Dark Skinny

There have been many economic events that happen within the US and Global economies that go unreported — and all for good, solid fraudulent reasons. I have suspected for a long time that the US has been acting fraudulently concerning their gold reserves, and here is some good evidence towards this fact. If it is confirmed that the both the US government and the US Gold exchanges — that’s paper ETF gold to you — are entirely fraudulent for the most part and not backed by hard gold bullion as they are supposed to be, then the ramifications for America will be severe, since if it is proved that disguised tungsten  or lead has been sold by the America government to other mainly Asian nations(and many others) instead of real gold, America will have no choice but to go into default and be declared a Rogue Nation.  As these two following articles depict, every gold assayer in the world is  currently heavily employed, together with international lawyers, in proving that all recent gold purchased from the US is indeed real gold. It doesn’t get any lower than this…

BREAKDOWN AT GOLD EXCHANGES

From an article by Jim Willie on Kitco

The bust cometh, and it will be spectacular. The stories told in the press will be peculiar, since not told objectively. The headlines might be a comedy, with phony reports of foreign subterfuge, when the perpetrators are home grown. The focal point for attacks is actually London at their metals exchange. The early October events included numerous offers by exchange officials to settle gold contract deliveries in cash with a 25% extra big bonus [instead of gold]. Much gold was drained from London on demanded delivery, thanks to a small army of lawyers, a small blizzard of contracts, and a few key judges at the courts. They were all Asians, the majority Chinese. Gold was taken, thus enforcing futures contracts, which happen to be binding contracts. The pressure at the end of November will be worse to make good on gold contract deliveries. Recall the stories back in April for a Deutsche Bank rescue by the Euro Central Bank with a very large (over one million oz gold position) provision made. DBank was in trouble. The pressures are mounting every couple months. Next March will be a climax of the breakdown, or else June.

Breakdowns come from extreme pressures. Each delivery month event includes more gold removed from the London exchange, more gold demanded from it, and more movement toward a breakdown. So the next events have even more pressure, with less gold supply and continued relentless demand. Recall also that the exchange, along with the COMEX in the Untied States, exempt certain parties from maintaining 80% collateral when they short gold & silver with paper contracts. Thus the name suppression, or better yet corruption. They are being caught in their naked shorting game. The December 1st events surrounding settlement delivery demands will be more contentious and stressful than October 1st. In sequential manner, the March event will be even more pressure packed, with precious little physical gold in store and more targeted Chinese delivery demanded. The June event will be even more pressure packed still, a backup date for a potential breakdown if it does not occur in March.

FAKE U.S. GOLD

Article from the Gather website:

“$$$ THE BIGGEST GOLD CRIME STORY OF THE CENTURY MIGHT BE SOON COMING TO FULL LIGHT. EVIDENCE HAS BEEN  ACCUMULATING THAT THE CLINTON ADMIN WITH RUBIN AT US DEPT TREASURY REPLACED PERHAPS THE ENTIRE CONTENTS OF THE FORT KNOX GOLD WITH TUNGSTEN BARS PLATED BY GOLD. THE SALTED GOLD BARS ARE FAST BECOMING A GLOBAL CRIME ISSUE. HONG KONG DISCOVERED THEM, AND NOW ASSAYERS ARE TRYING TO AUTHENTICATE MOST OF THE GLOBAL GOLD HELD IN BANKS. ENTIRE NATIONS ARE AT RISK. BEFORE LONG THE US GOVT COULD BE DECLARED A ROGUE NATION INTERNATIONALLY. $$$”

Evidence is being gathered by perhaps a dozen key gold traders with diverse connections to the gold industry. They tie the delivery systems, the authentication processes, the assayers, record keeping, big financial firms, and trading platforms. Evidence mounts that as many as 1.5 million 400-oz gold bars were replaced at Fort Knox during the Clinton Admin with tungsten bars covered with a thin gold plate. This was a complex metallurgical feat, from what is told. The first ’salted bars’ were discovered in Hong Kong a month ago, reported by the Hat Trick Letter. Since that time, tens of thousands of bars have been examined, usually using four test holes drilled for direct sampling. Other non-invasive methods are being used as well, such as electro-magnetic tests to detect the actual lattice structure of the metal to distinguish gold from other substitutes. Word came this week that almost every available assayer in the world is currently tied up, charged with proving the authenticity of gold bars worldwide, right now! Rob Kirby suspects that the Street Tracks GLD exchange traded fund might be loaded with such salted bars. It is a perfect destination for them, since the Wall Street syndicate prevents any audit. The total value of gold removed within the plot was worth over $500 billion. So where are the real gold bars stored? My guess is the same location where the Madoff money is secretly held.

