"It’s A Rotten System" Ron Paul Says: US Elections Are Rigged, Voting Simply Used To Pacify The Public
By Tyler Durden
Submitted by MintPress via TheAntiMedia.org,
Dr. Ron Paul says the American electoral system is rigged to keep “independent thinkers” from succeeding.
“I see elections as so much of a charade,” the former Texas congressman said during an April 11 appearance on RT America’s “The Fishtank.” “So much deceit goes on.”
Paul is no stranger to the twisted rules of the American presidential horse race. He ran for the highest office as a Libertarian in 1988, and in 2008 and 2012 as a Republican.
He arguably came closest to the nomination in 2012, when the GOP amended its party regulations to prevent the former Texas representative from stealing Mitt Romney’s thunder.
Rule 40(b) of “The Rules of the Republican Party” was changed so the Republican National Committee could “limit the visibility and power of libertarian-minded Texas Rep. Ron Paul at the convention and thus present a unified front behind Mitt Romney, the presumptive nominee,” according to David Byler, an elections analyst at RealClearPolitics. The rule requires that, in order to win the nomination, a candidate must have the support of a majority of delegates from eight states.
Although recent wins have tipped Sen. Ted Cruz past the cut off, the rule as written came close to helping Trump take the nomination. Paul warned that the GOP’s machinations to block Donald Trump are a sign of a corrupt, undemocratic system.
“I’ve worked on the assumption … for many, many decades, that whether there’s a Republican or a Democrat president, the people who want to keep the status quo seems to have their finger in the pot and can control things,” he said in the interview.
“They just get so nervous, though, if they have an independent thinker out there — whether it’s Sanders, or Trump or Ron Paul, they’re going to be very desperate to try to change things.”
Paul had nothing but scorn for Trump’s policies: “He’s offering us nothing new, and he’s going backward in many ways.”
He suggested that the 2016 election is “a lot more entertainment than anything else” because none of the candidates “have answers” to modern political problems.
Even so, Paul interprets the success of these outsider candidates as a sign that “more people are discovering that the system is all rigged and voting is just pacification for the voters and it really doesn’t count.”
“I don’t think there’s an easy way out for the establishment or the parties,” he noted, explaining that Democrats and Republicans would both rather risk “further alienation of the people” than allow a candidate to succeed who could shake up the system.
Paul recalled his own 2012 encounter with Rule 40(b) as an important political lesson for both himself and the American people.
“I was upset about it but didn’t want to waste too much energy being angry because this is the way the system works,” he said. “It’s a rotten system.”
Watch the entire interview below:
Billion Dollar Lawsuits Filed Following Deutsche Bank’s Admission Of Gold, Silver Rigging
By Tyler Durden
Barely a day had passed since the historic admission of gold and silver price rigging by Deutsche bank, which as we reported on Thursday was settled with not only “valuable monetary consideration”, but Deutsche’s “cooperation in pursuing claims” against other members of the cartel, i.e., exposing the manipulation of other cartel members, and the class action lawsuits have begun.
Overnight, two class action lawsuits seeking $1 billion in damages on behalf of Canadian gold and silver investors were launched in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice.
The first class action alleges that the defendants, including The Bank of Nova Scotia, conspired to manipulate prices in the silver market under the guise of the benchmark fixing process, known as the London Silver Fixing, for a fifteen-year period.
More from the suit:
It is further alleged that the defendants manipulated the bid-ask spreads of silver market instruments throughout the trading day in order to enhance their profits at the expense of the class. This alleged conduct affected not only those investors who bought and sold physical silver, but those who bought and sold silver-related financial instruments.
Law enforcement and regulatory authorities in the United States, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom have active investigations into the defendants’ conduct in the precious metals market.
The case is on behalf of all persons in Canada who, between January 1, 1999 and August 14, 2014, transacted in a silver market instrument either directly or indirectly, including investors who participated in an investment or equity fund, mutual fund, hedge fund, pension fund or any other investment vehicle that transacted in a silver market instrument.
A copy of the Notice of Action can be found at sotosllp.com. Potential class members can register on the website to obtain more information as the case progresses.
