Adnan Al-Daini

Something stands out when one tries to understand the roots of the economic crash and the following crises that are currently engulfing Europe and the US.  It is how money is created.

There are two related elements to this. One is what the bank does if you go to it and ask for a loan for a business, mortgage …etc., and the second is fractional reserve banking. Without some knowledge of these two tools of finance, no true understanding of the way the economic system works or the crash is possible.

The campaigning group Positive Money explains that only 3% of the money supply is in the form of notes and coins created by the UK government. The rest, 97%, is electronic money created by banks out of nothing when they make a loan. It is created by typing the amount on a computer and crediting it to your account. The interest charged varies, and in the case of loans on credit cards it is exorbitant. With this power at hand, it is not surprising that banks use the hard sell to get people to take loans. An enormous part of the money created in this way, hundreds of billions of pounds over the 10 years before the crash, found its way into financing mortgages for housing, which grew from1997-2007 by 370%. Hundreds of billions more of this new money went into financial services and casino type banking, "harming the real economy and lowering employment and growth."

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Naomi Wolf

New documents prove what was once dismissed as paranoid fantasy: totally integrated corporate-state repression of dissent

It was more sophisticated than we had imagined: new documents show that the violent crackdown on Occupy last fall - so mystifying at the time - was not just coordinated at the level of the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and local police. The crackdown, which involved, as you may recall, violent arrests, group disruption, canister missiles to the skulls of protesters, people held in handcuffs so tight they were injured, people held in bondage till they were forced to wet or soil themselves -was coordinated with the big banks themselves.

The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, in a groundbreaking scoop that should once more shame major US media outlets (why are nonprofits now some of the only entities in America left breaking major civil liberties news?), filed this request. The document - reproduced here in an easily searchable format - shows a terrifying network of coordinated DHS, FBI, police, regional fusion center, and private-sector activity so completely merged into one another that the monstrous whole is, in fact, one entity: in some cases, bearing a single name, the Domestic Security Alliance Council. And it reveals this merged entity to have one centrally planned, locally executed mission. The documents, in short, show the cops and DHS working for and with banks to target, arrest, and politically disable peaceful American citizens.

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Webster G. Tarpley

In the annals of international criminal aggression, the destabilization, dismemberment, and ultimate annihilation of independent Czechoslovakia in 1938 and 1939 by Hitler’s Nazi regime has come to occupy a place of particular infamy.

The eagerness of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French premier Edouard Daladier, at the infamous Munich conference of September 1938 with Hitler and Mussolini, to sacrifice the national existence of Czechoslovakia in the service of their policy of appeasing and supporting Hitler’s eastward expansion is widely regarded as the event which placed Europe on track for the outbreak of World War II slightly less than a year later.

It has been less widely noted that the 2011-2012 destabilization of Syria by NATO and the reactionary Persian Gulf monarchies has been closely following the script of Hitler’s onslaught against Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1938.

Hitler was hostile to Czechoslovakia because it possessed a highly effective army of 30 modern divisions, a formidable system of border forts, was allied to France in the framework of the Little Entente, and also had a mutual defense treaty with the Soviet Union. After Hitler’s remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936 and his absorption of Austria through the Anschluss of March 1938, he quickly turned his attention to smashing Czechoslovakia. William L. Shirer’s 1960 study The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is readily available in libraries and will be cited to establish some important facts.

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