I have my doubts about the closure of Liberty Reserve. It is widely reported to have had 1 million users. I am not yet convinced that a higher percentage of these were criminals, than is true in much of the mainstream banking system. I have been told by an email – which I cannot currently verify – that of the US $6 billion processed through Liberty Reserve, only US$20 million has to date been seized as the proceeds of crime.
It seems to me that a public sickened by the massive charges of bankers for simple intermediary services, will increasingly look for means to exchange value outwith the formal banking sector using modern technology. Services like Western Union are dreadfully overpriced, and make massive profits on home transfers by poor immigrant workers worldwide. It is getting increasingly hard to despatch money as physical cash by a friend. Carrying large quantities of money, even if it is your own, is seen as suspicious.
I was astonished when, during the Norwich by-election, my request to take several thousand pounds worth of cash out of my own bank account to pay various expenses was met with an insistence by the bank that I complete a form saying what it was for. Furious at being denied my own money, I wrote on the form that I needed the money for “Drink and bad women”. That sufficed to meet the stupid regulation.
The US government through aggressive – and in my view illegal – pressure on banks and financial services providers managed to cut off Wikileaks from almost all avenues of sources of international donation funding by individuals. You cannot trust governments to have the power to control all funds transfers. Governments will abuse that power.
Of course proceeds of crime should be seized. I have no problem with that. Stopping the crime in the first place would be better, but failing that you should track the money and seize it. But the way to do that is not to control everybody’s exchanges of value at all times. It is like asking me for proof I am not going to rob a bank every time I walk out of the house. It would make as much sense to ban mattresses, as stolen cash can be hidden under them, or cars, as stolen cash can be transported in them, as to close down internet transfer options because they might be used to transfer crooked cash.
Am I alone in worrying that the mainstream media’s reporting of this closure has involved simply repeating US government press releases, with no attempt at all to analyse what percentage of Liberty Reserve’s funds were actually criminal proceeds, and compare that to a mainstream bank?
It would not be surprising if Gulnara Karimova and her father, Islam Karimov, and their friends were not Bilderberg guests.
Everything is being done to prevent the peaceful Bilderberg Fringe Festival from going ahead. As an example scroll down to Rowena Mason’s article about how much Bilderberg is costing the UK taxpayer on the infowars website.
http://www.infowars.com/
See what I mean?
On the Infowars site the contact tab and writers tab are disabled too so you cannot let them know Rowena Mason’s article is unavailable. Somebody is getting worried.
I’ve just found the original article from the Telegraph.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/10089131/British-taxpayers-to-pay-millions-towards-secretive-Bilderberg-meeting-security.html
Call out to Clark:
This is one of your specialties, isn’t it? Perhaps you’d be kind enough to offer them some advice?
https://twitter.com/oojamaflipper/status/340647122426818560
Arbed, I’m rushed off my feet, and this Wikipedia article needs to be updated soon! Anyone can do it, here are some rules to follow:
* You don’t need an account, but your IP address gets displayed unless you have one so that you can log in. Really, displaying your IP address isn’t a problem, everybody’s got one.
* Write factually, in an encyclopaedic, non-opinionated style, or other people will have to re-write it – don’t create work, keep your work popular!
* You can add or remove anything you want, but so can anyone else including your “opponents”. Removing stuff that’s referenced to a reliable source is called “vandalism”; such material will be restored by other editors. You can also restore other people’s contributions if you notice from the History page that they’ve been removed.
* There are many living people featured in the film; anything added to Wikipedia about them has to conform to the rules on “Biography of Living People – WP:BLP”. Basically, it mustn’t be potentially libellous. It could be a derogatory comment by an authority or a public figure, in which case it must be a properly referenced direct quote.
Sorry folks, gotta go…
@Mike who says:
This ability or private banks to create money as debt and then charge interest on it has some rather shocking but mathematically factual outcomes. If all our money is created by private banks as interest bearing debt, where exactly is the money to pay the interest supposed to come from. Banks create only the principle. The money to pay back the interest can only come from more debt. This is why, since 1694, our total debt has grown every year. This is why most households, businesses and governments around the world are in debt.
Our only way out is for government to relieve the banks of this burden to the people and start creating debt-free money. With this sort of monetary reform in place, there would be less need for Bitcoin, banks would become utilities, government could fund all the welfare projects in wanted to, reduce taxes for the poor, even provide a citizens dividend and remove the expensive means-tested benefits system entirely.
No government would ever create debt free money. They wouldn’t be allowed. Any politician in a position high enough to have the power to do so in theory would meet a sticky end if he/she even tried to do so. And they know it, that’s why no government ever even broaches the idea of reforming the money supply. The Usurers have entrenched their position of debt enslaving us all through Fractional Reserve banking and Usury
Austerity? What austerity?
