Jim Rickards: Currency Wars and Gold

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Jim Rickards: Currency Wars Simulation

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NASA Predicts "Irreversible" COLLAPSE of Society (+playlist)

Here’s How NASA Thinks Society Will CollapseToo much inequality and too few natural resources could leave the West vulnerable to a Roman Empire-style fall.
“collapse is difficult to avoid…. Elites grow and consume too much, resulting in a famine among Commoners that eventually causes the collapse of society.”
“… accumulated surplus is not evenly distributed throughout society, but rather has been controlled by an elite. The mass of the population, while producing the wealth, is only allocated a small portion of it by elites, usually at or just above subsistence levels.”

How My Generation is Getting Screwed Once Again

David Seaman

Activist Post

If you’re an American around my age (I’m 28), a couple of things are becoming clear.

We’re one of the first generations since the Great Depression that is expected to live a lower quality of life than our parents. Significantly lower.

We all got suckered into paying $160,000 we didn’t have for a piece of paper that entitles us to apply for a bunch of entry level jobs that don’t even want us on account of our lack of experience.

Entry level receptionist or social media position. 3-5 years experience required.

The US job market is crazier than one of Jigsaw’s rusty machinations.

So now there’s a generation of us, walking around in a debt daze, unable to start families “on time” or leave the nest or invest in new businesses—or do any of the things that Americans in their late twenties and early thirties should be up to.

The war machine fucked us. The banks fucked us.

And yes, the media fucked us: by failing to acknowledge these problems exist, instead we’re all jovial Paul Rudd “slackers” who move back home or remain unemployed by choice—haha, alrighty then.

What emerged from this realization of mass fuckery were a variety of grassroots movements, which can be roughly divided into three categories: the Internet hacktivists, the Occupiers, and the Tea Party.

My generation never thought we’d have to protest anything. This is America.

But when you only have debts and long-term unemployment and some of your friends are coming back in body bags from Afghanistan and Iraq and the media doesn’t really explain why except MISSION ACCOMPLISHED, protest doesn’t sound so crazy anymore.

The federal government did an impressive job of disabling the hacktivists by striking fear into their Tor-loving hearts. Anything you do on a keyboard today, some old J. Edgar Hoover type can drag up a law from the 1970s or early '80s—laws clearly designed for people like Pablo Escobar, not peaceful Internet activists—and find a way to put you in a cage, so you no longer have a voice.

Examples: Barrett Brown, Jeremy Hammond, and Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz.

The latter committed suicide by hanging himself, as he was facing decades behind bars if convicted for a “crime” that had no victim.

I don’t think this cheerful public tech personality just decided out of the blue to hang himself. It’s quite clear the legal harassment drove him to end his life—it first drained his finances, then his morale, and finally his confidence in the future.

Occupy and the Tea Party fell victim to a combination of government infiltration and good old fashioned mission creep: Occupy became too full of itself. The Tea Party became part Water World, part Koch Brothers shill factory, and part convenient way for old school GOPers to pretend to be something new and different.

So, without any judgment on what these organizations accomplished or did not accomplish, I think it’s fair to say they are neutered at this point.

Something else emerged parallel and yet separate from all of this: Bitcoin. Globally decentralized currency that’s fair because every line of its code is open source, able to be reviewed and built upon by anyone with the interest and the time.

The media keeps painting Bitcoin as precarious and unfair to distract us from the core fact we aren’t supposed to learn: cryptocurrency is one of the most radically fair things humans have ever created.

Comparing central bank issued government currency to a digital cryptocurrency running according to impartial algorithm is like comparing a witch doctor ceremony to a modern operating room. There is no comparison.

Make no mistake: the technology that runs Bitcoin is one giant “Fuck you” to the corrupt banking establishment that drove my generation into debt, foreclosed on our parents generation, and has the nerve to take money from the Fed practically for free and loan it out to us at a 20% mark-up ... but only if you’re a good boy or girl with a perfect credit rating and assets.

Over the last few weeks, many have noticed what appears to be a shift in government policy toward Bitcoin. I think they are trying to crush it, by offering regulatory guidance that is so contradictory no honest business entity or individual user will be able to stay on the right side of the law. (More specifically, the Treasury Department’s FinCEN is treating Bitcoin as currency, complete with all the cumbersome KYC/AML requirements currency transmission requires … while the Treasury Department’s tax collectors at the IRS have ruled Bitcoin is property and not currency at all, meaning the accounting and recordkeeping for this electronic “non-currency” has now gone beyond the point of practicality).

