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American • Diplomatic Immunity For Your Assets In Interesting Times!
Diplomatic Immunity For Your Assets In Interesting Times!
SUNDAY, MAY 19, 2013 AT 7:30PM
Since I write so much about financial fiascos, debacles, nightmares, and entanglements. I’ve been asked by my readers about ways to protect assets in this environment. I had to disappoint them: I don’t give financial advice. Even if I did, I wouldn’t have all the answers. But I just finished reading an excellent book on precisely that topic, so I decided to review it.
Going Global 2013, A Special Report from Casey Research, starts with the premise that we live in interesting times, in a world that has, let’s say, some issues. Particularly concerning financial safety.
– There is the toxic mix of the “dubious dollar,” mauled continually by the Fed’s money-printing operations, and the gigantic US deficits and debt.
- Then there is the risk of “lightning-fast asset seizures,” such as when the IRS thinks you haven’t paid your taxes or when a government employee gets your name confused with someone on a blacklist, and suddenly your bank and brokerage accounts are locked. You might not even have access to cash to hire a lawyer to help recover your property.
- Not like it hasn’t happened before: “gold confiscation” is something the US government resorted to in 1933, and might resort to again. “Investment controls” were practiced in the US in the 1940s and 1960s; if imposed again, it might become impractical or illegal to buy or keep assets outside the US, whether for effective diversification or for taking advantage of profit opportunities.
- Already a reality, or becoming one: “Rising income taxes” and “exorbitant estate taxes and shifting rules” that make tax optimization that much more important. And finally, one of the craziest risks in the US, “predatory lawsuits” that can hit anyone, particularly those with deep pockets.
But there are strategies to deal with these risks: true international diversification. The authors – six of them, all specialists in their field – begin step by step with the simplest measures, though in today’s interesting times, even they aren’t simple anymore.
So the authors lay out how to open foreign bank or brokerage accounts – a form of currency diversification that is becoming increasingly tough for US citizens because many foreign banks no longer accept them as clients. Later in the book, they propose tactics, such as establishing a non-US Limited Liability Company (LLC), which conveys numerous advantages, including a warmer welcome at foreign banks. Such an LLC can open accounts where an American cannot; it can discourage “would-be lawsuit attackers”; and it can be crucial in estate planning.
They dive into the issues gold storage in the US vs. overseas, stock markets in other countries, and foreign annuities and life insurance. Then they move to more ambitious topics: setting up a self-directed IRA, such as an Open Opportunity IRA, which reduces the hassles of a regular self-directed IRA. It can invest internationally, buy real estate or rental property down under, for example, or get a brokerage account in Singapore.
But the “permanent solution” is an international trust that places your assets in a more benign legal environment – the arrangement can be involved and might require a leap of faith: “The only way to achieve complete protection for your wealth is to let someone else own it for you!” the authors write. Though few people have an international trust, the advantages are enormous, and the authors walk you through the ins and outs.
To complete internationalization, the authors also discuss how to buy a second home in a foreign country, and how to obtain a second passport. Legally! They provide an overview over the countries that allow dual citizenship, what their rules are, and how long it takes. And they add some interesting but crucial tidbits: for example, a Singaporean passport is the only one in the world that allows for visa-free travel to China, the EU, and the US!
US taxpayers who internationalize their assets are subject to some hairy reporting requirements; the authors sort them out and provide essential information, down to the IRS forms that have to be dealt with.
Going Global dissects the pros and cons of individual countries. It provides numerous links, in addition to contact information of foreign banks, other financial institutions, organizations, and companies that can offer further information or be helpful in setting up these strategies.
Who Going Global is for: Anyone who doesn’t yet have vast holdings and complex structures overseas but wants to find out more about it, get started on the right foot, learn how to do it legally, and avoid the many pitfalls along the way.
Who Going Global is not for: Broadly internationalized investors with dual passports, and with homes, bank accounts, trusts, and LLCs scattered around the globe; or anyone wanting to evade US taxes. “If you dream of a numbered account stuffed with a string of zeroes’ worth of money secretly earning undeclared income behind Uncle Sam’s back… wake up! Those days are gone, and financial privacy is dead, snuffed out by US reporting regulations that blanket the world’s financial system,” the authors write. And they warn: “Do not attempt to evade taxes in the name of financial privacy; the penalty for noncompliance is wealth-crushingly severe.”
