Tuesday, February 5, 2013

Peter Schiff: Market-Crushing Treasury Collapse To Hit This Year

Peter Schiff
Peter Schiff, the divisive investor and commentator that predicted the subprime/real-estate bubble, is forecasting a U.S. dollar and bond crisis over the next couple of years. Schiff blames intervened bond markets, where rates are artificially and excessively low, and expects the coming crisis to blow the 2008-9 financial crisis out of the water.

There is little doubt that the Federal Reserve, with Chairman Ben Bernanke at the helm, is holding markets by the hand. Bernanke, himself a divisive figure, has done all he can to push interest rates lower, using quantitative easing and Operation Twist once nominal rates had hit the zero-range. While many believe ultra-loose monetary policy is dangerous, Schiff thinks it will lead to a catastrophic correction.

“The more you delay it, the bigger it will be,” Schiff tells Forbes in a phone interview Tuesday, “so we need to raise interest rates during the recession to confront the inefficiencies.” Schiff, who runs Euro Pacific Capital and is seen by many as permanently bearish, argues that government-intervened bond markets are leading to massive distortions in capital allocation that have only been exacerbated as the Fed reacted to the last couple of recessions.

Recent market behavior supports his thesis that massive dislocations in bond yields distort reality. Ten-year Treasury yields had traded in a narrow-range for about four months, on the presumption that a weak economy would continue to count on Bernanke’s monetary support (particularly of the bond market). On March 13, the policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) acknowledged an improved recovery, but did not mention more quantitative easing, or bond purchases, were on the way, sparking a violent sell-off in Treasuries (exacerbated by JPMorgan’s dividend announcement the same day, which triggered a rally in financial stocks) as market players fled a bond rally they considered fixed by the Fed.

While Bernanke delivered calm to bond markets on Monday in a speech that promised “continued accommodative policies,” the violence of the sell-off speaks to Schiff’s argument. “We consume more than we produce and we borrow abroad, but we are never going to be able to pay them back,” says Schiff.


Bloomberg-funded gun control ad airs during Super Bowl [VIDEO]

New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s gun control coalition aired a 30-second commercial during the Super Bowl.

The nonprofit Mayors Against Illegal Guns targeted the National Rifle Association’s stance on background checks in an ad that aired in Washington, D.C. during the third quarter of the game.
In the ad, “America, the Beautiful” plays in the background as photographs of five children flash across the screen. A young boy narrates.

“The NRA once supported background checks,” the boy says, before playing a 1999 clip of NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre urging mandatory criminal background checks for gun sales.

After LaPierre’s 14-year old speech, the boy narrator finishes by saying, “America can do this. For us. Please.”

A spokesman for Bloomberg told the Associated Press that the ad cost six figures. The New Yorker reports that Bloomberg used his personal finances to front the ad.

Mark Glaze, director of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, told the Center for Public Integrity that the ad played only in Washington because “that’s where the people who make decisions are.”
WATCH:

The Transhumanist and Police State Agenda in Pop Music

Today’s pop music is filled with symbols and messages aimed to shape and mold today’s youth. Apart from the occult symbolism discussed in other articles, other parts of the elite’s agenda are communicated through music videos. Two of those parts are transhumanism and the introduction of a police state. We’ll look at the way those agendas are part of the acts of Rihanna, Beyonce, Daddy Yankee and the Black Eyed Peas.
As seen in previous articles on this site, the world’s biggest stars exploit common themes in their work,  permeating popular culture with a set of symbols and values. The cohesiveness of the message that is communicated to the masses,  regardless of the artists’  musical genre, attests to the influence of a “higher power” over the industry. Other articles on this site have explored the way Illuminati symbolism, based on secret society occultism, has been reflected in popular videos. Exposing and desensitizing the world to the elite’s sacred symbols is, however, only one aspect of their agenda. Other aspects of Illuminati control are reflected in today’s popular music as well, including: mass mind control, transhumanism (the “robotization” of the human body) and the gradual introduction of a virtual police state. Through the news, movies and the music industry, this agenda is being insidiously presented to the masses, using various techniques. If the news scares people into accepting measures diminishing their personal freedoms and ushering in a “new era”, the music business accomplishes the same job by making it seem sexy, cool and trendy. This angle is mainly aimed at the younger crowd, which is much more susceptible to “take in” the industry’s message.

Essential Information

If you’ve never heard of transhumanism or martial law, I suggest you visit the “Educate Yourself” section first, as I will only provide a very summary explanation of each concept here.