My view is the story is not only credible, but it is the climax to the US financial collapse. In time the United States will be isolated, declared a Rogue Nation, unable to fund its debt except with monetization, whose leaders and former leaders face international prosecution. The resulting inflation will undermine the US Dollar to the point that it will not be accepted. A US Treasury default will be forced, all in time. To be sure, some demand for gold might be frozen into inaction obviously, as customers would fear owning fake gold bars. However, the significantly greater effect is that sellers of gold will scramble to purchase real gold bars, so as to avoid fraud charges, criminal prosecution, and jail time. They will be motivated to repair the fraudulent transaction with full expedience. The replacement effect will cause an extraordinarily huge demand. Only at that time, will the risk of exposing the stolen gold come, as the thieves will want to cash out on their crime, at least partially. The removal and illegal swap of gold has precedent. In the 1960 decade, around 1968, President Lyndon Johnson ordered the removal of 7000 of the 8000 tons of gold from Fort Knox, and had it sent to England. The motive was to support the gold price at the time. Just a few years later, the US under President Nixon abandoned the US$ Gold Standard, as dictated by the Bretton Woods Accord. The gold was replaced during the Johnson Admin in Fort Knox by lead bars plated by gold. A contact of mine was in the US Military Police at the time. He reported long caravans exiting Fort Knox for weeks at a time, but the details of shipments were not known to the guards, only their duties.”

Here is the best article on the Afghan  War that I’ve read in a long time. No smoke and mirrors here. This article does not present tired, stale arguments about removing Al Quaeda as a terrorist threat or even fighting the Taliban to make Afghanistan a free democracy. This war game has much bigger goals. Very different reasons are presented here, which wholly and only bear relevance to Afghanistan’s location in between those two rising powers, Russia and China. What is reported in the US media is merely what the Administration and The Pentagon want you to believe. But all the real and inconvenient truths — as well as the dark  and ruthless background history –  are nicely contained within the article below.

From Financial Sense
by F. William Engdahl
October 12, 2009

One of the most remarkable aspects of the Obama Presidential agenda is how little anyone has questioned in the media or elsewhere why at all the United States Pentagon is committed to a military occupation of Afghanistan. There are two basic reasons, neither one of which can be admitted openly to the public at large.

Behind all the deceptive official debate over how many troops are needed to “win” the war in Afghanistan, whether another 30,000 is sufficient, or whether at least 200000 are needed, the real purpose of US military presence in that pivotal Central Asian country is obscured.

Even during the 2008 Presidential campaign candidate Obama argued that Afghanistan not Iraq was where the US must wage war. His reason? Because he claimed, that was where the Al Qaeda organization was holed up and that was the “real” threat to US national security. The reasons behind US involvement in Afghanistan is quite another one.

The US military is in Afghanistan for two reasons. First to restore and control the world’s largest supply of opium for the world heroin markets and to use the drugs as a geopolitical weapon against opponents, especially Russia. That control of the Afghan drug market is essential for the liquidity of the bankrupt and corrupt Wall Street financial mafia.

Geopolitics of Afghan Opium

According even to an official UN report, opium production in Afghanistan has risen dramatically since the downfall of the Taliban in 2001. UNODC data shows more opium poppy cultivation in each of the past four growing seasons (2004-2007), than in any one year during Taliban rule. More land is now used for opium in Afghanistan, than for coca cultivation in Latin America. In 2007, 93% of the opiates on the world market originated in Afghanistan. This is no accident.

It has been documented that Washington hand-picked the controversial Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun warlord from the Popalzai tribe, long in the CIA’s service, brought him back from exile in the USA, created a Hollywood mythology around his “courageous leadership of his people.” According to Afghan sources, Karzai is the Opium “Godfather” of Afghanistan today. There is apparently no accident that he was and is today still Washington’s preferred man in Kabul. Yet even with massive vote buying and fraud and intimidation, Karzai’s days could be ending as President.