Epsom June 1st 2013
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2013/06/01/article-2334144-1A1851E3000005DC-512_964x640.jpg
The UK’s arms salesman was there with his parents and daughters.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2334144/Queen-resplendent-sunshine-joined-granddaughters-Beatrice-Eugenie-Epsom-Derby.html
I see Mary/April Showers is sock-puppeting under a different moniker despite common experience that this can cause misunderstandings and confusion among both regular contributors and casual readers.
If people want to change their screen name, please be kind enough to use a transitional suffix eg. “Menopausal&Stupid_(formally_Fecund&Stupid)”, at least for a week or two until others catch on.
Jemand,
“I see Mary/April Showers is sock-puppeting under a different moniker despite common experience that this can cause misunderstandings and confusion among both regular contributors and casual readers.”
Poor point Jemand.
Consider the message not the messenger.We could all change our handles and few would know so all that really matters is the message.
You really ought know better than that thin point Jemand.
No Jives, a diversity of names implies a degree of popularity in opinion and is therefore relevant in itself. Maintaining a single identity allows various comments to be considered as a whole – also relevent. And some discussions/exchanges extend across different threads and over a long time. Changing handles is problematic except for the most casual, infrequent and benign posts. This issue has been elaborated upon by many others here and elsewhere. Habbabkuk has been admonished for allegedly doing the very same thing.
Someone needs to wash their mouth out with a strong solution of Listerine or similar.
Me. I am looking forward to seeing John Pilger’s film, Utopia, when it is released here.
Australia’s boom is anything but for its Aboriginal people
The story of the first Australians is still poverty and humiliation, while their land yields the world’s biggest resources boom
John Pilger
The Guardian, Sunday 28 April 2013
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/28/australia-boom-aboriginal-story-despair
The score :
Jemand 1, Jives 0.
Did not our moderator John make the same point as Jemand several months ago?
Not, of course, that Mary/April Showers/Flaming June is bound by the same rules/code as the rest of us – it is her blog, after all, isn’t it.
______________
I believe that I was the first to spot that Mary, having flounced off the blog in disgust at having been called to account rather frequently, surreptitiously re-appeared as April Showers a week or so later. Not that it was difficult, of course, because the similarities of content, approach and style were evident; as Jives rightly said (for once), ‘consider the message’.
BTW, the 13 1/2 year old schoolgirl ..-.. our Poetess Laureate?
Drowning in the
Endless tide of Nit-Picking and Pedantry
Spewing from the keyboard of the King.
.
Habba. There are issues moving people to visit these threads that are so much more important than whether a compulsive troll has to scratch his thick head now and then because on of the rabble has dared to play the dastardlymultiple-identity trick.
.
How about engaging in the debate and answering questions now and then?
.
Since it’s the weekend and we all deserve a little relaxation I’ll repeat myself now. And yes Sherlock, it is stolen from Coleridge, as I told you right at the beginning. I don’t know whether you have a Dell, but maybe you can waste some more of your grey life arguing about that.
…………………
A henchman with a Dellsimer
In a vision once I saw
It was a flunky, bought and paid
And on his Dellsimer he played
Singing for Distopia
Could I revive within me
His symphony and song
To such a deep distress ‘twould bring me
That with curses loud and long
I would revile that bag of air,
that Wicked Gnome! Whose mad advice
Forever did reside there,
And I should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on pure bull-shit hath fed
And drunk the milk of Parasites.
““Paul Julius Reuter” real name Israel Beer Josafat is the son of “Samual”, who in turn was the the son of “Julius”. The family’s business connections to the Rothschild’s go back to 18th Century Germany. “Julius” was the man that made the family name, he started of in political espionage and was the source of the news of England’s defeat at Waterloo. ”
Not what you said originally and you’ve got it totally wrong. The story is that Rothschild’s own agents brought him news of Napoleon’s defeat 24 hours before Wellington’s own messengers arrived in the capital. He promptly began selling all his stock, knowing it would start a panic, bought everything a the end of the day at rock bottom prices and made a fortune when the markets rose the following day. Sadly for the conspiracy theorists it is just that, a story, historian Niall Ferguson amongst others have identified the source as an anti-semitic pamphlet first published in 1845. The amount Rothschild is said to have made was also way more than the entire market was worth at the time.
Truth is that like everybody else the Rothschilds were not expecting Waterloo to be decisive, they had banked (quite literally) on it being the start of another long drawn out war and run up a substantial loss.
Kibo, at 18h13, asserts :
“.. it is stolen from Coleridge, as I told you right at the beginning.”
————
Musn’t tell porkies, even of it’s fashionable on this blog.
I believe the first time you mentioned Coleridge – in what you told us was the ‘concluding part’ of your copy, was on 31 May at 08h29 (‘the denial of justice’ thread).
Not quite “right at the beginning”, was it.
***********
La vita è bella, life is good!
Meeting of maniacs aka Bilderberg
If you’ve been wondering who picks up the tab for this gigantic conference and security operation, the answer arrived last week, on a pdf file sent round by Anonymous. It showed that the Bilderberg conference is paid for, in the UK, by an officially registered charity: the Bilderberg Association (charity number 272706).
