Winter Patriot dot com

OPEN THREAD:
I just had to share this with anyone who is out there. I thought you might need a chuckle right about now.
I don't know how this made it past the editors.

And a quote from one of the spam comments, I just deleted, from someone who needs help.

"Hello everyone. My mother loved children - she would have given anything if I had been one. Help me!"

This article is borrowed in its entirety from "The Canadian" (a new Canadian national newspaper. You can support it if you like what you see by clicking on this link and scroling down to the bottom of the page. I can't endorse the author's enthusiasm for Ron Paul as I don't know enough about him but everything else he says I whole heartedly agree with. ed.)

Twilight of the Psychopaths by Dr. Kevin Barrett

“Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we're being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I'm liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That's what's insane about it.” – John Lennon, before his murder by CIA mind-control subject Mark David Chapman

When Gandhi was asked his opinion of Western civilization he said it would be a good idea. But that oft-cited quote, is misleading, assuming as it does that civilization is an unmitigated blessing.

Civilized people, we are told, live peacefully and cooperatively with their fellows, sharing the necessary labour in order to obtain the leisure to develop arts and sciences. And while that would be a good idea, it is not a good description of what has been going on in the so-called advanced cultures during the past 8,000 years.

Civilization, as we know it, is largely the creation of psychopaths. All civilizations, our own included, have been based on slavery and “warfare.” Incidentally, the latter term is a euphemism for mass murder.

The prevailing recipe for civilization is simple:

1) Use lies and brainwashing to create an army of controlled, systematic mass murderers;

2) Use that army to enslave large numbers of people (i.e. seize control of their labour power and its fruits);

3) Use that slave labour power to improve the brainwashing process (by using the economic surplus to employ scribes, priests, and PR men). Then go back to step one and repeat the process.

Psychopaths have played a disproportionate role in the development of civilization, because they are hard-wired to lie, kill, injure, and generally inflict great suffering on other humans without feeling any remorse. The inventor of civilization — the first tribal chieftain who successfully brainwashed an army of controlled mass murderers—was almost certainly a genetic psychopath. Since that momentous discovery, psychopaths have enjoyed a significant advantage over non-psychopaths in the struggle for power in civilizational hierarchies — especially military hierarchies.
Political Satire

Military institutions are tailor-made for psychopathic killers. The 5% or so of human males who feel no remorse about killing their fellow human beings make the best soldiers. And the 95% who are extremely reluctant to kill make terrible soldiers — unless they are brainwashed with highly sophisticated modern techniques that turn them (temporarily it is hoped) into functional psychopaths.

In On Killing, Lt. Col. Dave Grossman has re-written military history, to highlight what other histories hide: The fact that military science is less about strategy and technology, than about overcoming the instinctive human reluctance to kill members of our own species. The true “Revolution in Military Affairs” was not Donald Rumsfeld’s move to high-tech in 2001, but Brigadier Gen. S.L.A. Marshall’s discovery in the 1940s that only 15-20% of World War II soldiers along the line of fire would use their weapons: “Those (80-85%) who did not fire did not run or hide (in many cases they were willing to risk great danger to rescue comrades, get ammunition, or run messages), but they simply would not fire their weapons at the enemy, even when faced with repeated waves of banzai charges” (Grossman, p. 4).

Marshall’s discovery and subsequent research, proved that in all previous wars, a tiny minority of soldiers — the 5% who are natural-born psychopaths, and perhaps a few temporarily-insane imitators—did almost all the killing. Normal men just went through the motions and, if at all possible, refused to take the life of an enemy soldier, even if that meant giving up their own. The implication: Wars are ritualized mass murders by psychopaths of non-psychopaths. (This cannot be good for humanity’s genetic endowment!)

