Planet Awakening

Archives for April 2013

Poofness 4-28-13…”Justice Prevails”

Greetings and Salutations;

You know the old line, bad news travels fast. It certainly did this past week, Wells Fargo, getting caught with their fingers in the cookie jar. [What] They didn’t pick up was the swiss bankers tho. When the 3 countries issued the bonds to cover everything being released. They made an assumption, they were free to do as they chose with all that money. That brought so much heat down from the rafters, they withered and lost their jobs. They thought they could do something sneaky but, they are all learning, those days are over, can’t hide that stuff anymore.

Like a virus, the new banking system is taking over the old fractional reserve banking system, that’s been running the world’s banking since 1913. This will cause changes across the planet. Politics is not immune to money as I’m sure you know. As the new regs become known to each country and they are enforced, many changes will become apparent to everyone….across the world. The time of the people has arrived. Before i step away, I wish to send out condolences out to all the families, who’ve lost people suddenly in the last few days who were hanging on til all this redistribution of the wealth was done. Bless you all in the journey into the light and sanity of being. I am having my own issues so, I’m not answering so many emails. It’s all at an end now so, you don’t need me that much anyhow. Dinar folks will have their exchanges, world global settlements are due so, all will be well for everyone. My main function was only to hold the torch up til it was done. Maximum respect for all who hung on, I know it wasn’t easy. Consultations till the end.

Blessings to all,

Love and Kisses,
Poofness [2goforth@Safe-mail.net]

Ride captain ride Lyrics
by Blood Sweat &Tears
(Konte, Pimera)

http://youtube.googleapis.com/v/Q52A_M1At1A&source=uds 

Seventy-three men sailed up from the San Francisco Bay,
Rolled off of their ship and here’s what they had to say.
“We’re calling everyone to ride along to another shore,
Where we can laugh our lives away and be free once more.”

Ride, captain ride on your mystery ship,
Be amazed at the friends you’ve got there on your trip.
Ride, captain ride on your mystery ship,
Be aware of the things others just might have missed

No one heard them calling, no one came at all,
‘Cause they were too busy watching those old raindrops fall.
As a storm was blowing out on the peaceful sea,
Seventy-three men were sailing off into history.

Ride, captain ride on your mystery ship,
Be amazed at the friends you’ve got there on your trip.
Ride captain ride on your mystery ship,
Be aware of the world others just might have missed

Ride, captain ride on your mystery ship,
Be amazed at the friends you’ve got there on your trip.
Ride captain ride on your mystery ship,
Be aware of the world othersjust might have missed

Ride, captain ride on your mystery ship,
Be amazed at the friends you have here on your trip.
Ride, captain ride on your mystery ship,
Be aware of a world others just might have missed.

Inner Worlds, Outer Worlds

Here are a series of videos that eloquently explain ancient knowledge: the logos, unity consciousness, cymatics, sacred geometry, etc. All I can say is, how did I not find these sooner! Enjoy! -PA

All 4 parts of the film can be found at www.innerworldsmovie.com. 

“one who looks outside dreams, one who looks inside awakes.”
-Carl Jung

Inner Worlds, Outer Worlds – Part 1 – Akasha
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXuTt7c3Jkg

http://youtube.googleapis.com/v/aXuTt7c3Jkg&source=uds

Part one of the film Inner Worlds, Outer Worlds. Akasha is the unmanifested, the “nothing” or emptiness which fills the vacuum of space. As Einstein realized, empty space is not really empty. Saints, sages and yogis who have looked within themselves have also realized that within the emptiness is unfathomable power, a web of information or energy which connects all things. This matrix or web has been called the Logos, the Higgs Field, the Primordial OM and a thousand other names throughout history. In part one of Inner Worlds, we explore the one vibratory source that extends through all things, through the science of cymatics, the concept of the Logos, and the Vedic concept of Nada Brahma (the universe is sound or vibration). Once we realize that there is one vibratory source that is the root of all scientific and spiritual investigation, how can we say “my religion”, “my God” or “my discovery”.




Inner Worlds, Outer Worlds – Part 2 – The Spiral
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIMoxXO0XvM 

http://youtube.googleapis.com/v/ZIMoxXO0XvM&source=uds

The Pythagorian philosopher Plato hinted enigmatically that there was a golden key that unified all of the mysteries of the universe. The golden key is the intelligence of the logos, the source of the primordial om. One could say that it is the mind of God. The source of this divine symmetry is the greatest mystery of our existence. Many of history’s monumental thinkers such as Pythagoras, Keppler, Leonardo da Vinci, Tesla and Einstein have come to the threshold the mystery. Every scientist who looks deeply into the universe and every mystic who looks deeply within the self, eventually comes face to face with the same thing: The Primordial Spiral.

 
Inner Worlds, Outer Worlds – Part 3 – The Serpent and the Lotus
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNEruEsb5T4 

http://youtube.googleapis.com/v/yNEruEsb5T4&source=uds

The primordial spiral is the manifested world, while Akasha is the unmanifested, or emptiness itself. All of reality is an interplay between these two things; Yang and Yin, or consciousness and matter. The spiral has often been represented by the snake, the downward current, while the bird or blooming lotus flower has represented the upward current or transcendence.The ancient traditions taught that a human being can become a bridge extending from the outer to the inner, from gross to subtle, from the lower chakras to the higher chakras. To balance the inner and the outer is what the Buddha called the middle way, or what Aristotle called the Golden Mean. You can be that bridge. The full awakening of human consciousness and energy is the birthright of every individual on the planet. In today’s society we have lost the balance between the inner and the outer. We are so distracted by the outer world of form, thoughts and ideas, that we no longer take time to connect to our inner worlds, the kingdom of heaven that is within.