This is unacceptable, and we need to speak up.

If the idea of cryptocurrency fails in the United States, because no one can afford to remain “in compliance,” two things will happen:

1. A vast increase in radicalism. Occupy, Anonymous and the Tea Party will appear as little more than prologue for what may come if people in my age group are forced to only work with banks that—as dramatic as this sounds—have made us modern-day indentured servants with little to look forward to. We don’t want to work with them anymore. Cryptocurrency offers people a way out of the high unemployment rates, lifelong debts, weak access to credit lines. Allows us to transact with each other peer-to-peer without involving Chase or Wells Fargo or Bank of America or the shady credit reporting bureaus. If that escape valve is shut off, people with nothing but debt will find they have little to lose by protesting every second of every day until we see real change.
2. Huge amounts of wealth will be generated abroad. Middle class Americans will watch with rising envy and anger as billions are made in Hong Kong and London—now favored to become the cryptocurrency centers of the world, as they have taken a decidedly less draconian and less two-faced approach to regulation. When Americans see the amount of prosperity and efficiency the government has arbitrarily prevented them from participating in, I believe that anger and desperation will lead to even more of #1: radicalism.

In a sense what the government is doing is like that Greek myth about the king who receives prophecy his son will grow up to kill him—so he exiles the son to a distant kingdom. In so doing, he seals his own fate: years later, the son kills his father in battle, because he doesn’t know what his father looks like.

We are trying very hard to make this work, to peacefully improve the state of the world through more fair technology and more distributed networks for transferring and recording financial value.

If that is taken away, I don’t think the average person will have anything left to lose.

The government has set itself up as an adversary of the common citizen, which I don’t understand.

When the IRS’ Lois Lerner pleaded the Fifth before the House oversight committee, that was a wake up call. It made my stomach turn. IRS officials shouldn’t be pleading the Fifth when asked if they are involved in political targeting and harassment of citizens: the answer should be a clear no.

When the Director of National Intelligence lied to the American people while testifying before Congress, that was another wake up call.

When Obama unveiled his much awaited NSA reforms earlier this week—and it only applied to landlines,not our cell phones, text messages, Facebook accounts or Twitter activity—another wake up call.

Who are these people? And what do they have to gain by turning the American people into an enemy? What do they have to gain by keeping us shut out of what could be an enormous new growth sector of the economy?

The government has already spent a ludicrous amount of time kneecapping Bitcoin, yet lets real financial hucksters like HSBC off the hook (whose executives knowingly laundered as much as $670 BILLION! 67 times Bitcoin’s entire market capitalization).

Again, I don’t understand.

Bitcoin and whatever currencies come after it cannot be stopped. The government’s complex approach only hurts American businesses and consumers, and will lead to less tax revenue for the government itself, because people are becoming afraid to use Bitcoin.

With such a hostile government stance toward innovation, it makes it very hard for the US to remain the birthplace of companies like HP, Microsoft, and Apple. Steve Jobs built computers in his garage—today that’s probably a crime. Unlicenced computer manufacturing, and let’s throw in a CFAA violation or two—how’s life in prison sound?

We’re becoming a ludicrous Ayn Randian short story filled with vindictive regulator fiefdoms and unelected IRS thugs and NSA agents who spy on their own fellow citizens using euphemisms like “two hop analysis” to describe what is, without question, a wholesale violation of millions of our private communications.

I hope we wake up in time. These are not American values. The government needs to provide decisive leadership on Bitcoin: it’s either a currency or a property. The community can find a way to comply with either of those categorizations—but can’t be treated as both, because that makes no sense.

And it’s hypocritical for President Obama to call for all students to learn computer code, when those who do so face prosecution under the anti-computer, archaic CFAA and see their digital currency businesses face destruction from agencies like the IRS.

Maybe Obama should be calling on every student to become an oil company lobbyist or NSA snoop, because those seem to be far more certain career paths in America at the moment.

