In case you missed tonight’s Conference Call you can listen to it
online here:
or you can download the .mp3 file here:
This was an excellent call with great information. Feel free
to share with others.
Sincerely,
Steven Michaels
FREE Asset Protection Crash Course
http://www.keepyourassets.net
From PrisonPlanet:
White House bypasses Senate to ink agreement that could allow Chinese companies to demand ISPs remove web content in US with no legal oversight
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Months before the debate about Internet censorship raged as SOPA and PIPA dominated the concerns of web users, President Obama signed an international treaty that would allow companies in China or any other country in the world to demand ISPs remove web content in the US with no legal oversight whatsoever.
The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement was signed by Obama on October 1 2011, yet is currently the subject of a White House petition demanding Senators be forced to ratify the treaty. The White House has circumvented the necessity to have the treaty confirmed by lawmakers by presenting it an as “executive agreement,” although legal scholars have highlighted the dubious nature of this characterization.
The hacktivist group Anonymous attacked and took offline the Federal Trade Commission’s website yesterday in protest against the treaty, which was also the subject of demonstrations across major cities in Poland, a country set to sign the agreement today.
Under the provisions of ACTA, copyright holders will be granted sweeping direct powers to demand ISPs remove material from the Internet on a whim. Whereas ISPs normally are only forced to remove content after a court order, all legal oversight will be abolished, a precedent that will apply globally, rendering the treaty worse in its potential scope for abuse than SOPA or PIPA.
A country known for its enforcement of harsh Internet censorship policies like China could demand under the treaty that an ISP in the United States remove content or terminate a website on its server altogether. As we have seen from the enforcement of similar copyright policies in the US, websites are sometimes targeted for no justifiable reason.
The groups pushing the treaty also want to empower copyright holders with the ability to demand that users who violate intellectual property rights (with no legal process) have their Internet connections terminated, a punishment that could only ever be properly enforced by the creation of an individual Internet ID card for every web user, a system that is already in the works.
“The same industry rightsholder groups that support the creation of ACTA have also called for mandatory network-level filtering by Internet Service Providers and for Internet Service Providers to terminate citizens’ Internet connection on repeat allegation of copyright infringement (the “Three Strikes” /Graduated Response) so there is reason to believe that ACTA will seek to increase intermediary liability and require these things of Internet Service Providers,” reports the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The treaty will also mandate that ISPs disclose personal user information to the copyright holder, while providing authorities across the globe with broader powers to search laptops and Internet-capable devices at border checkpoints.
In presenting ACTA as an “international agreement” rather than a treaty, the Obama administration managed to circumvent the legislative process and avoid having to get Senate approval, a method questioned by Senator Wyden.
“That said, even if Obama has declared ACTA an executive agreement (while those in Europe insist that it’s a binding treaty), there is a very real Constitutional question here: can it actually be an executive agreement?” asks TechDirt. “The law is clear that the only things that can be covered by executive agreements are things that involve items that are solely under the President’s mandate. That is, you can’t sign an executive agreement that impacts the things Congress has control over. But here’s the thing: intellectual property, in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, is an issue given to Congress, not the President. Thus, there’s a pretty strong argument that the president legally cannot sign any intellectual property agreements as an executive agreement and, instead, must submit them to the Senate.”.
26 European Union member states along with the EU itself are set to sign the treaty at a ceremony today in Tokyo. Other countries wishing to sign the agreement have until May 2013 to do so.
Critics are urging those concerned about Obama’s decision to sign the document with no legislative oversight to demand the Senate be forced to ratify the treaty.
This GPS tracker was one of two found on the bottom of a California man’s car in October. Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com
There’s plenty of reason to be concerned Big Brother is watching.
We’re paranoid not because we have grandiose notions of our self-importance, but because the facts speak for themselves.
Here’s our short list of nine reasons that Wired readers ought to wear tinfoil hats, or at least, fight for their rights and consider ways to protect themselves with encryption and defensive digital technologies.
