WND EXCLUSIVE

SOROS: OCCUPY TO TURN VIOLENT

Billionaire warns U.S. financial system faces collapse

Published: 01/23/2012 at 1:05 PMhttp://www.wnd.com/2012/01/soros-occupy-to-turn-violent/

by AARON KLEINEmail | Archive

Aaron Klein is WND's senior staff reporter and Jerusalem bureau chief. He also hosts "Aaron Klein Investigative Radio" on New York's WABC Radio. His latest book is the N.Y. Times best-selling, "The Manchurian President: Barack Obama's Ties to Communists, Socialists and Other Anti-American Extremists."More ↓

 Subscribe to author feed

Billionaire George Soros is predicting protests by Occupy Wall Street will turn violent, while warning the U.S. financial system may collapse.

In an interview with Newsweek writer John Arlidge, Soros reportedly said riots on the streets of American cities are inevitable.

“‘Yes, yes, yes,’ he says, almost gleefully,” when asked about the prospect of Occupy turning violent, writes Arlidge.

Soros claimed the riots will “be an excuse for cracking down and using strong-arm tactics to maintain law and order, which, carried to an extreme, could bring about a repressive political system, a society where individual liberty is much more constrained, which would be a break with the tradition of the United States.”

“At times like these, survival is the most important thing,” Soros continued.

“I am not here to cheer you up. The situation is about as serious and difficult as I’ve experienced in my career,” Soros said.

“We are facing an extremely difficult time, comparable in many ways to the 1930s, the Great Depression. We are facing now a general retrenchment in the developed world, which threatens to put us in a decade of more stagnation, or worse,” he said.

“The best-case scenario is a deflationary environment. The worst-case scenario is a collapse of the financial system.”

In the interview, Soros claimed the Occupy Wall Street movement “is an inchoate, leaderless manifestation of protest.”

However, WND has repeatedly documented the billionaire’s many ties to Occupy, including how the group’s reported nerve center is staffed by professional agitators deeply linked to organizations funded by Soros.

Those groups, most prominent among them being the Tides Center, have been involved with Occupy since the anti-Wall Street movement’s inception.

Tides functions as a money tunnel in which major leftist donors provide large sums that are channeled to hundreds of radical groups.

The Tides-funded Adbusters magazine is reported to have come up with the Occupy Wall Street idea after Arab Spring protests toppled governments in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia. The Adbusters website serves as a central hub for Occupy’s planning.

The Tides-funded Ruckus Society has been providing direct-action training to Occupy protesters as well as official training resources, including manuals, to Occupy training groups. Ruckus, which helped spark the 1999 World Trade Organization riots in Seattle, was also listed as a “friend and partner” of the “Occupy Days of Action” in October.

Another grantee of Tides is MoveOn.org, which has joined Occupy.

The Pig in the XL Pipeline

The Pig in the XL Pipeline
Insider reveals concealed “error”
in pipeline safety equipment that could blow away the GOP’s XL pipe dream

http://www.gregpalast.com/the-pig-in-the-xl-pipelineinsider-reveals-concealed-%e2%80%9cerror%e2%80%9din-pipeline-safety-equipment-that-could-blow-away-the-gop%e2%80%99s-xl-pipe-dream/
Sunday, January 22, 2012