The plaintiffs and the proposed national class are being represented by a national team of lawyers from Sotos LLP (www.sotosllp.com), Koskie Minsky LLP (www.kmlaw.ca) and Camp Fiorante Matthews Mogerman (www.cfmlawyers.ca) with offices in Ontario and British Columbia.
An identical class action lawsuit was also launched for gold manipulation.
This is just the tip of the iceberg: with DB’s official “admission”, countless other plaintiffs will step up, and everyone who may have “lost” money trading gold over the noted 15 year period will surely demand to be made whole.
More importantly, we are curious to see what if anything the discovery process will unveil. This is what we said on Thursday:
Since this is just one of many lawsuits filed over the past two years in Manhattan federal court in which investors accused banks of conspiring to rig rates or prices in financial and commodities markets, we expect that now that DB has “turned” that much more curious information about precious metals rigging will emerge, and will confirm what the “bugs” had said all along: that the precious metals market has been rigged all along.
Now that Canada has broken the seal, we expect similar lawsuits to follow in the U.S.
Source: Billion Dollar Lawsuits Filed Following Deutsche Bank’s Admission Of Gold, Silver Rigging
‘Hamilton’ actors to get share of profits from hit musical
“Hamilton” actors and producers have reached an agreement over sharing some of the profits from the hit musical. …read more
Source: ‘Hamilton’ actors to get share of profits from hit musical
Saudi Arabia Threatens To Liquidate Its Treasury Holdings If Congress Probes Its Role In Sept 11 Attacks
By Tyler Durden
Back in January, when the market was watching in shocked silence as oil prices were crashing to decade lows and as concerns emerged that Saudi Arabia may need to commence selling its vast, if unquantified, USD reserves, we wrote a post titled “Attention Finally Turns To Saudi Arabia’s “Secret” US Treasury Holdings” where we noted something very surprising: whereas we do know that Saudi Arabia is the owner of the world’s third largest USD reserves…
… their actual composition remains as a secret, because while the US discloses the explicit Treasury holdings of all other nations, Saudi Arabia’s holdings, for some unknown reason, are not officially disclosed.
“It’s a secret of the vast U.S. Treasury market, a holdover from an age of oil shortages and mighty petrodollars,” Bloomberg wrote of Saudi Arabia’s US Treasury holdings.
“As a matter of policy, the Treasury has never disclosed the holdings of Saudi Arabia, long a key ally in the volatile Middle East, and instead groups it with 14 other mostly OPEC nations including Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Nigeria,” Bloomberg goes on to note, adding that the rules are different for almost everyone else. Although Saudi Arabia’s “secret” is protected by “an unusual blackout by the U.S. Treasury Department,” for more than a hundred other countries, from China to the Vatican, the Treasury provides a detailed breakdown of how much U.S. debt each holds.”
So who does know how much US paper the Saudis are sitting on? Well, the Saudis of course,”a handful of Treasury officials,” and some bureaucrats at the Fed, Bloomberg says, noting that “for everyone else, it’s a guessing game.“
Yes, a “guessing game,” but one that will very soon have profound consequences for markets and for geopolitics.
We closed with a simple, if suddenly very prophetic question:
“who would be the new patron saint of the US Treasury Department in the event the Saudis drawdown all of their reserves and decide to diversify away from USD assets… Put differently, who will monetize the US deficit if relations between Washington and Riyadh hit the skids over Iran?”
It is this question that has suddenly reemerged with a bang, and could rock the US administration to its core as what until recently was a “fringe conspiracy theory” is suddenly exposed as an all too unpleasant fact, and becomes the biggest political scandal to rock the U.S. in years, in the process maybe even crushing the friendly diplomatic relations the U.S. has held for years with its biggest Mid-East ally, Saudi Arabia.
* * *
First, a quick tangent: we have been greatly surprised by the reemergence of the topic of September 11 in recent weeks, and specifically the taboo – in official circles – issue whether there was a “Saudi connection” in the biggest terrorist attack on US soil. Just last weekend, out of the blue, 60 Minutes held segment on the “28 pages” that were classified in the Congressional investigative report into 9/11 – pages that allegedly confirm the Saudi connection.
