Royal Canadian Mint Missing Gold, Silver, & PM Holdings

Posted on by

In the news, a Canwest News report notes that the Royal Canadian Mint has been caught with its gold, silver and other precious metals AWOL…

“A significant quantity of gold, silver and other precious metals is unaccounted for at the Royal Canadian Mint.

External auditors are investigating a discrepancy between the mint’s 2008 financial accounting of its precious metals holdings and the physical stockpile at the plant on Sussex Drive in Ottawa.

The mystery raises possibilities from sloppy bookkeeping to a gold heist.

Officials with the commercial Crown corporation are saying little and refuse to confirm the amount and value of the unaccounted for gold, silver and palladium.”

Team Obama Turns Up Heat on NY Journalist

Posted on by

Michelle Malkin, writing in The Pittsburgh Tribune Online:

“As I’ve reported before, the Obama campaign’s “Vote for Change” registration drive, run simultaneously with ACORN/Project Vote, was an all-out scramble to scrape up every last unregistered voter sympathetic to Obama’s big-government vision.

In an e-mail message to whistle-blower MonCrief last summer, New York Times reporter Stephanie Strom told the truth: “The real story to all this is how these myriad entities allow them to shuffle money around so much that no one really knows what’s getting spent on what.” By Oct. 6, 2008, Strom had thrown in the towel in the wake of blistering phone conversations with the Obama campaign. She wrote:

“I’m calling a halt to my efforts. I just had two unpleasant calls with the Obama campaign, wherein the spokesman was screaming and yelling and cursing me, calling me a right-wing nut and a conspiracy theorist and everything else. I’d still like to get that file from you when you have a chance to send it. One of these days, the truth is going to come out.”

It’s only just begun.”

My Comment

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t consider Michelle Malkin anything but a very partisan source. I find her incredibly abrasive and limited. But this story really needs attention, not so much for the revelations about ACORN and the Obama campaign (what else would you expect?), but for the insight into how the government handles the “free” press when it gets out of line.

Short the American Public

Posted on by

Suze Orman on the FDIC versus a shoe-box:

Here’s what Karl Denninger at Market Ticker had to say about her performance:

“If you believe that having 0.27% of the insured base of deposits as a reserve, having lost more than two thirds of the original reserve due to malfeasance and misfeasance, when not one person has been indicted, prosecuted or imprisoned for their misconduct over the previous two years constitutes “well-capitalized, prudently operated and able to meet insurance obligations”…

… you are free to believe that.

I will however strongly suggest that you investigate the facts for yourself before believing Suze Orman playing “mouthpiece” for a clearly-desperate regulatory apparatus that has allowed the wholesale looting of the American Taxpayer to occur – a regulatory apparatus and government, from the top down that will, it appears, continue to rob you blind until and unless you, the people, demand that it stop.

Disclosure: Short the American people, who appear to be as dumb as a box of rocks for putting up with this crap.”

My Comment

The Suze Orman video isn’t alone. The past few weeks have seen an uptick in Polyanna-ish messages about the economy, some of them making distinct swipes at libertarian doom-sayers.

Here’s some positive spin early in May from The Times Online (UK):

“The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development said yesterday there were indications that the country was experiencing a “pause in the economic slowdown”.

The multibillionaire investor George Soros echoed the positive forecast, saying that a meltdown of the world’s financial system had been averted. Jean-Claude Trichet, the President of the European Central Bank, said that some countries had already moved beyond the worst of their recessions.”

That simply echoed what US policy makers were saying early in April:

“Top US officials on Saturday offered reassurances that the worst of the economic downturn is likely over, helped by unprecedented efforts to keep credit flowing, though the recovery will be slow. Two Federal Reserve policy-makers, Vice Chairman Donald Kohn and New York Fed chief William Dudley, both pointed to signs that measures taken by the US central bank are indeed working to help revive the economy”

Note that Kohn was the one who stone-walled Congress when pressed for the names of AIG’s counterparties. What are the chances he’s a disinterested observer? Nil, I’d say…

Anne Williamson on the IMF’s Role in the Mexican Crisis

Posted on by

An expert on the neo-liberal rape of Russia, as well as on international finance in general, Anne Williamson testified before the Committee on Banking and Financial Services of the U.S. House of Representatives, on Sept. 21, 1999.  The testimony is well worth reading through today. It shows how precisely the situation in the 1990s during the various financial crises parallels the crisis today in the US. Even the actors are the same  – from Harvard to the IMF to Goldman Sachs.