Marshall’s work, brought a Copernican revolution to military science. In the past, everyone believed that the soldier willing to kill for his country was the (heroic) norm, while one who refused to fight was a (cowardly) aberration. The truth, as it turned out, was that the normative soldier hailed from the psychopathic five percent. The sane majority, would rather die than fight.
Political Satire

The implication, too frightening for even the likes of Marshall and Grossman to fully digest, was that the norms for soldiers’ behaviour in battle had been set by psychopaths. That meant that psychopaths were in control of the military as an institution. Worse, it meant that psychopaths were in control of society’s perception of military affairs. Evidently, psychopaths exercised an enormous amount of power in seemingly sane, normal society.

How could that be? In Political Ponerology, Andrzej Lobaczewski explains that clinical psychopaths enjoy advantages even in non-violent competitions to climb the ranks of social hierarchies. Because they can lie without remorse (and without the telltale physiological stress that is measured by lie detector tests) psychopaths can always say whatever is necessary to get what they want. In court, for example, psychopaths can tell extreme bald-faced lies in a plausible manner, while their sane opponents are handicapped by an emotional predisposition to remain within hailing distance of the truth. Too often, the judge or jury imagines that the truth must be somewhere in the middle, and then issues decisions that benefit the psychopath. As with judges and juries, so too with those charged with decisions concerning who to promote and who not to promote in corporate, military and governmental hierarchies. The result is that all hierarchies inevitably become top-heavy with psychopaths.

So-called conspiracy theorists, some of whom deserve the pejorative connotation of that much-abused term, often imagine that secret societies of Jews, Jesuits, bankers, communists, Bilderbergers, Muslim extremists, papists, and so on, are secretly controlling history, doing dastardly deeds, and/or threatening to take over the world. As a leading “conspiracy theorist” according to Wikipedia, I feel eminently qualified to offer an alternative conspiracy theory which, like the alternative conspiracy theory of 9/11, is both simpler and more accurate than the prevailing wisdom: The only conspiracy that matters is the conspiracy of the psychopaths against the rest of us.
Political Satire

Behind the apparent insanity of contemporary history, is the actual insanity of psychopaths fighting to preserve their disproportionate power. And as that power grows ever-more-threatened, the psychopaths grow ever-more-desperate. We are witnessing the apotheosis of the overworld—the criminal syndicate or overlapping set of syndicates that lurks above ordinary society and law just as the underworld lurks below it. In 9/11 and the 9/11 wars, we are seeing the final desperate power-grab or “endgame” (Alex Jones) of brutal, cunning gangs of CIA drug-runners and President-killers; money-laundering international bankers and their hit-men, economic and otherwise; corrupt military contractors and gung-ho generals; corporate predators and their political enablers; brainwashers and mind-rapists euphemistically known as psy-ops experts and PR specialists—in short, the whole sick crew of certifiable psychopaths running our so-called civilization. And they are running scared. It was their terror of losing control that they projected onto the rest of us by blowing up the Twin Towers and inciting temporary psychopathic terror-rage in the American public.

Why does the pathocracy fear it is losing control? Because it is threatened by the spread of knowledge. The greatest fear of any psychopath is of being found out. As George H. W. Bush said to journalist Sarah McClendon, December 1992, “If the people knew what we had done, they would chase us down the street and lynch us.” Given that Bush is reported to have participated in parties where child prostitutes were sodomized and otherwise abused, among his many other crimes, his statement to McClendon should be taken seriously.

Psychopaths go through life knowing that they are completely different from other people. They quickly learn to hide their lack of empathy, while carefully studying others’ emotions so as to mimic normalcy while cold-bloodedly manipulating the normals.

Today, thanks to new information technologies, we are on the brink of unmasking the psychopaths and building a civilization of, by and for the normal human being — a civilization without war, a civilization based on truth, a civilization in which the saintly few rather than the diabolical few would gravitate to positions of power. We already have the knowledge necessary to diagnose psychopathic personalities and keep them out of power. We have the knowledge necessary to dismantle the institutions in which psychopaths especially flourish — militaries, intelligence agencies, large corporations, and secret societies. We simply need to disseminate this knowledge, and the will to use it, as widely as possible.

Above all, we need to inform the public about how psychopaths co-opt and corrupt normal human beings. One way they do this, is by manipulating shame and denial — emotions foreign to psychopaths but common and easily-induced among normals.