David Seaman is a blogger, podcaster, media analyst and political activist. Read his book The Bitcoin Primer. Subscribe to his broadcasts at DavidSeaman.net. Follow him on Twitter@d_seaman

SOURCE

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Are We Living in Idiocracy? These Three Stories Suggest We Are

Published on Mar 25, 2014

Yeah, it's a rant. Melissa here. Instead of doing three videos, I just put all three of these ridiculous March 2014 stories into one. (No, it isn't just that we can't find the missing Malaysian plane, either.)

If you haven't seen Idiocracy, you might want to check that movie out; it's becoming less a fictional film and more a documentary day-by-day.

Idiocracy Trailer: http://youtu.be/BBvIweCIgwk

Sources
http://truthstreammedia.com/mom-arres...
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/oddnews/m...
http://www.theorganicprepper.ca/befor...
http://www.thedailysheeple.com/karmas...
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum...
http://www.latimes.com/nation/politic...

Website: TruthstreamMedia.com
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Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use.

Scientists Condemn New FDA Study Saying BPA Is Safe: "It Borders on Scientific Misconduct"

Researchers working on a joint NIH-FDA program to better regulate harmful chemicals accuse the agency of undermining their research with a flawed and deceptive study.

—By Mariah Blake

| Mon Mar. 24, 2014 3:00 AM GMT

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In February, a group of Food and Drug Administration scientists published a study finding that low-level exposure to the common plastic additive bisphenol A (BPA) is safe. The media, the chemical industry, and FDA officials touted this as evidence that long-standing concerns about the health effects of BPA were unfounded. ("BPA Is A-Okay, Says FDA," read one Forbes headline.) But, behind the scenes, a dozen leading academic scientists who had been working with the FDA on a related project were fuming over the study's release—partly because they believed the agency had ​bungled the experiment.

• The Scary New Evidence on BPA-Free Plastics
• A Frightening Field Guide to Common Plastics
• How Industry and the Feds Suppressed Evidence That Plastics Wreak Havoc on Our Hormones
• The Frog of War: One Biologist's Crusade Against Atrazine
• Waiter, There's BPA in My Soup
• Which 9 Household Items Will Make Your Hormones Go Haywire?
• Buying Local and Organic? You're Still Eating Plastic Chemicals

On a conference call the previous summer, officials from the FDA and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) had informed these researchers that the lab where the study was housed was contaminated. As a result, all of the animals—including the supposedly unexposed control group—had been exposed to BPA. The FDA made the case that this didn't affect the outcome, but their academic counterparts believed it cast serious doubt on the study's findings. "It's basic science," saysGail S. Prins, a professor of physiology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who was on the call. "If your controls are contaminated, you've got a failed experiment and the data should be discarded. I'm baffled that any journal would even publish this."

Yet the FDA study glossed over this detail, which was buried near the end of the paper.Prins and her colleagues also complain that the paper omitted key information—including the fact that some of them had found dramatic effects in the same group of animals. "The way the FDA presented its findings is so disingenuous," says one scientist, who works closely with the agency. "It borders on scientific misconduct."

Perhaps more importantly, the group worries that the fallout from the flawed paper could undermine their collaborative study—a $32 million taxpayer-funded project known a CLARITY-BPA, which is supposed to pinpoint the most effective methods for assessing the effects of BPA and ensure they shape regulation. "The FDA is essentially preempting our findings," says Prins, who is on the CLARITY team. "Right now, people are being told that BPA is harmless. As the CLARITY data trickles out over the next few years, the public is just going to be confused."

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In contrast to the FDA's recent paper, roughly 1,000 published studies have found that low-level exposure to BPA—a synthetic estrogen that is also used in cash register receipts and the lining of tin cans—can lead to serious health problems, from cancer and insulin-resistant diabetes to obesity and attention-deficit disorder. In some cases, the effects appear to be handed down, with the chemical reprogramming an individual's genes and causing disease in future generations.

But the agencies that regulate BPA and other chemicals have largely ignored this research in favor of industry data showing BPA is safe. A 2008 investigation by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel revealed that the FDA had relied on industry lobbyists to track and evaluate research on BPA. It also found that the agency's assessment of BPA's safety was based largely on two industry-funded studies—one of which turned out to have "fatal flaws," according to leading researchers in the field. Both studies also relied on a breed of rat, known as the Charles River Sprague Dawley, that is all but immune to the effects of synthetic estrogens like BPA.