Inner Worlds, Outer Worlds – Part 4 – Beyond Thinking
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmL4CeTENtw

http://youtube.googleapis.com/v/qmL4CeTENtw&source=uds

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We live our lives pursuing happiness “out there” as if it is a commodity. We have become slaves to our own desires and craving. Happiness isn’t something that can be pursued or purchased like a cheap suit. This is Maya, illusion, the endless play of form. In the Buddhist tradition, Samsara, or the endless cycle of suffering is perpetuated by the craving of pleasure and aversion to pain. Freud referred to this as the “pleasure principle.” Everything we do is an attempt to create pleasure, to gain something that we want, or to push away something that is undesirable that we don’t want. Even a simple organism like the paramecium does this. It is called response to stimulus. Unlike a paramecium, humans have more choice. We are free to think, and that is the heart of the problem. It is the thinking about what we want that has gotten out of control.The dilemma of modern society is that we seek to understand the world, not in terms of archaic inner consciousness, but by quantifying and qualifying what we perceive to be the external world by using scientific means and thought. Thinking has only led to more thinking and more questions. We seek to know the innermost forces which create the world and guide its course. But we conceive of this essence as outside of ourselves, not as a living thing, intrinsic to our own nature. It was the famous psychiatrist Carl Jung who said, “one who looks outside dreams, one who looks inside awakes.” It is not wrong to desire to be awake, to be happy. What is wrong is to look for happiness outside when it can only be found inside.

We Had No Idea What Alexander Graham Bell Sounded Like. Until Now.

By Charlotte Gray | Smithsonian 

During the years I spent in the company of Alexander Graham Bell, at work on his biography, I often wondered what the inventor of the world’s most important acoustical device—the telephone—might have sounded like.
 

This wax-and-cardboard disc from 1885 contains a recording of Bell’s voice.


Born in Scotland in 1847, Bell, at different periods of his life, lived in England, then Canada and, later, the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. His favorite refuge was Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, where he spent the summers from the mid-1880s on. In his day, 85 percent of the population there conversed in Gaelic. Did Bell speak with a Scottish burr? What was the pitch and depth of the voice with which he loved to belt out ballads and music hall songs?

Someone who knew that voice was his granddaughter, Mabel Grosvenor, a noted Washington, D.C. pediatrician who retired in 1966. In 2004, I met with Dr. Mabel, as she was known in the family, when she was 99 years old—clearheaded, dignified and a bit fierce. I inquired whether her grandfather had an accent. “He sounded,” she said firmly, “like you.” As a British-born immigrant to Canada, my accent is BBC English with a Canadian overlay: It made instant sense to me that I would share intonations and pronunciations with a man raised in Edinburgh who had resided in North America from the age of 23. When Dr. Mabel died in 2006, the last direct link with the inventor was gone.

Today, however, a dramatic application of digital technology has allowed researchers to recover Bell’s voice from a recording held by the Smithsonian—a breakthrough announced here for the first time. From the 1880s on, until his death in 1922, Bell gave an extensive collection of laboratory materials to the Smithsonian Institution, where he was a member of the Board of Regents. The donation included more than 400 discs and cylinders Bell used as he tried his hand at recording sound. The holdings also documented Bell’s research, should patent disputes arise similar to the protracted legal wrangling that attended the invention of the telephone.

Bell conducted his sound experiments between 1880 and 1886, collaborating with his cousin Chichester Bell and technician Charles Sumner Tainter. They worked at Bell’s Volta Laboratory, at 1221 Connecticut Avenue in Washington, originally established inside what had been a stable. In 1877, his great rival, Thomas Edison, had recorded sound on embossed foil; Bell was eager to improve the process. Some of Bell’s research on light and sound during this period anticipated fiber-optic communications.

Read the full article at: smithsonianmag.com

http://youtube.googleapis.com/v/afyRRGEn6Bo&source=uds



Warnings from Former Presidents About Who Really Runs the Show

Verified Warnings From Former U.S. Presidents About the “Invisible Government” Running the U.S. With “No Allegiance To the People”

“Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”   ~ George Santayana

Past presidents of the United States and other high profile political leaders have repeatedly issued warnings over the last 214 years that the U.S. government is under the control of an “invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people.”

According to half-dozen of our former presidents, one vice-president,  and a myriad of other high profile political leaders, an invisible government that is “incredibly evil in intent” has been in control of the U.S. government“ever since the days of Andrew Jackson” (since at least 1836).  They “virtually run the United States government for their own selfish purposes. They practically control both parties… It operates under cover of a self-created screen [and] seizes our executive officers, legislative bodies, schools, courts, newspapers and every agency created for the public protection.”

As a result, “we have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated, governments in the civilized world—no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and the duress of small groups of dominant men.”

The sources for the above quotes (and more) are listed below. All of the quotes listed in this article have been verified as authentic and have associated links to the source materials.  Also included below are statements made by David Rockefeller, Sr, former director of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), and Federal Reserve Chairman’s Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke that appear to confirm some of the warnings.

Warnings About the Invisible Government Running the U.S.
The warnings listed below, which appear in chronological order, began with our first president – George Washington.  The last president to speak out was JFK, who was assassinated. Read what they and other political leaders have said about the invisible government. 
George Washington wrote that the Illuminati want to separate the People from their Government.