Consider how gangs and secret societies (psychopaths’ guilds in disguise) recruit new members. Some criminal gangs and satanist covens demand that candidates for admission commit a murder to “earn their stripes.” Skull and Bones, the Yale-based secret society that supplies the CIA with drug-runners, mind-rapists, child abusers and professional killers, requires neophytes to lie naked in a coffin and masturbate in front of older members while reciting the candidate’s entire sexual history. By forcing the neophyte to engage in ritualized behaviour that would be horrendously shameful in normal society, the psychopaths’ guild destroys the candidate’s normal personality, assuming he had one in the first place, and turns the individual into a co-opted, corrupt, degraded shadow of his former self — a manufactured psychopath or psychopath’s apprentice.

This manipulation of shame has the added benefit of making psychopathic organizations effectively invisible to normal society. Despite easily available media reports, American voters in 2004 simply refused to see that the two major-party presidential candidates had lain naked in a coffin masturbating in front of older Bonesmen in order to gain admission to Skull and Bones and thus become members of the criminal overworld. Likewise, many Americans have long refused to see that hawkish elements of the overworld, operating through the CIA, had obviously been the murderers of JFK, MLK, RFK, JFK Jr., Malcolm X, ChÈ, AllendÈ, Wellstone, Lumumba, Aguilera, Diem, and countless other relatively non-psychopathic leaders. They refuse to see the continuing murders of millions of people around the world in what amounts to an American holocaust. They refuse to see the evidence that the psychopaths’ guilds running America’s most powerful institutions use the most horrific forms of sexualized abuse imaginable to induce multiple-personality-disorder in child victims, then use the resulting mind-control slaves as disposable drug-runners, prostitutes, Manchurian candidates, and even diplomatic envoys. And of course they refuse to see that 9/11 was a transparently obvious inside job, and that their own psychopath-dominated military-intelligence apparatus is behind almost every major terrorist outrage of recent decades.

All of this psychopathic behaviour at the top of the social hierarchy is simply too shameful for ordinary people to see, so they avert their gaze, just as wives of husbands who are sexually abusing their children sometimes refuse to see what is happening in plain view. If deep, deep denial were a river in Egypt, American citizens’ wilful blindness would be more like the Marianas Trench.

But thanks to the power of the internet, people everywhere are waking up. The only obvious non-psychopath among Republican presidential candidates, Ron Paul, also happens to be the only candidate in either party with significant grassroots support.

If “love” is embedded in the Revolution Ron Paul heralds, that is because Dr. Paul — a kindly, soft-spoken physician who has delivered more than 4,000 babies — implicitly recognizes that government is the invention and tool of psychopaths, and therefore must be strictly limited in scope and subjected to a rigorous system of checks and balances, lest the psychopath’s tools, fear and hatred, replace love as the glue that binds society together.

The decline in militarism since World War II in advanced countries, the spread of literacy and communications technology, and the people’s growing demands for a better life, together represent a gathering force that terrifies the pathocracy, (those alternately competing-then-cooperating gangs of psychopaths who have ruled through lies, fear and intimidation since the dawn of so-called civilization).

Since nuclear weapons have made war obsolete, the pathocracy is terrified that its favourite social control mechanism — ritualized mass slaughter — is increasingly unavailable. And if war was the great human tragedy, the pathocrats’ pathetic attempt at a war-substitute — the transparently phoney “war on terror” — is repeating it as sheerest farce.

Truly, we are witnessing the twilight of the psychopaths. Whether in their death throes they succeed in pulling down the curtain of eternal night on all of us, or whether we resist them and survive to see the dawn of a civilization worthy of the name, is the great decision in which all of us others, however humbly, are now participating.

About the writer:

Dr. Kevin Barrett, co-founder of the Muslim-Christian-Jewish Alliance for 9/11 Truth, LINK, has taught English, French, Arabic, American Civilization, Humanities, African Literature, Folklore, and Islam at colleges and universities in the San Francisco Bay area, Paris, and Madison, Wisconsin. Barrett became a 9/11 truth activist in 2004 after reading David Griffin's The New Pearl Harbor and conducting follow-up research that convinced him Griffin had accurately summarized evidence indicating 9/11 was an inside job.