Going Global is short (about 110 pages); a fast and interesting read with a refreshing lack of jargon. It’s expensive: $99. But for those who want to learn more about how to protect their assets, and with an eye on the mounting financial challenges of our times, it may be the best money ever spent. Available exclusively from Casey Research
http://www.testosteronepit.com/home/201 … times.html
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Sun May 19, 2013 10:46 pm
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War and Conflict • Dangerous Times: The genocidal logic of anti-Zionism
May 18, 2013
Dangerous Times: The genocidal logic of anti-Zionism
By James Lewis
Physicist Stephen Hawking is a famous media scientist, with all the pristine morality of a Hollywood starlet starving for publicity. By calling for an academic boycott of Israel, Hawking just joined the long, long list of bloody-minded professors, as Winston Churchill called his Hawking’s species.
Paul Johnson’s excellent book Intellectuals shows that most of the famous professors of the 20th century actively promoted mass murder — far away from home, of course. Most of the bloody-minded gang favored leftist mass murderers like Stalin and Mao, but others supported Hitler before he started to lose. Famous philosopher Martin Heidegger even joined the German Nazi Party, and he never renounced his support. French intellectual star Jean-Paul Sartre managed to serially support Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, for a record high murder count of 80-90 million human beings. Sartre never renounced his support, either.
Whaddaguy.
Even today, bloody-minded professors are a dime a dozen on the campuses. They are obscene, but they still thrive like poison mushrooms.
Yet even a Professor Hawking should be able to follow this logic.
1. Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. It has about 7 million Jews, almost all descended from refugees from deadly persecutions in Europe and the Middle East.
After Mr. Obama called for Hosni Mubarak to resign as president of Egypt in 2011, the "Arab Spring" started mass killings in all the Muslim countries around Israel. Some 100,000 Syrian Arabs have died, and unknown thousands of Libyans, Tunisians, and Egyptians. When refugees from the jihad war in the Sudan run for safety, they often find refuge in Israel. Not in the surrounding Islamist countries, because they are the wrong religion.
2. Israel is the only country left standing after the "Arab Spring." Egypt is starving. Libya is in chaos. Syria is in terminal civil war. Israel is stable and well-defended.
3. It is therefore clear to the shining genius of Professor Hawking that Israel must be an illegitimate foreign substance in the rich native soil of the Middle East and must disappear as soon as possible.
That is the goal of the academic boycott.
4. Israel has always been surrounded by crazy calls for genocide of the Jews (and also for killing Arab Christians, Bahá’ís, and atheists).
Since Jimmy Carter handed Iran to theocrat Ayatollah Khomeini three decades ago, all the schoolchildren in that peaceful country have been forced to chant every single day, "Death to Israel! Death to America!"
Only liberals are idiotic enough to convince themselves that the daily hate indoctrination in Iran means nothing.
Professor Hawking is, of course, a delusional liberal.
5. On top of Iran’s hate industry, the Saudis and Gulf tribes are busy paying for international hate campaigns, as shown every day by the excellent MEMRI.org website. European fascist parties are indoctrinating their own followers into the Muslim hate campaign, resurrecting the Dark Ages of Europe’s ethnic genocides of the 1930s and ’40s. Muslim oil dollars are going to neo-neo-fascist parties that have now gained real power in Hungary, Italy, and Albania.
6. Israel is therefore the obsessive target of a genocide campaign. Iran is predicted to have nukes in a couple of months. Egypt will follow.
Israel declared its independence in 1948, the same year as India and Pakistan did. The 1948 Partition between those countries killed an estimated 3-4 million human beings in Muslim-Hindu riots. The Partition was demanded by the Indian Congress Party, led by…Mahatma Gandhi…who was instantly deified by the Western media for his love of peace.
Remember that year, 1948, the year of independence for Israel, Pakistan, and India.
Pakistan is Muslim and dangerously unstable. It has nukes and missiles.
India is mostly Hindu today. It also has nukes and missiles.
You might call India and Pakistan "apartheid nations" if you were a liberal, and therefore delusional.
But there is no liberal campaign to boycott India or Pakistan.
Same year of independence, same big ethnic divisions, but no liberal boycott.
Professor Hawking has apparently never heard of Pakistan and India and their "apartheid."