“It was not my intention to doubt that, the Doctrines of the Illuminati, and principles of Jacobinism had not spread in the United States. On the contrary, no one is more truly satisfied of this fact than I am. The idea that I meant to convey, was, that I did not believe that the Lodges of Free Masons in this Country had, as Societies, endeavoured to propagate the diabolical tenets of the first, or pernicious principles of the latter (if they are susceptible of separation).That Individuals of them may… actually had a separation [sic] of the People from their Government in view, is too evident to be questioned.” – George Washington,  1st President of the United States (1789–1797), from a letter that Washington wrote on October 24, 1798, which can be found in the Library of Congress.  For an analysis of Washington’s warning, see the article “Library of Congress: George Washington Warns of Illuminati”

“I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies.” —Thomas Jefferson, 3rd President of the United States (1801–1809) and principal author of the United States Declaration of Independence (1776), in a letter written to John Taylor on May 28, 1816
“A power has risen up in the government greater than the people themselves, consisting of many and various powerful interests, combined in one mass, and held together by the cohesive power of the vast surplus in banks.” – John C. Calhoun, Vice President (1825-1832) and U.S. Senator, from a speech given on May 27, 1836

Note that it appears that Washington’s and Jefferson’s concerns regarding bankers and separation of the people from the government was realized by 1836.  This fact was confirmed in a letter written by FDR in 1933 (see below) in which he wrote that “a financial element in the large centers has owned the government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson.”  Jackson was the seventh president of the United States (1829-1937).  Calhoun served as Jackson’s vice-president from 1829-1932.

“Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people.  To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.”— Theodore Roosevelt, 26th President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, An Autobiography, 1913 (Appendix B)

“A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is privately concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men… [W]e have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated, governments in the civilized world—no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority,but a government by the opinion and the duress of small groups of dominant men.” – Woodrow Wilson, 28th President of the United States, The New Freedom, 1913

“Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men’s views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of something.  They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.” – Woodrow Wilson, 28th President of the United States, The New Freedom, 1913 

“The real menace of our Republic is the invisible government, which like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy legs over our cities, states and nation… The little coterie of powerful international bankers virtually run the United States government for their own selfish purposes. They practically control both parties, … and control the majority of the newspapers and magazines in this country. They use the columns of these papers to club into submission or drive out of office public officials who refuse to do the bidding of the powerful corrupt cliques which compose the invisible government. It operates under cover of a self-created screen [and] seizes our executive officers, legislative bodies, schools, courts, newspapers and every agency created for the public protection.”  – New York City Mayor John F. Hylan, New York Times, March 26, 1922

 “Mr. Chairman, we have in this country one of the most corrupt institutions the world has ever known. I refer to the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Banks. The Federal Reserve Board, a Government board, has cheated the Government of the United States and the people of the United States out of enough money to pay the national debt…Mr. Chairman, when the Federal Reserve act was passed, the people of the United States did not perceive that a world system was being set up here… and that this country was to supply financial power to an international superstate — a superstate controlled by international bankers and international industrialists acting together to enslave the world for their own pleasure.” – Congressman Louis T. McFadden, from a speech delivered to the House of Representatives on June 10, 1932

“The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson.” — Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 32nd President of the United States (1933–1945), in a letter to Colonel Edward M House dated November 21, 1933, as quoted in F.D.R.: His Personal Letters, 1928-1945.

“Today the path to total dictatorship in the U.S. can be laid by strictly legal means… We have a well-organized political-action group in this country, determined to destroy our Constitution and establish a one-party state… It operates secretly, silently, continuously to transform our Government… This ruthless power-seeking elite is a disease of our century… This group…is answerable neither to the President, the Congress, nor the courts. It is practically irremovable.” – Senator William Jenner, 1954 speech

“The individual is handicapped by coming face-to-face with a conspiracy somonstrous he cannot believe it exists. The American mind simply has not come to a realization of the evil which has been introduced into our midst.It rejects even the assumption that human creatures could espouse a philosophy which must ultimately destroy all that is good and decent.”  —J. Edgar Hoover, The Elks Magazine, 1956

“For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence–on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations. Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed.” — John F Kennedy, 35th President of the United States, from a speech delivered to the American Newspaper Publishers Association on April 27, 1961 and known as the “Secret Society” speech.  Listen to Kennedy’s speech.

“The Rockefellers and their allies have, for at least fifty years, been carefully following a plan to use their economic power to gain political control of first America, and then the rest of the world.  Do I mean conspiracy? Yes, I do. I am convinced there is such a plot, international in scope, generations old in planning, and incredibly evil in intent.” Congressman Larry P. McDonald, November 1975, from the introduction to a book titled The Rockefeller File.

“There exists a shadowy government with its own Air Force, its own Navy, its own fundraising mechanism, and the ability to pursue its own ideas of national interest, free from all checks and balances, and free from the law itself.” – Daniel K. Inouye, US Senator from Hawaii, testimony at the Iran Contra Hearings, 1986

The Federal Reserve

“A power has risen up in the government greater than the people themselves…” – John C. Calhoun

“… owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people.” – Theodore Roosevelt

“… one of the most corrupt institutions the world has ever known. I refer to the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Bank.“  – Louis T. McFadden

In an interview with Jim Lehrer that was aired on PBS’ News Hour on September 18, 2007 that you can watch on YouTube, formal Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said, essentially, that the Federal Reserve was above the law and that no agency of government can overrule their actions:

Jim Lehrer: “What is the proper relationship, what should be the proper relationship between a chairman of the Fed and a president of the United States?”

Alan Greenspan: “Well, first of all, the Federal Reserve is an independent agency, and that means, basically, that there is no other agency of government which can overrule actions that we take. So long as that is in place and there is no evidence that the administration or the Congress or anybody else is requesting that we do things other than what we think is the appropriate thing, then what the relationships are don’t frankly matter.”

