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For Mystery Babylon to retain its power, it depends that its identity and activities remain secret. That's why the Lord calls them "mystery"(secret) Babylon. By losing it's secrecy having more and more people of the world knowing their existence and plans, Mystery Babylon has lost its power and in no time we will witness its final fall. We know from Scriptures that it will be the Lord's people of the saint that will rule and reign with Christ on earth during the Millenium.
A top secret document obtained by the Guardian reveal that the government NSA(Nationla Security Agency) program call Prism were spying on the people via Verizon, Hotmail, Gmail, Facebook, Yahoo, Google, Skype, paltalk, Youtube, AOL, Apple, etc... This is a major PR disaster for these mega corporation which by the most are currently denying any knowledge or collaboration with the Prism program. These merchants will "shall weep and mourn over her, for no man buyeth their merchandise any more".
There are several news coverage of this. Below are a few.
A: A Bloomberg TV news report with Richard Falkenrath The Biggest Security Leak of the 21st Century?
“WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has slammed a recently exposed NSA mass-surveillance scheme as a "calamitous collapse in the rule of law." Google, Facebook and other tech giants apparently involved have denied giving the NSA access to their servers.
Assange accused the US government of trying to "launder" its activities concerning the large-scale spying program PRISM. The system was made public after a leaked classified National Security Agency (NSA) document was revealed earlier this week.
"The US administration has the phone records of everyone in the United States and is receiving them daily from carriers to the National Security Agency under secret agreements. That's what's come out," he said.
President Barack Obama earlier defended PRISM, saying it was a key part of the country’s counterterrorism efforts and that privacy was a necessary sacrifice for the sake of security. He also lashed out at the media, and those who leaked information on the massive spying program.
“If every step that we are taking to try to prevent a terrorist act is on the front page of the newspapers or any television, then presumably the people that are trying to do us harm are going to be able to get around our preventative measures,” Obama said.
Critics of the Obama Administration have accused it of an unprecedented crackdown on whistleblowers – more government officials are being prosecuted for leaks under Obama than all previous administrations combined. News of PRISM comes just after reports that the Justice Department secretly obtained two months of AP reporters' telephone records and tapped Fox News reporter James Rosen’s private email.
"Over the last 10 years, the US justice system has suffered from a collapse, a calamitous collapse, in the rule of law,” Assange said.
The US tech giants apparently involved in PRISM have rushed to deny they participated in the program; their logos were visible on each the 41 PowerPoint slides of the leaked NSA document.
“Indeed, the US government does not have direct access or a 'back door' to the information stored in our data centers. We had not heard of a program called PRISM until yesterday,” Google CEO Larry Page and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond said in a statement.
Google's remarks mirrored those by Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo. All have claimed they have no knowledge of whether the NSA had direct access to their servers, and that only upon legal orders do they provide the government with data on specific persons.
While activists debate the legality and ethics of online espionage and high-tech firms try to distance themselves from the revelations, a former NSA official believes PRISM is largely ineffective, as the amount of data it collects cannot be effectively digested by a surveillance system.
“In fact it adds more of a problem because what that means, quite simply, is that if you go into a larger database, you get more data back no matter what the query is. It’s like making a query with Google. If you go in with a Google query you can get tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands or even a million returns. Well, there’s no way you can go through that, all of that, to see what you’re really interested in. So what that does is make them less proficient at doing their jobs,” former NSA analyst William Binney told RT.
The UK's electronic eavesdropping and security agency, GCHQ, has been secretly gathering intelligence from the world's biggest internet companies through a covertly run operation set up by America's top spy agency, documents obtained by the Guardian reveal. The documents show that GCHQ, based in Cheltenham, has had access to the system since at least June 2010, and generated 197 intelligence reports from it last year.
The US-run programme, called Prism, would appear to allow GCHQ to circumvent the formal legal process required to seek personal material such as emails, photos and videos from an internet company based outside the UK.
The use of Prism raises ethical and legal issues about such direct access to potentially millions of internet users, as well as questions about which British ministers knew of the programme.
In a statement to the Guardian, GCHQ, insisted it "takes its obligations under the law very seriously".
The details of GCHQ's use of Prism are set out in documents prepared for senior analysts working at America's National Security Agency, the biggest eavesdropping organisation in the world.
Dated April this year, the papers describe the remarkable scope of a previously undisclosed "snooping" operation which gave the NSA and the FBI easy access to the systems of nine of the world's biggest internet companies. The group includes Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo and Skype.
The documents, which appear in the form of a 41-page PowerPoint presentation, suggest the firms co-operated with the Prism programme. Technology companies denied knowledge of Prism, with Google insisting it "does not have a back door for the government to access private user data". But the companies acknowledged that they complied with legal orders.
The existence of Prism, though, is not in doubt.
Thanks to changes to US surveillance law introduced under President George W Bush and renewed under Barack Obama in December 2012, Prism was established in December 2007 to provide in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored information about foreigners overseas.
The law allows for the targeting of any customers of participating firms who live outside the US, or those Americans whose communications include people outside the US. The documents make clear the NSA has been able to obtain unilaterally both stored communications as well as real-time collection of raw data for the last six years, without the knowledge of users, who would assume their correspondence was private.