The second reason the US military remains in Afghanistan long after the world has forgotten even who the mysterious Osama bin Laden and his alleged Al Qaeda terrorist organization is or even if they exist, is as a pretext to build a permanent US military strike force with a series of permanent US airbases across Afghanistan. The aim of those bases is not to eradicate any Al Qaeda cells that may have survived in the caves of Tora Bora, or to eradicate a mythical “Taliban” which at this point according to eyewitness reports is made up overwhelmingly of local ordinary Afghanis fighting to rid their land once more of occupier armies as they  did in the 11980’s against the Russians.

The aim of the US bases in Afghanistan is to target and be able to strike at the two nations which today represent the only combined threat in the world today to an American global imperium, to America’s Full Spectrum Dominance as the Pentagon terms it.

The lost ‘Mandate of Heaven’

The problem for the US power elites around Wall Street and in Washington is the fact that they are now in the deepest financial crisis in their history. That crisis is clear to the entire world and the world is acting on a basis of self-survival. The US elites have lost what in Chinese imperial history is known as the Mandate of Heaven. That mandate is given a ruler or ruling elite provided they rule their people justly and fairly. When they rule tyrannically and as despots, oppressing and abusing their people, they lose that Mandate of Heaven.

If the powerful private wealthy elites that have controlled essential US financial and foreign policy for most of the past century or more ever had a “mandate of Heaven” they clearly have lost it. The domestic developments towards creation of an abusive police state with deprivation of Constitutional rights to its citizens, the arbitrary exercise of power by non elected officials such as Treasury Secretaries Henry Paulson and now Tim Geithner, stealing trillion dollar sums from taxpayers without their consent in order to bailout the bankrupt biggest Wall Street banks, banks deemed “Too Big To Fail,” this all demonstrates to the world they have lost the mandate

In this situation, the US power elites are increasingly desperate to maintain their control of a global parasitical empire, called deceptively by their media machine, “globalization.” To hold that dominance it is essential that they be able to break up any emerging cooperation in the economic, energy or military realm between the two major powers of Eurasia that conceivably could pose a challenge to future US sole Superpower control—China in combination with Russia.

Each Eurasian power brings to the table essential contributions. China has the world’s most robust economy, a huge young and dynamic workforce, an educated middle class. Russia, whose economy has not recovered from the destructive end pf the Soviet era and of the primitive looting during the Yeltsin era, still holds essential assets for the combination. Russia’s nuclear strike force and its military pose the only threat in the world today to US military dominance, even if it is largely a residue of the Cold War. The Russian military elites never gave up that potential.

As well Russia holds the world’s largest treasure of natural gas and vast reserves of oil urgently needed by China. The two powers are increasingly converging via a new organization they created in 2001 known as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). That includes as well as China and Russia, the largest Central Asia states Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.

The purpose of the alleged US war against both Taliban and Al Qaeda is in reality to place its military strike force directly in the middle of the geographical space of this emerging SCO in Central Asia. Iran is a diversion. The main goal or target is Russia and China.

Officially, of course, Washington claims it has built its military presence inside Afghanistan since 2002 in order to protect a “fragile” Afghan democracy. It’s a curious argument given the reality of US military presence there.

In December 2004, during a visit to Kabul, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld finalized plans to build nine new bases in Afghanistan in the provinces of Helmand, Herat, Nimrouz, Balkh, Khost and Paktia. The nine are in addition to the three major US military bases already installed in the wake of its occupation of Afghanistan in winter of 2001-2002, ostensibly to isolate and eliminate the terror threat of Osama bin Laden.

The Pentagon built its first three bases at Bagram Air Field north of Kabul, the US’ main military logistics center; Kandahar Air Field, in southern Afghanistan; and Shindand Air Field in the western province of Herat. Shindand, the largest US base in Afghanistan, was constructed a mere 100 kilometers from the border of Iran, and within striking distance of Russia as well as China.

Afghanistan has historically been the heartland for the British-Russia Great Game, the struggle for control of Central Asia during the 19th and early 20th Centuries. British strategy then was to prevent Russia at all costs from controlling Afghanistan and thereby threatening Britain’s imperial crown jewel, India.