The fact that the Fed is above the law was demonstrated by current Fed chairman, Ben Bernanke, during his appearance before Congress on March 4, 2009 (as shown in this video). Senator Bernie Sanders asked Bernanke about $2.2 trillion in American tax dollars that was lent out by Federal Reserve.  Bernanke refused to provide an answer:

Senator Sanders: “Will you tell the American people to whom you lent $2.2 trillion of their dollars? … Can you tell us who they are?”

Bernanke: “No”

Source: http://www.thehealersjournal.com/2012/09/05/warnings-from-former-presidents-about-who-really-runs-the-show/

 

Has UFO Disclosure Already Happened? (VIDEO)


Editor at Open Minds Magazine

A lot of UFO researchers talk about disclosure, but who do we want to make this disclosure, and what are we looking for them to disclose? There are those that believe disclosure has already happened, and depending on your answers to these two questions, you may think so too.

The most common idea people have of disclosure is the President making a special announcement that they have discovered some UFOs are flown by extraterrestrials. This is the sort of disclosure that the Citizen Hearing on Disclosure is seeking this weekend in Washington D.C. at the National Press Club. There will be a panel of former congress members reviewing five days of testimony from witnesses and UFO researchers. The idea is to inspire real congressional hearings that will prompt the President to announce that they knew it all the time.

http://youtube.googleapis.com/v/dlxxLNwjpfQ&source=uds 

This sort of disclosure sounds simple. However, a lot of these people feel the government is currently lying about the subject. How would we know what we were being told is now the truth? If proponents of this type of disclosure already believe the government cannot be trusted, why would they trust any announcement?

That is a point that is often made by retired Army Colonel, Dr. John Alexander. He is convinced the UFO phenomena is real and is likely of an extraterrestrial nature. However, he feels government disclosure has already happened. The FBI and the Air Force are two examples of government agencies that currently have thousands of files available on their investigations into UFOs. Alexander says they have released all of their research, but they haven’t discovered much and are as baffled as the rest of us.


Much ado has been made of an unofficial group of friends inside intelligence circles Alexander helped to organize that looked into government UFO secrecy. He thought maybe they would find a group of secret keepers. What he found is that the topic is a bit of a hot potato. No one wants to deal with it, because it is too weird and they fear ridicule. He thinks the real lack of serious investigation by the government is due more to incompetence than anything else. However, he does feel official investigation is needed and advocates for organized research into the topic.

Another UFO investigator who often says disclosure has been accomplished is Dr. Steven Greer. Greer has been in the news a lot these past few weeks for his new documentary, Sirius. He was the first to bring credible witnesses to the National Press Club in Washington D.C. to address the media in 2001. It was an impressive group that included retired military officers, an FAA official, and credentialed people in the private sector. They testified to their knowledge or involvement with UFO research or sightings. To many, the credentials of these people were sufficient enough to be a sort of disclosure. In fact, this event prompted me to not only sit up and pay attention, but to get involved with reporting and researching the topic.

Others feel that the secrets are locked up so tight that getting answers is a much more difficult and complicated task. Richard Dolan, a UFO historian, thinks that the answers are probably locked up in deep black projects. Even the President may not have the need to know, giving him plausible deniability, and making it true that the White House doesn’t know anything about UFOs because they are not in the loop. If we don’t know where the secrets are, how do we, or the President or even congress get to them?

Of course there is also Jaden Smith. He says President Obama has already disclosed to him the truth about ETs. Jaden is the 14 year-old son of Will and Jada Pinkett Smith. In an interview with Wonderland magazine last week he says he asked Obama about ETs when he got to visit the White House with his family. He told Wonderland:

I talked to President Obama about extraterrestrials. He said he could neither confirm nor deny the existence of aliens, which means they’re real. If people think we’re the only people that live in this universe, then something is wrong with them.

The point is that there are many ideas about what disclosure really means, and whether it has already happened, or if it is even necessary. Of course, all of this would be moot if extraterrestrials decide to park a spaceship over the White House, and disclose themselves.

 

Follow Alejandro Rojas on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ATRojas_OM

Healing Energy Streams Flow from Portal to Portal…

Healing energy streams flow from portal to portal as Gaia balances with Hue-manity and humanity (smaller h) energies.

Light Workers called to portal adjustments are encouraged to follow healing energy flow within, as this aligns with the Gaia Healing energy streams, and will lead each to their Gaia healing portal center.

As Hue-manity aligns, and more and more of humanity (smaller h) begins to align, with these healing energy streams, and accepts those processes within themselves, Gaia rests in the resulting peace, and needs not the “catastrophic” adjustments previously thought necessary.

Those promoting the “doom and/or gloom catastrophe” scenarios will find difficulty in expressing those ideas, as their time is over. The current energetic state of Gaia does not support, in any way, that type of energy intent.

http://gaiaportal.wordpress.com/

Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever

The Illuminati were amateurs. The second huge financial scandal of the year reveals the real international conspiracy: There’s no price the big banks can’t fix

By Matt Taibbi

RollingStone.com
April 25, 2013 1:00 PM ET

Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world’s largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything.

You may have heard of the Libor scandal, in which at least three – and perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that’s trillion, with a “t”) worth of financial instruments. When that sprawling con burst into public view last year, it was easily the biggest financial scandal in history – MIT professor Andrew Lo even said it “dwarfs by orders of magnitude any financial scam in the history of markets.”