The NSA describes Prism as "one of the most valuable, unique and productive accesses" of intelligence, and boasts the service has been made available to spy organisations from other countries, including GCHQ.
It says the British agency generated 197 intelligence reports from Prism in the year to May 2012 – marking a 137% increase in the number of reports generated from the year before. Intelligence reports from GCHQ are normally passed to MI5 and MI6.
The documents underline that "special programmes for GCHQ exist for focused Prism processing", suggesting the agency has been able to receive material from a bespoke part of the programme to suit British interests.
Unless GCHQ has stopped using Prism, the agency has accessed information from the programme for at least three years. It is not mentioned in the latest report from the Interception of Communications Commissioner Office, which scrutinises the way the UK's three security agencies use the laws covering the interception and retention of data.
Asked to comment on its use of Prism, GCHQ said it "takes its obligations under the law very seriously. Our work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework which ensures that our activities are authorised, necessary and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight, including from the secretary of state, the interception and intelligence services commissioners and the intelligence and security committee". The agency refused to be drawn on how long it had been using Prism, how many intelligence reports it had gleaned from it, or which ministers knew it was being used. A GCHQ spokesperson added: "We do not comment on intelligence matters." The existence and use of Prism reflects concern within the intelligence community about access it has to material held by internet service providers. Many of the web giants are based in the US and are beyond the jurisdiction of British laws. Very often, the UK agencies have to go through a formal legal process to request information from service providers. Because the UK has a mutual legal assistance treaty with America, GCHQ can make an application through the US department of justice, which will make the approach on its behalf. Though the process is used extensively – almost 3,000 requests were made to Google alone last year – it is time consuming. Prism would appear to give GCHQ a chance to bypass the procedure. In its statement about Prism, Google said it "cares deeply about the security of our users' data. We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government 'back door' into our systems, but Google does not have a back door for the government to access private user data".
Several senior tech executives insisted they had no knowledge of Prism or of any similar scheme. They said they would never have been involved in such a programme. "If they are doing this, they are doing it without our knowledge," one said. An Apple spokesman said it had "never heard" of Prism.
In a statement confirming the existence of Prism, James Clapper, the director of national intelligence in the US, said: "Information collected under this programme is among the most important and valuable intelligence information we collect, and is used to protect our nation from a wide variety of threats."
A senior US administration official said: "The programme is subject to oversight by the foreign intelligence surveillance court, the executive branch, and Congress. It involves extensive procedures, specifically approved by the court, to ensure that only non-US persons outside the US are targeted, and that minimise the acquisition, retention and dissemination of incidentally acquired information about US persons."
D: Report: NSA Secretly Collecting Phone Records Of All U.S. Verizon Calls http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/05/report-nsa-secretly-collecting-phone-records-of-all-verizon-calls/?icid=maing-grid10|htmlws-sb-bb|dl1|sec1_lnk3&pLid=323980
Quote:
The National Security Administration is secretly collecting phone record information for all U.S. calls on the Verizon network. “Under the terms of the blanket order, the numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as is location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls,” reports The Guardian, which broke the story of the top-secret project after it obtained record of a court order mandating Verizon hand over the information.
The contents of the call are not recorded and it is also not known whether Verizon is the only cell-phone carrier complying with the massive spying project. The court order concerns all calls to, from, and within the United States.
With this so-called “metadata,” the government knows “the identity of every person with whom an individual communicates electronically, how long they spoke, and their location at the time of the communication,” explains the Guardian.
The Senate’s tech-savviest member, Ron Wyden (CrunchGov Grade: A), has been discretely warning citizens of these kinds of secretive government projects. “There is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows,” wrote Wyden and Senator Mark Udall to embattled Attorney Eric Holder.
The order apparently draws from a 2001 Bush-era provision in the Patriot Act (50 USC section 1861). The revelation dovetails similar exposes on massive government spying projects, including one project to combine federal datasets and look for patterns on anything which could be related to terrorism.
Late last year, I wrote about a few actual harms that citizens should be worried about from these types of big-data spying programs. Blackmailing citizens critical of the government seemed like a distant hypothetical, until we learned that the IRS was auditing Tea Party groups and journalists were being wiretapped. Nefarious actors inside the government like to abuse national security programs for political ends, and that should make us all (even more) suspect of government spying.
Some government secrecy is necessary for national security purposes. But it’s justified based on our trust that the information will be used with care. With every passing scandal, the justification for these types of programs becomes more and more questionable.
Either way, this is a massive PR disaster for Verizon. While it’s true that AT&T had it’s own spying scandal, misery still loves company. It’s in Verizon’s interest to somehow implicate other carriers in the spying program. If Verizon is, indeed, not the only carrier, I suspect we’ll be finding out in the near future.
Blessings
Re: A new Global Economic Restructure in 2012
[Re: Elle]
#153053 06/09/1311:56 AM06/09/1311:56 AM
My comment : The Global Collateral Accounts is an important part of the world economic history that needs to be understood. I have read many long dissertation of this available on the net, but below is a simple briefing of it. It is said that the release of the Global Collateral Accounts needs to happen before the Global Economic Restructure takes place. It may... it may not... however I'm more looking for a repentance in America fulfilling the condition of the Law of Tribulation in Lev 26 & Deut 28 that will be caused by the Lord working behind these events we've been seeing these past years to bring the hidden truths out then catalysed by the coming outpouring of His Spirit. I don't know if the repentance will happen before or after the Global restructuring but either I think these events will be close together. But for sure according to how the Lord has acted in the past according to the law of tribulation when he has sold Israel into slavery to the Foreigners(read the book of Judges), at the 5th captivity a repentance was necessary before the Lord delivered Israel. So I do not believe the Lord is going to deliver us from Mystery Babylon before a repentance happens in America (& Canada).
