Let us be clear, that in the aftermath of 9/11,
American policy vis-à-vis its relations with the rest of the world
changed forever under the aegis of the Bush Doctrine:
The Bush Doctrine
is a phrase used to describe various related foreign policy principles of
former United States
president George W. Bush. The phrase initially described the policy that
the United States had the right to secure itself from countries that harbor
or give aid to terrorist groups, which was used to justify the 2001
Invasion of Afghanistan.
Later it came to
include additional elements, including the
controversial policy of preventive war, which held that the United States
should depose foreign regimes that represented a potential or perceived threat to the security of
the United States, even if that threat was not immediate; a policy of
spreading democracy around the world, especially in the Middle East, as a
strategy for combating terrorism; and a willingness to pursue U.S.
military interests in a unilateral way. Some of these policies were codified in
a National Security Council text entitled the National Security Strategy
of the United States published on September 20, 2002.
In
a military sense, we are all familiar with and can visibly recognize the
physical manifestations of the implementation of the Bush Doctrine through
the occupation of both Iraq and Afghanistan.
But what about warfare from an economic
perspective?:
Economic warfare can win terror war: Ronald Reagan personally crafted a
security-minded economic strategy that toppled the Soviet Union—a blueprint George W.
Bush could use to defeat terrorists
Nov 12, 2002 by J. Michael Waller
Al-Qaeda recently announced economic warfare
against the United States
and other Western countries. U.S.
intelligence expects years of attacks on the economic infrastructure of the
civilized world. For its part, the United States has an arsenal of economic
weapons for this war, but critics fear it may have forgotten how to use them
strategically--an important point, because proponents believe that strategic
economic warfare thoughtfully applied by the United States could save
innocent lives and avoid military conflict while achieving the same
objectives as an all-out bombing or invasion.
Lessons of successful
economic-warfare operations that hastened the collapse of the Soviet Union, veteran practitioners tell
INSIGHT, are valuable guideposts to help the Bush administration develop an
integrated economic-warfare strategy.
Many weapons in the
economic arsenal already are in play in the war on terrorism. The United
States and other governments are going after bank accounts and electronic
money transfers of terrorists and their sponsors, seizing assets and running
a spectrum of policy options from covert "black operations" against
terrorist financiers to full-scale embargoes against terrorist regimes. U.S. dominance of
information technology and space for orbital satellite communications gives Washington
immense superiority over any other world power.
The Department of Defense (DOD) defines economic warfare as the
"aggressive use of economic means to achieve national objectives." Economic warfare can range from blockades and sanctions to physical
attacks on an enemy's agricultural or industrial production, workforce and
distribution systems to disruption of financial transactions and information
networks. The concept dates to antiquity, from the plagues that destroyed the
Egyptian pharaoh's crops, as reported in the Book of Exodus, to the enemy who
sowed weeds on top of his neighbor's wheat in the New
Testament……..
National Objectives or National Security, [take
your pick]
On
June 11, 2009 – Bank of America CEO, Ken Lewis, gave sworn testimony to
law makers on Capitol Hill describing how regulators, [Fed Chairman] Ben
Bernanke and [then Treasury Secretary] Hank Paulson “threatened”
him to keep mum and not disclose material
adverse financial changes [MAC] in Merrill Lynch’s financial position
to B of A shareholders, prior to B of A acquiring Merrill in the fall of 2008:
Watch
and Listen to Lewis testimony on C-Span here.
If
you listen to Lewis’ testimony, as we did, you will hear him interact
with law makers and hear references to the [then] successful merger of B of A
and Merrill being ushered along in the name of “not wanting to
disclose” as well as “not spooking the Capital
Markets”. Sounds a lot like
a “hush-and-rush” in the name of National Security, ehhh?
Speaking of Obscured Motives and Actions..
It
was first reported by Dawn Kopecki back in early 2006 [2 ½ years prior
to the B of A / Merrill incident] when she reported in BusinessWeek Online in
a piece titled, Intelligence Czar Can Waive SEC
Rules,
"President George W. Bush has
bestowed on his [then] intelligence czar, John Negroponte, broad authority, in the name of national security, to
excuse publicly traded companies from their usual accounting and
securities-disclosure obligations. Notice of the development came in a brief
entry in the Federal Register, dated May 5, 2006, that was opaque to the
untrained eye."
What
this means folks, if institutions like J.P. Morgan are deemed to be integral
to U.S. National Security - they could be "legally" excused from
reporting their true financial condition.
The
entry in the Federal Register is described as follows:
The memo Bush signed on May 5, which was
published seven days later in the Federal Register, had the unrevealing title
"Assignment of Function Relating to Granting of Authority for Issuance
of Certain Directives: Memorandum for the Director of National
Intelligence." In the document, Bush addressed Negroponte, saying:
"I hereby assign to you the function of the President under section
13(b)(3)(A) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended."