Afghanistan is similarly regarded by Pentagon planners as highly strategic. It is a platform from which US military power could directly threaten Russia and China, as well as Iran and other oil-rich Middle East lands. Little has changed geopolitically over more than a century of wars.

Afghanistan is in an extremely vital location, straddling South Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East. Afghanistan also lies along a proposed oil pipeline route from the Caspian Sea oil fields to the Indian Ocean, where the US oil company, Unocal, along with Enron and Cheney’s Halliburton, had been in negotiations for exclusive pipeline rights to bring natural gas from Turkmenistan across Afghanistan and Pakistan to Enron’s huge natural gas power plant at Dabhol near Mumbai. Karzai, before becoming puppet US president, had been a Unocal lobbyist.

Al Qaeda doesn’t exist as a threat

The truth of all this deception around the real purpose in Afghanistan becomes clear on a closer look at the alleged “Al Qaeda” threat in Afghanistan. According to author Erik Margolis, prior to the September 11,2001 attacks, US intelligence was giving aid and support both to the Taliban and to Al Qaeda. Margolis claims that “The CIA was planning to use Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda to stir up Muslim Uighurs against Chinese rule, and Taliban against Russia’s Central Asian allies.”

The US clearly found other means of stirring up Muslim Uighurs against Beijing last July via its support for the World Uighur Congress. But the Al Qaeda “threat” remains the lynchpin of Obama US justification for his Afghan war buildup.

Now, however, the National Security Adviser to President Obama, former Marine Gen. James Jones has made a statement, conveniently buried by the friendly US media, about the estimated size of the present Al Qaeda danger in Afghanistan. Jones told Congress, “The al-Qaeda presence is very diminished. The maximum estimate is less than 100 operating in the country, no bases, no ability to launch attacks on either us or our allies.”

That means that Al-Qaeda, for all practical purposes, does not exist in Afghanistan. Oops…

Even in neighboring Pakistan, the remnants of Al-Qaeda are scarcely to be found. The Wall Street Journal reports, “Hunted by US drones, beset by money problems and finding it tougher to lure young Arabs to the bleak mountains of Pakistan, al Qaeda is seeing its role shrink there and in Afghanistan, according to intelligence reports and Pakistan and U.S. officials. For Arab youths who are al Qaeda’s primary recruits, ‘it’s not romantic to be cold and hungry and hiding,’ said a senior U.S. official in South Asia.”

If we follow the statement to its logical consequence we must conclude then that the reason German soldiers are dying along with other NATO youth in the mountains of Afghanistan has nothing to do with “winning a war against terrorism.” Conveniently most media chooses to forget the fact that Al Qaeda to the extent it ever existed, was a creation in the 1980’s of the CIA, who recruited and trained radical muslims from across the Islamic world to wage war against Russian troops in Afghanistan as part of a strategy developed by Reagan’s CIA head Bill Casey and others to create a “new Vietnam” for the Soviet Union which would lead to a humiliating defeat for the Red Army and the ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union.

Now US NSC head Jones admits there is essentially no Al Qaeda anymore in Afghanistan. Perhaps it is time for a more honest debate from our political leaders about the true purpose of sending more young to die protecting the opium harvests of Afghanistan.

Well, anyway, what’s so important about gold? If you are clever and lucky enough to be able to control and manipulate  the gold price, then you control a massive amount of power. You will be able to manipulate the commodities market so that your own fiat currency is always King. From what is being inferred from the article below regarding gold, China’s influence on the gold markets is growing massively and globally whereas the US govt’s influence is simultaneously decreasing very quickly.

China, over the last two years, has been moving itself into a position where, very soon, the US govt. will be unable to defend the dollar’s flawed weakness. There is no maybe about this, only when. Simultaneously, China is strengthening her own currency, bit by bit, always increasing her gold reserves while at the same time steadily and surely weakening the dollar.

Trouble is, that in order for the US govt. to manipulate and suppress the price of gold, they have to continually sell vast quantities of gold onto the open market in order to  ruthlessly depress the gold price. For 30 years the American government has done this together with other on-side European central banks. Over  20,000 tons of their gold has thus been squandered for this purpose.

But now all this gold is running out, they cannot flood the gold market with anymore gold to stabilize the dollar, simply because their gold well is running dry. But unfortunately China is now buying up all this gold discreetly in opposition, deliberately forcing an upward trend in the gold price against the dollar, consistently herself manipulating this entity successfully against America’s greenback. And the worst of it is, many are now saying that America is running out of gold.