"The history behind the Global Collateral Accounts is vast and complex, and reaches back some 250 years. For the purposes of this brief overview, we will focus on two key elements which are now headlining stories around the world: debt, and gold.
The Western banking oligarchy’s current global control can be traced back to the Rothschild family’s dominance of international banking in the early years of the 19th century. The long-term strategy of the elite banking and royal bloodline families was simple: gain control of the global gold supply in order to maintain power through the control of global currency and its underlying collateral. Gold and Debt – that is the essence of this story.
Where Did the Gold Come from and to Whom Does It Belong? For two thousand years, the gold of the world flowed east toward China, along the Silk Road, from the Roman Empire, on through to the Byzantine and the Spanish, in exchange for the silks, spices, and treasures of the East. When the bankers of Europe decided to seek control of the world financial system, control of this gold became essential.
Who created the Global Collateral Accounts and why? Operation Golden Lily is the well-documented story of the Japanese gold-collecting teams, which infiltrated key gold-holding nations well in advance of the military invasions of China and other nations, with the express intent of seizing the hundreds of thousands of metric tons of gold that had accumulated in Asia (primarily in China). The Nazi gold-collecting system is well-known, but the Japanese accumulated a far greater hoard, with the knowledge and cooperation of certain European banking interests.
Where is the gold and how did it get there? The “official” total for the entire amount of gold said to be above ground since humanity first began mining the precious metal is approximately 160,000 metric tons. Evidence now indicates that a more accurate figure is well in excess of two million metric tons. During World War Two, the Japanese dug tunnels and bunkers throughout Southeast Asia to store the gold – primarily in Indonesia, Thailand, and The Phillipines. After the war, the gold was discovered by the Allies, and was incorporated into a system set up by the European central bankers before the war for this very purpose. The exact total of the wealth in the off-ledger accounts is not known, but is said to be in the thousands of trillions of dollars in gold, platinum, and gems, in addition to an undetermined amount in Federal Reserve notes and other currencies.
How did the nations come to agree that the Accounts were to be used for humanitarian programs? At the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, when the soon-to-be-victorious Allies met to create a new global financial system, the International Monetary Fund was created. In the late 1940’s, President Sukarno of Indonesia was appointed monetary controller of behalf of the depositors to monitor and implement the Global Accounts for redevelopment purposes.
How did the banking elite abuse the Accounts? The central banking families had already put in place essential structures to seize and control this wealth: the Bank of International Settlements, the International Monetary Fund, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the United Nations, all of which were funded by elite banking figures, including the Rockefellers and Warburgs. The agreements to use the funds for development were neglected, and the banking elite proceeded to use them for their own ends, blocking the depositors from access. President Sukarno of Indonesia had been appointed “M1” or Monetary Controller of the Accounts (as much of the assets are stored in hidden bunkers in Indonesia), but he was removed from power after making a deal with John F. Kennedy to use the funds to back new U.S. Treasury dollars, in a direct move against the central bankers’ power. Kennedy’s assassination prevented this move from succeeding.
The central bankers put in place a system that allows the Federal Reserve to block anyone but banking elite insiders from using the Accounts, thus blocking the actual owners – the depositors – from utilizing the assets for humanitarian programs, as originally intended.
Who is Neil Keenan and what is his relationship to the Global Accounts? The emergence of Neil Keenan at the cutting edge of these events can be traced to the theft in 2009 by Vatican financial insider Daniele dal Bosco of $144.5 billion in Federal Reserve notes which were entrusted to Mr. Keenan by the Dragon Family, the group of ancient wealthy clans in Asia who are the legitimate owners of vast amounts of gold in the off-ledger Global Accounts. The Dragon Family has been attempting for decades to utilize the Accounts for their originally intended purpose, and sought out Keenan’s help because of his reputation as a well-connected, tough-minded international businessman. The story of this theft, and of Mr. Keenan’s filing of a trillion-dollar lawsuit against elite figures and institutions (including the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, The World Bank, the Italian government, the Italian Financial Police, Silvio Berlusconi, and others) was first revealed by Benjamin Fulford, former Forbes Magazine financial editor for Asia, who traveled to Italy to conduct initial investigations, where an attempt was made on his life. The story was then taken up by best-selling author David Wilcock (who then also received death threats), confirming the story in an investigative article on his influential blog. The 110-page lawsuit, first filed in New York federal court, can be viewed at this link.
In addition to his lawsuit (which he subsequently withdrew in order to re-file in a more effective jurisdiction), Keenan also filed a Cease and Desist order (available upon request) on behalf of the Dragon Family against a Who’s Who of the cabal power structure, putting them on notice that they were defrauding the Global Accounts, and would be prosecuted for any further fraud. This Cease and Desist names George Herbert Walker Bush, George W Bush, Queen Elizabeth II, the United Nations, Ban Ki Moon, David Rockefeller, Hillary Clinton, and a host of other world figures and organizations who are in the inner circle of the cabal.