A trip to the statute books showed that the amended version of the 1934 act
states that "with respect to
matters concerning the national security of the United States,"
the President or the head of an
Executive Branch agency may exempt companies from certain critical legal
obligations. These obligations include keeping accurate "books, records,
and accounts" and maintaining "a system of internal accounting
controls sufficient" to ensure the propriety of financial transactions
and the preparation of financial statements in compliance with
"generally accepted accounting principles."
Given
what we now know has occurred – isn’t anyone curious as to which institutions
might have been granted a pass in the action referenced above?
We’ve
included a link to the C-Span coverage of the Lewis testimony in this article
but we originally watched it “live” on Bloomberg Financial
TV. We took special note of
Bloomberg’s live coverage and how they preemptively “cut
away” from, and for the entirety of Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s [D -
OH] questioning of Lewis – to give an update on the auction results of
a 30 year bond auction. Not
surprisingly and predictably, the Kucinich questioning was, HANDS DOWN - the most direct and
indicting exchange of all Mr. Lewis’s testimony.
Mr.
Kucinich’s questioning of Mr. Lewis implied that the party with the UGLIEST and most ADVERSE financial position was B of A itself – not Merrill
– and that Ken Lewis, threatened invoking the ‘MAC clause’
to extort more tax-payer’s-money / support for B of A’s own
increasingly dilapidated financial position. The record is clear that ole Kenny and
B of A did, in fact, get their additional dollars. It makes you wonder if ole Kenny might
have dug himself his own grave, ehhh?
The
Kucinich questioning / testimony begins at the 19:00 minute mark of the
C-Span piece linked above.
Getting the Upper Hand in Rigged Markets
Because
criminal shenanigans like those chronicled above have become such common
practice in our ‘rigged’ capital markets [take note of how the
price of gold “took off” when the ‘damning’ Ken Lewis
testimony began this morning at 10:13 a.m.], we have prepared a special
report for subscribers outlining steps that investors can take to help
insulate their own investment portfolios from these and other despicable acts.
The United States
has long practiced covert, economic warfare even though this fact is seldom,
if ever, mentioned in the mainstream press:
Blurring the lines between military and
civilian Psychological Operations is nothing new. In 1989, US forces in
Panama blasted Guns N' Roses' "Welcome to the Jungle" into the
Vatican Embassy during negotiations for the handover of General Manuel
Noriega, and from 1998-1999, US
military PSYOP personnel interned at both CNN and NPR.
It
is this fascist – leaning “Pollyanna Creep” – a long
drawn out merger of corporate / media / government which have blurred the
lines between regulator and the regulated.
Understanding Exactly Who You Are Playing /
Betting Against
In
recent years the not so invisible hands of government and monetary elites
have increasingly been exerting their influence in our formerly
“free” markets through the veiled actions of the
President’s Working Group on Financial Markets [aka the Plunge
Protection Team or PPT] in futile, vain efforts [in the long rate] to
‘rig’ outcomes in financial markets that are consistent with public
perception of confidence in irredeemable fiat money.
Sometimes
the defense of the currency revolves around carefully crafted disinformation
campaigns by people in high places – like Ben Bernanke’s recent
pronouncements about the Output Gap before lawmakers on Capitol Hill:
BERNANKE ON INFLATION EXPECTATIONS
"I
think I would note that you look around for evidence of inflation, inflation
expectations, you're not going to find very much.
If you look, for example, at
surveys of consumers, if you look at the forecasts of professional
forecasters, if you look at the spreads between indexed and non-indexed
bonds, all of those things are quite consistent with inflation remaining
stable and well within the bounds that the Federal Reserve believes is
consistent with price stability." "What we're seeing in the markets is that prices, manufacturing
goods, for example, and wages in nominal terms are not showing any signs of a
wage-price spiral……..
What
makes Mr. Bernanke’s Fed speak so disingenuous is his alluding to
inflation being an outcome of wage pressures, which have been engineered to
be benign through outsourcing of jobs and sieve-like porous border with a low
wage country [Mexico] on the southern flank. Take note how the ‘higher
wage’ northern border [Canada]
has always been empirically, relatively, “well guarded”. Prattle about these “engineered
outcomes” is misdirection anyway - owing to the fact that INFLATION IS AND ALWAYS HAS BEEN A MONETARY EVENT – and here’s
what the Fed has been doing to the money supply:
Historically
on the inflation front, the Fed has only had to concern itself with Dollars
held Domestically. This meant
that the Fed – at any given time in a Domestic sense – could
counter-act any Domestically created money-glut by tightening domestic
credit, thereby, reducing the domestic velocity [turn-over] of fiat money
– hence – inflationary pressures at home.