For Firedoglake
by Greg Palast

“They threatened me. Last night I got a call and they threatened me. If I talked.”
“Pig Man #2,” a pipeline industry insider, had a good reason to be afraid.  He was about to blow the whistle on a fraud, information that could blow away the XL Keystone Pipeline project.
His information: The software for the crucial piece of pipeline safety equipment, the “Smart PIG,” has a flaw known to the industry but concealed from regulators.
The flaw allows cracks, leaks and corrosion to go undetected – and that saves the industry billions of dollars in pipe replacements.  But there’s a catch. Pipes with cracks and leaks can explode – and kill.
Federal law requires the oil and gas industry to run a PIG, a Pipeline Inspection Gauge, through big oil and gas pipelines.  The robot porker, tethered to a GPS, beeps and boops as it rolls through, electronically squealing when it finds dangers.
But whistleblowers told us at Channel 4 Dispatches (the “60 Minutes” of Britain) that the software is deliberately calibrated to ignore or minimize deadly problems.  They know because they themselves worked on the software design team.
This week, President Obama refused to issue a permit for the Keystone XL Pipeline, but invited its owner, Trans-Canada, to re-apply.  The GOP has gone wild over Obama’s hesitation, screeching that slowing the Canada-to-Houston pipe for a full safety review is a jobs killer.
But it’s the Pipeline that’s the killer.  Here’s what Pig Man #2 told me, on camera, his face in shadow:
When his team found the life-threatening flaw in the program, they immediately created a software patch to fix it.  But then their supervisor ordered them to bury the fix and conceal the problem.
With the PIG calibrated to the danger sensitivity required by law, oil and gas companies would have to dig up, inspect and replace pipe at a cost of millions per mile.  That’s not what the oil companies wanted from their contractor that designed the PIG program.
The programmers’ bosses took no chances. “We had to sign nondisclosure agreements.” They were required to conceal “any problems of this sort or the nature of the software we worked.”  It could not “be made public at all. Under threat of lawsuit.” Nice.
With the error left in place, he said, “People die.”
Pig Man #2 was shaking a bit when he said it. On September 9, 2010, a gas pipeline exploded, incinerating 13-year-old Janessa Greig, her mom and six others.
A PIG – an honest PIG – would have caught the bad welds in the old pipe.
Trans-Canada says that Keystone XL won’t contaminate the Ogallala Aquifer, the Plains states’ crucial water source.  Keystone’s permit application boasts that we can rely on XL’s “full pigging capability.”
Sure.  Last summer, an ExxonMobil pipeline burst and poisoned parts of the Yellowstone River - only months after it had been “pigged.”
The danger of a muzzled PIG goes beyond Keystone XL.  New gas fields opened by hydraulic fracking will require over 100,000 miles of new transmission pipe.
This week, Newt Gingrich called Obama’s temporary block on the XL Pipeline, “stunningly stupid”; and Mitt Romney said Obama’s decision threatened America’s “energy independence.” (Mitt, the oil is from, uh, Canada.)
But the real question is, can we trust these pigs?  And not just the ones in the pipeline.
****
Greg Palast, whose reports can be seen on BBC Television Newsnight, is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy” and “Armed Madhouse.”  His latest book, Vultures’ Picnic, includes Palast’s investigation of the Deepwater Horizon explosion, vulture capitalism, and “the pig in the pipeline.”
You can read Vultures' Picnic, "Chapter 1: Goldfinger," or download it, at no charge: click here.
Support the Palast Investigative Fund and keep our work alive.
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.
GregPalast.com

Wonderful News

Dear Friends of the American Monetary Institute,

Two important announcements:
First:
The 29,000 member Chicago Teachers Union passed a resolution in strong support of Dennis Kucinich's HR 2990 NEED Act! (National Employment Emergency Defense)Please see the attachment for their thoughtful resolution.

Kucinich's HR 2990 dismantles the Federal Reserve System, ends "fractional reserve" banking, and provides for funding the $2.2 trillion, the engineers tell us is needed over the next 5 years to repair our infrastructure; which solves the unemployment problem. Read the 14 page Act at http://www.monetary.org . HR 2990 contains all the monetary reforms of our American Monetary Act, and HR 2990 creates 7 million jobs, for starters!

Congressman Kucinich presently represents Ohio's 10th district, but with redistricting is now running to represent the 9th district. Please seehttp://kucinich.house.gov/
Congressman John Conyers of Detroit co sponsors HR 2990.Second:The Eighth Annual AMI Monetary Reform Conference will be held at University Center in Chicago, September 20-23, 2012.  If your registration is made by February 18th, the donation is $225, instead of $395. A savings of
$170!University Center's state of the art facility holds 80 people in a comfortable "schoolroom" type sitting, with narrow tables. We want our participants to enjoy a relaxed experience, so attendance will be limited to 80 participants. We'll again do our best to better prior conferences! If you have attended any one of our prior seven conferences, you know that's a real challenge! Here is the 2012 conference announcement sheethttp://www.monetary.org/2012-conference

and here are last year's speaker and talk descriptions:http://www.old.monetary.org/2011schedule.html   Monetary reform is more and more on people's and organization's agenda's, as it should be. We are making a difference and I'm looking forward to seeing you in September.
Thank you all for your attention,Stephen Zarlenga
Director,
American Monetary Institute

-- 
"Over time, whoever controls the money system
controls the nation."
Stephen Zarlenga
Director
American Monetary Institute

To receive notices for free AMI materials,
sign up for our email list at www.monetary.org
(224) 805-2200

N.E.E.D. Resolution

Fed 'Activism' Harms U.S. Growth, Ex-Fed Governor

Reuters picks up on Warsh's remarks at Stanford

Submitted by cpowell on Mon, 2012-01-30 15:53. Section: Daily Dispatches

Fed 'Activism' Harms U.S. Growth, Ex-Fed Governor Warsh Says

By Ann Saphir
Reuters
Friday, January 27, 2012

http://in.reuters.com/article/2012/01/26/usa-fed-warsh-idINDEE80P0I12012...

The Federal Reserve's latest efforts to bolster the recovery with unprecedented policy tools will hurt the U.S. economy in the long run, a former member of Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke's inner circle suggested on Thursday.