The bonds which were stolen from Mr. Keenan were Federal Reserve notes given to the Dragon Family in payment for the gold deposited in the Accounts – notes which the Federal Reserve continually blocked from utilization. Mr. Keenan’s lawsuit represents the first formidable attempt to defeat this theft.
As may be expected, his life is in danger. He has survived four assassination attempts to date, and now has protection in place from numerous allies around the world. Mr. Keenan is currently in Indonesia, finalizing agreements with the Indonesian elders, and Chinese officials holding lineal claim to the majority of the assets in the Accounts.
Mr. Keenan is in possession of key documents, such as the original of the Green Hilton Memorial Agreement between Kennedy and Sukarno, and the “Black Book,” secret records of the Accounts. Numerous other pieces of evidence can be provided. In addition to Mr. Keenan’s participation, other key players may be brought to the table as part of the interview process, including Indonesians involved in the guardianship of the Assets, powerful Asian financial officials, and others. We propose immediate discussions to explore this possibility."
Michael Henry Dunn
Blessings
Re: A new Global Economic Restructure in 2012
[Re: Elle]
#153286 06/17/1307:03 AM06/17/1307:03 AM
Below is a very informative and interesting news article that reveal that Yahoo has fought in court in 2008 against the government to protect their users private information. Yahoo lost due to the Patriot Act and were force to comply with the Prism program.
So it is obvious that all these corporations including President Obama are under a gag order.
"Yahoo's top lawyers had a courtroom showdown with the National Security Agency after it had demanded information on certain foreign users without a warrant, but the tech giant lost and was forced to hand over the data, it was revealed today.
Court documents obtained by the New York Times show that the Internet company had initially refused to join the PRISM spying program, insisting that the broad national security requests seeking users' personal information were unconstitutional.
However, the secret court operating under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) sided with the NSA and forced Yahoo's hand.
Information about Yahoo's legal battle against the NSA first emerged in a heavily redacted court order, but the name of the company involved had not been released until now.
It was claimed that besides Yahoo, a number of major Silicon Valley companies became part of PRISM, among them Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, YouTube, Skype, AOL and the lesser known Internet company PalTalk, which has hosted a lot of traffic during the Arab Spring and the on-going Syrian civil war.
However, only Facebook and Google have been shown to have worked toward creating 'online rooms' in which to share data with the government.
Information about the classified program was leaked last week by NSA systems administrator Edward Snowden, 29, who smuggled the files concerning PRISM on a thumb drive.
So far, Yahoo, Google and Facebook have all denied their involvement in PRISM. 'Yahoo! has not joined any program in which we volunteer to share user data with the U.S. government,' Yahoo General Counsel Ron Bell wrote in a Tumblr post Saturday. 'We do not voluntarily disclose user information. The only disclosures that occur are in response to specific demands.' In the wake of the unwarranted spying scandal, a number of top Silicon Valley companies, among them Facebook, Google and Microsoft, have asked the government to overturn a gag order allowing them to publicly disclose national security requests.
Google Inc was the first to go public with its demand for greater transparency, releasing an open letter asking the U.S. Department of Justice for permission to disclose the number and scope of data requests each receives from security agencies, including confidential FISA requests. Microsoft Corp and Facebook Inc soon followed with similarly worded statements in support of Google.
Last year, the government issued more than 1,850 FISA requests and 15,000 National Security Letters, which refers to requests filed by the FBI to collect information about Americans. Between 2008 and last year, only two of more than 8,500 FISA requests were rejected by the secret court, according to the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a non-profit research group. "
Blessings
Re: A new Global Economic Restructure in 2012
[Re: Elle]
#153287 06/17/1307:31 AM06/17/1307:31 AM
Now the scandilous scope of Prism is more than spying on individuals, but spying on Presidents communications of other countries before summit meetings to be used to sway them into Mystery Babylon's agendas. This is quite dishonest and break all ethical laws of negotiations that countries are not going to forget or forgive this.
US spied on Russian President Medvedev at 2009 G20 summit – NSA leaks
"As Britain readies to host the G8 summit, the documents uncovered by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden have revealed that back in 2009 US spies intercepted top-secret communications of then Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, during his visit to London.
The Guardian, which has seen the documents, also revealed that UK intelligence agency GCHQ monitored foreign politicians and intercepted their emails during the 2009 G20 summit held in the British capital, which was attended by Medvedev. Some delegates were tricked into using internet cafes which had been set up by UK intelligence agencies to read their email traffic.
This comes as the 39th G8 summit is scheduled to start on Monday in the small Northern Irish resort town of Lough Erne with all the nations who were present at the 2009 London meeting attending.
According to the leaked documents viewed by the British paper, the details of the intercept of Medvedev’s communications were set out in a briefing prepared by the US National Security Agency (NSA), and shared with high-ranking officials from Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. The document entitled "Russian Leadership Communications in support of President Dmitry Medvedev at the G20 summit in London – Intercept at Menwith Hill station" was drafted in August 2009, four months after the Russian president attended the London G20 summit.