It’s just one of those things, I guess.
India is still targeted by Muslim jihadis directed by Pakistan.
Professor Hawking is not calling for an academic boycott of India.
Or Pakistan.
Or any other ethnically divided country in the world.
Oddly enough, Hawking is just focused like a laser on Israel.
Bloody-minded professors.
Winston Churchill had it right, as usual.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/05/ … onism.html
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Sat May 18, 2013 2:17 am
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A Tax Haven Primer for the New York Times
Daniel J. Mitchell
I could only use 428 words, but I highlighted the main arguments for tax havens and tax competition in a “Room for Debate” piece for the New York Times.
I hope that my contribution is a good addition to the powerful analysis of experts such as Allister Heath and Pierre Bessard.
I started with the economic argument.
[T]ax havens are very valuable because they discourage anti-growth tax policy. Simply stated, it is very difficult for governments to impose and enforce confiscatory tax rates when investors and entrepreneurs can shift their economic activity to jurisdictions with better tax policy. Particularly if those nations have strong policies on financial privacy, thus making it difficult for uncompetitive high-tax nations to track and tax flight capital. Thanks to this process of tax competition, with havens playing a key role, top personal income tax rates have dropped from an average of more than 67 percent in 1980 to about 42 percent today. Corporate tax rates also have plummeted, falling from an average of 48 percent to 24 percent.
…Lawmakers also were pressured to lower or eliminate death taxes and wealth taxes, as well as to reduce the double taxation of interest, dividends and capital gains. Once again, tax havens deserve much of the credit because politicians presumably would not have implemented these pro-growth reforms if they didn’t have to worry that the geese with the golden eggs might fly away to a confidential account in a well-run nation like Luxembourg or Singapore.
Since I didn’t have much space, I couldn’t go into much greater detail. Below the jump is a video that elaborates on the economic benefits of tax havens, including an explanation of why fiscal sovereignty is a big part of the debate.
My favorite part of the video is when I quote Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development economists admitting the beneficial impact of tax havens.
Back to my NYT column, I also explain that there’s a critical ethical reason to defend low-tax jurisdictions:
Tax havens also play a very valuable moral role by providing high-quality rule of law in an uncertain world, offering a financial refuge for people who live in nations where governments are incompetent and corrupt. …There are also billions of people living in nations with venal and oppressive governments. To cite just a few examples, tax havens offer secure financial services to political dissidents in Russia, ethnic Chinese in Indonesia and the Philippines, Jews in North Africa, gays in Iran and farmers in Zimbabwe.
To elaborate, here’s my video making the moral case for tax havens:
By the way, many of the issues in this video may not resonate with those of us in “first world” nations, but please remember that the majority of people in the world live in countries where basic human rights are at risk or simply don’t exist.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t worry about the stability of our nations. I close my NYT column by warning that the welfare state may collapse:
With more and more nations careening toward fiscal collapse, raising the risk of social chaos and economic calamity, it is more important than ever that there are places where people can protect themselves from bad government. Tax havens should be celebrated, not persecuted.
I didn’t have space to cite the Bank for International Settlements and OECD data showing that most of the world’s big nations—including Germany, the United States, and the United Kingdom—face fiscal problems more significant that Greece is dealing with today. Assuming these nations don’t implement desperately needed entitlement reform, the you-know-what is going to hit the fan at some point. Folks with funds in a tax haven will be in much better shape if, or when, that happens.
For more background information on tax competition, here’s a video explaining the ABCs of the issue.
It’s galling, by the way, that the bureaucrats at the OECD pushing for a global tax cartel get tax-free salaries.
And here’s my video debunking some of the common myths about tax havens:
My favorite part of this video is the revelation that a former John Kerry staffer fabricated a number that is still being used by anti–tax haven demagogues.
And speaking of demagogues misusing numbers, you’ll notice the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has a starring role in this video:
I’ve probably exhausted your interest in videos, but if you’re game for one more, click here to learn more about the Paris-based OECD, a statist international bureaucracy that is active in trying to undermine tax havens as part of its efforts to create a global tax cartel to prop up Europe’s welfare states.
