Happy Headless Halloween to the .01% and their Puppets

99% Solution for the .01 %

                                     ”  Don’t Go away MAD, just go away “

Open Letter to ISIL Stooges

To the IS-ISIL -ISIS or WTF you call yourselves rank and file jihadis don’t you know you are being manipulated by your enemies. Israel is dancing in the streets with joy every time you behead some American or British journalist,  The American people do not want war, journalists do not want war. Only the Zionist banks and multi-national corporations want war. If you want to succeed in establishing a Caliphate , it must be done through justice, and moderation and progressive reform.  The American people are horrified by the beheadings, it is true. We don’t matter. The Zionist banks that control western  false democracies will do whatever they want regardless of what their people want. It sure was easy for you to seize power, was it not ?  A Modern American war machine with assorted tanks, vehicles and weaponry was literally handed to you wasn’t it ?

Did you ever think you were being set up and used by the Puppet Masters of Global Empire ? Maybe you are dummies.

You ISIS stand to be pulverized into the sands of history not because the American people want to destroy Islam, but because your methods play into the stereotype designed by your Zionist enemies who manipulate public opinion and orchestrate global events to serve their own imperial capitalist profit motives.

Denounce your beheadings, reform your political goals. You are not attacking the right people. You need to kill the right people, the heads of snakes and  the snake oil companies and snake  families, not innocent journalists who only seek the truth and may be your best allies in exposing the global corruption, conspiracy and war profiteering that is consuming mankind and sacrificing the souls of Muslims and Christians alike.

A world united in peace and brotherhood is the only way to destroy the great Satanic New World Empire. You have become the servants of the Zionist cabal of evil capitalist imperialism yourselves. I repeat, you are not beheading the right people.

If only IS could get IT right, right ? Here are some beheadings the world might enjoy watching:

This would be ” Curious George Loses his Head ”

…And this would be Dick-Head(less) Cheney.

.. And what about Benji ? ” Mission Accomplished “.

But no, you  foolish stooges and pawns of the New World Order kill innocent journalists and aid workers.

Even I want you all dead, as much as I reject the crooked capitalism and corporate crime that spreads universal war profiteering and mass murder across the planet. Please go to hell, go straight to hell, do not pass go, do not collect $200., but please take the puppet masters with you, all of them, and perhaps history will memorialize you as true martyrs for social justice.

Russian Intelligence Continues 9/11 Data Dump, Key Perps Named

The Vampire Squid Strikes Again: The Mega Banks’ Most Devious Scam Yet

Banks are no longer just financing heavy industry. They are actually buying it up and inventing bigger, bolder and scarier scams than ever

Photo: Illustration by Victor Juhasz

By Matt Taibbi | February 12, 2014
Call it the loophole that destroyed the world. It’s 1999, the tail end of the Clinton years. While the rest of America obsesses over Monica Lewinsky, Columbine and Mark McGwire’s biceps, Congress is feverishly crafting what could yet prove to be one of the most transformative laws in the history of our economy – a law that would make possible a broader concentration of financial and industrial power than we’ve seen in more than a century.

But the crazy thing is, nobody at the time quite knew it. Most observers on the Hill thought the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 – also known as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act – was just the latest and boldest in a long line of deregulatory handouts to Wall Street that had begun in the Reagan years.

Wall Street had spent much of that era arguing that America’s banks needed to become bigger and badder, in order to compete globally with the German and Japanese-style financial giants, which were supposedly about to swallow up all the world’s banking business. So through legislative lackeys like red-faced Republican deregulatory enthusiast Phil Gramm, bank lobbyists were pushing a new law designed to wipe out 60-plus years of bedrock financial regulation. The key was repealing – or “modifying,” as bill proponents put it – the famed Glass-Steagall Act separating bankers and brokers, which had been passed in 1933 to prevent conflicts of interest within the finance sector that had led to the Great Depression. Now, commercial banks would be allowed to merge with investment banks and insurance companies, creating financial megafirms potentially far more powerful than had ever existed in America.

All of this was big enough news in itself. But it would take half a generation – till now, basically – to understand the most explosive part of the bill, which additionally legalized new forms of monopoly, allowing banks to merge with heavy industry. A tiny provision in the bill also permitted commercial banks to delve into any activity that is “complementary to a financial activity and does not pose a substantial risk to the safety or soundness of depository institutions or the financial system generally.”

Complementary to a financial activity. What the hell did that mean?

“From the perspective of the banks,” says Saule Omarova, a law professor at the University of North Carolina, “pretty much everything is considered complementary to a financial activity.”

Fifteen years later, in fact, it now looks like Wall Street and its lawyers took the term to be a synonym for ruthless campaigns of world domination. “Nobody knew the reach it would have into the real economy,” says Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown. Now a leading voice on the Hill against the hidden provisions, Brown actually voted for Gramm-Leach-Bliley as a congressman, along with all but 72 other House members. “I bet even some of the people who were the bill’s advocates had no idea.”

Today, banks like Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs own oil tankers, run airports and control huge quantities of coal, natural gas, heating oil, electric power and precious metals. They likewise can now be found exerting direct control over the supply of a whole galaxy of raw materials crucial to world industry and to society in general, including everything from food products to metals like zinc, copper, tin, nickel and, most infamously thanks to a recent high-profile scandal, aluminum. And they’re doing it not just here but abroad as well: In Denmark, thousands took to the streets in protest in recent weeks, vampire-squid banners in hand, when news came out that Goldman Sachs was about to buy a 19 percent stake in Dong Energy, a national electric provider. The furor inspired mass resignations of ministers from the government’s ruling coalition, as the Danish public wondered how an American investment bank could possibly hold so much influence over the state energy grid.

There are more eclectic interests, too. After 9/11, we found it worrisome when foreigners started to get into the business of running ports, but there’s been little controversy as banks have done the same, or even started dabbling in other activities with national-security implications – Goldman Sachs, for instance, is apparently now in the uranium business, a piece of news that attracted few headlines.