This is why I’ve consistently argued against any policy prescribed by this government. Anything suggested by such a corrupt group of actors should be suspect.  There’s no point criticizing a Summers or a Geithner or a Paulson alone, when those who oppose them also accept the underlying premises of their arguments; they merely split the difference over a solution that is in essence no different. That is, their “differences” are essentially cosmetic.

I had the privilege of talking at length to Anne and found that her own experiences with the media and publishers were much like mine, only worse. The reasons for that are obvious.  Ask for reform of the IMF or of the World Bank or of the Fed and you will get a sympathetic ear. Ask for the abolition of these institutions and you have questioned the entire system and the credibility of the functionaries and apparatchiks who run it. That’s unforgivable.

“Some governments — especially those with an election on the horizon — actually want to devalue since national exporters, their goods now being cheaper, sell more goods. Global lenders like the IMF are also fond of devaluations because a rising national income from bargain exports leave plenty in the national kitty for principal and interest payments to them. (Global direct investors — the “good guys” — fear devaluations, because their profits calculated in a devalued domestic currency buy fewer dollars for repatriation.)

But when exchange rates depreciate rapidly the specter of capital flowing out of a country appears. Foreigners and residents put their savings elsewhere. The currency goes into free fall, its value plummets, more investors flee and at the end of the cycle, interest rates skyrocket. This is exactly what happened in Asia in 1997, in Russia in 1998 and will soon happen in both Brazil and China.

Yet to curse the speculators is useless; since the 1972 collapse of Bretton Woods that broke the international link between the dollar and gold, the fear of the syndrome described above is the only remaining bit of discipline in the international system. How much better, the globalists reason, if there were to be one central bank and one fiat currency for everyone so that then national leaderships (and the financial oligarchies they sustain) could inflate and rob their own populations in unison, thereby perpetually enserfing all the world’s people….”

And on the role of the IMF:

“In mid-July 1994 — at the very moment dollar-based Mexican tesobonos were being oversold to prosperous clients of Goldman Sachs and other U.S. investment banks, which, in turn, would lead to the 1995 Mexican bailout and the introduction of moral hazard into the world’s financial system — Michel Camdessus told a press conference that he intended to press for the creation of a new IMF facility to give members resources with which to defend themselves against speculative attacks in financial markets.

In other words, long before bailouts of entire countries became routine Camdessus wanted a new loan program to feed the last disciplinarians in the world’s financial system — currency speculators — so that national governments might become even more unaccountable to their citizens. At the time, The Economist slammed the proposal, saying it was “absurd and almost certainly unworkable,” since Camdessus “bizarrely” was assuming the IMF would know more about economic fundamentals than the markets. And that assumption, The Economist noted, was the very assumption which had been the undoing of the USSR’s centrally planned empire. But Camdessus’ 1994 plan is the very one the U.S. President proposed just this week!”

Read the rest of her testimony here.

The CPJ’s Top Ten Worst Countries to Blog In

Posted on by

In 2008, the Committee to Protect Journalists CPJ found that bloggers and other online journalists were the largest professional group being jailed. Earlier, that honor went to print and broadcast journalists.

Here’s a quick summary of their evaluation of the worst countries in the world for bloggers:

1. Burma

Monitoring, regulation of cybercafes, blocking. At least two bloggers in prison.

2. Iran

Monitoring, harassment, detention, pending legislation advocating death penalty for promoting corruption, prostitution and apostasy. One blogger died in jail in unclear circumstances

3. Syria

Filtering, blocking, harassment, self-censorship, monitoring, detention.

4. Cuba

Blocking, harassment. 21 bloggers jailed

5. Saudi Arabia

Widespread blocking, self-censorship

6. Vietnam

Monitoring, harassment.

7. Tunisia

Electronic surveillance including email monitoring, electronic sabotage, content filtering, IP submission, imprisonment of at least 2 journalists

8. China

Blocking, monitoring of email, filtering of searches, deletion of objectionable material. Has a vibrant bloggin culture but maintains world’s most comprehensive online censorship program.  At least 24 bloggers in prison.