To be sure, …read more
The Fed Sends A Frightening Letter To JPMorgan, Corporate Media Yawns
By Tyler Durden
Submitted by Pam Martens and Russ Martens via WallStreetOnParade.com,
Yesterday the Federal Reserve released a 19-page letter that it and the FDIC had issued to Jamie Dimon, the Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, on April 12 as a result of its failure to present a credible plan for winding itself down if the bank failed. The letter carried frightening passages and large blocks of redacted material in critical areas, instilling in any careful reader a sense of panic about the U.S. financial system.
A rational observer of Wall Street’s serial hubris might have expected some key segments of this letter to make it into the business press. A mere eight years ago the United States experienced a complete meltdown of its financial system, leading to the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. President Obama and regulators have been assuring us over these intervening eight years that things are under control as a result of the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation. But according to the letter the Fed and FDIC issued on April 12 to JPMorgan Chase, the country’s largest bank with over $2 trillion in assets and $51 trillion in notional amounts of derivatives, things are decidedly not under control.
At the top of page 11, the Federal regulators reveal that they have “identified a deficiency” in JPMorgan’s wind-down plan which if not properly addressed could “pose serious adverse effects to the financial stability of the United States.” Why didn’t JPMorgan’s Board of Directors or its legions of lawyers catch this?
It’s important to parse the phrasing of that sentence. The Federal regulators didn’t say JPMorgan could pose a threat to its shareholders or Wall Street or the markets. It said the potential threat was to “the financial stability of the United States.”
That statement should strike fear into even the likes of presidential candidate Hillary Clinton who has been tilting at the shadows in shadow banks while buying into the Paul Krugman nonsense that “Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Is Working” when it comes to the behemoth banks on Wall Street.
How could one bank, even one as big and global as JPMorgan Chase, bring down the whole financial stability of the United States? Because, as the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Financial Research (OFR) has explained in detail and plotted in pictures (see below), five big banks in the U.S. have high contagion risk to each other. Which bank poses the highest contagion risk? JPMorgan Chase.
The OFR study was authored by Meraj Allahrakha, Paul Glasserman, and H. Peyton Young, who found the following:
“…the default of a bank with a higher connectivity index would have a greater impact on the rest of the banking system because its shortfall would spill over onto other financial institutions, creating a cascade that could lead to further defaults. High leverage, measured as the ratio of total assets to Tier 1 capital, tends to be associated with high financial connectivity and many of the largest institutions are high on both dimensions…The larger the bank, the greater the potential …read more
Source: The Fed Sends A Frightening Letter To JPMorgan, Corporate Media Yawns
What Happens Next (In Europe)?
By Tyler Durden
A year ago today, European equities hit their highest levels ever. But, as Bloomberg reports, the euphoria about Mario Draghi’s stimulus program didn’t last, and trader skepticism is now rampant. The Stoxx Europe 600 Index has lost 17% since its record, and investors who piled in last year are now unwinding bets at the fastest rate since 2013 as analysts predict an earnings contraction. The trading pattern looks familiar: a fast run to just over 400 on the gauge, then disaster…
To Benedict Goette of Crossbow Partners, the odds of another crisis are higher than a rally to fresh records.
“The 2009-2015 rally originated from two main drivers: a massive stimulus, and credit expansion in China,” said Goette, who’s a partner at his firm in Zug, Switzerland and helps oversee 1 billion Swiss francs ($1 billion).
“European earnings have not followed suit so far. Skepticism regarding central-bank operations has started to emerge.”
Bloomberg notes that investors have withdrawn money from funds tracking the region’s equities for nine straight weeks, the longest streak since May 2013, according to a Bank of America Corp. note dated April 7 that cited EPFR Global data.
Source: What Happens Next (In Europe)?
These Are The 10 Worst (And Best) Jobs In America
By Tyler Durden
A new survey of the best and worst jobs in the country has declared that being a newspaper reporter (blogger may or may not fall under the umbrella) is the worst career you could be pursuing.
Careercast.com has released their annual job rankings, where they rank 200 jobs from best to worst. At the very bottom, The survey put the annual median salary of a print reporter at $37,200.