Related Wall Street’s War

But banks aren’t just buying stuff, they’re buying whole industrial processes. They’re buying oil that’s still in the ground, the tankers that move it across the sea, the refineries that turn it into fuel, and the pipelines that bring it to your home. Then, just for kicks, they’re also betting on the timing and efficiency of these same industrial processes in the financial markets – buying and selling oil stocks on the stock exchange, oil futures on the futures market, swaps on the swaps market, etc.

Allowing one company to control the supply of crucial physical commodities, and also trade in the financial products that might be related to those markets, is an open invitation to commit mass manipulation. It’s something akin to letting casino owners who take book on NFL games during the week also coach all the teams on Sundays.

The situation has opened a Pandora’s box of horrifying new corruption possibilities, but it’s been hard for the public to notice, since regulators have struggled to put even the slightest dent in Wall Street’s older, more familiar scams. In just the past few years we’ve seen an explosion of scandals – from the multitrillion-dollar Libor saga (major international banks gaming world interest rates), to the more recent foreign-currency-exchange fiasco (many of the same banks suspected of rigging prices in the $5.3-trillion-a-day currency markets), to lesser scandals involving manipulation of interest-rate swaps, and gold and silver prices.

But those are purely financial schemes. In these new, even scarier kinds of manipulations, banks that own whole chains of physical business interests have been caught rigging prices in those industries. For instance, in just the past two years, fines in excess of $400 million have been levied against both JPMorgan Chase and Barclays for allegedly manipulating the delivery of electricity in several states, including California. In the case of Barclays, which is contesting the fine, regulators claim prices were manipulated to help the bank win financial bets it had made on those same energy markets.

And last summer, The New York Times described how Goldman Sachs was caught systematically delaying the delivery of metals out of a network of warehouses it owned in order to jack up rents and artificially boost prices.

You might not have been surprised that Goldman got caught scamming the world again, but it was certainly news to a lot of people that an investment bank with no industrial expertise, just five years removed from a federal bailout, stores and controls enough of America’s aluminum supply to affect world prices.

How was all of this possible? And who signed off on it?

By exploiting loopholes in a dense, decade-and-a-half-old piece of financial legislation, Wall Street has effected a revolutionary change that American citizens never discussed, debated or prepared for, and certainly never explicitly permitted in any meaningful way: the wholesale merger of high finance with heavy industry. This blitzkrieg reorganization of our economy has left millions of Americans facing a smorgasbord of frightfully unexpected new problems. Do we even have a regulatory structure in place to look out for these new forms of manipulation? (Answer: We don’t.) And given that the banking sector that came so close to ruining the world economy five years ago has now vastly expanded its footprint, who’s in charge of preventing the next crash?

In this Brave New World, nobody knows. Moreover, whatever we’ve done, it’s too late to have a referendum on it. Garrett Wotkyns, an Arizona-based class-action attorney who has spent more than a year investigating the banks’ involvement in the metals markets and is suing Goldman and others over the aluminum case on behalf of two major manufacturers, puts it this way: “It’s like that line in The Dark Knight Rises,” he says. “‘The storm isn’t coming. The storm is already here.'”

To this day, the provenance of the “complementary activities” loophole that set much of this mess in motion remains something of a mystery. We know from congressional records that a vice chairman of JPMorgan, Michael Patterson, was one of the first to push the idea in House testimony in February 1999 and that, later that year, an early version of the bill put forward in the Senate by Phil Gramm also contained the provision.

But even one of the final bill’s eventual authors, Republican congressman Jim Leach, can’t remember exactly whose idea adding the “complementary activities” line was. “I know of no legislative history of the provision,” he says. “It probably came from the Senate side.”

Moreover, Leach was shocked to hear that regulators had pointed to this section of a bill bearing his name as the legal authority allowing banks to gain control over physical-commodities markets. “That’s news to me,” says the mortified ex-congressman, now a law professor at the University of Iowa. “I assume no one at the time would have thought it would apply to commodities brokering of a nature that has recently been reported.”

One thing that is clear in the public record is that nobody was talking, at least publicly, about banks someday owning oil tankers or controlling the supply of industrial metals.

The JPMorgan witness, Michael Patterson, told the House Financial Services Committee at the 1999 hearing that his idea of “complementary activities” was, say, a credit-card company putting out a restaurant guide. “One example is American Express, which publishes magazines,” he testified. “Travel + Leisure magazine is complementary to the travel business. Food & Wine promotes dining out . . . which might lead to greater use of the American Express card.”

“That’s how insignificant this was supposed to be,” says Omarova. “They were talking about being allowed to put out magazines.”

Even apart from the “complementary” provision, Gramm quietly added another time bomb to the law, a grandfather clause, which said that any company that became a bank holding company after the passage of Gramm-Leach-Bliley in 1999 could engage in (or control shares of a company engaged in) commodities trading – but only if it was already doing so before a seemingly arbitrary date in September 1997.

This meant that if you were a bank holding company at the time the law was passed and you wanted to get into the commodities business, you were out of luck, because the federal law prohibited banks from being involved in physical commodities or any other forms of heavy industry. But if you were already a commodities dealer in 1997 and then somehow became a bank holding company, you could get into whatever you pleased.

This was nuts. It was a little like passing a law that ordered you to leave the Army if you were gay in November 1999 – but if you were a heterosexual soldier as of September 1997 and then somehow became gay after 1999, you could stay in the Army.

To this day, nobody is exactly clear on what the grandfather clause means. If a company traded in tin before 1997 and then became a bank holding company in 2015, would it have to stick with tin? Or did the fact that it traded tin in 1997 mean the company could buy oil tankers and pipelines in 2020?

In 2012, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York – the most powerful branch of the Fed, the primary regulator of bank holding companies and the final authority on these things – put out a paper saying it had no clue about the exact meaning of the provision. “The legal scope of the exemption,” a trio of New York Fed officials wrote in July that year, “is widely seen as ambiguous.” Just a few weeks ago, the Fed’s director of banking supervision, Michael Gibson, told the Senate, “I’m not a lawyer,” and that it’s “under review.”