9. Turkmenistan

Blocking access to opposition sites. Monitoring of email accounts.

10. Egypt

Monitoring of sites, open-ended detention, sometimes imprisonment and even torture. But only a few sites are blocked. More than 100 journalists detained (usually for short periods).

All this seems very bad compared to what we have in the US.

Or, is it? Let’s see.

  • Email monitoring Check.   And note this program, ADVISE, in the works, supposedly scrapped in 2007, but status unknown is a better description. And if that’s been thought up for the citizenry at large, bloggers should expect quite a bit more attention.
  • Censorship Depends on what you define as censorship.  Wiki demonstrably manipulates  information in subtle and not so subtle ways. Sometimes there’s outright deletion of articles for no good reason besides content censorship. Google not only censors some material overtly, it’s been accused of manipulating the visibility of material. Facebook is reported to be impossible to leave. Finally, there’s probably far more disinformation in the US than in any other country, and it’s certainly the most sophisticated.
  • Website harassment/sabotage Check
  • Controlled mainstream media Check
  • Bloggers killed None that I know of, but I can think of at least two journalists (Gary Webb is the most famous) who died in mysterious circumstances.  And dozens of foreign journalists (and some foreign-born US journalists) were killed outside the country by the US military during the coverage of the Iraq war, as I noted in this piece in 2006.
  • Professional Sabotage Widespread
  • Ruinous litigation Widespread
  • Self-censorship Widespread
  • Verbal and physical threats  Check

Note: I’m not sure why countries like Malaysia and Morocco didn’t make this list.

Could it have something to do with encouraging foreign investments there? I notice that Malaysia has recently been taken off the list of foreign tax havens (Labuan, a small island off the Malatsian coast, is well-known as an off-shore haven).  But only last year,  an antigovernment blogger was jailed on sedition charges .

As for Morocco, when I was there in 2008, I was told repeatedly not to write about anything controversial (such as, Moroccan jails or torture) because it would land me in serious trouble (i.e. jail).  In September 2008, Just a month before I was there, a blogger was sentenced to two years in prison for failure to show respect to the king. The Tangier-Tetuan region in the north of Morocco is the target of  government investment and vast amounts of foreign real estate development and speculation.  I was told by knowledgeable people that a lot of the money pouring into the luxury apartments in Tangiers was drug money….

Are Speculators to Blame for Soaring Oil Prices?

Posted on by

Mike Martin has a piece on speculation at Huffington Post today arguing that the movement of oil prices is just the result of supply and demand and that speculators are taking the rap unfairly.

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

This was my comment:

Good piece.. We all speculate, to different degrees, and over different time frames. Some of us do it consciously, others do it more unconsciously.

I think it’s fair to say that speculation in certain things – food and land, for starters – has social consequences we shouldn’t brush aside. But as long as money is not being priced correctly (the interest rate is held artificially low), people have an incentive to get a better return.

The underlying problem is created by the government….

https://lilarajiva.com



Independent Institute’s Vargas Llosa Detained in Venezuela for Political Positions

Posted on by

From the Independent Institute

“Peruvian journalist Álvaro Vargas Llosa was briefly arrested for a few hours and his passport withheld by the authorities when he arrived at the Maiquetía’s airport in Venezuela. He had been invited participated in a Democracy, Freedom, and Property Forum organized by Venezuela’s main opposition party and the Knowledge Disclosure Centre for Economic Freedom (Cedice).

Álvaro, son of the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, said that after being released he was told he “didn’t had the right to make any political comments, that I’m only a foreigner, but as a Peruvian citizen, a country that was also freed by Simón Bolivar, I don’t think I have less rights than others of Bolivar’s supporters to defend my ideas.”

The head of the Venezuelan United Socialists party (PSUV), President Hugo Chávez, said last week that Álvaro Vargas Llosa and Colombian Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza were going to Venezuela to participate in the inauguration of a new university, which he claimed would teach “neoliberal ideas.

They are coming here using the Forum as an excuse. We are warning them that we are not going to tolerate that behaviour in our country,” said on May 18th the PSUV Communication and Propaganda director, David Medina. “The PSUV will support the government’s decision if they decides to expulse them,” he continued.”

Read more at The Buenos Aires Herald.