In the summer of 2006, Republican state legislators and Fox newscasters demanded that Barrett be fired from his job teaching an introductory Islam class at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but the University refused to buckle, and Barrett got high marks from his students. He has appeared in several documentary films, lectures widely on 9/11 and hosts three radio programs on three different patriot networks.
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I am taking a break from all my 'participating' in Canadian politics. As I wrote in my last blog post, there is a pro-democracy movement underway in Canada right now. Along with many ongoing projects and initiatives, Canadians across the country are sharing information and discussing the anti democratic and primarily secret actions of the current Progressive Conservative government. This is primarily taking place on a Face Book Group named CAPP (Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament). Currently, there are over 225,000 members, over 28,000 links, 142 videos, thousands of ongoing side discussions and numerous initiatives underway. The most visible face of the movement right now is 'flash rallies' that take place whenever the Prime Minister or his Cabinet Ministers show up in public. I am not a fan of Face Book and there is a whole lot of 'cat herding' going on over there however, surprisingly, so far it is working. The only way I can describe it to you is raucous, as in boisterous, rowdy and disorderly. I have no idea how much longer this will last and it is obvious (to me at least) that there are disinformation specialists at work there along with obvious trolls (provoking endless emotional responses) and the more subtle types who seek to create division and centralize power etc. All in all an interesting experience...only in Canada, eh!

I am not sure if there is anyone left out there to read this but here is a roundup of some of the articles I have been reading lately.
=======================================================================
McJ's News Roundup - Feb. 11, 2010

President Peace Prize is busy spreading 'peace' around the world - notably near the Russian and Chinese borders and neither of these countries seem to want to get with his peace program.

Veiled Threats Directed against Russia: U.S. Expands Missile Shield Into Black Sea
by Rick Rozoff

Dmitry Rogozin, Russian envoy to NATO was quoted as saying "The U.S. is using Iran's actions to globalize its system of missile defense....Our military shouldn't believe some promises or intentions. We need to go on the assumption that a foreign military potential is approaching our borders."
Retired Colonel Igor Korotchenko said "Russia must warn Romania that if the elements of the U.S. missile shield are placed in the country they will become a target of Russia's preventive missile strikes."

Russia is all for nuclear strikes against potential aggressors

''The President informed the members of Russia's Security Council yesterday that he has approved two documents - the military doctrine and the Fundamentals of the state policy on nuclear deterrence until 2020,'' presidential press secretary Natalia Timakova said.
...
"The seizure of strategic initiative, dominance on the ground, at sea, and in aerospace will be the decisive factors in attaining goals,'' it said.

''Military actions will be characterised by the growing significance of high-precision, electromagnetic, laser, and infrasonic weapons, information control systems, unmanned aerial and autonomous sea vehicles, and guided robotised types of weapons and military hardware,'' it said.

China threatens U.S. sanctions over Taiwan arms

China threatened to impose sanctions on U.S. arms firms and cut cooperation with Washington unless it cancels a $6.4 billion arms sale to Taiwan, in an unprecedented move signaling Beijing's growing global power.

China's hawks demand cold war on the US

More than half of Chinese people questioned in a poll believe China and America are heading for a new "cold war".

..."This time China must punish the US," said Major-General Yang Yi, a naval officer. "We must make them hurt." A major-general in the People's Liberation Army (PLA), Luo Yuan, told a television audience that more missiles would be deployed against Taiwan. And a PLA strategist, Colonel Meng Xianging, said China would "qualitatively upgrade" its military over the next 10 years to force a showdown "when we're strong enough for a hand-to-hand fight with the US".

The Crotch Bomber has mostly dropped off the MSM radar however there is good news for Michael Chertoff, Perv Scanner sales are skyrocketing!

Christmas day crotch bomber tied to Israel, FBI

The Christmas Day "terrorist" is the latest in a series of staged incidents meant to make The Clash of Civilizations appear plausible and "the war on terrorism" rational.