It almost didn’t matter. For nearly a decade, this obscure provision of Gramm-Leach-Bliley effectively applied to nobody. Then, in the third week of September 2008, while the economy was imploding after the collapses of Lehman and AIG, two of America’s biggest investment banks, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, found themselves in desperate need of emergency financing. So late on a Sunday night, on September 21st, to be exact, the two banks announced they had applied to the Federal Reserve to become bank holding companies, which would give them lifesaving access to emergency cash from the Fed’s discount window.

The Fed granted the requests overnight. The move saved the bacon of both firms, and it had one additional benefit: It made Goldman and Morgan Stanley, which both had significant commodity-trading operations prior to 1997, the first and last two companies to qualify for the grandfather exemption of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. “Kind of convenient, isn’t it?” says one congressional aide. “It’s almost like the law was written specifically for them.”

The irony was incredible. After fucking up so badly that the government had to give them federal bank charters and bottomless wells of free cash to save their necks, the feds gave Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley hall passes to become cross-species monopolistic powers with almost limitless reach into any sectors of the economy.

And they weren’t the only accidental beneficiaries of the crisis. JPMorgan Chase acquired the commodity-trading operations of Bear Stearns in early 2008, after the Fed pledged billions in guarantees to help Chase rescue the doomed investment bank. Within the next two years, Chase also acquired the commodities operations of another failing bank, the newly nationalized Royal Bank of Scotland, which included Henry Bath, a U.K.-based company that owns a large network of warehouses throughout Europe.

As a result, entering 2010, these three companies were newly empowered to go out and start doubling down on investments in physical industry. Through a fortuitous circumstance, the cost of financing for bank holding companies had also dropped like a stone by the end of 2009, as the Fed slashed interest rates almost to zero in a desperate attempt to stimulate the economy out of its post-crash doldrums.

The sudden turning on of this huge faucet of free money seems to have been a factor in an ensuing commodities shopping spree undertaken by all three firms. Morgan Stanley, for instance, claimed to have just $2.5 billion in commodity assets in March 2009. By September 2011, those holdings had nearly quadrupled, to $10.3 billion.

Goldman and Chase – along with Glencore and Trafigura, a pair of giant Swiss-based conglomerates that were offshoots of a firm founded by notorious deceased commodities trader and known market manipulator Marc Rich – all made notably coincidental purchases of metals-warehousing companies in 2010.

The presence of these Marc Rich entities is particularly noteworthy. According to famed Forbes reporter Paul Klebnikov, who was assassinated in 2004 after years of reports on Russian corruption, Rich made a fortune in the early Nineties striking crooked deals with the Soviet bosses who controlled the U.S.S.R.’s supplies of raw materials – in particular commodities like zinc and aluminum. These deals helped create a fledgling class of profiteers among the bosses of the crumbling Soviet empire, a class that would go on years later to help push Russia out of its communist past into its kleptocratic present.

“He’d strike a deal with the local party boss, or the director of a state-owned company,” Klebnikov said back in 2001. “He’d say, ‘OK, you will sell me the [commodity] at five to 10 percent of the world-market price . . . and in return, I will deposit some of the profit I make by reselling it 10 times higher on the world market, and put the kickback in a Swiss bank account.'”

Rich made these reported deals while in exile from the United States, which he fled in 1983 after the U.S. government charged him with tax evasion, wire fraud, racketeering and trading with the enemy after being caught trading with rogue states like Iran, among other things. The state filed enough counts to put him away for life, and he remained a fugitive until January 2001, when a little-known Clinton administration Justice Department official named Eric Holder recommended Rich be pardoned. A report by the House Committee on Government Reform later concluded that Holder had not provided a credible explanation for supporting Rich’s pardon and that he must have had “other motivations” that he didn’t share with Congress. Among other things, the committee speculated that Holder had designs on the attorney general’s office in a potential Al Gore administration.

In any case, in 2010, a decade after the Rich pardon, Holder was attorney general, but under Barack Obama, and two Rich-created firms, along with two banks that have been major donors to the Democratic Party, all made moves to buy up metals warehouses. In near simultaneous fashion, Goldman, Chase, Glencore and Trafigura bought companies that control warehouses all over the world for the LME, or London Metals Exchange. The LME is a privately owned exchange for world metals trading. It’s the world’s primary hub for determining metals prices and also for trading metals-based futures, options, swaps and other instruments.

“If they were just interested in collecting rent for metals storage, they’d have bought all kinds of warehouses,” says Manal Mehta, the founder of Sunesis Capital, a hedge fund that has done extensive research on the banks’ forays into the commodities markets. “But they seemed to focus on these official LME facilities.”

The JPMorgan deal seemed to be in direct violation of an order sent to the bank by the Fed in 2005, which declared the bank was not authorized to “own, operate, or invest in facilities for the extraction, transportation, storage, or distribution of commodities.” The way the Fed later explained this to the Senate was that the purchase of Henry Bath was OK because it considered the acquisition of this commodities company kosher within the context of a larger sale that the Fed was cool with – “If the bulk of the acquisition is a permissible activity, they’re allowed to include a small amount of impermissible activities.”

What’s more, according to LME regulations, no warehouse company can also own metal or make trades on the exchange. While they may have been following the letter of the law, they were certainly violating the spirit: Goldman preposterously seems to have engaged in all three activities simultaneously, changing a hat every time it wanted to switch roles. It conducted its metal trades through its commodities subsidiary J. Aron, and then put Metro, its warehouse company, in charge of the storage, and according to industry experts, Goldman most likely owned some metal, though the company has remained vague on the subject.

If you’re wondering why the LME would permit a seemingly blatant violation of its own rules, a good place to start would be to look at who owned the LME at the time. Although it eventual­ly sold itself to a Hong Kong company in 2012, in 2010 the LME was owned by a consortium of banks and financial companies. The two largest shareholders? Goldman and JPMorgan Chase.

Humorously, another was Koch Metals (2.32 percent), a commodities concern that’s part of the Koch brothers’ empire. The Kochs have been caught up in their own commodity-manipulation schemes, including an episode in 2008, in which they rented out huge tankers and used them to store excess oil offshore essentially as floating warehouses, taking cheap oil out of available supply and thereby helping to drive up energy prices. Additionally, some banks have been accused of similar oil-hoarding schemes.