What
has now occurred – IN THE GLOBALIZED ECONOMY – the Federal
Reserve has acted in their customary way in the wake of their own reckless
monetary excess, by restricting the creation of “new” fiat credit
[the CREDIT CRUNCH WE ARE NOW EXPERIENCING]. The problem for the Fed is that
the Chinese have “OVERTURNED” or
“trumped” Fed policy [by virtue of the staggering amount of
Dollars they hold arising from their Balance of Trade Surplus] by extending
Dollar Reserve Derived credit to spur demand [increasing foreign velocity of
U.S. Dollars] – which has, in turn, led to GLOBAL
INFLATION.
Effectively,
the U.S. Federal Reserve has lost a significant amount of control of their
own financial house and puts their current policies of money printing [aka
inflation] at odds with their biggest creditor – CHINA.
The
inaccurate, polluted, interventionist and often baseless revisionist economic
accounts increasingly served up by the Private Federal Reserve [which is no
more Federal than Federal Express and has no reserves], has understandably
led to the Fed having an IMAGE PROBLEM:
Lousy Wizards, Curtains to Free
Markets and Dogs Barking At the Moon
Fed Intends to Hire Lobbyist in Campaign to Buttress Its Image
June 5 (Bloomberg) -- The Federal Reserve intends to hire a veteran
lobbyist as it seeks to counter skepticism in Congress about the central
bank’s growing power over the U.S.
financial system, people familiar with the matter said.
Linda Robertson currently handles government, community and public
affairs at Johns
Hopkins
University
in Baltimore,
and headed the Washington
lobbying office of Enron Corp., the energy trading company that collapsed in
2002 after an accounting scandal. She was also an adviser to all three of the
Clinton
administration’s Treasury secretaries.
Robertson would help the Fed manage relations with lawmakers seeking
greater oversight of a central bank that has used emergency powers to prevent
Wall Street’s demise. While she wasn’t tied to Enron’s
fraud, her association with the firm may raise questions, analysts said.
“Some members of Congress think there are votes in attacking the
Fed” after it “unnecessarily and unwisely entangled monetary
policy with fiscal policy,” said former St. Louis Fed President William
Poole. “The Fed is going to have a tricky time of unwinding what has
been done” and will need to “keep in touch with members of
Congress more thoroughly,” said Poole, now senior fellow with the Cato
Institute in Washington.
Robertson served under Treasury Secretaries Lawrence Summers, Robert
Rubin and Lloyd Bentsen. She didn’t return calls seeking comment.
Summers Tie
Summers now heads the
White House National Economic Council. Along with Treasury Secretary Timothy
Geithner, he is leading Obama administration efforts to broaden the economic
rescue and overhaul financial regulation. He has been mentioned as a possible
successor to Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke should Bernanke not be renominated
when his term ends in January.
With
the U.S. Dollar still being the world’s reserve currency – and in
light of the money printing spendthrifts that manage it, it is a constant
up-hill battle [or psychological warfare, take your pick?] for integrated
elites to make believers in their Public Theater of
Operation [that
would be all of us]. This has been achieved by “engineering” -
through Fed appointed proxies or agents, like J.P. Morgan-Chase and others,
shorting gold futures [derivatives] to suppress the price of gold and other
strategic, inflation-bell-weather commodity prices.
It
is “us” – we, the grass roots folks, who are increasingly
becoming more educated / empowered through knowledge gained and shared -
through the “free internet”.
This poses a threat to these strategically and sometimes recklessly
engineered / manufactured market manipulations. Accordingly, the establishment views
the internet as an enemy
"weapons system":
“…a 2003 Pentagon document called
Information Operations Roadmap detailed the US
military's approach to exploiting information in order to "keep pace
with warfighter needs and support defense transformation." Personally
approved by former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, the document was declassified
in 2006 and covers everything from the Pentagon's plans for Computer Network
Attack ("We Must Fight the Net") to beefing up the use of Psychological
Operations ("We Must Improve PSYOP") to manipulating
information through means including: "Radio/ TV/Print/ Web media
designed to directly modify behavior and distributed in theater supporting
military endeavors in semi or non-permissive environment."
Rob Kirby
KirbyAnalytics.com
Rob Kirby
is proprietor of Kirbyanalytics.com and sales agent for Bullion Custodial
Services. Subscribe to
Kirbyanalytics news letter here. Buy physical gold, silver or platinum
bullion here.
All
articles by Rob Kirby
Subscribers to Kirbyanalytics.com are
profiting from paid in-depth research reports, analysis and commentary on
rapidly unfolding economic developments. Subscribe here.
|