According to its Charity Commission accounts, the association meets the “considerable costs” of the conference when it is held in the UK, which include hospitality costs and the travel costs of some delegates. Presumably the charity is also covering the massive G4S security contract. Fortunately, the charity receives regular five-figure sums from two kindly supporters of its benevolent aims: Goldman Sachs and BP. The most recent documentary proof of this is from 2008 (pdf), since when the charity has omitted its donors’ names (pdf) from its accounts.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/02/week-ahead-bilderberg-2013-watford
@flaming june – please have a look at the accounts in the above
@Habbabkuk (La vita è bella!)
2 Jun, 2013 – 10:56 pm
“Kibo, at 18h13, asserts :
“.. it is stolen from Coleridge, as I told you right at the beginning.”
————
Musn’t tell porkies, even of it’s fashionable on this blog.”
……………………………………………………….
@Kibo Noh
28 May, 2013 – 6:26 pm
(http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2013/05/the-sky-has-not-fallen/comment-page-4/#comments )
.
“……..Apologies to the ghost of STC*
.
Kukla Bak
v. 1
In Surbiton did Kukla Bak a withering bloggattack dercee……..”
…………………………………………………………..
Who wasn’t paying attention? Just wait till your supervisor sees this.
Progress Report No 3485374: “Habba tries hard but, to tell the truth, he’s becoming a bit of an embarssment. Move his desk down to the basement first thing in the morning. And for heaven’s sake hide the sherry.”
……………………………………………………
I can’t believe I just spent ten minutes of my precious life going back and finding that.
There’s real stuff happening, affecting real lives and I used my time to show a troll he wasn’t paying attention to a fictional poetic thief. I must be losing it. I’ve become a feckin troll myself! So in a way Habba you’ve succeeded.
.
But anyway I’m grateful to have spent some very agreeable moments over the last week with Coleridge’s rhymes and rythyms dancing back and forth among my neurones, sometimes while I earthed up my spuds, sometimes on the road.
.
The fact that responding in verse to your posts, when they were stalking other commenters, or simply spewing the mandated narratives took me all the way through the wonderful Kubla Khan is, I believe a testiment to your stamina and my foolishness.
…………………………………………………………………
I’ll reconnect it all for you here without the, often exasperated commentries that accompanied each small section.
.
Kukla Bak
.
In Surbiton did Kukla Bak a withering bloggattack dercee
From shed where unbeknown to man an endless stream of drivel ran
A wonder of sophistry
And twice five hundred hapless men
On reading yawned an wondered when
Such tides would ever cease.
.
So after twice five sherrys downed
With walls and and floors all swaying round:
He from his fevered mind straight-way distils
A tide of venom, sharp-tongued and sweetness-free;
Vituperation, disrespect that kills,
Derailing true discourse and empathy
.
But oh! That deep Craig Murray Blog with planted
Trolls there speaking denial, abuse and cover
A wondrous place! A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By Kukla wailing at the demon-blogger!
.
And from his shed, with ceaseless turmoil seething
Ranted The King, his mental grip receding
A mighty fountain crazed and foul was forced
Amid whose rude and castigating force
Huge rancour vaulted like rebounding hail
That all sane thought would ultimately fail
And ‘mid his dancing thoughts at once and ever
A host of bold affronts did quiver.
.
Those heavy arms from Europe had been set in motion
Through wood and dale the vicious arms-flow ran,
Then reached the streets so loved by Syrian,
And added to the lifeless ocean:
And to this tumult Kukla cheered from far
Justifications glorifying war!
.
The shadow of the War on Terror
Floated daily on the ‘waves;
Gazing from his shed in pleasure
Kukla couldn’t hear the screams
From Bastion, that camp of vice,
That sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!
.
A henchman with a Dellsimer
In a vision once I saw
It was a flunky, bought and paid
And on his Dellsimer he played
Singing for Distopia
Could I revive within me
His symphony and song
To such a deep distress ‘twould bring me
That with curses loud and long
I would revile that bag of air,
that Wicked Gnome! Whose mad advice
Forever did reside there,
And I should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on pure bull-shit hath fed
And drunk the milk of Parasites.
.
At that point I was not even disturbed by the man from Porlock, but lost my inspiration all the same….. “Mercifully!” I hear the late-night blogging community sigh!
Goodnight All.
* Clue: STC………….Samuel Taylor who?
@ Kibo
You’re right, I overlooked the reference to STC (although it wouldn’t have hurt for you to add the further 8 letters).
For your next source of inspiration, how about JM (that’s John Milton, btw) 🙂
Habbabkuk.
You’ve already been outed on this forum changing your handle so your point is hypocritical and irrelevant.
Should the Bank of England be abolished?
What do Scots really think? Answer here: http://bit.ly/10PBjbi
http://www.scottishtimes.com