That was bad enough, but now Libor may have a twin brother. Word has leaked out that the London-based firm ICAP, the world’s largest broker of interest-rate swaps, is being investigated by American authorities for behavior that sounds eerily reminiscent of the Libor mess. Regulators are looking into whether or not a small group of brokers at ICAP may have worked with up to 15 of the world’s largest banks to manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark number used around the world to calculate the prices of interest-rate swaps.

Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their use is almost unimaginably massive. It’s about a $379 trillion market, meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100 times the size of the United States federal budget.

It should surprise no one that among the players implicated in this scheme to fix the prices of interest-rate swaps are the same megabanks – including Barclays, UBS, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and the Royal Bank of Scotland – that serve on the Libor panel that sets global interest rates. In fact, in recent years many of these banks have already paid multimillion-dollar settlements for anti-competitive manipulation of one form or another (in addition to Libor, some were caught up in an anti-competitive scheme, detailed in Rolling Stone last year, to rig municipal-debt service auctions). Though the jumble of financial acronyms sounds like gibberish to the layperson, the fact that there may now be price-fixing scandals involving both Libor and ISDAfix suggests a single, giant mushrooming conspiracy of collusion and price-fixing hovering under the ostensibly competitive veneer of Wall Street culture.

The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia

Why? Because Libor already affects the prices of interest-rate swaps, making this a manipulation-on-manipulation situation. If the allegations prove to be right, that will mean that swap customers have been paying for two different layers of price-fixing corruption. If you can imagine paying 20 bucks for a crappy PB&J because some evil cabal of agribusiness companies colluded to fix the prices of both peanuts and peanut butter, you come close to grasping the lunacy of financial markets where both interest rates and interest-rate swaps are being manipulated at the same time, often by the same banks.

“It’s a double conspiracy,” says an amazed Michael Greenberger, a former director of the trading and markets division at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and now a professor at the University of Maryland. “It’s the height of criminality.”


The bad news didn’t stop with swaps and interest rates. In March, it also came out that two regulators – the CFTC here in the U.S. and the Madrid-based International Organization of Securities Commissions – were spurred by the Libor revelations to investigate the possibility of collusive manipulation of gold and silver prices. “Given the clubby manipulation efforts we saw in Libor benchmarks, I assume other benchmarks – many other benchmarks – are legit areas of inquiry,” CFTC Commissioner Bart Chilton said.

But the biggest shock came out of a federal courtroom at the end of March – though if you follow these matters closely, it may not have been so shocking at all – when a landmark class-action civil lawsuit against the banks for Libor-related offenses was dismissed. In that case, a federal judge accepted the banker-defendants’ incredible argument: If cities and towns and other investors lost money because of Libor manipulation, that was their own fault for ever thinking the banks were competing in the first place.

“A farce,” was one antitrust lawyer’s response to the eyebrow-raising dismissal.

“Incredible,” says Sylvia Sokol, an attorney for Constantine Cannon, a firm that specializes in antitrust cases.

All of these stories collectively pointed to the same thing: These banks, which already possess enormous power just by virtue of their financial holdings – in the United States, the top six banks, many of them the same names you see on the Libor and ISDAfix panels, own assets equivalent to 60 percent of the nation’s GDP – are beginning to realize the awesome possibilities for increased profit and political might that would come with colluding instead of competing. Moreover, it’s increasingly clear that both the criminal justice system and the civil courts may be impotent to stop them, even when they do get caught working together to game the system.

If true, that would leave us living in an era of undisguised, real-world conspiracy, in which the prices of currencies, commodities like gold and silver, even interest rates and the value of money itself, can be and may already have been dictated from above. And those who are doing it can get away with it. Forget the Illuminati – this is the real thing, and it’s no secret. You can stare right at it, anytime you want.

The banks found a loophole, a basic flaw in the machine. Across the financial system, there are places where prices or official indices are set based upon unverified data sent in by private banks and financial companies. In other words, we gave the players with incentives to game the system institutional roles in the economic infrastructure.

Libor, which measures the prices banks charge one another to borrow money, is a perfect example, not only of this basic flaw in the price-setting system but of the weakness in the regulatory framework supposedly policing it. Couple a voluntary reporting scheme with too-big-to-fail status and a revolving-door legal system, and what you get is unstoppable corruption.

Every morning, 18 of the world’s biggest banks submit data to an office in London about how much they believe they would have to pay to borrow from other banks. The 18 banks together are called the “Libor panel,” and when all of these data from all 18 panelist banks are collected, the numbers are averaged out. What emerges, every morning at 11:30 London time, are the daily Libor figures.

Banks submit numbers about borrowing in 10 different currencies across 15 different time periods, e.g., loans as short as one day and as long as one year. This mountain of bank-submitted data is used every day to create benchmark rates that affect the prices of everything from credit cards to mortgages to currencies to commercial loans (both short- and long-term) to swaps.

Gangster Bankers Broke Every Law in the Book

Dating back perhaps as far as the early Nineties, traders and others inside these banks were sometimes calling up the company geeks responsible for submitting the daily Libor numbers (the “Libor submitters”) and asking them to fudge the numbers. Usually, the gimmick was the trader had made a bet on something – a swap, currencies, something – and he wanted the Libor submitter to make the numbers look lower (or, occasionally, higher) to help his bet pay off.

Famously, one Barclays trader monkeyed with Libor submissions in exchange for a bottle of Bollinger champagne, but in some cases, it was even lamer than that. This is from an exchange between a trader and a Libor submitter at the Royal Bank of Scotland:

SWISS FRANC TRADER: can u put 6m swiss libor in low pls?…
PRIMARY SUBMITTER: Whats it worth
SWSISS FRANC TRADER: ive got some sushi rolls from yesterday?…
PRIMARY SUBMITTER: ok low 6m, just for u
SWISS FRANC TRADER: wooooooohooooooo. . . thatd be awesome

Screwing around with world interest rates that affect billions of people in exchange for day-old sushi – it’s hard to imagine an image that better captures the moral insanity of the modern financial-services sector.