The NSA paper says: "This is an analysis of signal activity in support of President Dmitry Medvedev's visit to London. The report details a change in the way Russian leadership signals have been normally transmitted. The signal activity was found to be emanating from the Russian embassy in London and the communications are believed to be in support of the Russian president."
The interception of Medvedev’s communications by the US intelligence service came hours after his first meeting with the US President Barack Obama where they struck a warm tone and promised a “fresh start” in US-Russia relations.
The latest revelations will be a major embarrassment for Washington, as Obama is set to meet with the incumbent Russian President Vladimir Putin during the G8 summit in Northern Ireland and discuss such tough issues as the Syrian conflict.
In the wake of the scandalous leak of NSA documents, US officials have been defending massive surveillance tactics stressing that they were crucial in the fight against terrorism. However, the recent revelations about the actions of the NSA and Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) suggests this was simply a case of espionage.
The information obtained by the GCHQ analysts was being rapidly passed on to the British representatives in the G20 meetings, giving them a negotiating advantage. "In a live situation such as this, intelligence received may be used to influence events on the ground taking place just minutes or hours later. This means that it is not sufficient to mine call records afterwards – real-time tip-off is essential," read one of the leaked documents.
During the London summit, GCHQ used what one document described as "ground-breaking intelligence capabilities" to intercept the communications of the foreign delegations. The spy agency set up internet cafes where they used an email interception program and key-logging software to monitor delegates' use of computers. The security of delegates’ BlackBerrys had been penetrated to enable GCHQ see their messages and phone calls.
According to the report the surveillance operation was ordered at a senior level in the government of the then prime minister, Gordon Brown, and appears to have run for at least six months before and after the world leaders gathered in London on April 2.
One document reveals that when G20 finance ministers met in London in September 2009, British intelligence again spied on the delegates, including Turkish Finance Minister Mehmet Simsek and possibly 15 other members of his team.
Referring to the NSA spying on the Russian president at that summit, RT contributor Afshin Rattansi says Britain has served as a surveillance platform for the US for decades. “For many years the British people realized that the National Security Agency was basically using the United Kingdom. And the largest spying outfit of the United States is here in Britain,” he said.
“Perhaps the British people will realize that they are living in a state where their media and all institutions surrounding them, all industrial aspects of the civic society are under a kind of surveillance state that is not being covered in the news.”
The 2009 summit came at a critical moment when the crisis in Western capitalism hit its peak, Rattansi notes. “These kind of revelations show that when governments such as Britain and the United States come close to worrying, they will use this to try and persuade different officials at different governments to sway them.”
Blessings
Re: A new Global Economic Restructure in 2012
[Re: Elle]
#153535 06/23/1305:00 AM06/23/1305:00 AM
That's what "they" always say about the financial crisis and the teeming rat's nest of corruption it left behind. Everybody else got plenty of blame: the greed-fattened banks, the sleeping regulators, the unscrupulous mortgage hucksters like spray-tanned Countrywide ex-CEO Angelo Mozilo.
But what about the ratings agencies? Isn't it true that almost none of the fraud that's swallowed Wall Street in the past decade could have taken place without companies like Moody's and Standard & Poor's rubber-stamping it? Aren't they guilty, too?
Man, are they ever. And a lot more than even the least generous of us suspected.
Thanks to a mountain of evidence gathered for a pair of major lawsuits by the San Diego-based law firm Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd, documents that for the most part have never been seen by the general public, we now know that the nation's two top ratings companies, Moody's and S&P, have for many years been shameless tools for the banks, willing to give just about anything a high rating in exchange for cash.
In incriminating e-mail after incriminating e-mail, executives and analysts from these companies are caught admitting their entire business model is crooked.
"*****************;this has to be the stupidest place I have worked at," writes one Standard & Poor's executive. "As you know, I had difficulties explaining 'HOW' we got to those numbers since there is no science behind it," confesses a high-ranking S&P analyst. "If we are just going to make it up in order to rate deals, then quants [quantitative analysts] are of precious little value," complains another senior S&P man. "Let's hope we are all wealthy and retired by the time this house of card[s] falters," ruminates one more.
Ratings agencies are the glue that ostensibly holds the entire financial industry together. These gigantic companies – also known as Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organizations, or NRSROs – have teams of examiners who analyze companies, cities, towns, countries, mortgage borrowers, anybody or anything that takes on debt or creates an investment vehicle.
Their primary function is to help define what's safe to buy, and what isn't. A triple-A rating is to the financial world what the USDA seal of approval is to a meat-eater, or virginity is to a Catholic. It's supposed to be sacrosanct, inviolable: According to Moody's own reports, AAA investments "should survive the equivalent of the U.S. Great Depression."
It's not a stretch to say the whole financial industry revolves around the compass point of the absolutely safe AAA rating. But the financial crisis happened because AAA ratings stopped being something that had to be earned and turned into something that could be paid for.
That this happened is even more amazing because these companies naturally have powerful leverage over their clients, as they are part of a quasi-protected industry that enjoys massive de facto state subsidies. Largely that's because government agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission often force private companies to fulfill regulatory requirements by retaining or keeping in reserve certain fixed quantities of assets – bonds, securities, whatever – that have been rated highly by a "Nationally Recognized" ratings agency, like the "Big Three" of Moody's, S&P and Fitch. So while they're not quite part of the official regulatory infrastructure, they might as well be.