Meanwhile the U.S. has been transformed from the wealthiest nation to the world’s largest debtor. Nobel economist Joe Stiglitz projects a $3 trillion tab for a war based on fixed, flawed and outright fabricated intelligence—every cent of it borrowed, including $700 billion in interest.

Invasion of the Body Scanners

The concept of "stimulus" may soon take on new connotations in the days ahead. The federal government is poised to emplace full-body scanners at airports across the nation, capable of peering under a person's garments.
...
This is essentially a form of high-tech voyeurism masking as security, and it portends more such incursions into liberty and privacy. How did it come to this, and so suddenly at that?
...
This new paradigm of high-tech security by way of scanning devices has become lucrative in recent years, and promises to become even more so in the near future. However, as Mother Jones Senior Washington correspondent James Ridgeway noted in his blog Unsilent Generation, "the TSA has a dismal record of enriching private corporations with failed technologies, and there are signs that the latest miracle device may just bring more of the same.
...
Beyond the lack of guaranteed functionality, a number of additional critiques have appeared questioning the untested nature of these technologies and whether they are in fact safe for widespread use. As an article from NaturalNews (recently reprinted by Truthout) observed:

"In researching the biological effects of the millimeter wave scanners used for whole body imaging at airports, NaturalNews has learned that the energy emitted by the machines may damage human DNA."

The Olympics are about to start just down the road from me. I won't be attending the festivities. The torch was trotted around town here last week but I didn't make it out to see it. However, one of my daughters did get to meet Arnold Schwarznegger's buddy our provincial premier, Gordon Campbell, at a restaurant in town where she was working. He was here for the big celebration.

In related news, the Terminator will be taking that same torch for a run on a prominent part of the last leg of it's trip. To add to this, yesterday the torch took a detour over the Peace Arch into the US. All this comes as a surprise to Canadians, nobody here seems to have known any of this was going to happen.

Arnold Schwarzenegger will carry the Olympic torch

Despite zero Canadian heritage, Schwarzenegger will join Canadian heroes such as Steve Nash (two time NBA MVP), Walter Gretzky (father of Wayne Gretzky), and Michael Bublé (singer my mom really likes).

Even more perplexing is that Schwarzenegger will carry the torch on Friday morning, a scant twelve hours before the Opening Ceremony begins, meaning that an Austro-American politician will be a major figure during one of Canada's finest moments."

Schwarzenegger unworthy to carry our Olympic torch

John Furlong and VANO C should be ashamed of themselves for embarrassing all Canadians by allowing an Austrian-born American with no connection with this country or with the Olympics to carry our torch.
...
How Schwarzenegger, a national symbol of American violence and mindless U.S. media culture was deemed suitable to carry the Olympic torch for our Canadian ceremonies simply boggles the mind.

On a more serious note, the bills for this two week party for the rich, famous and connected are piling up, with cost overruns through the roof and security costs at the top of that heap. Turns out it was more expensive than they estimated to turn our beautiful city of Vancouver and the Whistler/Blackcomb resort towns into militarized security zones. Things like military helicopters, navy warships in the harbour, troops stationed on mountaintops and in town, snipers, private contractors, the US Department of Homeland Security, RCMP, local police, bylaw officers, high tech crowd control weapons, spy balloons, enhanced airport security and extra border controls don't come cheap! At least everyone will be safe, right?

Olympic security estimated to cost $900M

"It would be nice if we could do it for less, but our approach has not been to set a budget and then deliver security for that budget," said Peter van Loan, the federal minister in charge of Olympic security.

The province initially estimated its contribution for providing security for the Games would be $87.5 million. As recently as last July, Hansen announced the entire security budget would be $175 million.

And then of course there is this to think about along with the fact that the head electrical inspector for the 2010 Olympics was mysteriously let go about two weeks ago.