Hundreds of similar exchanges were uncovered when regulators like Britain’s Financial Services Authority and the U.S. Justice Department started burrowing into the befouled entrails of Libor. The documentary evidence of anti-competitive manipulation they found was so overwhelming that, to read it, one almost becomes embarrassed for the banks. “It’s just amazing how Libor fixing can make you that much money,” chirped one yen trader. “Pure manipulation going on,” wrote another.

Yet despite so many instances of at least attempted manipulation, the banks mostly skated. Barclays got off with a relatively minor fine in the $450 million range, UBS was stuck with $1.5 billion in penalties, and RBS was forced to give up $615 million. Apart from a few low-level flunkies overseas, no individual involved in this scam that impacted nearly everyone in the industrialized world was even threatened with criminal prosecution.

Two of America’s top law-enforcement officials, Attorney General Eric Holder and former Justice Department Criminal Division chief Lanny Breuer, confessed that it’s dangerous to prosecute offending banks because they are simply too big. Making arrests, they say, might lead to “collateral consequences” in the economy.

The relatively small sums of money extracted in these settlements did not go toward reparations for the cities, towns and other victims who lost money due to Libor manipulation. Instead, it flowed mindlessly into government coffers. So it was left to towns and cities like Baltimore (which lost money due to fluctuations in their municipal investments caused by Libor movements), pensions like the New Britain, Connecticut, Firefighters’ and Police Benefit Fund, and other foundations – and even individuals (billionaire real-estate developer Sheldon Solow, who filed his own suit in February, claims that his company lost $450 million because of Libor manipulation) – to sue the banks for damages.

One of the biggest Libor suits was proceeding on schedule when, early in March, an army of superstar lawyers working on behalf of the banks descended upon federal judge Naomi Buchwald in the Southern District of New York to argue an extraordinary motion to dismiss. The banks’ legal dream team drew from heavyweight Beltway-connected firms like Boies Schiller (you remember David Boies represented Al Gore), Davis Polk (home of top ex-regulators like former SEC enforcement chief Linda Thomsen) and Covington & Burling, the onetime private-practice home of both Holder and Breuer.

The presence of Covington & Burling in the suit – representing, of all companies, Citigroup, the former employer of current Treasury Secretary Jack Lew – was particularly galling. Right as the Libor case was being dismissed, the firm had hired none other than Lanny Breuer, the same Lanny Breuer who, just a few months before, was the assistant attorney general who had balked at criminally prosecuting UBS over Libor because, he said, “Our goal here is not to destroy a major financial institution.”

In any case, this all-star squad of white-shoe lawyers came before Buchwald and made the mother of all audacious arguments. Robert Wise of Davis Polk, representing Bank of America, told Buchwald that the banks could not possibly be guilty of anti- competitive collusion because nobody ever said that the creation of Libor was competitive. “It is essential to our argument that this is not a competitive process,” he said. “The banks do not compete with one another in the submission of Libor.”

If you squint incredibly hard and look at the issue through a mirror, maybe while standing on your head, you can sort of see what Wise is saying. In a very theoretical, technical sense, the actual process by which banks submit Libor data – 18 geeks sending numbers to the British Bankers’ Association offices in London once every morning – is not competitive per se.

But these numbers are supposed to reflect interbank-loan prices derived in a real, competitive market. Saying the Libor submission process is not competitive is sort of like pointing out that bank robbers obeyed the speed limit on the way to the heist. It’s the silliest kind of legal sophistry.

But Wise eventually outdid even that argument, essentially saying that while the banks may have lied to or cheated their customers, they weren’t guilty of the particular crime of antitrust collusion. This is like the old joke about the lawyer who gets up in court and claims his client had to be innocent, because his client was committing a crime in a different state at the time of the offense.

“The plaintiffs, I believe, are confusing a claim of being perhaps deceived,” he said, “with a claim for harm to competition.”

Judge Buchwald swallowed this lunatic argument whole and dismissed most of the case. Libor, she said, was a “cooperative endeavor” that was “never intended to be competitive.” Her decision “does not reflect the reality of this business, where all of these banks were acting as competitors throughout the process,” said the antitrust lawyer Sokol. Buchwald made this ruling despite the fact that both the U.S. and British governments had already settled with three banks for billions of dollars for improper manipulation, manipulation that these companies admitted to in their settlements.

Michael Hausfeld of Hausfeld LLP, one of the lead lawyers for the plaintiffs in this Libor suit, declined to comment specifically on the dismissal. But he did talk about the significance of the Libor case and other manipulation cases now in the pipeline.

“It’s now evident that there is a ubiquitous culture among the banks to collude and cheat their customers as many times as they can in as many forms as they can conceive,” he said. “And that’s not just surmising. This is just based upon what they’ve been caught at.”

Greenberger says the lack of serious consequences for the Libor scandal has only made other kinds of manipulation more inevitable. “There’s no therapy like sending those who are used to wearing Gucci shoes to jail,” he says. “But when the attorney general says, ‘I don’t want to indict people,’ it’s the Wild West. There’s no law.”

The problem is, a number of markets feature the same infrastructural weakness that failed in the Libor mess. In the case of interest-rate swaps and the ISDAfix benchmark, the system is very similar to Libor, although the investigation into these markets reportedly focuses on some different types of improprieties.