"It's basic science. If your controls are contaminated, you've got a failed experiment and the data should be discarded."

The FDA's rationale for favoring industry-funded studies has to do with the way industry scientists track data; most of them rely on a record-keeping system called Good Laboratory Practice (GLP), which is meant to prevent scientific fraud (something that was common in commercial labs before this standard was introduced in the 1970s). This doesn't mean that these studies are better designed or that their results are more reliable. "Using GLP in no way says that you asked the right questions," says Linda Birnbaum, director of the NIH's National Toxicology Program and National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. "Academic research groups have their own quality controls, which tend to be very high level. From my point of view, that's a lot better than GLP."

Still, the industry has persuaded regulators to treat GLP as the gold standard, and to give studies that use it more weight than their academic counterparts. Regulatory agencies also require toxicology studies to follow strict guidelines, which aren't regularly updated to reflect the latest testing methods or new insights about how chemicals effect our bodies. Critics argue that this approach, which focuses on easy-to-observe symptoms such as weight loss, is poor at detecting the often subtle changes caused by chemicals like BPA. But our rigid regulatory model leaves little room for integrating the newer, more sophisticated​ techniques developed by academic scientists, even when they're more effective.

The $32 million CLARITY program—also known as the Consortium Linking Academic and Regulatory Insights on BPA Toxicity—aims to solve this conundrum. A collaboration between the NIH, the FDA, and 12 academic scientists who study BPA, the project involves exposing hundreds of rats to various levels of the chemical inside an FDA laboratory, which operates under GLP. The animals' tissues are then distributed to FDA researchers, who test them according to regulatory guidelines, and to academic scientists, who deploy their own methods.

By comparing the two approaches, the NIH and its partners hope to reconcile the conflicting data on BPA's safety and create a process for the most relevant information to shape regulation. "This is far bigger than any single chemical," explains Thomas Zoeller, a biology professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and a CLARITY participant. "This presents a path forward for regulatory agencies to make use of data from academic scientists who have developed state-of-the-art techniques."

"Honestly, we may be throwing millions of taxpayer dollars down the toilet," says one CLARITY researcher.

But the project has been fraught. According to internal FDA correspondence obtained by Mother Jones, outside CLARITY scientists have sparred fiercely with the FDA over study design—particularly the agency's reliance on the Sprague Dawley rat, which isn't very sensitive to synthetic hormones. (The FDA maintains its strain is more sensitive than the variation commonly used by industry.) To keep their differences from overshadowing the collaboration, everyone involved has agreed to refrain from disparaging each other's methods or undercutting one another's findings.

The FDA argues that its recently published study was separate from the CLARITY program, which launched in 2012, and that the publicity surrounding it didn't violate the CLARITY agreement. But some CLARITY researchers find this disingenuous. "This was explicitly a pilot study for CLARITY," says Fred vom Saal, a biology professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia and a member of the CLARITY team. "If you look at the study design and the dosing, it's identical. The claim that it had nothing to do with CLARITY is at best bizarre." Vom Saal and his colleagues are also livid that the FDA would publish a study based on older testing methods in the midst of their collaboration and treat it as the near-final word on BPA. "It's not surprising that the FDA wouldn't find anything using these archaic techniques," vom Saal says. "That's the reason that CLARITY exists. That's why they're spending all this money to bring in highly skilled scientists whose methods are designed to detect the effects of BPA." 

The outside CLARITY researchers are even more troubled by the FDA's recent revelation that the contamination from its just-published study has spread to the CLARITY lab, which is in the same building. An FDA spokesman told Mother Jones that the agency is making "all attempts to limit" unintended BPA exposure. But so far it hasn't pinpointed the source of contamination, and its partners in academia fear the ongoing problem could affect their results and cast doubt on CLARITY's findings. "Honestly, we may be throwing millions of taxpayer dollars down the toilet," says one CLARITY researcher. 