We know the list is incomplete, so if you have better reasons that we list here, put them in the comments and we’ll make a list based off them.
Until then, remember: Don’t suspect a friend; report him.
The government refuses to acknowledge whether the National Security Agency is secretly siphoning the nation’s electronic communications to the National Security Agency without warrants, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation alleges. The lawsuit was based on evidence provided by a former AT&T technician Mark Klein that showed that AT&T had installed a secret spying room in an internet hub in San Francisco. The spying got so bad that Attorney General Ashcroft threatened to resign over it.
When a federal judge said a lawsuit on that issue could go forward, Congress passed legislation stopping the case in its tracks. Two American lawyers for an Islamic charity did, however, prevail in their suit that they were wiretapped without warrants, but the Administration is appealing. Much of the program was legalized in 2008 by the FISA Amendments Act.
The FBI has also built a nationwide computer system called the Digital Collection System, connected by fiber optic cables, to collect and analyze wiretaps of all types, including ones used in ultra-secret terrorism investigations.
The Obama administration claims Americans have no right to privacy in their public movements. The issue surfaced this month in a landmark case before the U.S. Supreme Court to determine if law enforcement agents should be required to obtain a probable-cause warrant in order to place a GPS tracking device on a citizen’s car. The government admitted to the Supreme Court that it thinks it would have the power to track the justices’ cars without a warrant.
The invasive technology allows police, the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration and other agencies to engage in covert round-the-clock surveillance over an extended period of time, collecting vast amounts of information about anyone who drives the vehicle that is being tracked. The Justice Department has said that law enforcement agents employ GPS as a crime-fighting tool with “great frequency,” and GPS retailers have told Wired that they’ve sold thousands of the devices to the feds.
That mobile phone in your pocket chronicles almost everything. Once-secret software developed by a private company pretty much chronicles all you do on your smartphone and sends it to the carriers. The carriers themselves keep a wealth of information, such as text messages, call-location data, and PINs — though none of them disclose to their customers what data they store or how long they keep the data.
Law enforcement can get at much of that historical data — and often get real-time tracking information without proving probable cause to a judge.
Sounds like a great idea. When jurisdictions compete against each other, the individual wins. This is why “world government” would be destructive – no competition.
Former “Seasteaders” Come Ashore To Start Libertarian Utopias In Honduran Jungle
Forgoing the plan to build independent floating cities away from chafing laws, some libertarians—led by Milton Friedman’s grandson, no less—have found something better: desperate countries willing to allow the founding of autonomous libertarian cities within their borders.
The seasteader-in-chief is headed ashore. Patri Friedman (that’s Milton Friedman‘s grandson to you), who stepped down as the chief executive of the Peter Thiel-backed Seasteading Institute in August, has resurfaced as the CEO of a new for-profit enterprise named Future Cities Development Inc., which aims to create new cities from scratch (on land this time) governed by “cutting-edge legal systems.” The startup may have found its first taker in Honduras, whose government amended its constitution in January to permit the creation of special autonomous zones exempt from local and federal laws. Future Cities has signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding to build a city in one such zone starting next year.
Seasteading, i.e. the creation of sovereign nations floating offshore, is enshrined in libertarian thought as an end-run around the constraints of stodgy nation-states. The idea has received plenty of (mocking) mainstream coverage, most recently in a Details profile of Thiel, in which Friedman outlined the new startup he had in mind:
One potential model is something Friedman calls Appletopia: A corporation, such as Apple, “starts a country as a business. The more desirable the country, the more valuable the real estate,” Friedman says.
Future Cities follows this approach, describing its mission as bringing “Silicon Valley’s spirit of innovation to the implementation of cutting-edge legal systems in new cities,” most likely in the role of the cities’ master developer. Citing laissez-faire entrepots such as Hong Kong and Singapore as examples, the company’s founders believe that strong property rights and business-friendly regulation are key to creating jobs, stimulating investment, and lifting millions out of poverty, a la China’s special economic zones. “The evidence is much stronger,” Friedman replies when asked if he’s building another libertarian utopia, “that rule of law, fairness, and a lack of corruption leads to more economic growth than low taxes.” (Not that they’re mutually exclusive, as Singapore demonstrates.)