Though interest-rate swaps are not widely understood outside the finance world, the root concept actually isn’t that hard. If you can imagine taking out a variable-rate mortgage and then paying a bank to make your loan payments fixed, you’ve got the basic idea of an interest-rate swap.

In practice, it might be a country like Greece or a regional government like Jefferson County, Alabama, that borrows money at a variable rate of interest, then later goes to a bank to “swap” that loan to a more predictable fixed rate. In its simplest form, the customer in a swap deal is usually paying a premium for the safety and security of fixed interest rates, while the firm selling the swap is usually betting that it knows more about future movements in interest rates than its customers.

Prices for interest-rate swaps are often based on ISDAfix, which, like Libor, is yet another of these privately calculated benchmarks. ISDAfix’s U.S. dollar rates are published every day, at 11:30 a.m. and 3:30 p.m., after a gang of the same usual-suspect megabanks (Bank of America, RBS, Deutsche, JPMorgan Chase, Barclays, etc.) submits information about bids and offers for swaps.

And here’s what we know so far: The CFTC has sent subpoenas to ICAP and to as many as 15 of those member banks, and plans to interview about a dozen ICAP employees from the company’s office in Jersey City, New Jersey. Moreover, the International Swaps and Derivatives Association, or ISDA, which works together with ICAP (for U.S. dollar transactions) and Thomson Reuters to compute the ISDAfix benchmark, has hired the consulting firm Oliver Wyman to review the process by which ISDAfix is calculated. Oliver Wyman is the same company that the British Bankers’ Association hired to review the Libor submission process after that scandal broke last year. The upshot of all of this is that it looks very much like ISDAfix could be Libor all over again.

“It’s obviously reminiscent of the Libor manipulation issue,” Darrell Duffie, a finance professor at Stanford University, told reporters. “People may have been naive that simply reporting these rates was enough to avoid manipulation.”

And just like in Libor, the potential losers in an interest-rate-swap manipulation scandal would be the same sad-sack collection of cities, towns, companies and other nonbank entities that have no way of knowing if they’re paying the real price for swaps or a price being manipulated by bank insiders for profit. Moreover, ISDAfix is not only used to calculate prices for interest-rate swaps, it’s also used to set values for about $550 billion worth of bonds tied to commercial real estate, and also affects the payouts on some state-pension annuities.

So although it’s not quite as widespread as Libor, ISDAfix is sufficiently power-jammed into the world financial infrastructure that any manipulation of the rate would be catastrophic – and a huge class of victims that could include everyone from state pensioners to big cities to wealthy investors in structured notes would have no idea they were being robbed.

“How is some municipality in Cleveland or wherever going to know if it’s getting ripped off?” asks Michael Masters of Masters Capital Management, a fund manager who has long been an advocate of greater transparency in the derivatives world. “The answer is, they won’t know.”

Worse still, the CFTC investigation apparently isn’t limited to possible manipulation of swap prices by monkeying around with ISDAfix. According to reports, the commission is also looking at whether or not employees at ICAP may have intentionally delayed publication of swap prices, which in theory could give someone (bankers, cough, cough) a chance to trade ahead of the information.

Swap prices are published when ICAP employees manually enter the data on a computer screen called “19901.” Some 6,000 customers subscribe to a service that allows them to access the data appearing on the 19901 screen.

The key here is that unlike a more transparent, regulated market like the New York Stock Exchange, where the results of stock trades are computed more or less instantly and everyone in theory can immediately see the impact of trading on the prices of stocks, in the swap market the whole world is dependent upon a handful of brokers quickly and honestly entering data about trades by hand into a computer terminal.

Any delay in entering price data would provide the banks involved in the transactions with a rare opportunity to trade ahead of the information. One way to imagine it would be to picture a racetrack where a giant curtain is pulled over the track as the horses come down the stretch – and the gallery is only told two minutes later which horse actually won. Anyone on the right side of the curtain could make a lot of smart bets before the audience saw the results of the race.

At ICAP, the interest-rate swap desk, and the 19901 screen, were reportedly controlled by a small group of 20 or so brokers, some of whom were making millions of dollars. These brokers made so much money for themselves the unit was nicknamed “Treasure Island.”

Already, there are some reports that brokers of Treasure Island did create such intentional delays. Bloomberg interviewed a former broker who claims that he watched ICAP brokers delay the reporting of swap prices. “That allows dealers to tell the brokers to delay putting trades into the system instead of in real time,” Bloomberg wrote, noting the former broker had “witnessed such activity firsthand.” An ICAP spokesman has no comment on the story, though the company has released a statement saying that it is “cooperating” with the CFTC’s inquiry and that it “maintains policies that prohibit” the improper behavior alleged in news reports.

The idea that prices in a $379 trillion market could be dependent on a desk of about 20 guys in New Jersey should tell you a lot about the absurdity of our financial infrastructure. The whole thing, in fact, has a darkly comic element to it. “It’s almost hilarious in the irony,” says David Frenk, director of research for Better Markets, a financial-reform advocacy group, “that they called it ISDAfix.”

After scandals involving libor and, perhaps, ISDAfix, the question that should have everyone freaked out is this: What other markets out there carry the same potential for manipulation? The answer to that question is far from reassuring, because the potential is almost everywhere. From gold to gas to swaps to interest rates, prices all over the world are dependent upon little private cabals of cigar-chomping insiders we’re forced to trust.

“In all the over-the-counter markets, you don’t really have pricing except by a bunch of guys getting together,” Masters notes glumly.