The FDA, meanwhile, is sticking to its long-standing position that low-level BPA exposure isn't harmful. Just last Friday, the agency rejected a 2008 petition from the Natural Resources Defense Council requesting that BPA be banned from food packaging and containers, on the grounds that the organization had "failed to provide sufficient data"​ linking the chemical to disease. Among academic scientists and public health advocates, this touched off a another groundswell of outrage. "T​he next decision the FDA should make is to remove 'responsible for protecting the public health' from its mission statement," Jane Houlihan, senior vice president for research at the Environmental Working Group, told the Huffington Post. "It's false advertising. Allowing a chemical as toxic as BPA…to remain in food means the agency has veered dangerously off course."​​​​

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IF YOU LIKED THIS, YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE...

• The Scary New Evidence on BPA-Free Plastics

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• This Man Wants You to Believe That BPA-Laced Plastic Is Harmless

  News outlets have heralded a new report finding the plastic chemical BPA safe for humans. Turns out, it's an unpublished study by an industry-connected scientist.

• Can BPA Make You Fat?

  New studies suggest that the ubiquitous chemical could be linked to our national obesity problem.

• The Frog of War

  Atrazine makes male frogs grow ovaries. It's in your water supply. It's also the cause of one of science's weirdest feuds ever.

• A Frightening Field Guide to Common Plastics

  Read this. Then check your pantry.

New Law to Allow Record Number of Executions in Total Secrecy

by Kerry-anne

The US state of Tennessee is seeking to execute record numbers of death row inmates this year, and a new law means these deaths will take place in almost total secrecy.

As the Times Free Press reports:

Never before has Tennessee asked to execute so many of the condemned.

Officials, believing they are free of the latest round of challenges to Tennessee's death penalty, recently asked the state Supreme Court for execution dates for 10 death row inmates.

The new law will keep almost all of the details of these state sanctioned killings secret to the public, outside the reach of the media and even the Freedom of Information Act.  Basic details such as who put the inmate to death and the method of their execution will become privileged information.

As The Tennessean comments:

The state of Tennessee doesn't want you to know how it will kill the condemned.

It doesn't want you to know who will flip the switch, sending a lethal dose of pentobarbital through the veins of death row inmates. And it doesn't want you to know how it obtained that pentobarbital — which isn't available from any legal drug manufacturer — as well. State correction officials have even banned the media from visiting inmates on death row.

This new shroud of secrecy over Tennessee's death row was enabled by a law passed last year. But 11 death row inmates have sued the state, arguing that this information should remain in the public domain, as part of the critical role of citizen oversight of the death penalty.  In fact, advocates of transparency argue the sole purpose of this law is to keep those critical eyes away.

“Tennesseans should be concerned because these executions are ostensibly for them,” assistant public defender Kelley Henry, who represents several of the inmates, pointed out. “They are carried out in the name of the people.

“The people have a right to know that the Department of Corrections isn’t torturing citizens using public funds.”

The first of Tennessee’s 10 scheduled executions is set for April 22nd.

Tennessee is not alone in passing this kind of law.  Legislatures in Georgia, Oklahoma and Missouri all passed similar laws after manufacturers began refusing to sell traditional execution drugs to U.S. states in a public bid to end their complicity in the death penalty. New drugs have been criticized for being extremely cruel. In one case, it took an inmate 26 minutes to die an excruciating death.  The new laws will make it all but impossible for such details to come to light, and the advocacy of human beings being put to death by the state an ever more difficult task.

SOURCE

Resistance Against the New Youtube Police

Published on Mar 23, 2014

In this video Luke Rudkowski breaks down what occurred to fellow youtuber Mark Dice recently with the termination of his channel. We can only speculate but at this point many people are pointing fingers are the "super flaggers" 200 individuals some government employees that have been recently granted extra powers to shut down videos by youtube. The situation is still developing and even though WeAreChange and Mark Dice disagree on many issues and approaches we still want to bring as much attention to this case as possible because it could be a dangerous precedent to youtube freedom.




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For the First Time in History, Israel Suspiciously Closes All Embassies ...

Published on Mar 23, 2014

More info at links:

http://voiceofrussia.com/news/2014_03...

http://voiceofrussia.com/news/2014_03...

http://israelforeignaffairs.com/all-i...

For the First Time in History, Israel Suspiciously Closes All Embassies ...

Published on Mar 23, 2014

More info at links:

http://voiceofrussia.com/news/2014_03...

http://voiceofrussia.com/news/2014_03...

http://israelforeignaffairs.com/all-i...