View full post on Cato @ Liberty
California’s ObamaCare Exchange Costs 56 Times More to Launch than Facebook
Michael F. Cannon
Robert Laszewski notes that launching California’s ObamaCare “Exchange” is so far costing taxpayers 56 times as much as it cost to launch Facebook, while its marketing budget is 8 times what Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) spent on her reelection bid (adjusted for inflation):
So far California has received $910 million in federal grants to launch its new health insurance exchange under the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”).
The California exchange, “Covered California,” has so far awarded a $183 million contract to Accenture to build the website, enrollment, and eligibility system and another $174 million to operate the exchange for four years.
The state will also spend $250 million on a two-year marketing campaign. By comparison California Senator Barbara Boxer spent $28 million on her 2010 statewide reelection campaign while her challenger spent another $22 million…
Privately funded Esurance began its multi-product national web business in 1998 with an initial $5.5 million round of venture fund investment in 1999 and a second round of $34 million a few months later.
The start-up experience of other major web companies is also instructive. Facebook received $13.7 million to launch in 2005. eBay was founded in 1995 and received its first venture money in 1997––$6.7 million in 1997.
Even doubling these investments for inflation still leaves quite a gap.
The California Exchange officials also say they need 20,000 part time enrollers to get everybody signed up––paying them $58 for each application. Having that many people out in the market creates quality control issues particularly when these people will be handling personal information like address, birth date, and social security number. California Blue Shield, by comparison has 5,000 employees serving 3.5 million members.
New York is off to a similar start. New York has received two grants totaling $340 millionagain just to set up an enrollment and eligibility process.
I thought it was notable that the Obama Administration has issued grants totaling $174 million to a non-profit group––Freelancers––for the purpose of setting up a new full service health plan in New York under the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance co-op program.
So, the Obama administration thinks it costs $174 million to set up a full service health insurance company in New York (including the significant cost of premium reserves) compared to $340 million to set up just a statewide insurance exchange to do eligibility and enrollment?
As many as 17 states are going to be setting up their own health insurance exchanges under the new law and the feds have so far released $3.4 billion to the states to build them. Little Vermont has received $124 million so far, Kentucky $253 million, and Oregon $242 million, for example. I wonder what the per person cost of exchange enrollment in Vermont will be?
View full post on Cato @ Liberty
International News • Dangerous Times: Is Italy teetering?
March 9, 2013
Dangerous Times: Is Italy teetering?
By James Lewis and Justine Aristea
Italy is the strategic center of the Mediterranean. The U.S. Sixth Fleet is headquartered in Naples, and with Muslim radicals taking over the southern and eastern shores of the Med, Italy is once again Europe’s defensive line against chaos and instability.
Which is why Europe is panicking about Italy’s unprecedented political chaos, triggered by comedian and mass agitator Beppe Grillo. (See our previous columns.)
Two weeks ago, Grillo led his mass personality cult — "The Five Star Party" — to a shocking 24% of the Italian vote, the biggest party vote since Mussolini received 25% in 1922. Now the polls show an additional 3% for Grillo. New elections are slated for June, and a huge political brawl is exploding to expose Grillo for the remarkable nutcase he really is. The Euromedia completely failed to report on Grillo before the election, and now they are trying to make up for lost time.
In response, Grillo is threatening "violence in the streets" unless he gets what he wants. What does he want? "We want 100% of the Parliament, not 20% or 25% or 30%. When the movement reaches 100%, when the citizens become the State, the movement will no longer need to exist. "
Which sounds too much like the horrific past, and all of Europe is finally paying attention. It might be too late. We will know in June, with the next elections. The new campaign is therefore in full swing, with many Italians feeling panicked. Rumors of terrorist attacks and street riots are rife. Other Europeans are looking on, like passing gawkers at a car wreck.
Grillo is one scary guy.
Yes, Beppe Grillo is not Benito Mussolini, as we are told over and over again. For one thing, he’s a lot fatter. Duce was a grandiose, swaggering narcissist. Beppe Grillo is the same. Duce’s followers were a delusional mass movement. Grillo’s followers look the same. Duce used the mass technologies of the 1920s, the radio and telephone. Grillo uses Twitter and YouTube. Duce thrived on scapegoating imaginary enemies. Grillo does the same.
Beppe Grillo isn’t exactly Mussolini, but then 2013 isn’t exactly 1922, either.
But Grillo is a certifiable nut, and the evidence is all over the web in spite of his efforts to scrub it. Grillo’s private internet partner, his "guru" Casaleggio, owns a large web business and is said to run Grillo’s Five Star Movement.