Could Vancouver 2010 be the next 9/11? (UPDATED 5pm EST 2-7-10)

"...an attack during the Olympics while it is being highly guarded would be the perfect way to bring in more police state measures and to more fully integrate the US and Canada into a functioning North American Union; I will provide some evidence of this taking place already but there may be another motive at work here to expand the “war on terror” into more nations while blaming an attack on their scapegoat for everything, Al-Qaeda; however, the question remains, is that what will happen? In more recent news, it looks as if Iran may be the one to take the blame."

Top electrician dismissed weeks before Olympics

The City of Vancouver has drawn fire from safety experts after letting go of its chief electrician just weeks before the opening ceremony of the 2010 Olympic Games.
...
"The chief electrical safety officer has all kinds of things to do in a busy time like this. There's all kinds of temporary installations going up, tents and all those activities that have electrical power in them."

Industry leaders have written to Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson demanding Tsisserev be reinstated -- but the mayor says his plate is already full.

And finally from the HFF (that's the Holy F**k File).

A scheme only psychopaths could invent: Israeli mind-scanner planned for airports

As part of stringent measures to beef up airport security, US authorities may use an Israeli-made mind-reading scanner that allegedly predicts whether a passenger is a potential threat or not.
...
the system aims to project images onto airport screens, such as symbols affiliated with a terrorist group or signs only a terrorist would recognize.

"One by one, you can screen out from the flow of people those with specific malicious intent,"...

As I mentioned in an earlier comment I attended my first rally ever last weekend. A pro democracy rally . Here is a small run down on what has been going on in Canada.

It's been estimated that on Saturday, Jan 23, 2010 more than 25,000 Canadians demonstrated in over 60 cites in Canada and around the world. They were protesting Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Proroguing (closing) of parliament for the second January in a row. What's notable is that it was a spontaneous protest having it's roots on a Face Book group started by University of Alberta student, Christopher White. Within 2-3 weeks it's membership rose to almost a quarter million (the largest and fastest growing FB Group in Canada). Canadians across the country finally began to wake up to the fact that their democracy was under attack.

Last year Stephen Harper prorogued the Canadian parliament to avoid a vote of non confidence in the house that would have brought his government down. This year it was to avoid having to answer the questions of a parliamentary committee. The committee was looking into the abuse and torture of Afghan detainees who were transferred to Afghan authorities by the Canadian Military. The proroguing of parliament means that over 30 bills that were making their way through the house have been dropped and have to be reintroduced, parliamentary committees are ended and must be restarted from scratch and government accountability offices (watchdogs) are closed for business. Making matters worse, Stephen Harper and his ministers then took to the airwaves to tell Canadians that the suspension of parliament was a routine procedure and that we really weren't concerned about what was happening to Afghan detainees. It was a big mistake on his part. It turns out Canadians actually do care. His Conservative government has dropped 10 points in the polls since then, putting them in a dead heat with the Liberal opposition.

This news clip from the Real News Network is a fairly decent rundown of events.

Stephen Harper's official excuse for shutting down parliament (there are a whole list of secondary excuses) is that his government needs to recalibrate their economic plan. No one seems to know for sure what exactly that means but apparently they can't walk and chew gum at the same time.

On a humerous note lots of Canadians have had fun with this piece of history.
Off with his head:
King Charles I dissolved the Parliament of England in 1628, after the Petition of Right, he gave a prorogation speech that effectively canceled all future meetings of the legislature, at least until he could get his finances in order.
King Charles I was subsequently captured, tried and convicted of high treason. He was beheaded Jan 30, 1649. The monarchy was then abolished and a republic called the Commonwealth of England was declared.