Transhumanism


Image from humanityplus.org
“Transhumanism is an international intellectual and cultural movement supporting the use of science and technology to improve human mental and physical characteristics and capacities. The movement regards aspects of the human condition, such as disability, suffering, disease, aging, and involuntary death as unnecessary and undesirable. Transhumanists look to biotechnologies and other emerging technologies for these purposes. Dangers, as well as benefits, are also of concern to the transhumanist movement. 
The term “transhumanism” is symbolized by H+ or h+ and is often used as a synonym for “human enhancement”. Although the first known use of the term dates from 1957, the contemporary meaning is a product of the 1980s when futurists in the United States began to organize what has since grown into the transhumanist movement. Transhumanist thinkers predict that human beings may eventually be able to transform themselves into beings with such greatly expanded abilities as to merit the label “posthuman”. Transhumanism is therefore sometimes referred to as “posthumanism” or a form of transformational activism influenced by posthumanist ideals.
The transhumanist vision of a transformed future humanity has attracted many supporters and detractors from a wide range of perspectives. Transhumanism has been described by one critic, Francis Fukuyama, as the world’s most dangerous idea,while one proponent, Ronald Bailey, counters that it is the “movement that epitomizes the most daring, courageous, imaginative, and idealistic aspirations of humanity”.
What is almost never mentioned is the fact that those technological “improvements” will be out of reach for the average man. The huge price tags of those scientific discoveries will render them only accessible to a select elite. While the common man is forced to seek nourishment in genetically modified, chemically altered and even poisonous foods, the elite is trying to achieve immortality through science. Even if the masses cannot have access to those discoveries, mass media makes transhumanism cool, desirable and, ultimately, acceptable.

Cover of H+, a transhumanist magazine. The headline says it all.

Police State

George W. Bush’s Patriot Act has enabled the American government to expand surveillance of its citizens, whether it be phone calls, e-mails and physical movements. It also gave the government almost unlimited powers of arrest, detention, search and seizure. Donald E. Wilkes, Professor of Law at the University of Georgia School of Law describes this last concept:
“I want to examine here a single section of the USA Patriot Act–section 213, definitely one of the most sinister provisions of this monstrous statute.
In euphemistic language that conceals the provision’s momentous significance, section 213 states that with regard to federal search warrants “any notice required … to be given may be delayed if … [1]the court finds reasonable cause to believe that providing immediate notification of the execution of the warrant may have an adverse result …; [2] the warrant prohibits the seizure of any tangible property …  except where the court finds reasonable necessity for the seizure; and [3] the warrant provides for the giving of such notice within a reasonable period of its execution, which period may thereafter be extended by the court for good cause shown.”
Section 213 may be couched in Orwellian terminology, but there is no doubt about what it does. 
Section 213 is the first statute ever enacted in the history of American criminal procedure to specifically authorize an entirely new form of search warrant-what legal scholars call the sneak and peek warrant (also dubbed the covert entry warrant or the surreptitious entry warrant).  A sneak and peek search warrant authorizes police to effect physical entry into private premises without the owner’s or the occupant’s permission or knowledge to conduct a search; generally, such entry requires a breaking and entering.”
- Donald E. Wilkes, Flagpole Magazine Sept 2002.
Subsequent acts have further diminished civil liberties of citizens by enabling the government to declare any American a “terrorist” with little to no proof. The government can also declare martial law with little or no valid reason.
The John W. Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2006, “named for the longtime Armed Services Committee chairman from Virginia,” was signed October 17, 2006, by President George W. Bush. The Act “has a provocative provision called ‘Use of the Armed Forces in Major Public Emergencies’,” the thrust of which “seems to be about giving the federal government a far stronger hand in coordinating responses to [Hurricane] Katrina-like disasters,” Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor wrote December 1, 2006.
“But on closer inspection, its language also alters the two-centuries-old Insurrection Act, which Congress passed in 1807 to limit the president’s power to deploy troops within the United States … ‘to suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy’,” Stein wrote.
“But the amended law takes the cuffs off” and “critics say it’s a formula for executive branch mischief,” Stein wrote, as “the new language adds ‘natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident’ to the list of conditions permitting the President to take over local authority — particularly ‘if domestic violence has occurred to such an extent that the constituted authorities of the State or possession are incapable of maintaining public order.’”
“One of the few to complain, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., warned that the measure virtually invites the White House to declare federal martial law. … It ‘subverts solid, longstanding posse comitatus statutes that limit the military’s involvement in law enforcement, thereby making it easier for the President to declare martial law,’ he said in remarks submitted to the Congressional Record on Sept. 29.”
- Source