49% of US believes gov't is trying to kill them (+playlist)

Published on Mar 23, 2014

A new study from the University of Chicago says that nearly half of all Americans believe medical conspiracy theories. Researchers polled a bunch of people about whether or not they believed in six popular theories. 49% agreed with at least one. All the theories involve the US government doing terrible things to essentially kill people. Some in the MSM used the study to say people are nuts; The Resident thinks it says something else. Follow The Resident athttp://www.twitter.com/TheResident

Find RT America in your area: http://rt.com/where-to-watch/
Or watch us online: http://rt.com/on-air/rt-america-air/

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The truth is out: money is just an IOU, and the banks are rolling in it

The Bank of England's dose of honesty throws the theoretical basis for austerity out the window

• 
• • David Graeber
  • theguardian.com, Tuesday 18 March 2014 06.47 EDT
  • 
    

'The central bank can print as much money as it wishes.' Photograph: Alamy

Back in the 1930s, Henry Ford is supposed to have remarked that it was a good thing that most Americans didn't know how banking really works, because if they did, "there'd be a revolution before tomorrow morning".

Last week, something remarkable happened. The Bank of England let the cat out of the bag. In a paper called "Money Creation in the Modern Economy", co-authored by three economists from the Bank's Monetary Analysis Directorate, they stated outright that most common assumptions of how banking works are simply wrong, and that the kind of populist, heterodox positions more ordinarily associated with groups such as Occupy Wall Streetare correct. In doing so, they have effectively thrown the entire theoretical basis for austerity out of the window.

To get a sense of how radical the Bank's new position is, consider the conventional view, which continues to be the basis of all respectable debate on public policy. People put their money in banks. Banks then lend that money out at interest – either to consumers, or to entrepreneurs willing to invest it in some profitable enterprise. True, the fractional reserve system does allow banks to lend out considerably more than they hold in reserve, and true, if savings don't suffice, private banks can seek to borrow more from the central bank.

The central bank can print as much money as it wishes. But it is also careful not to print too much. In fact, we are often told this is why independent central banks exist in the first place. If governments could print money themselves, they would surely put out too much of it, and the resulting inflation would throw the economy into chaos. Institutions such as the Bank of England or US Federal Reserve were created to carefully regulate the money supply to prevent inflation. This is why they are forbidden to directly fund the government, say, by buying treasury bonds, but instead fund private economic activity that the government merely taxes.

It's this understanding that allows us to continue to talk about money as if it were a limited resource like bauxite or petroleum, to say "there's just not enough money" to fund social programmes, to speak of the immorality of government debt or of public spending "crowding out" the private sector. What the Bank of England admitted this week is that none of this is really true. To quote from its own initial summary: "Rather than banks receiving deposits when households save and then lending them out, bank lending creates deposits" … "In normal times, the central bank does not fix the amount of money in circulation, nor is central bank money 'multiplied up' into more loans and deposits."

In other words, everything we know is not just wrong – it's backwards. When banks make loans, they create money. This is because money is really just an IOU. The role of the central bank is to preside over a legal order that effectively grants banks the exclusive right to create IOUs of a certain kind, ones that the government will recognise as legal tender by its willingness to accept them in payment of taxes. There's really no limit on how much banks could create, provided they can find someone willing to borrow it. They will never get caught short, for the simple reason that borrowers do not, generally speaking, take the cash and put it under their mattresses; ultimately, any money a bank loans out will just end up back in some bank again. So for the banking system as a whole, every loan just becomes another deposit. What's more, insofar as banks do need to acquire funds from the central bank, they can borrow as much as they like; all the latter really does is set the rate of interest, the cost of money, not its quantity. Since the beginning of the recession, the US and British central banks have reduced that cost to almost nothing. In fact, with "quantitative easing" they've been effectively pumping as much money as they can into the banks, without producing any inflationary effects.

What this means is that the real limit on the amount of money in circulation is not how much the central bank is willing to lend, but how much government, firms, and ordinary citizens, are willing to borrow. Government spending is the main driver in all this (and the paper does admit, if you read it carefully, that the central bank does fund the government after all). So there's no question of public spending "crowding out" private investment. It's exactly the opposite.

