Just about every major banker and finance minister in the world is meeting in Washington, DC, this week, following two rushed, secretive meetings of the Federal Reserve and another instantaneous and rare meeting between the Fed Chair and the president of the United States. These and other emergency bank meetings around the world cause one to wonder what is going down. Let’s start with a bullet list of the week’s big-bank events:
Here's some good news that will certainly be music to the ears of one of our previous guests, Ole Anthony. According to Premier, and The Guardian (which has more on the story), a website called "Christian Prayer Center" in the US has been ordered to pay back millions of dollars to its customers. Apparently, they arranged for bogus (and even non-existent!) religious ministers to "pray" for those who sent money to the website—anywhere between $9 and $35 a go.
Critics have long questioned why violent intervention was necessary in Libya. Hillary Clinton’s recently published emails confirm that it was less about protecting the people from a dictator than about money, banking, and preventing African economic sovereignty.
An excellent interview conducted by Abby Martin with the historian Dr. Vijay Prashad, George and Martha Kellner Chair in South Asian History and Professor of International Studies at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut.
Bob Coen & Eric Nadler, "AFRICOM's War on Libya", Pat Chess YouTube Channel (08 April 2016)
In this excerpt from the film Shadow War of the Sahara by Bob Coen and Eric Nadler (broadcast on the Franco-German channel ARTE), anthropologist Maximilian Forte of ZeroAnthropology.net shares his insights into why AFRICOM's chief critic, Muammar Gaddafi, was earmarked for removal.
I never thought I would have good reason to use this acronym. It's one that my daughter uses quite a lot, although I'm glad to say she uses it less frequently than last year when she was in Upper Juniors. But I simply cannot think of a better response to this article in the Daily Mail, so I'll gladly use it now—just this once—promise.
This is an interesting interview—not so much for what Roger Stone says about Jeb Bush's presidential ambitions—but for the wider window it gives us into the Bush family. After listening to this, I paused for a moment to watch again George H. W. Bush mentioning the Kennedy Assassination at President Ford's funeral. Interesting...
Over the last few months a stream of articles have crossed my screen, all proclaiming the need of governments and banks to eliminate cash. I’m sure you’ve noticed them too.
It is terrorists and other assorted madmen, we are told, who use cash. And so, to protect us from being blown up and dismembered on our very own street corners, governments will have to ban it.
In a "must watch" interview, Abby Martin speaks to retired US Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to US Secretary of State Colin Powell during the GW Bush Administration. In a nutshell, Wilkerson says that the US has become an Imperial War Machine—a "military-industrial-congressional complex" that manipulates the media, falsifies intelligence, and celebrates conflict as a means to corporate profits and expansion of the empire.
Swedish documentary (with English subtitles) about Livets Ord ("Word of Life"), a "Word of Faith" church in Sweden. The documentary questions the financial management of the church, and investigates its former leader and founder Ulf Ekman, who—before his move to Catholicism—was a "prosperity theology" preacher. But just who was getting prosperous? Anyone who has heard our interview with fraud investigator Ole Anthony ("Fleecing the Flock") will find this no surprise, but sad nonetheless.
A listener kindly drew my attention to this perceptive article by Justin P. McBrayer, associate professor of philosophy at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colo. The piece connects the issues of Common Core (as discussed with Dr. Duke Pesta, here and here) and the question of Moral Facts (as recently discussed with Dr. Glenn Peoples). It's worth a read... and a sigh.
I would like to have been able to reproduce this article at TMR, but I can't for copyright reasons, and I can't even ask permission without writing to their postal address; so that's that. (In a way, it's a bit of cheek considering the bulk of the article is a collection of quotations from Francis Schaeffer's writings.) Whatever...
Passage of Senator Mitch McConnell’s authorization for war against ISIS will not only lead to perpetual US wars across the globe, it will also endanger our civil and economic liberties. The measure allows the president to place troops anywhere he determines ISIS is operating. Therefore, it could be used to justify using military force against United States citizens on US territory. It may even be used to justify imposing martial law in America.
In the fall of 2015, the world descended into an economic apocalypse that will transform the globe into a single cashless society. This bold prediction is based on trends in nations all over the earth as shown in the article below.
As we enter 2016, we are only beginning to see this Epocalypse form through the fog of war. The war I’m talking about is the world war waged furiously by central banks against the Great Recession as the governments they supposedly serve fiddled while their capital burned.
Sir Edward Leigh, "We will end up with a list of tens of thousands of law-abiding, non-extremist groups, and Ofsted inspectors will try to justify their existence by picking on the occasional conservative religious group and brand them non-compliant with British values", Hansard, Westminster Hall (20 Jan 2016)
On Wednesday there was a debate in the UK Parliament on the government's mad and poorly-thought-out proposals to introduce a nationwide registration scheme for any "out-of-school education setting" providing instruction to under-nineteen-year-olds for more than six hours in any week... to counter extremism, of course. After all, if you want to check on a few, you have to check on everybody, don't you? So let's just hope that the really obnoxious groups bother to register...
While I have a healthy respect for the observations—though not all—of the good "Archbishop" and join with him in a sense of horror at the persecution of so many of our brothers and sisters in Christ across the globe, I note a subordinate clause in one of the Archbishop's sentences the significance of which, at least on this occasion, seems to have escaped him:
Senior Fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) Micah Zenko comments upon the US Military's addiction to the "kill-em’-all with airstrikes" approach to fighting ISIS, and helpfully tots up some of the numbers for us.