Not surprisingly for an industry in its twilight days, it is the third year in a row that a newspaper reporter ranked as the worst job. Being a broadcaster didn’t fare much better. It came in third worst on the list.
“The news business has changed drastically over the years, and not in a good way,” former Broadcaster Ann Baldwin, president of Baldwin Media PR in New Britain, Connecticut told Fox5NY. “When people ask me if I miss it, I tell them ‘I feel as if I jumped off of a sinking ship.’”
The report says that one factor that has many media jobs among the worst is the decline of advertising revenue. And, a drop in advertising sales translates to a decline in positions for advertising sales people. Advertising Sales Person appears on the 10 worst jobs list for the first time (#193), after finishing just outside the bottom 10 a year ago.
As for the best job of the year, that went to data scientists. The survey cited a strong growth outlook and an annual median salary of $128,240. If you are lucky enough to find them, the top jobs will be in Information Technology, Healthcare, and Mathematics.
It was not immediately clear where the most rapidly growing job category in the “new normal” American recovery, those of waiters and bartenders, fell within this list.
Here is the summary of the 5 best and worst jobs:
And here is the detailed breakdown of the 10 best and 10 worst in the U.S. right now.
First, the top 10 best jobs according to the Careercast rankings:
And here are the top 10 worst jobs. We’ll begin with the worst according to Careercast, which happens to be a newspaper reporter. As noted above, blogger – especially, and ironically, one chronicling the failure of a broken socio-economic system – may or may not fall into this umbrella definition.
A Drone Flies Through A Rotting, Abandoned $17.5 Million Vancouver Mansion; This Is What It Saw
By Tyler Durden
Over the past several months we have repeatedly noted a recurring peculiarity of the Vancouver housing bubble: there are numerous multi-million dollar mansions, which rot, abandoned, their owners having long ago disappeared.
Two months ago, we first postulated the hypothetical timeline that starts with the purchase of a Vancouver mansion
- Chinese investors smuggled out millions in embezzled cash, hot money or perfectly legal funds, bypassing the $50,000/year limit in legal capital outflows.
- They make “all cash” purchases, usually sight unseen, using third parties intermediaries to preserve their anonymity, or directly in perso, in cities like Vancouver, New York, London or San Francisco.
- The house becomes a new “Swiss bank account”, providing the promise of an anonymous store of value and retaining the cash equivalent value of the original capital outflow.
- Then the owners disappear, never to be heard from or seen again.
Then we showed a dramatic example of the last step just yesterday in our post laying out the “Curious Story Of The Chinese Tycoon Found “Chopped Up Into 100 Pieces” In A Vancouver Mansion.”
But while the mysterious past of Vancouver’s abandoned mansions may be increasingly more transparent, their “present” is just is perplexing: after all, they are still the legal possession of someone – even if that someone is a dismembered Chinese tycoon long dead – and as such they may remain a neighborhood blight for a long time.
Another mystery: what is contained inside?
For at least one answer to that question, we go to Corbie Fieldwalker, a 40 year old Vancouver resident who last July stumbled upon a house left to rot in Point Grey, a neighborhood that’s home to some of North America’s priciest real estate and coveted for its ocean, mountain and city views.
Quoted by the National Post, Fieldwaker, said that “we started thinking about the last few years of media coverage surrounding real estate, community and Vancouver’s rapidly changing identity, and how these properties could be used to frame those issue in an emotionally engaging way that may be lacking in the current conversation.”
The solution was obvious. Make films.
And so for the past nine months, Fieldwalker has been entering abandoned multimillion-dollar properties equipped with a DSLR camera and drone, shooting them from every angle he can before they’re gone forever.
So far, he’s filmed five properties in Point Grey and a few in the south Cambie area. Many of them sit behind blue fences, the telltale sign a backhoe is on its way.
Fieldwalker said accessing the properties is simple: “We just go up to them and shoot.”
In the following film posted to Fieldwalker’s Vimeo page, the viewer is brought inside a 3,430 square-foot Point Grey teardown on Drummond Drive, which last year sold for $17.5 million.
The property’s overgrown lawn, mossy shingles, smashed windows and missing doors suggest it’s been many years since anyone called it home. It’s owner, mostly likely another Chinese tycoon, is long gone.