The motive for the Kochs, or anyone else, to hoard a commodity like oil can be almost beautiful in its simplicity. Basically, a bank or a trading company wants to buy commodities cheap in the present and sell them for a premium as futures. This trade, sometimes called “arbitraging the contango,” works best if the cost of storing your oil or metals or whatever you’re dealing with is negligible – you make more money off the futures trade if you don’t have to pay rent while you wait to deliver.

So when financial firms suddenly start buying oil tankers or warehouses, they could be doing so to make bets pay off, as part of a speculative strategy – which is why the banks’ sudden acquisitions of metals-storage companies in 2010 is so noteworthy.

These were not minor projects. The firms put high-ranking executives in charge of these operations. Goldman’s acquisition of Metro was the project of Isabelle Ealet, the bank’s then-global commodities chief. (In a curious coincidence commented upon by several sources for this story, many of Goldman’s most senior officials, including CEO Lloyd Blankfein and president Gary Cohn, started their careers in Goldman’s commodities division.)

Meanwhile, Chase’s own head of commodities operations, Blythe Masters – an even more famed Wall Street figure, sometimes described as the inventor of the credit default swap – admitted that her company’s warehouse interests weren’t just a casual thing. “Just being able to trade financial commodities is a serious limitation because financial commodities represent only a tiny fraction of the reality of the real commodity exposure picture,” she said in 2010.

Loosely translated, Masters was saying that there was a limited amount of money to be made simply trading commodities in the traditional legal manner. The solution? “We need to be active in the underlying physical commodity markets,” she said, “in order to understand and make prices.”

We need to make prices. The head of Chase’s commodities division actually said this, out loud, and it speaks to both the general unlikelihood of God’s existence and the consistently low level of competence of America’s regulators that she was not immediately zapped between the eyebrows with a thunderbolt upon doing so. Instead, the government sat by and watched as a curious phenomenon developed at all of these new bank-owned warehouses, in the aluminum markets in particular.

As detailed by New York Times reporter David Kocieniewski last July, Goldman had bought into these warehouses and soon began pointlessly shuttling stocks of aluminum from one warehouse to another. It was a “merry-go-round of metal,” as one former forklift operator called it, a scheme of delays apparently designed to drive up prices of the metal used to make the stuff we all buy – like beer cans, flashlights and car parts.

When Goldman bought Metro in February 2010, the average delivery time for an aluminum order was six weeks. Under Goldman ownership, Metro’s delivery times soon ballooned by a factor of 10, to an average of 16 months, leading in part to the explosive growth of a surcharge called the Midwest premium, which represented not the cost of aluminum itself but the cost of its storage and delivery, a thing easily manipulated when you control the supply. So despite the fact that the overall LME price of aluminum fell during this time, the Midwest premium conspicuously surged in the other direction. In 2008, it represented about three percent of the LME price of aluminum. By 2013, it was a whopping 15 percent of the benchmark (it has since spiked to 25 percent).

“In layman’s terms, they were artificially jacking up the shipping and handling costs,” says Mehta.

The intentional warehouse delays were just one part of the anti-capitalist game the banks were playing. As an incentive to get metal under their control, they actually paid the industrial producers of aluminum extra cash to store the metal in their warehouses, fees reportedly as much as $230 a metric ton.

Both Goldman and Glencore reportedly offered such incentives, which not only allowed the companies to collect more rent (Goldman was charging a daily rate of 48 cents a metric ton) but also served to discourage industrial producers like Alcoa or the Russian industrial giant Rusal (which has Glencore CEO Ivan Glasenberg on its board of directors) from selling directly to manufacturers.

The result of all this was a bottlenecking of aluminum supplies. A crucial industrial material that was plentiful and even in oversupply was now stuck in the speculative merry-go-round of the bank finance trade.

Every time you bought a can of soda in 2011 and 2012, you paid a little tax thanks to firms like Goldman. Mehta, whose fund has a financial stake in the issue, insists there’s an irony here that should infuriate everyone. “Banks used taxpayer-backed subsidies,” he says, “to drive up prices for the very same taxpayers that bailed them out in the first place.”

Dave Smith, Coca-Cola’s strategic procurement manager, told reporters as early as the summer of 2011 that “the situation has been organized to artificially drive up premiums.” Nick Madden, the chief procurement officer of Novelis, a leading can-maker, said at roughly the same time that the delays in Detroit were adding $20 to $40 a metric ton to the price of aluminum.

Coca-Cola was the first to file a complaint against Goldman over the warehouse issue, doing so in mid-2011, and many people in and around the industry weren’t surprised that it was the world’s biggest and most powerful corporate consumer of aluminum that came forward first. Other manufacturers, many believe, kept their mouths shut out of fear the banks would punish them. “It’s very likely that commercial companies deliberately avoided an open confrontation with Goldman because it was a Wall Street powerhouse with which they had – or hoped to establish – important credit and financial-advisory relationships,” says Omarova. One government official who has investigated the issue for Congress said even some of the country’s largest aluminum users have been reluctant to come forward. “When some of these huge transnationals don’t want to talk about it, it makes you wonder,” the aide noted.

Still, a few days after the Times published its aluminum-storage exposé in late July 2013, Sen. Brown held hearings to investigate the causes of the alleged manipulation. (One executive, Tim Weiner of MillerCoors, would testify that global aluminum costs for manufacturers had been inflated by $3 billion in just the past year.) After those hearings, and after word leaked out that regulatory agencies had launched investigations, Goldman curtly announced new plans to reduce the delivery times of its aluminum stocks. The bank has consistently maintained that its interest in the warehouse company Metro is not “strategic,” that it only bought the firm “as an investment,” and will sell it within 10 years. JPMorgan Chase and other banks announced that it might be getting out of the physical commodities business altogether. The LME, meanwhile, had already come up with plans to force its member warehouses to increase their output of aluminum.

