in sworn testimony.

“The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the state to ask for greater security. This is the political logic that lies behind all the massacres and the bombings which remain unpunished, because the state cannot convict itself or declare itself responsible for what happened,” he added.

Imposimato stated that he was given the document by a former Ordine Nuovo terrorist. Members of Ordine Nuovo (Italian for “New Order”) participated in numerous deadly terrorist attacks, including the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing, the 1970 Rome-Messina train attack, the 1974 Piazza della Loggia bombing in Brescia, and the Italicus Express bombing in 1974.

The Bilderberg Group is an annual confab of around 120 of the most influential power brokers on the planet from the world of politics, business, banking, academia, media, and even royalty. The organization’s yearly meeting is held in a plush hotel resort in either Europe, Canada or America, but despite a plethora of heavy hitters in attendance, the mainstream media affords the event scant coverage, labeling it a mere talking shop despite former NATO Secretary-General and Bilderberg member Willy Claes’ 2010 admission that Bilderberg attendees are mandated to implement policy decisions that are formulated during the meeting.

There are innumerable other examples of how Bilderberg has influenced major global events ahead of time, picking Presidents and Prime Ministers on a regular basis with total contempt for the democratic process.

In 2009, Bilderberg chairman Étienne Davignon even bragged about how the Euro single currency was a brainchild of the Bilderberg Group.

Imposimato’s broadside against Bilderberg follows in the footsteps of his compatriot Alfonso Luigi Marra, a prominent lawyer who recently requested that the Public Prosecutor of Rome investigate the Bilderberg Group for criminal activity, questioning whether the elitist organization’s 2011 meeting in Switzerland led to the selection of Mario Monti as Prime Minister of Italy.

Labeling the group a “unique, illegal brotherhood” of elitists who consider themselves to be “above the law,” Marra pointed the finger at Bilderberg for engineering wars, economic collapses, and arming dictators, activities which, “constitute an obvious, blatant violation, to say the least, of the articles of the Criminal Code.”

The precise date and location of the 2013 Bilderberg meeting is yet to be confirmed, although speculation has centered around the confab taking place somewhere near London in early June.