It's not like the iniquity of the ratings agencies had gone completely unnoticed before. The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission published a case study in 2011 of Moody's in particular and discovered that between 2000 and 2007, the agency gave nearly 45,000 mortgage-backed securities AAA ratings. One year Moody's doled out AAA ratings to 30 mortgage-backed securities every day, 83 percent of which were ultimately downgraded. "This crisis could not have happened without the rating agencies," the commission concluded.
Thanks to these documents, we now know how that happened. And showing as they do the back-and-forth between the country's top ratings agencies and one of America's biggest investment banks (Morgan Stanley) in advance of two major subprime deals, they also lay out in detail the evolution of the industrywide fraud that led to implosion of the world economy – how banks, hedge funds, mortgage lenders and ratings agencies, working at an extraordinary level of cooperation, teamed up to disguise and then sell near-worthless loans as AAA securities. It's the black box in the American financial airplane.
In April, Moody's and Standard & Poor's settled the lawsuits for a reported $225 million. Brought by a diverse group of institutional plaintiffs with King County, Washington, and the Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank taking the lead, the suits accused the ratings agencies of conspiring in the mid-to-late 2000s with Morgan Stanley to fraudulently induce heavy investment into a pair of doomed-to-implode subprime-laden deals, called Cheyne and Rhinebridge.
Stock prices for both companies soared at the settlement, with markets believing the firms would be spared the hell of reams of embarrassing evidence thrust into public view at trial. But in a quirk, an earlier judge's ruling had already made most of the documents in the case public. Although a few news outlets, including The New York Times, took note at the time, the vast majority of the material was never reported, and some was never seen by reporters at all. The cases revolved around a highly exotic and complex financial instrument called a SIV, or structured investment vehicle.
The SIV is a not-so-distant cousin of the special purpose entity, or SPE, which was the main weapon of destruction in the Enron scandal. The corporate scam du jour in those days was mass accounting fraud, in which a company would create an ostensibly independent corporate structure that would actually be controlled by its own executives, who would then move their company's liabilities off their own books and onto the remote-controlled SPE, hiding the firm's losses.
The SIV is a similar concept. They first started showing up in the late Eighties after banks discovered a loophole in international banking standards that allowed them to create SPE-like repositories full of assets like mortgage-backed securities and keep them off their own books.
These behemoths operated on the same basic concept as an ordinary bank, which borrows short-term cash from depositors and then lends money long-term in the form of things like mortgages, business loans, etc. The SIV did the same thing, borrowing short-term from investors and then investing long-term on things like student loans, car loans, subprime mortgages. Like banks, a SIV made money on the spread between its short-term debt and long-term investments. If a SIV borrowed on the commercial paper market at 3 percent but earned 6.5 percent on subprime mortgages, that was an easy 3.5 percent profit.
The big difference is a bank has regulatory capital requirements. A SIV doesn't, and being technically independent, its potential liabilities don't show up on the books of the megabank that created it. So the SIV structure allowed investment banks to create and take advantage of, without risk, billions of dollars of things like subprime loans, which became the centerpiece of the new trendy corporate scam – creating and then selling masses of risky mortgage-backed securities as AAA investments to institutional suckers."
...continue reading at the link above
Last edited by Rosangela; 06/24/1305:44 PM. Reason: Removal of inappropriate words
Blessings
Re: A new Global Economic Restructure in 2012
[Re: Elle]
#153569 06/23/1305:24 PM06/23/1305:24 PM
"Let’s examine the rumors that are floating around.
1. The Fed Reserve will merge or absorb into the UST
2. There IS a global event that has been unfolding during the past ten-plus years. The Basel III Protocols (which includes the Global Currency Reset) have required the cooperation of many nations — 198, to be exact.
3. What gets in the way from time to time with regard to this Global Currency Reset (as has just happened in the past few days) is political maneuvering and disagreements that delay things.
4. Fiat currency is becoming a thing of the past due to ongoing pervasive fraud and devaluation of paper currency – now it will have to be backed by assets (precious metals, oil, etc.) China would like to take over the US’s position as holding the world’s reserve currency in hopes to have their currency backed by gold. However, Clinton mentioned in one of her speeches that Iraq will become the richest nation in the world due to its oil reserves. Thereby, numerous nations that hold the Iraqi Dinar are looking to the IQD becoming the global reserve currency.
Basel III (or the Third Basel Accord) is a global, voluntary regulatory standard on bank capital adequacy, stress testing and market liquidity risk. It was agreed upon by the members of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision in 2010–11, and was scheduled to be introduced from 2013 until 2015; Basel III was supposed to strengthen bank capital requirements by increasing bank liquidity and bank leverage.
5. Precious metals (gold and silver) prices are manipulated. Currently the price is dropping. Why? Something big is about to happen. What?
The Global Currency Reset will take those 198 nations currency and revalue it up or down based upon that country’s assets. For example, Canada will go up about 20 cents, along with the Dong and IQD going up. The USD may go down or not depending upon how much IQD they have in reserve – and because O had all the other nations that owe the US money agree to pay back what they owe when the reset happens taking the US out of debt.