A few weeks later, on August 9th, 2013, a company called CME Group – one of the world’s leading derivatives dealers – announced that it would henceforth be selling a new kind of aluminum swap futures contract. The new instrument, the firm said, would be “the first Exchange product that enables the aluminum Midwest premium to be managed.”

What this signaled was that before that moment, no one in the financial sector wanted to get within a hundred miles of selling price insurance against the Midwest premium, because it was so obviously corrupt. But then the Times let the cat out of the bag, and next thing you knew, now that everyone was watching, a major derivatives purveyor suddenly felt confident enough to sell a hedging insurance against the Midwest premium, given that it was now presumed, once again, to be free from manipulation and subject to market forces.

“That should tell you a lot about how completely people in the business understood that the metals market was broken,” says Wotkyns.

One other bizarre footnote to the aluminum scandal: According to the Bank Holding Company Act of 1956, any company that becomes a bank holding company must divest itself of certain commercial holdings it may own within two years. To that two-year grace period, the Fed may add up to three additional years. This was done for both Goldman and Morgan Stanley. The aluminum scandal broke, coincidentally, just a few months before Goldman’s five-year grace period was scheduled to end. There was some expectation that the Fed might order the banks to divest some of their commercial holdings.

But there was a catch. “Congress in its infinite wisdom left an ambiguity,” says Omarova. Although the Bank Holding Company Act mandated that the companies had to be compliant at the end of the review period, it didn’t actually specify what the Fed had to do if they weren’t. When Goldman’s review period passed, “the Fed took the position that nothing had to happen,” says Omarova. “So nothing happened.”

The aluminum delays were not just an isolated incident of banks scheming to boost rent revenue. Recently, evidence has surfaced that the same kinds of behavior may be going on across the LME. In order for a parcel of metal to be traded on the LME, it has to be what’s called “on warrant.” If you are the owner of a metal that you no longer want to be traded, you can “cancel the warrant” – essentially taking it out of the system. It’s still in the warehouse, but in a kind of administrative limbo.

When the world LME supply of a metal features high percent­ages of canceled stock, that typically means someone is moving metals around a lot even after they’ve been put into storage – perhaps in a Goldman-style “merry-go-round,” perhaps for some other reason, but historically it has not been something seen often in functioning, healthy metals markets.

In January 2009, before the American too-big-to-fail banks and the shady Swiss commodities giants bought into all of these warehouses, less than one percent of the total global supply of LME aluminum was “canceled warrant.” Today, with world supplies of aluminum about double what they were then, 45.2 percent of the total stock is classified as canceled. In Detroit, where Goldman is supposedly cleaning things up, the percentage is even crazier: 76.9 percent of the aluminum stock has canceled warrants.

You can see hints of the phenomenon in other LME metals. Five years ago, just 1.3 percent of the LME’s copper stocks had canceled warrants. Today, 59 percent of it does. In January 2009, just 2.3 percent of zinc stocks were canceled; it’s at 32 percent today. Zinc incidentally has something else in common with aluminum – a shipping-and-handling-like premium, called the U.S. zinc premium in the United States, which has skyrocketed in recent years, increasing by 400 percent between the summer of 2012 and the summer of 2013, when the price plateaued just as the aluminum scandal broke.

Then there’s nickel. Thirty-seven percent of the global stock is now classified as canceled. Five years ago, 0.5 percent was. One industry insider, who is very familiar with and utilizes the nickel market, says that despite the fact that there is a massive global oversupply of the metal, prices are being artificially propped up as much as 20 to 30 percent.

He blames the banks’ speculative weigh stations, saying that nickel producers, despite low global demand, are cheerfully selling their stocks to bank-run warehouses, which are paying above-market prices to put raw materials into the merry-go-round. “They are happy to sell to the banks and to the warehouse supply, while they pray for demand to pick up,” the insider said.

This leads to the next potentially disastrous aspect of this story: What happens if the Fed suddenly raises interest rates, and the banks, their access to free money cut off, can no longer afford to sit on piles of metal for 16 months at a time?

“Look at nickel,” says Eric Salzman, a financial analyst who has done research on metals manipulation for several law firms. “You could see the price drop 20 to 30 percent in no time. It’d be a classic bursting of a bubble.”

But the potential for wide-scale manipulation and/or new financial disasters is only part of the nightmare that this new merger of banking and industry has created. The other, perhaps even darker problem involves the new existential dangers both to the environment and to the stability of the financial system. Long before Goldman and Chase started buying up metals warehouses, for instance, Morgan Stanley had already bought up a substantial empire of physical businesses – electricity plants in a number of states, a firm that trades in heating oil, jet fuels, fertilizers, asphalt, chemicals, pipelines and a global operator of oil tankers.

How long before one of these fully loaded monster ships capsizes, and Morgan Stanley becomes the next BP, not only killing a gazillion birds and sea mammals off some unlucky country’s shores but also taking the financial system down with them, as lawsuits plunge the company into bankruptcy with Lehman-style repercussions? Morgan Stanley’s CEO, James Gorman, even admitted how risky his firm’s new acquisitions were last year, when he reportedly told staff that a hypothetical oil spill was “a risk we just can’t take.”

The regulators are almost worse. Remember the 2008 collapse happened when government bodies like the Fed, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Office of Thrift Supervision – whose entire expertise supposedly revolves around monitoring the safety and soundness of financial companies – somehow missed that half of Wall Street was functionally bankrupt.

Now that many of those financial companies have been bailed out, those same regulators who couldn’t or wouldn’t smell smoke in a raging fire last time around are suddenly in charge of deciding if companies like Morgan Stanley are taking out enough insurance on their oil tankers, or if banks like Goldman Sachs are properly handling their uranium deposits.

“The Fed isn’t the most enthusiastic regulator in the best of times,” says Brown. “And now we’re asking them to take this on?”

Banks in America were never meant to own industries. This principle has been part of our culture practically from the beginning of our history. The original restrictions on banks getting involved with commerce were rooted in the classically American fear of overweening government power – citizens in the early 1800s were concerned about the potential for monopolistic abuses posed by state-sponsored banks.