Then, once China achieves final dominance over the gold markets, most likely they will also adopt policies favourable only to their Yuan currency and China, just as America has done for the last 30 years or so in favouring only the greenback. So how can America possibly complain? The Chinese will just be doing what the American govt. has been doing for so long. Any such complaint or judgement would surely qualify for The Hypocrite of the Decade Award. How can the American govt. possibly complain about China’s currency manipulations, when they themselves have set this very precedent with there own past and lengthy gold/dollar manipulations?

Author: Lawrence Williams
Posted:  Friday , 11 Sep 2009

LONDON -

There is little doubt that China nowadays has the financial muscle to effectively control the global gold price.  The mere sniff of a report that it is taking gold into its official reserves to counteract dollar decline is sufficient to, at the least, stabilise the gold price - and there seems to be little doubt that it is so doing, but at the moment in a manner that is not designed to de-stabilise the dollar or, on the other hand, not to contribute to a quantum leap in the yellow metal’s valuation - yet.

But - should China wish to de-stabilise the dollar by announcing big gold purchases into its reserves to replace a good proportion of its trillions of dollars, there is also little doubt that it could do so.  It is an economic weapon which perhaps has more power than a nuclear one if it wished to bring America, and the West, to its collective economic knees through currency war.  But again that is not seen as an option - or at least not until the country’s domestic market is big enough to soak up all the manufactured goods China can still sell to the West.

Thus China is still very dependent on export markets, so revaluation of the renminbi is not seen as helpful and dollar decline has to be worrying.  So the country has to move cautiously to retain some kind of global economic equilibrium.

But noticeably, China is already exerting its financial dominance.  It has said its mostly state-owned financial organisations will have the right to default on some of the more dubious commodity and financial related derivative trades that they may have entered into.  This has only raised a muted response from those financial institutions which could be affected because it is China’s financial muscle which is beginning to call the tune in world financial circles - not the mighty U.S.A. any longer.  But it could lead to more grief in western financial circles and the already stressed banking system.

Its state-owned enterprises are on a massive buying spree of western assets, both as an investment and, in the case of the mining sector, to tie down future strategic resource supplies.  In perhaps a conscious effort to allay suspicions of Chinese motives in many countries, much of this is via significant minority stakes in western companies tied to long term supply deals.

But back to gold.  We reported here that a top Chinese official virtually admitted China was buying gold, but in a way which was designed to maintain at least a reasonable degree of stability in the markets and not rock the gold boat.  If this is true, and there is little reason why it should not be so then this will effectively mean there is little or no serious downside risk in buying gold.  But China can also control the upside, as it may not wish to precipitate a big dollar collapse which would be the likely outcome of a big gold price rise.

We reported also, in an article which virtually went viral on the internet and has been picked up by many other commentators (China pushes silver and gold investment to the masses), that Chinese state organisations are selling, like soap powder, the advice to buy gold and silver to the general populace - which already has a gold purchasing psyche.  As a result China is likely to surpass India as the world’s biggest precious metals purchaser this year or next.  It also lends support to the country’s domestic gold mining industry - China is currently the world’s largest gold producer and is a country where output is continuing to rise.

This too provides a massive underpinning of the gold price at, at least, around current levels.  It is apparent that buying has been coming in every time gold dips and the suspicion is that this is by the Chinese, but it is well enough hidden that it is difficult, if not impossible, to clearly define the source.

At the moment gold seems to be holding up well close to the $1,000 level despite the huge degree of profit taking which comes in at psychological levels like this.  The suspicion is that China may wish to see $1,000 gold, or thereabouts, as a new floor, but there is unlikely to be any official recognition of this and we will have to wait and see whether the supposed Chinese underpinning of the market is reality - or yet another gold bug’s dream.

From DNA India
By Jeff Nielson

There are many changing dynamics in the precious metals market which suggest that we are about to witness exponential, upward moves in prices for gold and silver — which dwarf the gains these metals made when they more-than-tripled in value.

For silver, it is a relatively straightforward issue of supply and demand: demand is surging in numerous areas, while decades of price-suppression has resulted in the evaporation of global stockpiles.