Inside, the camera pans and dollies slowly over peeling paint, crumbling gypsum and broken glass, up a staircase …read more
Source: A Drone Flies Through A Rotting, Abandoned $17.5 Million Vancouver Mansion; This Is What It Saw
The Difference Between Bernie’s & Hillary’s Tax Plan Explained In 1 Simple Cartoon
By Tyler Durden
On the one hand…
One can't help but look at the current debacle and consider whether, just as we warned, The Cloward-Piven strategy is reaching a pivotal moment…
In the mid-sixties at the height of the “social revolution” the line between democratic benevolence and outright communism became rather blurry. The Democratic Party, which controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress, was used as the springboard by social engineers to introduce a new era of welfare initiatives enacted in the name of “defending the poor”, also known as the “Great Society Programs”. These initiatives, however, were driven by far more subversive and extreme motivations, and have been expanded on by every presidency since, Republican and Democrat alike.
At Columbia University, sociologist professors Richard Cloward and Francis Fox Piven introduced a political strategy in 1966 in an article entitled 'The Weight Of The Poor: A Strategy To End Poverty'. This article outlined a plan that they believed would eventually lead to the total transmutation of America into a full-fledged centralized welfare state (in other words, a collectivist enclave). The spearpoint of the Cloward-Piven strategy involved nothing less than economic sabotage against the U.S.
Theoretically, according to the doctrine, a condition of overwhelming tension and strain could be engineered through the overloading of American welfare rolls, thereby smothering the entitlement program structure at the state and local level. The implosion of welfare benefits would facilitate a massive spike in poverty and desperation, creating a financial crisis that would lead to an even greater cycle of demand for a fully socialized system. This desperation would then “force” the federal government to concentrate all welfare programs under one roof, nationalize and enforce a socialist ideology, and ultimately, compact an immense level of power into the hands of a select few.
…
The tactic can only decrease wealth security by making all citizens equally destitute. As we have seen in numerous socialist and communist experiments over the past century, economic harmonization never creates wealth or prosperity, it only siphons wealth from one area and redistributes it to others, evaporating much of it as it is squeezed through the grinding gears of the establishment machine. Socialism, in its very essence, elevates government to the role of all-pervasive parent, and casts the citizenry down into the role of dependent sniveling infant. Even in its most righteous form, Cloward-Piven seeks to make infants of us all, whether we like it or not.
Equality through universal dependence.
Source: The Difference Between Bernie’s & Hillary’s Tax Plan Explained In 1 Simple Cartoon
One Reader Tried To Get The Recording Of Yellen’s "World-Saving Phone Call"; This Is What The Fed Replied
By Tyler Durden
Two weeks ago we showed something striking: while combing through Janet Yellen’s recently disclosed daily diary, we noticed that on February 11 and 12, the Fed chair held two critical phone calls, one with BOE governor Marc Carney and the next day, with BOE president Mario Draghi.
But what was especially shocking, and the reason why we dubbed them “the phone calls that saved the world“, is that the first call took place quite literally the very hour that the market hit its 2016 lows.
Zoomed out:
We asked if thanks to Yellen’s diary we got “the closest glimpse of Keyser Soze the global Plunge Protection Team communication by phone call?” before concluding that “only the NSA knows.”
This was not enough for one of our readers who decided to find out more and as a result, he sent a FOIA request to the Fed on the day of the post, in which he requested the audio file or any documentation of the nature of the telephone call between Yellen and Carney and, subsequently, Draghi.
The Fed’s response: a resounding “no”, for the following reason: “the responsive document contains nonpublic commercial or financial information” and while “the document containing the exempt information was reviewed… no reasonably segregable nonexempt information was found.”
Case closed.
Of course, if the phone contains the information many suspect it does, then the Fed is probably wondering why is someone so naive as to ask how the sausage is made when they can just BTFD and live happily ever after.
More seriously, when the Fed parades around with its “transparency” it clearly has this in mind.
But when it comes to truly important things like the content of a phone call that may very well have prevented the market from collapsing, well you better work at Goldman Sachs to get that particular confidential Fed data…
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