Grillo and his Guru started fourteen years ago, when Beppe published his "Message to Humanity" (yes, check it out). They have used the last fourteen years to recruit a mass cult through the internet, with the usual mix of grandiose and Armageddon fantasies.
According to Grillo, AIDS doesn’t exist, vaccines will kill you, and the Holocaust never happened.
Big Pharma is out to get you with chemotherapy, and natural treatments (like bloodletting) are better than that awful scientific medicine. The world is run by Jewish bankers like the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds, and those blessed Islamic banks give out free money. Not like the usurious Jews, who want to kill off all their customers.
The latest story is all about "moon cups," designed to eliminate tampons from feminine hygiene forever. Yes, you can now watch a YouTube video promoting a new tribute to mother Gaia.
Something of a public breakthrough happened when a businessman named Henry Sassoon resigned from Casaleggio Associates. Sassoon wrote a letter of explanation to a major newspaper, Corriere della Sera. He felt that he had been defamed by bloggers, but he failed to say that his partner Casaleggio is deeply involved in driving those paranoid blogs.
In fact, Casaleggio’s business website contains a page with Armageddon fantasies from Philip K. Dick, the science fiction writer. Apparently the guru believes that Philip Dick had the power of prophecy, complete with near decimation of the human species.
All of which would be just news from the loony bin except for the hard fact that Grillo’s cult received 24% in the election. Like it or not, Beppe Grillo is now a permanent fixture on the Italian political scene.
As we reported before, Grillo’s Iranian wife has high-level connections in Tehran, where making trouble in Italy is high on the priority list. Grillo has said that "everything I know about the Middle East I learned from my father-in-law," the Iranian bigshot. (Nasratollah Tajik just died in Tehran at the age of 83.)
Oil money is buying influence all over Europe, just as it has in the United States. How the Jews could be responsible for trillion-dollar Arab oil regimes run by Islamist fanatics is not explained by the Grillini. But then logic is not their strong suit.
Today, Europe is still reeling in shock. The Europeans are rubbing their collective eyes, trying to figure out what happened. The Telegraph and the Wall Street Journal have seen deep flaws in the euro currency for years, but the delusional left is having a hard time realizing the mess they have made. Again.
Naturally, they are blaming saner folks — a habit we have seen over here, too.
In the June election, Grillo could shrink to the usual size of movements like his, to a big sigh of relief from all of Europe — or he could increase his support from more frustrated voters.
Nobody knows for sure what will happen.
Italy may be teetering on the edge.
Southern and eastern Europe is in distress, and amazingly similar fascist movements are arising for the first time in sixty years. The other shores of the Med are afire — North Africa, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt. Outside powers like Iran and the Gulf Arabs are financing Islamist militancy in Europe and Africa. Islamist reactionaries are winning in Egypt, Syria, Libya, and the rest.
America has kept the balance for sixty years, and today there is a vacuum. But the fate of the world still comes down to an alliance of civilized nations. If America fails, some other center of civilized power will have to take over.
Are there any takers?
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/03/ … z2N1nnQ5UX
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Sat Mar 09, 2013 2:09 am
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“A cosmetologist needs 10 times as much experience as an emergency medical technician to be licensed in Indiana.”
For the most part occupational licencing is not for the safety of the public, as we are told. It is to create barriers to entry for industry. Why, for instance would an interior designer need a licence?
“Oh no, the sofa is in the wrong spot! And the coffee table is all wrong! If only we had hired a licensed interior designer our living room wouldn’t look like such a dump! Next time we move the furniture only a licensed and certified interior designer will do.”
The Indiana Senate has just passed a bill which seeks to sunset some of the various anti-competitive licences and designations used by industry in the state. Let’s hope they are successful. Competition creates value for the consumer.
(From ij.org)
If passed, the bill would create the Eliminate, Reduce, and Streamline Employee Regulation (ERASER) Committee, to, well, eliminate, reduce, and streamline employee regulation. The ERASER Committee would then review 13 different licenses that would be slated for elimination, “unless the general assembly takes action…to retain the licenses.” Members of a profession would need to convince legislators that their occupation truly needs to be licensed, thereby shifting the burden of proof for reform. Even if a license is preserved, it would be up for review again in five years.