That includes the markets for gold (where prices are set by five banks in a Libor-ish teleconferencing process that, ironically, was created in part by N M Rothschild & Sons) and silver (whose price is set by just three banks), as well as benchmark rates in numerous other commodities – jet fuel, diesel, electric power, coal, you name it. The problem in each of these markets is the same: We all have to rely upon the honesty of companies like Barclays (already caught and fined $453 million for rigging Libor) or JPMorgan Chase (paid a $228 million settlement for rigging municipal-bond auctions) or UBS (fined a collective $1.66 billion for both muni-bond rigging and Libor manipulation) to faithfully report the real prices of things like interest rates, swaps, currencies and commodities.

All of these benchmarks based on voluntary reporting are now being looked at by regulators around the world, and God knows what they’ll find. The European Federation of Financial Services Users wrote in an official EU survey last summer that all of these systems are ripe targets for manipulation. “In general,” it wrote, “those markets which are based on non-attested, voluntary submission of data from agents whose benefits depend on such benchmarks are especially vulnerable of market abuse and distortion.”

Translation: When prices are set by companies that can profit by manipulating them, we’re fucked.
“You name it,” says Frenk. “Any of these benchmarks is a possibility for corruption.”

The only reason this problem has not received the attention it deserves is because the scale of it is so enormous that ordinary people simply cannot see it. It’s not just stealing by reaching a hand into your pocket and taking out money, but stealing in which banks can hit a few keystrokes and magically make whatever’s in your pocket worth less. This is corruption at the molecular level of the economy, Space Age stealing – and it’s only just coming into view.

This story is from the May 9th, 2013 issue of Rolling Stone.

Rachel Maddow on 4-24-13… “A Lesson in How to ‘Push’ Disinformation”… (and Why I Have Stopped Watching Rachel, and Pretty Much Anyone Else, on MSNBC)

http://kauilapele.wordpress.com/

[UPDATE: a note from AK: “You know, I don’t often watch MSNBC but I saw that last night, and I was just shellshocked at how blatant the propaganda is getting…. very sad day indeed… (KP response): Very “glad” day, I’d say… shows what a state of desperation they [the cabal] must be in. I’m quite sure that most who watch Rachel are quite awake, aware, and intelligent (yes, WE know that those three words CAN go together).]

I happened to flip onto this portion of MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow show today, and since she was giving what appeared to be a traditional MSNBC, main stream media type, flogging of “conspiracy theorists”, I just ignored it… passed it by (I’d rather watch NHL hockey… which I did).
But then I saw this note at RMN (“Rachel Maddow’s Rant”), and read this:

“Until tonight, I thought Rachael was a very intelligent person. Now, I don’t know what to make of her. Her 4-24 show on MSNBC (at least the part of it that I saw) can only be described as a rant against everyone who won’t swallow the “official” story about anything.
“It was out of character for her.
“Maybe she’s in fear for her job (as all of the MSM actors should be right now). “

I’d have to agree with the “Maybe she’s in fear for her job” part (or maybe it’s “in fear for her life” (although I hope not)).

Here is the link to that segment of her show, should you wish to watch it.
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/26315908/ns/msnbc_tv-rachel_maddow_show/#51653479
I’ll just point out a few things I observed in this “Rachel Rant”, which I consider typical of those reporters who are simply out to “debunk”(should I say, “trash”?) alternative (to the MSM) explanations to many of the events we have experienced the last 12 years (e.g., 9-11, 7-7 (London), Sandy Hook, Aurora, Boston Marathon, Waco Texas Fertilizer plant explosion)…

  1. No matter what the alternative theory or explanation, bring in the word “crazy” when describing it. MSNBC’s favorite (thank you, Chris Matthews)… “Truther Nut Jobs”.
  2. No matter what the alternative theorIST, bring in the word “crazy” when describing THEM.
  3. Present as few as possible actual facts (observations) that those “conspiracy theorists” present (e.g., on 9-11 three steel structure buildings fell at free-fall speed).
  4. NEVER, I mean, NEVER, actually discuss in any intelligent way, what what their actual theories ARE.
  5. When showing a clip of one of “those conspiracy people”, be sure to bring out one where they look “crazy” (check out the Alex Jones clips).
  6. Interview a guest (in this case, Alice Hoagland (mother of Mark Bingham, who died in the “flight 93 crash” at Shanksville, PA)) who appears quite unconvincing in the “normalcy” that her son would greet her on the telephone by saying, “This is Mike Bingham” (How about, “This is Mike, your son”?).
  7. Interview a guest (in this case, Alice Hoagland) who, just like you, Rachel, implies these “conspiracy theorists” are “crazy” (alternatively, Alice says, “…think of these people as ‘mental patients’” (namely, they are “sick… off their rockers”).
  8. Tell your guest (in this case, Alice Hoagland) that you (Rachel Maddow) are “concerned about the harm that they (those conspiracy theorists) do”… implying, of course, that anyone who poses alternative (to MSM) theories to events, will be “harming” other people (they are “making it more miserable for us” (20:45)).
  9. Speak to your guest (in this case, Alice Hoagland) as if she is not only Mark Bingham’s mother, but also an expert on other events, like the Boston Marathon bombings.
  10. [Watch at 19:03…] Be sure your guest (in this case, Alice Hoagland) reads (checks) their notes throughout the interview so they stay on point (whose “point”? MSNBC’s?). This is also at 19:15, where she looks down, as well as at several other points after that).
  11. Have your guest (in this case, Alice Hoagland) bring in the words (regarding the Boston Marathon “suspects”), “cold blooded killers”.

Gotta love ‘em. Just send ‘em love, that’s all I say.
“See you, MSNBC. Glad that I’m awake enough to see that you’re just like the rest.” Have a nice life…

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