Later, however, Americans also found themselves forced to beat back a movement of private monopolies, in particular the great railroad and energy cartels built by robber barons of the Rockefeller type who, by the late 1800s, were on the precipice of swallowing markets whole and dictating to the public the prices of everything from products to labor. It took a long period of upheaval and prolonged fights over new laws like the Sherman and Clayton anti-trust acts before those monopolies were reined in.

Banks, however, were never really regulated under those laws. Only the Great Depression and years of brutal legislative trench warfare finally brought them to heel under the same kinds of anti-trust concepts that stopped the robber barons, through acts like Glass-Steagall and the Bank Holding Company Act of 1956. Then, with a few throwaway lines in a 1999 law that nobody ever heard of until now, that whole struggle went up in smoke, and here we are, in Hobbes’ jungle, waiting for the next fully legal catastrophe to unfold.

When does the fun part start?

This story is from the February 27th, 2014 issue of Rolling Stone.

From The Archives Issue 1203: February 27, 2014

Related Matt Taibbi on the Great American Bubble Machine

RelatedThe Feds vs. Goldman

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-vampire-squid-strikes-again-the-mega-banks-most-devious-scam-yet-20140212#ixzz3ESKmJsJc
Follow us: @rollingstone on Twitter | RollingStone on Facebook

NEW: Julian Assange on Google’s ‘Revolving Door’ with State Department

NEW Loose Change 3rd Edition! MUST SEE! 911 Truth – INSIDE JOB 2013

Architects and Engineers for 9-11 Truth have a research video too:

http://www.shop.ae911truth.org/DVD-Cased-The-Anatomy-of-a-Great-Deception-DVD-AGD.htm

911: A Conspiracy Theory

Wolfessblog -- Guillotine mediocrity in all its forms!

This has always been one of my faves.
Everything you ever wanted to know about the 9/11 conspiracy theory in under 5 minutes.

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MAD TERROR

All credible indications are that the ISIL beheadings are the work of agent provocateurs of the New World Empire. The CIA-MI6-MOSSAD triad of  Black-OP assassin infiltrators masquerade as terrorists and perform the function of demonizing the manufactured enemy to fool the people into consenting to an endless war of privatized economic conquest and criminal profiteering.

The innocent victims of this  macabre carnival are expendable collateral cast members,  martyred for the sake of a Greater God’s protocols, the global investor classes’  primal blood thirst for corporate profits, and geo-political supremacy.

Contrary to the scripted opinion of the global media propaganda,  this is the same  modus operandi of the old world order, of the British Empire, disguised as the New World Order.  The cabal of ruling elite and their royal corporations have vested interests to protect and business plans to execute. It’s a Mad, Mad World, indeed, quite right, cheerio then, stiff upper lip eh what…

Like the 9-11 false flag attack on the World Trade Center, which was an act of treason, espionage, mass murder and insurance fraud, executed by the same despotic regime that has ruled the world since 1947, the creation of ISIL and the stagecraft of the beheadings of western journalists has multiple operational benefits to serve  the puppet masters of the New World Empire. First, as another false flag 9-11 pretext for renewed protracted black war profiteering and to further expand the obscene fortunes of the banks, energy cartels, military-industrial complex, and the power and scope of the NSA intelligence and surveillance police state hegemony over the domestic front.

Yes the domestic front is the greatest threat to the royal global corporate ruling elite. The tyrant fears nothing as much as an informed, united and armed population, hell bent on social justice. So being  armed with the truth presents one helluva dilemma for the regime, that is why we are made equally afraid not just of phony foreign terrorists, but of the REAL terrorists who rule us. ‘ Mission Accomplished ‘, right ? Just keep the people in fear of the unknown, misinformed as to what is really going on, in extreme debt, disenfranchised by the 2008 economic and housing collapse, and  completely confused as to what is true,  important or relevant to their needs and  family’s future security.  Just keep watching football,  game shows, reality TV, the Bravo Channel and Fox Entertainment News, especially the BP,  and the Natural Gas Industry  commercials, and don’t say nuthin’ bad about Texas.

Another benefit to  of the sensational choreographed time signature of gruesome the beheadings is to dominate the media with the ‘Breaking News’ to steal the fire from the truly earth shaking revelations presented by the Architects and Engineers for 9-11 Truth and ReThink 9-11.org concerning the total fabrication of the official 9-11 report, or  Israel’s slaughter in Gaza, or Scotland’s vote for independence,  and any other truly newsworthy story that may unravel the web of  mass deception and corporate criminality that has decimated the planet vis a vis entrenched political corruption, a scripted and state run media and universal war profiteering for multiple decades.

The scientific proof that all three of the World Trade Center buildings were destroyed using  precisely planted military nano-thermite explosive cutter charges, implanted months in advance to create a textbook controlled demolition is irrefutable. The free fall collapse of the structures could only occur under a single set of circumstances, and it is well documented. It is based on 9th grade physics. The columns below must be blown out first  in order for the floors on top to free fall  down . Jet fuel cannot melt steel.

We know the imperial neo-cons conveniently pretend not to believe in science , such as climate science,  environmental science,  assassination science, biology, evolution, physics, mathematics, engineering, or chemistry when it suits them, and their control of the media allows them to avoid the obvious conclusions of experts.

These same megalomaniacal monopolists do however promote the science of creationism, petro chemical dispersant efficacy to remedy oil spills,  safety of  natural gas fracking science, spent fracking fluid injection well safety science, clean coal science, ‘you asked for it!’ rape science, single bullet theory science, chemical weapons and nuclear arms science,  jet fuel can melt steel science, lone gunman school shooter science,  and filibuster science when opportune.

They lie like lawyers and politicians because most of them are both,  because they can get away with it as they have all the power, and the people have none. Hitler knew if the lie was big enough and horrible enough and if the cover up for the  lie were repeated over and over again in all quarters regardless of it’s validity, that not enough people would believe the truth. This is normalcy bias, the normalization of deviation,  the  engineering of consent and the marketing of terror in a bombshell.