(Foreword - In the following, the words “stocks” and “shares” mean the same thing and are interchangeable. Similarly, “share scrip” and “share certificates” are interchangeable. I have assumed, too, that you, the reader, are familiar with Credit Creation or the way money comes into existence through banking practice. If you are not familiar with this foundational piece of corruption in Western society, you can read about it here – Warring Worlds pt4b )

If I were to tell you that you had been 'shorted' in a deal you made, most people would ordinarily take that to mean you had been cheated. Being shorted is being dudded. So 'shorting the market' or 'short selling' is a very aptly named practice because basically it is cheating the market, i.e. it's fraud. Too many years ago, I worked for the Melbourne Stock Exchange in Australia and 'short selling' was banned there then for this reason because it involves selling something you don't have and that's illegal most places I know. It's really, really simple. (What the situation is now at the MSE I don't know). Back then when delivery of scrip was a lengthy process it was my understanding, and also of everyone I knew, that the short sellers simply took advantage of this lengthy delay. I heard no one talking about 'borrowing' share scrip (certificates) to deliver and replacing them at a later date. The 'borrowing scrip' idea is a relatively new explanation to my ears, at least, and this explanation is, no doubt, necessary now because of the much faster electronic settlement times. But, it still leaves many questions.

So how and why does it operate and how is it all explained away by the industry? The explanation goes like this: a trader considers a stock to be overvalued and expects the price to fall in the near future. So to profit from the situation, the trader borrows shares from someone to sell into the market. When the stock falls in price, the trader buys back the shares to give back to the compliant lender and everybody is happy. That's the story and I don't believe it. I have never believed it because it never made sense; and it still doesn't! Who's going to lend the trader his shares to do this especially when it is perfectly obvious that selling the 'borrowed' shares on the market is going to help depress the price? Why would anyone lend a trader their shares so this 'borrower' could devalue them? It's nuts, of course.

So how do they actually pull it off? Until fairly recently, I didn't know. But then I came across the following articles on the net and all was revealed. The conclusions that I will state presently are not stated in the articles but their reality is undeniable once they are highlighted.

Here are the articles in question and to save my fingers from Repetitive Strain Injury, would you, gentle reader, go have a Bo Peep at them before reading on?

Links-
You don't really own the shares you think you own

The unknown 20 trillion dollar company

WSJ: Blame the 'Stock Vault'?

Okay, so now you know that most stockholders never get their name on their stock certificates. Indeed, they never even sight their share certificates. They instead have an account with their broker that says they are the 'beneficial owners' of the stock. It's remarkably like the situation of having money in the bank; you have an account in their computer and that's all. The name that is actually on the stock certificates is “Cede & Co” (or similar) as in you cede ownership to Cede & Co. Ironic, no? Cynical, more likely. The similarity with a bank doesn't end there. It seems from all the preceding information that it is reasonable, even unavoidable, to conclude that the short sellers 'borrow' shares in exactly the same way a person 'borrows' money from a bank and both come from the same source; thin air. These borrowed shares are invented and exist temporarily in a double entry type bookeeping system until the short sellers buy back shares to cancel these 'virtual' shares. It is essentially the same method whereby banks lend money that doesn't exist and this extra money has a life until the loan is paid back and the extra virtual money disappears again. This seemingly fraudulent practice has been legitimised through the passing of laws allowing this banking practice. It is called 'Fractional Reserve Banking' overseen in the US by the Federal Reserve Board. The same practice involving shares, stock brokers, the New York Stock Exchange in particular and the Depository Trust Company, is not likewise legal as far as I know.

Cede and Co (the registered name on almost all stock) is the nominee company used and owned by the Depository Trust Company (DTC) otherwise known as the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC).
Who owns DTC?
Answer, the New York Stock Exchange.
Who owns the New York Stock Exchange?
Answer, the same Federal Reserve Board mentioned above.
Who owns the Federal Reserve Board?
Answer, American and European banks.
Who owns these banks?
Answer, a very good question!

What is known for sure, though, is that they are not your friends.

So the shares remain in the name of Cede & Co no matter who buys and who sells thus making it impossible to trace particular share certificates through transactions and which shares in the total are pre-existing shares and which ones are the extra 'virtual' ones and which shares disappeared when the short sellers bought back shares to cover those they sold and even the fact that there were extra 'virtual' shares at all. Facilitating this further is the fact that there are no certificates for the shares thus held. They are merely book entries or, more accurately, computer entries.