Since the US has billions worth of UQD they can do several things. Exchange the IQD for gold thus taking the USD back to the gold standard. Hence the current USD will be collected and replace by the new currency. New currency expected to be distributed in the fall.
6. At the G-8 summit this year the talk among nations was how to collect taxes from tax dodgers. Basically the global banking system is tightening up its agreements between nations and will identify those who have been slipping through the current tax holes. Thus more tax return money for the nations who track down their tax dodgers.
So instead of a crash – which is inevitable given the current fiscal structure, there will be a Global Currency Reset which is in the works.
This aired on Bloomberg TV on July 25th. It is the FIRST time it has EVER been mentioned in the mainstream media…"
Blessings
Re: A new Global Economic Restructure in 2012
[Re: Elle]
#153806 06/30/1302:55 PM06/30/1302:55 PM
My Comment: The news has been reporting Snowden's leaks how NSA spied on other countries. Now this will break international relationship trust & friendships with the US & Mystery(Secret) Babylon. Below is Stephen Jones blog about it.
"The NSA claims to have done nothing illegal in their spying activities on the American people.
Of course, they had to stretch the Patriot Act to make it legal.
And, of course, there is nothing illegal about spying on foreign countries. But then, such activities also undermine friendships. It is no wonder other countries are tired of US policy toward their supposed "friends."
No wonder Edward Snowden is a secret hero to most other governments. No wonder no one wants to cooperate with the NSA and extradite Snowden to America for trial on charges of "treason." Is it any wonder that the BRICS nations are forming an alternate banking system that bypasses the dollar and the Fed? There would be no need for an alternative if the USA and its Fed bosses treated everyone fairly and equitably.
Scripture tells us that the beast will turn on the great whore who rides it. That is what we are witnessing today. The beast system does not love the whore. The whore has been whipping the beast for too long, and the beast is getting angry."
Blessings
Re: A new Global Economic Restructure in 2012
[Re: Elle]
#154016 07/08/1306:31 PM07/08/1306:31 PM
MOSCOW, Russia – "Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who recently unveiled the NSA’s ubiquitous PRISM wiretapping program, unveiled yet another insidious, citizen-targeting surveillance system Friday afternoon, in a chat with Internet Chronicle reporters.
SAURON, or the Semi-Autonomous Ultra-high-Resolution Orbital Network, is comprised of a series of hundreds of low-orbiting cameras that can make out objects on the ground as small as 1 centimeter in size.
There are so many satellites in this network that they are able to effectively monitor the entire planet’s populated surface without interruption. According to slides Snowden shared, taken from the NSA presentation on SAURON, each spy satellite feeds directly into a data bank so large that it is able to retain the captured imagery indefinitely.
SAURON is also a reference to a villain in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, an evil god of discord who appears in the material world as an ever-searching eye.
Snowden, looking as if he hadn’t slept in weeks, spoke with Internet Chronicle reporters in the transit corridor of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport. In a near whisper Snowden said, “It is shocking that the U.S. government would appropriate such evil imagery for a so-called security system like this. There is little doubt that this program – I won’t utter the name here – is not concerned with the security of citizens, but rather, it is a bald grab at power for power’s sake.”
Blessings
Re: A new Global Economic Restructure in 2012
[Re: Elle]
#154138 07/14/1304:04 PM07/14/1304:04 PM
Egypt(Ousted Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood) and Russia(Putin -- King of the East)
My comment : The oust of Morsi & the arrest of 200 Muslim Brotherhood leaders(details in post#153951 in the Hubris: Selling the Iraq War discussion) brought another level of the unveilling of Mystery(secret) Babylon. I find the following article quite informative giving some historical and current background of the working and purpose of the Nazi(faction of Mystery Babylon) behind the Muslim Brotherhood used to bring down Muslim countries like Iraq, Syria, Lybia, Afghanistan, etc.. to establish Mystery Babylon's Banking system to bring the country into debts and govern it through their established pup'pet ruler.
What's interesting is the writer's suggestion that Russia and China(Kings of the Easts) may have split their protecting & aiding different world sector in their common war against Mystery Baylon(Western World aka G7 or G8).
See the link of the original article to read the many references links available to support his statements.
Vladimir Putin ousts another White of the Western Nazi continuum
In the corridors of Western power, Vladimir Putin is not popular. He has a disconcerting habit of getting things done. Putin, a Russian patriot, started to reshape covert geopolitical power structures when he and his colleagues moved to stamp out the influence of the Rothschild and Rockefeller syndicate maggots at work inside Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989-90.
These parasites, mostly oligarchs, mummy-got-me-ready chess players, and P2 Lodge mafia proxies, were agents of the G7 Nazi continuum. Their aim was to secure Russian oil and gas to prop up the US petrodollar Ponzi nexus. They failed and, from 1998 onwards, Vladimir Putin made sure that they failed publicly.
Just as the Soviet Union was deliberately collapsed by the G7 élite syndicates, it had been deliberately constructed to fail by a previous generation of those same puppeteers many decades earlier.
The EuroZone was another bankster toy. Manufactured to launder unbacked fiat paper currency to Asia, it is now being collapsed by the very same banksters who set it up in the first place.
In Western fractional banking, it doesn't matter whether you build up or whether you smash down; you make big money each way and in the process you generate useful debt to control sovereign treasuries. After each collapse there is a fire sale. If you're a banker, you don't just buy the dips; you create the dips. Money is the mechanism which makes people poor.