The Zionist  New World Order hides behind a cyclone fence of plausible deniability. They ignore the obvious , deflect public assumptions that democracy has been beheaded and speciously denounce those  accusations that the extreme  measures and practices  of  restricting the Bill of Rights,  of mass surveillance, deceptive advertising of the ‘National Brand’, brainwashing , propagandizing, and using the arts of domestic terror to repress the dissent of the public are anything more than necessary patriotic compliments to the preservation of ‘American Freedom’ . War is Peace -Freedom is Slavery. Double-Speak is Realpolitik.

The  power of the ruling class to create their own truth is legendary, well notorious anyway. Their power to stifle investigations into the JFK, RFK, MLK  assassinations for 50 years,  the 9-11  conspiracy for 13 years, and more recently  Rep. Paul Wellstone’s and JFK, Jr.’s small airplane sabotage, the  two Malaysian Airlines plane disasters, the cover ups concerning the true origins of the Ukrainian civil war, and the rise of  ISIL is formidable. The prime benefactors of all of this, in addition to the war profiteers, is the Fascist State of Israel.

This is the map of the future ‘Greater Israel’. The land now held by ISIL.

By re-animating the Frankenstein monster of fear, of head-lopping terrorism across the western front, the  Zionist Puppet Masters fill the stocks of the slave market with needy misinformed and functionally mindless consumers, who are dependent on the war crimes economy for their survival.  To question the  almighty imperial American authority, to even consider the possibility of such a horrible reality is far too painful for most citizens.

Who have they murdered this time, in addition to the tens of  thousands of Palestinians, Iraqi’s, Afghans, Syrians and Kurds, ? So far only truth seeking  journalists and selfless volunteer aid workers have lost their heads on TV. Do you get the subtle message ? Empire creates their own reality and scripts  their own truths. This is the beginning of a new phase of universal war, and if you think it has nothing to do with the Protocols of The Learned Elders of Zion, maybe you should read them.

Do not blame Islam, blame the string section.

Anatomy of a Great Deception : 9-11 Controlled Demolition

AE911Truth’s Presenter Team “Star”

Volunteer Spotlight: Stan Beattie

Stan Beattie holds up David Ray Griffin’s book, The New Pearl Harbor, for his audience to see at a recent 9/11 Truth presentation.tan Beattie, PE, a member of the Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth Presenter Team, became convinced that the official story of the events of September 11, 2001, was false after reading Dr. David Griffin’s book, The New Pearl Harbor, in 2004.

He became so committed to sharing the truth with his fellow Americans that in 2007 he flew from his home outside Detroit, Michigan, to Washington, D.C., to join a protest on the Mall against the Bush surge of the Iraq War. While Stan was walking on the Mall, he met people from DC911Truth, signed their petition, and proudly held up one of their placards. Shortly thereafter, he watched AE911Truth’s two-hour Blueprint for Truth. Since then, he has become both an active member of AE’s Presenter Team and a financial contributor.

Stan also supports Firefighters for 9/11 Truth. In fact, he has visited fire stations in Farmington Hills, near Detroit, and in Brooklyn, New York, and talked with the firefighters about 9/11. One of the people who came up to thank him after his presentation in Brighton, Michigan, said that his son had been to a firefighters’ gathering, where the general feeling was that “controlled demolitions brought the buildings down.”

WTC Building #7, a 47-story high-rise not hit by an airplane, exhibited all the characteristics of classic controlled demolition with explosives:

1. Rapid onset of collapse
2. Sounds of explosions
3. Symmetrical structural failure
4. Free-fall acceleration through the path of what was greatest resistance
5. Imploded, collapsing completely, landing almost in its own footprint
6. Massive volume of expanding pyroclastic-like clouds
7. Expert corroboration from the top European controlled demolition professional
8. Foreknowledge of “collapse” by media, NYPD, FDNY

In the aftermath of WTC7’s destruction, strong evidence of demolition using incendiary devices was discovered:

1. FEMA finds rapid oxidation and intergranular melting on structural steel samples
2. Several tons of molten metal reported by numerous highly qualified witnesses
3. Chemical signature of the incendiary thermite found in solidified molten metal, and dust samples

WTC7 exhibited none of the characteristics of destruction by fire:

1. Slow onset with large visible deformations
2. Asymmetrical collapse which follows the path of least resistance (laws of conservation of momentum would cause a falling, to the side most damaged by the fires)
3. Evidence of fire temperatures capable of softening steel
4. High-rise buildings with much larger, hotter, and longer lasting fires have never collapsed

As seen in this revealing photo, the Twin Towers’ destruction exhibited all of the characteristics of destruction by explosives:

1. Destruction proceeds through the path of greatest resistance at nearly free-fall acceleration
2. Improbable symmetry of debris distribution
3. Extremely rapid onset of destruction
4. Over 100 first responders reported explosions and flashes
5. Multi-ton steel sections ejected laterally
6. Mid-air pulverization of 90,000 tons of concrete & metal decking
7. Massive volume of expanding pyroclastic-like clouds
8. 1200-foot-diameter debris field: no “pancaked” floors found
9. Isolated explosive ejections 20–40 stories below demolition front
10. Total building destruction: dismemberment of steel frame
11. Several tons of molten metal found under all 3 high-rises
12. Evidence of thermite incendiaries found by FEMA in steel samples
13. Evidence of explosives found in dust samples

The three high-rises exhibited none of the characteristics of destruction by fire:

1. Slow onset with large visible deformations
2. Asymmetrical collapse which follows the path of least resistance (laws of conservation of momentum would cause a falling, intact, from the point of plane impact, to the side most damaged by the fires)
3. Evidence of fire temperatures capable of softening steel
4. High-rise buildings with much larger, hotter, and longer-lasting fires have never collapsed

WhoWhatWhy.com informs readers of NYC ballot initiative

Editor’s Note: Investigative reporter Russ Baker launched the online publication WhoWhatWhy.com five years ago to do what he calls “forensic journalism”—that is, reporting that is “rigorous, relentless, and scientific.” Sounds like a description of AE911Truth’s research, doesn’t it? In mid-August, Baker wrote an article about the NYC Coalition for Accountability NOW (NYC CAN), and interviewed its founder, Ted Walter. You can read the piece here:

Putting a 9/11 Mystery on the Ballot

I was standing blocks from Building 7 of the World Trade Center complex and staring directly at it when it collapsed.