The only thing that changes are the broker's accounts and brokers, as you would have read at the links, are allowed to fudge things in the name of prompt settlement i.e. behave as if they have them in one of their accounts when they don't at all – fraud, in other words; shares created out of thin air. If this were not the case, then shareholders would notice that shares would disappear from their accounts and be replaced at a later date. This doesn't happen, of course, just as money doesn't disappear from your (or anyone else's) banking account when the bank lends someone money. The banks create new 'virtual' money whenever they lend and stock brokers and the DTC must, by all appearances, do exactly the same thing with shares to cover short positions.

Getting back to our 'borrowed' stocks and their accommodating owners, we can now see that they can not be borrowed at all but must be newly created. Who can do this? Who are they. They have to be none other the stock brokers who are allowed to do so to a limited degree under the NYSE rules but also the DTC and Cede & Co which is its nominee company that owns most of the real shares on behalf of the 'beneficial' or real owners, the ones that put up the money to buy them. The stocks are sort of held in trust, if you like. Except the trustee is acting against the interests of the rightful owners and without their knowledge whenever they conspire with large short sellers by creating fictitious shares and selling them to deliberately drive down the value of that stock. They can go on creating and selling these fictitious shares until they achieve their desired result; a low share price and driving legitimate owners of stocks that find themselves in financial straits to sell their shares on to a falling market and lose money. These shares are then purchased by the short sellers to cover their sale of fictitious shares at the previous higher prices and the loss suffered by the legitimate owners forced to sell becomes the profit of the short sellers. How is this not theft on a grand scale?

As I noted previously, an individual broker can cover for an individual short seller but this individual trader is unlikely to have the clout to crash the market under a wave of selling all by himself. To do that you need numbers and volume and co-ordination. And to cover the stock and share certificates for that necessarily involves the DTC itself because they are the ones that can 'supply' (actually, invent) that amount of scrip to cover the accounts that allows it all to happen. So the owners of DTC, the NYSE and the Fed have to be involved in, if not directly directing, any crash involving substantial short selling into the market. And they can do it any time they like and there's no one to blow the whistle on them. There's no one to say, “Oi, you pinched my share certificates to sell into the market without my permission!” More to the point, there's no one to say, “Oi, there seems to be a whole lot more “Ajax Hot Air Balloons” shares on issue today than there was yesterday!” If anyone on Wall Street wants to maintain that share scrip is really borrowed from existing shareholders, let them name them and show documentation to prove it.

Yes, folks, shares are created out of thin air when they are 'lent' just like money is created out of thin air when it is lent into existence. Because no shareholder's account at his brokers is suddenly missing shares to cover the short selling before they are bought back, extra shares have to come into existence for the bridging period. When the shorted shares are bought back (at lower prices), the extra ones, the virtual ones, the thin air ones, disappear into the ether from whence they came leaving no trace for investigators to find (assuming they would ever be appointed and also assuming they would be granted access to the DTC's or Cede & Co's books). Neat, huh? It's just like the banks and your money which they issue and control.

So next time there is a major stock market crash, you will know what is going on, who is doing it, how they're doing it and why they're doing it. This leaves the question of what to do about it? Given that these 'wise and honourable men' are the experts followed by the regulators, not much can be expected in the way of reform of these institutions and certainly not of their owners. Public education is the only recourse really, that I can see.

So spread the word and tell anyone who will listen that 'short selling' is fraud and why. And if you have shares (and/or have friends who have), insist on receiving your stock certificates in your hand and registered in your name or the name of your own nominee company. If this is not possible, consider selling those shares and buying others where you can be the 'registered owner' and hold actual share certificates instead of being the 'beneficial owner' as suggested in one of the above links.
The sooner the practice of short selling is eliminated the sooner the economy, which means everybody including non share holders, will be better off.

Has the U.S. supreme court stepped into the limelight as the new power in American "democracy"?

How can fascism be stopped? How can we get the right wing masses to unify with the progressives so we have the footsoldiers on the side of the people? Anyway... I will keep dreaming.

Here's an interesting article with the headline Bin Laden claims airline bomb attempt on Christmas; funny how they even bother to mention "There was no way to verify the voice on the audio message was actually bin Laden"

Open thread, welcome to it.