In the case of gold, however, the normal fundamentals of supply and demand do not apply. As a commodity which is never consumed, total stockpiles of gold grow every year. Conversely, even with a tripling in price, the supply of gold remains flat — despite the huge surge in Chinese gold production — suggesting that “peak gold” has arrived.

As a result of these different dynamics, what will fuel the explosion in the future price of gold are not supply and demand principles, but radical changes in behaviour amongst the major “players” in the gold market.

The gold market typically experiences seasonal weakness from roughly mid-Spring until September or October. This cyclical pattern was based on the buying habits of the Indian gold market — where cultural gold-buying during “wedding season” has dominated retail gold demand, since India has been the world’s largest gold market, historically.

In 2009, Indian gold-buying has completely evaporated. Overall, India’s gold imports were 75% lower for the first half of 2009, and this trend appears to be continuing — with imports 67% lower in July of this year compared to last.

Total gold demand actually fell by 9% in the second quarter versus a year ago, according to data from the World Gold Council.

In addition, the International Monetary Fund has finally received approval to sell some of its gold from the US Congress, and thus now appears poised to sell over 400 tonnes of gold.

Given this context, the natural assumption is that the price of gold would have a worse-than-usual performance in this period of seasonal weakness. Instead, gold has traded in a (relatively) tight 10% range, and as of this moment is little more than 5% below its all-time, nominal high.

What happened?

Part of the explanation for the unexpected resiliency of the gold market is the emergence of large-scale, retail buying by the Chinese. Chinese retail demand is currently only 2% less than Indian gold demand.

However, with Chinese growth in demand not quite offsetting Indian weakness, and with many less-informed commentators predicting that the IMF gold-sale would depress the gold market, clearly this does not account for gold’s better-than-usual performance during its period of seasonal weakness.

Instead, the primary support mechanism for the gold market at this time appears to be central bank purchases of gold. While the fall in Indian gold demand, and the rise in Chinese gold demand are both big stories in this market, they pale in significance to the fact that the world’s central banks have switched from being the largest sellers of gold to become net buyers.

In the first half of 2009, the world’s central banks bought 14 tonnes more in gold than they sold. This is the first time this has happened this decade. However, it would hardly be over-dramatic to say that this represents the biggest development in the global gold market in several decades.

Since the time when gold hit its all-time record-high roughly 30 years ago (when measured in inflation-adjusted dollars), the cabal of Western central banks has waged an unofficial ‘war’ against gold — doing everything in their power to depress the price of gold (and silver), since allowing gold to rise to its actual fair-market-value would expose their campaign of lies regarding inflation.

US president Richard Nixon effectively abolished the world’s “gold standard” as a backing for its “reserve currency” (the US dollar), when he announced that the US was defaulting on its gold obligations to the rest of the world, in 1971. A gold standard acts as a powerful “leash” on the world’s bankers by creating finite limits on the amount of new “money” (i.e. debt) which they can create.

Indeed, the US’s gold-default in 1971 proves this point with stunning clarity. It was specifically due to the vast creation of (then) unprecedented amounts of debt to fund the Vietnam war which made the US’s gold-default inevitable. This also illustrates the ‘unholy alliance’ between the world’s bankers and war-monger governments such as the US — since (as history has demonstrated) a gold standard prevents the exact sort of massive deficits required to stage large-scale warfare in our modern world.

Thus, for three decades, the US government and the anti-gold cabal of bankers have secretly waged war on gold — undermining the price of gold not only to lie about inflation, but also to undermine its obvious necessity as the only pillar of a stable, global monetary system.

However, there is a second, equally-evil reason why these actors have attacked gold to hide their inflation-lies. Inflation has often been called a “hidden tax”, since it decreases actual spending power even where there is no decline in nominal wealth. Historically, inflation has always hurt the poor and middle-class much more than the wealthy.

In other words, lying about inflation is a stealthy way of engaging in a massive transfer of wealth from the poor and middle-classes to the wealthy. This partially explains how Western “democracies” — who claim to have “progressive” tax systems, and “progressive” social programmes — are experiencing a rapid increase in the already huge wealth-gap between the rich and poor. This is a complete reversal of a trend during most of the 20th century, where (for one of the few times in history) the wealth-gap was actually narrowing.