With China and one hundred and eighty other BRICS alliance nations, Putin's Russia is teaching the G7 Nazi continuum a rather obvious lesson: fiat paper currencies are not money; gold is money.
What is happening worldwide now is that the BRICS nations are accumulating gold and beginning the process of freeing up the trillions (some say quadrillions) of dollars' worth of suppressed gold held outside the markets in the Global Collateral Accounts.
The G7, scenting the inevitable capitalist end-game, is rushing around trying to counter the BRICS alliance initiatives by rigging the markets to keep the price of gold down, by printing trillions of new fake dollars and euros on QE computer screens, by squeezing Western taxpayers with a media-backed austerity charade, and by accumulating off-ledger black-screen accounts which contain impossibly vast quadrillions and quintillions of notional syndicate wealth such as that found in the Committee of 300's White Spiritual Boy and Spiritual Wonder Boy accounts. More here, here and here.
Some say it all started with the Monaco Accords in August 2011; others say it started with the World War Two victors' carve-up at Bretton Woods in 1944. Still others say that it died with America's assassination of her own President in Dallas, Texas, in November 1963. John F.Kennedy had become too friendly with M1 in Indonesia for Shylock's liking. For the greater good of Western banking, it was time for him to die.
What has all this got to do with Putin and Morsi in Egypt in 2013? Everything. It's the same battle: the G7 banking syndicate versus the rest of the planet.
The outfit expediently fronted by Mohamed Morsi in Egypt, and now called the Muslim Brotherhood, had its origins as a terrorist organisation founded by the Nazis just before and during the Second World War. It was created by the Third Reich to provide uncritical cannon-fodder to fight against British and French colonial influences in the Middle East.
The Nazi-continuum is still embedded in several major Western governments, is still protected by rogue factions within their national security cadres, and it has kept the MB running in the background ever since. In the Western view, the radical 'Islamists' are useful fools to be manipulated, they don't cost much, and they can be made angry easily.
The Muslim Brotherhood, unbeknown to most of its current members, is a long-established Middle Eastern street gang which works for the Western banking syndicate to create opportunities for financial profit by fomenting unnecessary international conflict.
Its Egyptian branch, when briefly in government for a year between June 2012 and July 2013, lined up publicly with the private armies of the G7 war profiteers in an attempt to destabilise Syria. The plan was plain. Once Assad had gone, and the country was in ruins, its banks could be looted, its oil and gas could be stolen, foreign military bases could be established for drug trafficking purposes, and Qatar and Saudi Arabia could build their gas pipeline through Syria, unopposed, to supply Europe and support the US petrodollar scam.
Putin and the BRICS alliance saw all this. They agreed that there had to be régime change in Syria and that the Assad clique had to go; what they didn't want, and would not allow, was another capitalist looting fest by the G7 such as they had contrived in Korea, Vietnam, Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.
Russia plus China, plus a changed Turkey, plus the US Pentagon patriots, now have more influence, collectively, within the Egyptian military than do the Washington DC private corporation and the City of London private corporation.
The exact division of labour between Russia and China within the BRICS alliance adjustment of global geopolitics is yet to become clear. It seems that Putin is looking after Europe and the Middle East, while the new Chinese leadership is seeing to Asia, Africa and Australia. China, for example, is a powerful driving force behind the imminent reunification of North and South Korea.
In Europe, Russia and Germany are privately and quietly growing closer. The EuroZone is now seen as a lost cause by most significant opinion-makers in Berlin on the simple grounds that it is not in Germany's financial interest, any more, to waste time with the little people.
This is particularly the case when one of Germany's biggest commercial institutions, Deutsche Bank AG (Frankfurt), has an international derivatives exposure of $72.8 trillion. This sum is in excess of twenty times more than the total GDP of Germany itself. Faced with a domestic ticking time bomb of this nature, Greece, Spain, Italy and, yes, France, can go hang.
The word on the block is that Angela Merkel of Germany is quietly pursuing an Ostpolitik with Russia of the kind which was originally initiated by Willy Brandt in the 1960s. This will result in a Russian/German-led Eurasian Union being slipped into place by 2015.
In the lead up to this long-desired Eurasian outcome, a new, strong currency DeutschmarkZone in Northern Europe is likely to emerge, involving Germany, The Netherlands, Luxembourg and Finland. France will be consigned to the outer darkness of a local and much-devalued French Franc. And Greece, Spain and Italy? They can eat olives. The Western banks have finished with them.
Late note: The brief thirteen month Muslim Brotherhood spell in Egyptian government was ended at the beginning of July 2013 by a cackhanded and anti-democratic military coup. If ever practical proof was needed that the Egyptian revolution was as yet incomplete, this was it. Among avoidable own goals scored by the Egyptian military at this juncture was the partisan suppression of Islamic media outlets, along with CNN and al-Jazeera TV, and the appointment of Mohamed ElBaradei as deputy interim president. Indeed, ElBaradei would have been shoehorned in as interim prime minister had not the Salafi Nour party strenuously blocked the appointment. ElBaradei is well known in Middle Eastern diplomatic circles for being a bought-and-paid-for asset of Western intelligence and corporate interests.
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