Why did the Bank of England suddenly admit all this? Well, one reason is because it's obviously true. The Bank's job is to actually run the system, and of late, the system has not been running especially well. It's possible that it decided that maintaining the fantasy-land version of economics that has proved so convenient to the rich is simply a luxury it can no longer afford.

But politically, this is taking an enormous risk. Just consider what might happen if mortgage holders realised the money the bank lent them is not, really, the life savings of some thrifty pensioner, but something the bank just whisked into existence through its possession of a magic wand which we, the public, handed over to it.

Historically, the Bank of England has tended to be a bellwether, staking out seeming radical positions that ultimately become new orthodoxies. If that's what's happening here, we might soon be in a position to learn if Henry Ford was right.

Coal Company Caught Dumping 61 Million Gallons of Waste Into NC Drinking Water

by Jameson

North Carolina regulators have caught Duke Energy, the largest electricity company in the country, illegally and intentionally dumping up to 61 million gallons of toxic coal waste into the Cape Fear river - the same river several cities in the state get their drinking water from.

According to the State Department of Environment and Natural Resources, an investigation revealed that Duke Energy has been committing the crime for months before an environmental group Waterkeeper Alliance found them out using aerial photos. The photos revealed that Duke Energy had been sucking water directly from a large coal ash dump and distributing it into the nearby woods and into a canal leading to the river. The waste is said to contain such highly toxic chemicals as arsenic, lead, mercury, and other heavy metals. All of which is highly deadly to humans, but also to the wildlife whose environment Duke Energy just sprayed with the stuff many times over.

After North Carolina authorities were alerted to the illegal and potentially deadly atrocity being committed in their own backyard, they gave Duke Energy a heads up. Rather than showing up with handcuffs, they phoned the company and told them they would be coming over the next day to investigate. By the time they caught there, Duke had stopped the coal dump and attempted to cover their tracks. Unfortunately, they had one weak link. It was Waterkeeper Alliance's photos that proved Duke Energy's undoing.

"The incident shows the importance of citizen involvement," said Frank Holleman, senior attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center. "Had the Waterkeeper Alliance not been inspecting that site, it's likely that no one would have known it was happening, or DENR would not have found it until later and even more contaminated water might have been pumped into the river."

Remarkably, this isn't even Duke Energy's first violation this month. In fact, they've been cited an astonishing eight times for environmental violations in March - and the month isn't even over. It seems as though, cutting corners and committing crimes is part of the business plan, rather than a deviation from it.

That shouldn't be surprising when we consider just how cheap it is to break the law rather than abide by it as an energy company. The biggest polluters in the country almost always get away with it, and when they don't their punishments are hardly worthy of the name. Let's take a look at one example from Duke itself:

In the process of litigating a previous coal ash dump violation, North Carolina regulators where in the process of offering Duke Energy a settlement that would make them pay just a $99,000 fine and absolutely no requirement that they help clean up the mess they had made (the state would have to pick up that tab). A $99,000 fine might sound like a lot, but actually it would have been a serious win for Duke. The company is worth $50 billion and its CEO makes double that fine in a month. Instead of hitting Duke with a punishment so harsh that they would never think of polluting again, regulators were ready to slap them on the wrist and go out for celebratory drinks. The only reason the deal wasn't signed was because, in a truly inspiring cosmic event, just before both sides could put ink to paper, a facility run by Duke Energy had another massive leakcoating 70 miles of the Dan River with toxic sludge. Regulators, pressured by a public that had finally had enough, backed away from the deal. That may seem like an awful run of bad luck for a company that was just about to be let off the hook, but it was almost inevitable - Duke Energy pollutes like the rest of us breathe.

But all of that is ancient history, or as the rest of us call it, February. Duke went back to the error of its ways and is back to being charged with gross misconduct again. It has yet to be seen whether this one will be the one where prosecutors get serious about environmental destruction.  The regulatory department, DENR, itself has come under suspicion for being far too close with the companies its supposed to watch over. For example, in the case of the Dan River spill, DENR was so lenient with Duke that the U.S. Justice Department said it was launching a criminal investigation into the mishandling of the case. What tipped the feds off? Was it the laughably small fine? The slow as molasses investigation? or maybe the phone calls from regulators to Duke Energy announcing the days they would be investigating them ahead of time?