The full list of occupations includes athlete agents, dietitians, professional geologists, home inspectors, interior designers, land surveyors, massage therapists, professional soil scientists, auctioneers, real estate brokers, certified surgical technologists, behavior analysts and “beauty culture.” Under Indiana state law, beauty culture covers not only cosmetologists, but barbers, electrologists, estheticians and manicurists as well.
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Earth to New York Times: Please Show Us these “Deep Spending Cuts” You Keep Writing About
Daniel J. Mitchell
Sigh. I feel like a modern-day Sisyphus. Except I’m not pushing a rock up a hill, only to then watch it roll back down.
Compared to educating journalists about fiscal policy, this is an easy task
I have a far more frustrating job. I have to read the same nonsense day after day about “deep spending cuts” even though I keep explaining to journalists that a sequester merely means that spending climbs by $2.4 trillion over the next 10 years rather than $2.5 trillion.
The latest example comes from the New York Times, which just reportedabout “deep automatic spending cuts that will strike hard” without bothering to provide a single concrete number about spending levels in any fiscal year.
Yes, you read correctly. A story about budget cuts did not have any numbers for spending in FY2013, FY2014, or any other fiscal year.
So, for the umpteenth time, here are the actual numbers from the Congressional Budget Office showing what will happen to spending over the next 10 years if we have a sequester.
I don’t mean to pick on the New York Times. Yes, the self-styled paper of record has been guilty in the past of turning budget increases into spending cuts, but the Washington Post is guilty of the same sin, having actually written in 2011that reducing a $3.8 trillion budget by $6 billion would “slash spending.”
And the NYT story actually has some decent reporting on how Republicans so far have (fingers crossed) avoided the tax-increase trap that Obama thought the sequester would create.
But one would still like to think that Journalism 101 teaches reporters to include a few hard facts when writing stories. Particularly if they’re going to use dramatic adjectives to describe what supposedly will happen.
Anyhow, this is just part of a larger problem. As I explained in these John Stossel and Judge Napolitano interviews, the politicians and interest groups have given us a budget process that assumes ever-increasing spending levels, which then allows them to make hysterical claims about “savage” and “draconian” cuts whenever spending doesn’t rise as fast as some hypothetical baseline.
This is why almost nobody understands that it’s actually relatively simple to balance the budget with a modest bit of spending restraint. My goal is reducing the burden of government spending, not fiscal balance, but it’s worth noting that we’d have a balanced budget in just 10 years if spending grew by “only” 3.4 percent annually.
View full post on Cato @ Liberty
International News • Dangerous Times: Islamic fascism exploits Euro crisis
Dangerous Times: Islamic fascism exploits Euro crisis
By James Lewis and Justine Aristea
Silvio Berlusconi is one of the richest men in Italy, and he is not a fascist. So why is he saying nice things about Mussolini?
Because Berlusconi is watching Beppe Grillo, the comedian and fascist-talker, coming up fast in the election campaign, coming up just two weeks from now.
Vicious race baiting is selling like hotcakes to Italian voters. Mussolini is being resurrected from a bloody grave. Even worse, ancient ethnic hatreds are being whipped up in Hungary, Romania, Albania, and of course North Africa and the Middle East, where Muslim demagogues routinely accuse each other of being secret Jews.
All this hatred seems to be funded by Iran, Saudi Arabia and neo-Ottoman Turkey, which has bought up the mass media in countries like Albania.
For decades Muslim oil money has bought politicians in Europe and the UN, and now it’s buying up a big chunk of the Euro web. Muslim madrassahs are being built to brainwash children, and Saudi imams are the new missionaries to the infidels in Europe.
As we pointed out last week, in Italy, Beppe Grillo hates the Jews (natch), the Gypsies, the Albanians, the Illuminati, the Masons, the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds, GMO foods (which will poison you), anti-cancer drugs (ditto), and nanoparticles (ditto, ditto).
Grillo suddenly got very rich after marrying an Iranian woman. Everything he knows about the Middle East, he says, he learned from his father-in-law in Tehran. According to a Pentagon leak last week, the mullahs are running 30,000 spies, who are up to no good in Europe while going through the biggest economic crisis since World War 2.
We know exactly what caused the crisis: The European Union and its unelected political elite.