Working for the Los Angeles Times, I had arrived at the World Trade Center as the South and North Tower were making their rapid and deadly descents in the morning. That afternoon, I called in a series of reports to a staffer in the New York bureau.

I was literally on the phone with the office at 5:21 p.m., describing the fires burning in the structure as the building began—and completed—its remarkably fast, smooth descent to the ground. I described the building neatly pancaking, and the Pulitzer Prize winner on the other end taking my dictation declared: “That sounds like a controlled demolition.”

It’s likely that no one has given more presentations on this subject than Stan other than AE911Truth founder Richard Gage, AIA, according to Daniel Noel, AE911Truth’s Presenter Team leader. Noel is especially impressed with how many ways Stan finds to get the word out both in his own community (where he calls upon his broad range of contacts in the non-profit world, leaflets in various neighborhoods, and reaches out to people he doesn’t know) and beyond his community. “Stan travels far away from home just to present AE911Truth to the public, and he systematically looks for presentation opportunities wherever he goes,” recounts Noel.

Between when he joined the Presenter Team in 2010 and the end of 2012, Stan gave 12 presentations about 9/11 Truth. In the 18 months since then, he’s made another 15 presentations in Michigan, Florida, and Washington, D.C. The wide variety of groups he has spoken to include Rotary Clubs, the Destroyer Escort Sailors Association, Mid-Michigan Atheists and Humanists, the Southeast Michigan Mensa organization, Grey Panthers, and Ann Arbor Science and Skeptics. Most recently, he was invited to give a presentation on July 25 at the Veterans for Peace Convention, which was held at the University of North Carolina in Asheville.

One time Stan presented the evidence to a group of 16 at a friend’s home. Later his friend called and told him that several people who attended the gathering said they’d had trouble sleeping that night and wished there had been a follow-up meeting to discuss the 9/11 events.

Sometimes Stan isn’t the presenter but organizes presentations for others. For example, in 2011 he secured a venue for Richard Gage to speak at Lawrence Technological University in Detroit. At the event was a Fox News reporter, who invited Richard to the studio to be interviewed on that night’s 10 PM local news broadcast.

Stan’s reward for all this volunteer work is simply the “satisfaction I get from fulfilling a mission,” as he puts it. “I’m motivated by a quest for justice.”

If you would like to help introduce the truth of 9/11 to fellow Americans — or citizens of any country — consider joining the AE911Truth Presenter Team. Simply fill out a volunteer form. Just think: You will have the opportunity of showing the evidence to people who have never been exposed to it before. This could well advance the cause of securing a real investigation. Stan Beattie, for one, is sure you won’t have any regrets.

Anatomy of a Great Deception  ||  Times Square Digital Billboard   ||  Actions in New York City

Updated Details & Lineup here.

Streaming video from AE911Truth events

Many of our New York City Events will be carried live by Jeff Durkin of WeAreChange Connecticut! Simply visit:

http://ustream.tv/channel/we-are-change-ct

Covered events include (but not limited to)

September 11-13th — Street Actions in NYC

September 11 — AE911Truth Press Conference     11AM EDT

September 11 — NYC Premiere: Anatomy of a Great Deception     2 PM EDT

September 13 — AE911Truth Symposium     2 PM EDT

 

Great Recent AE911Truth Radio Interviews

August 21 —  Alex Jones Radio Show (15-min)

September 4 —  George Noory – Coast to Coast AM (2-hrs)

September 10 —  James Corbett – Corbett Report (20-min)

September 11 —  Jesse Ventura PodCastOne – We the People (30-min) – (Note – pre-recorded doesn’t air until Sept 11)

The Anatomy of a Great Deception

We will be sharing and screening all around the world the powerful new movie, The Anatomy of a Great Deception, which will be premiering this September:

Sept 5	Detroit, MI	Fillmore Theater
Sept 11	New York City	Theater 80 — Tickets
Sept 11	Houston, TX	Bayland Park Center — Houston 911Truth
Sept 11	Tempe, AZ	ASU Campus
Sept 11	Oakland, CA	Grand Lake Theater – SF911Truth
Sept 11	West Hartford, CT	Auerbach Auditorium in Hillyer Hall — CT 9/11 Truth
Sept 11	Austin, TX	Brave New Books
Sept 11	Washington, DC	Busboys and Poets
Sept 13	McQueeney, TX	Silver Eagle Taphouse

 

 

 

 

 

We will be sharing and screening all around the world the powerful new movie The Anatomy of a Great Deception which will be premiering this September at the locations above. If you cannot attend in person you can watch the live web-stream and/or watch the video archive for 30 days at this link.

Full 3 Day Schedule Available here

New York City Actions

Thursday 9/11/14

Our outreach efforts will be held at Ground Zero near the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, where we’ll inform the public about what they won’t find there by handing out the  alternative guide to the museum.

11 AM:   AE911Truth Press Conference

2 PM:   NYC Premiere — The Anatomy of a Great Deception, Theater 80, East Village. Get Tickets here.

Friday 9/12/14

10 AM:   Outreach at 9/11 Memorial Park, corner of Liberty St. & Greenwich St.

3 PM:    Outreach actions at the Times Square ReThink911 Billboard

7 PM:   9/11 Truth Café – Live music and socializing at 6th Street Community Center, 638 East 6th Street, between Avenues B & C in the East Village

Saturday 9/13/14

2 PM: Symposium — “The 9/11 Awakening Goes Mainstream.”  Speakers include: 9/11 survivor Ricki D.; attorney William Pepper; firefighter Rudy Dent; architects Bill Brinnier and Richard Gage; family members Bob McIlvaine, Vance Green, and Catherine Montano. Get Tickets here.

For those who cannot be in New York with us, we urge you to host your own screening of The Anatomy of a Great Deception – the “ultimate red pill.”

As you can see, the 13th anniversary events will be action-packed. Please spread the word and stand by for more details!