For a quarter of a century, their campaign was based on simple, brute force. With roughly 20,000 tonnes of gold at their disposal, any and every time that the price of gold showed any upward momentum, these bankers would “bomb” the gold market with their huge gold reserves.

This campaign was so ruthless that by the 1990’s this cabal had driven the price of gold well below the cost of production for most of the world’s gold mines — causing shut-downs of mines all over the world, and the bankruptcies of numerous gold-mining companies. This can be considered the first step in their own downfall, as they had depressed mine-supply to the point where it was well below annual demand.

While the once-huge stockpiles of Western central banks could absorb this supply/ demand imbalance for many years, the cost of such a strategy was to steadily deplete their own reserves (or “ammunition”) which would be available to continue depressing the gold market in the future.

Beginning this decade, the “future” has now caught up with this cabal. The moment of transition can now be clearly identified, in hindsight.

It occurred in May 1999, when then UK finance minister (and now prime minister) Gordon Brown dumped roughly half of his countries gold reserves at essentially the all-time low for the price of gold. The rumoured motive for this panic-sale was to rescue Goldman Sachs — who was sitting on a huge “short” position just as the gold market was showing signs of staging a big rally. This move has cost UK taxpayers in excess of $1 billion.

The increasing failure of these bankers to control the gold market can be illustrated in two ways. The most obvious indicator is that the price of gold has more than tripled this decade. Even given the low standards for performance which these bankers set for themselves, this represents a dismal failure.

The other way in which the inevitable defeat of this cabal can be revealed is through their own declining gold sales. A decade ago, these central bankers embarked on an official gold-sales strategy: an agreement to set an annual ceiling on gold sales.

At the time, with gold dismissed as a “barbarous relic” by these propagandists, selling gold was fashionable among these bankers.

Thus, during the first five-year term of the central bank sales agreement (which expired in 2004), all was well in the world of gold-manipulation.

However, as the second of these five-year agreements approaches its conclusion, the imminent defeat of the anti-gold cabal is now plain for all to see.

Yet more evidence of the US government’s strange, controlling agenda over its adoring masses but from within their very own political and foreign policies, their politically correct agencies only ever seem to present veiled and well-disguised excuses regarding outcomes and true intent  to their bewildered electorate. These perpetual and inaccurate excuses allow the US govt. agencies to easily withhold information and to bend the truth without  any oversight or responsibility.  Above all, the article below presents some choice examples and twists of The Convenient Truth vs The Inconvenient Reason and the article even illustrates and witnesses the ongoing destruction of the US Constitution — a document that embeds and is supposed to protect all freedoms for all Americans. But, clearly, all these freedoms are now stealthily defecting to the US govt. down a very dark and ill-lit one-way street, while the citizen must happily bear and suffer the infraction of less and less freedoms.

The article below was written by Paul Craig Roberts, a well known  American, and is perhaps a scream of frustration and a sheer condemnation against what American governance has become. This article even succeeds in suggesting or redefining a new form of American patriotism…

From GlobalReseach.com
By Paul Craig Roberts

Americans have lost their ability for introspection, thereby revealing their astounding hypocrisy to the world.

US War Secretary Robert Gates has condemned the Associated Press and a reporter, Julie Jacobson, embedded with US troops in Afghanistan, for taking and releasing a photo of a US Marine who was wounded in action and died from his injury.

The photographer was on patrol with the Marines when they came under fire. She found the courage and presence of mind to do her job. Her reward is to be condemned by the warmonger Gates as “insensitive.” Gates says her employer, the Associated Press, lacks “judgment and common decency.”

The American Legion jumped in and denounced the Associated Press for a “stunning lack of compassion and common decency.”

To stem opposition to its wars, the War Department hides signs of American casualties from the public. Angry that evidence escaped the censor, the War Secretary and the American Legion attacked with politically correct jargon: “insensitive,” “offended,” and the “anguish,” “pain and suffering” inflicted upon the Marine’s family. The War Department sounds like it is preparing a harassment tort.

Isn’t this passing the buck? The Marine lost his life not because of the Associated Press and a photographer, but because of the war criminals–Gates, Bush, Cheney, Obama, and the US Congress that supports wars of naked aggression that serve no American purpose, but which keeps campaign coffers filled with contributions from the armaments companies.