Like the old Soviet Union, the EU is being run off a cliff, by a mind-locked political elite, driven by visions of European imperial glory. If you believe their mass propaganda campaigns the EU is the model for peace on earth forever and ever. The EU convinced the poorer half of Europe to adopt the euro, which was priced way out of their range. Suddenly Greek exports were impossible to sell. When Greek wine and olives were sold in drachmas the currency could float against the German mark. The Greeks could price their goods to sell abroad and support the economy. It was the rigid, one-size-fits-all euro that killed the Greek economy. In spite of all the welfare subsidies from the EU. Because, as Maggie Thatcher told the world, "Eventually you run out of other people’s money."
In the poorer countries nobody dares to blame the EU, because its taxpayers are supporting their welfare payments. Europe needs a scapegoat. Middle class Italians are therefore talking racial hatred in private.
In Greece, the Golden Dawn Party is staging street fights. Immigrants are called "cockroaches," and food aid is now given only to Greeks, and not to legal immigrants. Der Spiegel, the German news magazine, is reporting a revival of Hungarian fascism.
It’s witch hunting time again. Any witch will do, but the dark old paranoid fears are being whipped up, probably by Islamic fascists and their oil-fueled agents. And just like the United States, the radical left makes common cause with Islamic fascism.
There is hope, but not if the United States and the decent parts of Europe sit on the sidelines. For sixty years the US has defended Europe from its biggest enemies, Hitler and Stalin. Today we are not even allowed to mention Islamist totalitarianism, which threatens the West just as it has since the early Middle Ages.
The first need is to speak the truth. The real "Islamophobia" is the fear of telling the truth about Islam. Without the truth, the West is helpless.
The second need is to break the OPEC monopoly, which has poisoned politics in Europe and the United States. New shale discoveries are undermining the monopoly power of Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Gulf States, not to mention genuine freaks like Hugo Chavez. Energy independence around the world will break the toxic power of OPEC. Middle East Oil money finds its way to green groups and movie makers hostile to fracking.
A third crucial need is to finally reject socialist ideology that controls the Western media and education, and therefore our voters and politics. We need a massive truth-telling campaign about the endless failures of "something for nothing" fantasies. That’s the hardest part, but it is vitally important.
Civilized peoples need to recapture the initiative. Socialism, fascism, Islamism — all are failed ideologies. They bring disaster in their wake. The Euro crisis is yet another example of massive failure by the same, tired old fantasy world.
Things looked bad when Churchill was warning about Hitler. They looked bad at the start of the Cold War. They look back today.
We have to reach deep inside to find the emotional and spiritual resources to resist the worst tendencies in human nature. It is hard, but Western culture has done it three times in the last century.
The web is a great medium, and civilized peoples must use the web as well as the radicals of all stripes, today’s barbarians. They are wrong and we are right, and we have the facts to prove it.
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/02/ … z2L2o4l0fU
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Sat Feb 16, 2013 1:19 am
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Other • Nine times more sellers than buyers as US insiders dump stoc
Nine times more sellers than buyers as US insiders dump stocks over the past week
Posted on 06 February 2013
Company executives are usually in a better position to know when to buy and sell stocks in their own firms, and such insider selling is a classic indicator of a stock market that has topped out.
Over the past week there have been nine times more sellers than buyers among insiders, according to the Vickers Weekly Insider report, one of the oldest researchers of executive buying and selling on Wall Street. The eight-week ratio is five-to-one, the most bearish since early last year when the market corrected suddenly by 10 per cent.
Deja vu all over again?
The same thing happened in June 2011 just before another stock market sell-off. Insiders have a remarkable record of getting this stuff right but then it is their business after all.
At the same time stock market technical analysts are confused by mixed signals. The appearance of a Golden Cross, for example, in the charts is supposed to be very bullish, though it has been wrong before.
Then again there have been trivial observations such as US GDP going down when the stock market is still going up. The reappearance of the eurozone sovereign debt crisis in headlines this week also ought to sound alarm bells. And many economists doubt the truth of recent positive data from China.
Still markets that sold off heavily on Monday rallied a little on Tuesday. Investors who have ridden this bull market this high seem reluctant to give up on a good thing.
http://www.arabianmoney.net/us-stocks/2 … past-week/
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Wed Feb 06, 2013 12:43 am
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