In his first public comments since stepping down as a Fed governor last March, Kevin Warsh said there is a place for exceptionally accommodative monetary policy to provide "important transitional support for an economy."

"But recent policy activism -- measures that go beyond a central bank's capacity or traditional remit -- threatens to forestall recovery and harms long-term growth," Warsh said, according to excerpts of remarks prepared for delivery to the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.

Warsh was the only member of Bernanke's inner circle with close ties to Republican lawmakers. An inflation hawk, Warsh nevertheless voted in favor of the Fed's groundbreaking moves to ease monetary policy after the financial crisis, including two bond-buying programs that swelled the Fed's balance sheet to unprecedented levels.

But Warsh apparently grew increasingly uncomfortable with the dovish stance of the central bank. Shortly after the Fed launched its second round of so-called quantitative easing, in November 2010, Warsh publicly expressed doubt over its effectiveness.

He announced his resignation the following February, and is currently a visiting fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution.

Since Warsh's departure, the Fed has embarked on still more easing, signaling last August its intent to keep rates ultra-low through at least mid-2013. On Thursday it extended that low-rate vow through late 2014.

The Fed also began publishing policymakers' forecasts for short-term interest rates and adopted an explicit inflation target for the first time, setting the target at 2 percent. Bernanke said both moves would clarify the Fed's policy decisions, making them more effective.

Bernanke also opened the door wide to a third round of quantitative easing, saying continued low inflation and high unemployment would create a case for it.

On Thursday, Warsh took aim at Bernanke's latest communications push and his recent foray into housing policy.

"Central bank transparency is good, but transparency that delineates future policy breeds market complacency," Warsh said. "It threatens to undermine the wisdom of crowds and the essential interchange with financial markets."

Warsh also was critical of leaning on government-run mortgage finance firms to pull the country from its housing slump, a policy idea the Fed floated in early January in an unsolicited paper to top lawmakers outlining a number of ways to revive the sector.

The paper noted that exposing the firms to losses could be worthwhile if such actions could spur a vigorous recovery in housing, the bane of the current sluggish recovery.

Warsh disagreed.

"The government-sponsored housing entities remain sources of vulnerability to the U.S. economy, and repeated ad-hoc attempts to push Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to take greater risks at taxpayer expense is deeply counterproductive," Warsh said, according to the excerpts.

Anonymous: #OpESR EvictTheFed

We are a decentralized non violent resistance movement, which seeks to restore the rule of law
and fight back against the organized criminal class.
The Federal Reserve System is the Private central banking system owned by foreign bankers.
They make up an international banking cartel of wealth beyond comparison.
On June 11th, 2011 we attempted to provoke the people of the U.S. to Occupy a public space
and demand Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke step down.
"We have all seen the world wide protests of occupy wall street and seen such great support worldwide.
A lot of people such as Ron Paul, Michael Ruppert, David DeGraw have talked about this issue,
but not enough action has been taken.People may think it's all Wall Street,
corporations and politicians. But they are all linked to the Federal Reserve.
We need to start on one realistic and solid goal.
The Fed is responsible for destroying the U.S. dollar, and impacting the global economy.
We may be in debt but the Fed makes the money we dont have and loans it out.
This effects the banks corporations and politicians,
this will show them we are not unorganized.
When the Fed is gone we will then proceed to clean up the rest of the filth.
Our demands:
1 Ben S. Bernanke steps down from all government positions indefinitaley and is tried in criminal court.
2 The Fed reserve is removed.
3 That all board members are investigated and tried in criminal court for crimes against humanity.

On June 17th we will gather at Zuccoti Park, the place it all began.
Come brothers and sisters we are no longer occupying we are evicting.

We are Anonymous
We are legion
We do not forgive
We do not forget
Operation ESR
Engaged.

Press Release: http://pastebin.com/4J12nSGS

AnonInfoWarfare Twitter: https://twitter.com/AnonInfoWarfare
AnonInfoWarfare Tumblr: http://anoninfowarfare.tumblr.com/

Zombie Debtors & Clown Bankers

U.S. INVESTMENT TOWARD BANCOCRACIES

U.S. INVESTMENT IN THE MIDDLE EAST, AND MORE FROM CRS

http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/2012/01/mena_invest.html

The possibility of increasing U.S. investment in the Middle East as a way to encourage democratic political transitions was examined in a new report from the Congressional Research Service.  See U.S. Trade and Investment in the Middle East and North Africa: Overview and Issues, January 20, 2012.

Other new or updated CRS reports that have not been made readily available to the public include these:

European Union Enlargement, January 26, 2012

Australia: Background and U.S. Relations, January 13, 2012