Marine Lance Cpl. Joshua M. Bernard is dead because the US government and a significant percentage of the US population believe that the US has the right to invade, bomb, and occupy other peoples who have raised no hand against us but are demonized with lies and propaganda.

For the American War Secretary it is a photo that is insensitive, not America’s assertion of the right to determine the fate of Afghanistan with bombs and soldiers.

The exceptional “virtuous nation” does not think it is insensitive for America’s bombs to blow innocent villagers to pieces. On September 4, the day before Gates’ outburst over the “insensitive” photo, Agence France Presse reported from Afghanistan that a US/Nato air strike had killed large numbers of villagers who had come to get fuel from two tankers that had been hijacked from negligent and inattentive occupation forces:

“ Nobody was in one piece. Hands, legs and body parts were scattered everywhere. Those who were away from the fuel tanker were badly burnt,’ said 32-year-old Mohammad Daud, depicting a scene from hell. The burned-out shells of the tankers, still smoking in marooned wrecks on the riverbank, were surrounded by the charred-meat remains of villagers from Chahar Dara district in Kunduz province, near the Tajik border. Dr. Farid Rahid, a spokesperson in Kabul for the ministry of health, said up to 250 villagers had been near the tankers when the air strike was called in.”

What does the world think of the United States? The American War Secretary and a US military veterans association think a photo of an injured and dying American soldier is insensitive, but not the wipeout of an Afghan village that came to get needed fuel.

The US government is like a criminal who accuses the police of his crime when he is arrested or a sociopathic abuser who blames the victim. It is a known fact that the CIA has violated US law and international law with its assassinations, kidnappings and torture. But it is not this criminal agency that will be held accountable. Instead, those who will be punished will be those moral beings who, appalled at the illegality and inhumanity of the CIA, leaked the evidence of the agency’s crimes. The CIA has asked the US Justice (sic) Department to investigate what the CIA alleges is the “criminal disclosure” of its secret program to murder suspected foreign terrorist leaders abroad. As we learned from Gitmo, those suspected by America are overwhelmingly innocent.

The CIA program is so indefensible that when CIA director Leon Panetta found out about it six months after being in office, he cancelled the program (assuming those running the program obeyed) and informed Congress.

Yet, the CIA wants the person who revealed its crime to be punished for revealing secret information. A secret agency this unmoored from moral and legal standards is a greater threat to our country than are terrorists. Who knows what false flag operation it will pull off in order to provide justification and support for its agenda. An agency that is more liability than benefit should be abolished.

The agency’s program of assassinating terrorist leaders is itself fraught with contradictions and dangers. The hatred created by the US and Israel is independent of any leader. If one is killed, others take his place. The most likely outcome of the CIA assassination program is that the agency will be manipulated by rivals, just as the FBI was used by one mafia family to eliminate another. In order to establish credibility with groups that they are attempting to penetrate, CIA agents will be drawn into participating in violent acts against the US and its allies.

Accusing the truth-teller instead of the evil-doer is the position that the neoconservatives took against the New York Times when after one year’s delay, which gave George W. Bush time to get reelected, the Times published the NSA leak that revealed that the Bush administration was committing felonies by violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The neocons, especially those associated with Commentary magazine, wanted the New York Times indicted for treason. To the evil neocon mind, anything that interferes with their diabolical agenda is treason.

This is the way many Americans think. America uber alles! No one counts but us (and Israel). The deaths we inflict and the pain and suffering we bring to others are merely collateral damage on the bloody path to American hegemony.

The attitude of the “freedom and democracy” US government is that anyone who complains of illegality or immorality or inhumanity is a traitor. The Republican Senator Christopher S. Bond is a recent example. Bond got on his high horse about “irreparable damage” to the CIA from the disclosures of its criminal activities. Bond wants those “back stabbers” who revealed the CIA’s wrongdoings to be held accountable. Bond is unable to grasp that it is the criminal activities, not their disclosure, that is the source of the problem. Obviously, the whistleblower protection act has no support from Senator Bond, who sees it as just another law to plough under.

This is where the US government stands today: Ignoring and covering up government crimes is the patriotic thing to do. To reveal the government’s crimes is an act of treason. Many Americans on both sides of the aisle agree.

Yet, they still think that they are The Virtuous Nation, the exceptional nation, the salt of the earth.