Instead of seasteading, Future Cities is modeling itself on “charter cities.” The brainchild of New York University economist Paul Romer (read his thoughts on FCI here), a charter city combines a host nation’s vacant land (in this case, Honduras) with the legal system and institutions of another (e.g. Canada) and residents drawn from anywhere. Romer’s central insight is that good governance is transplantable—rather than wait for a basket case nation to come around begging, a charter city could help show it the way, as Hong Kong did for Deng Xiaoping.
Romer spent two years jetting across Africa fruitlessly searching for takers before aides to Honduran president Porfirio Lobo stumbled across his idea last fall. In February, the Honduran Congress voted to amend the constitution to create Special Development Regions (called REDs) in order to implement his ideas. But it wasn’t an exclusive deal. Romer says he first heard of FCD a month ago when its proposal was brought before the committee which oversees the REDs (of which Romer is a member).
Future Cities’ marketing materials quote Romer repeatedly and explicitly cites charter cities as “our model.” For his part, Romer emphasizes that he has no involvement with FCD and cites his nonprofit think tank’s strict conflict-of-interest policy. While Romer shares the belief that neoliberal globalization can be harnessed toward humanitarian ends by creating work, skills, and a path out of poverty where there currently is none, he has no intentions of making money while doing it. (Friedman says his company is “inspired” by Romer’s model and didn’t mean to imply there was any relationship between the two.)
It remains to be seen whether FCD’s non-binding agreement with Honduras will proceed, or whether its leaders will elect to stick with Romer’s charter city for now. One thing that seems certain is that the FCD’s interest in Honduras—the recent site of a coup, human rights abuses, and land seizures—will bring a fresh round of criticism to the charter city model. While Romer has been battling unflattering comparisons to colonialism since he first presented the idea, FCD’s sudden interest in Honduras reads like an epilogue to The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein’s 2007 book tracing the checkered history of free market reforms in the wake of political crises (think 1970s Chile, 1990s Russia or 2000s Iraq). The Doctrine’s godfathers, in Klein’s telling, are Milton Friedman and his disciples in the University of Chicago’s economics department. Now it appears his grandson is offering to experiment with the legal system of one of Latin America’s poorest countries.
Friedman’s board members include Giancarlo Ibárgüen, president of University Francisco Marroquín in Guatemala City, Guatemala, a hotbed of libertarian thought where the library is named after Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises and busts of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman decorate the campus. Ibárgüen is also a cofounder of the recently announced Free Cities Institute with Michael Strong, an associate (and arch-defender) of Whole Foods CEO John Mackey.
“The real audience that matters most is not the Naomi Kleins of the old,” Patri Friedman says defiantly, “but the people of Honduras. If we can create jobs” and build a better city than the ones they have, “they’ll be happy.”
The following news story really pinpoints the problem with fractional reserve banking. When banks keep in reserves only a fraction of their outstanding deposits (most banks keep about 5 to 10 percent in reserves) then the money isn’t there when more than 5 to 10 percent of the people decide to pull their money out.
>News Story: Anxious Greeks Emptying Bank Accounts
http://keepyourassets.net/?p=1296
It’s like playing musical chairs when there are 10 people and only 1 chair.
Well, the music is stopping in Greece and then it will move to the rest of the world’s mismanaged economies.
How can you find shelter from the coming storm?
First, only keep in the banks what you can afford to lose. Use banks for cashing checks – not to store money. Save your money in gold or silver bullion.
If you must keep money in banks a good option is the Canadian banks. Yes, they inflate their currency too but they are one of the least “ugly ducks” in the currency world.
I recommend checking out our Invisible Banking Report to learn how you can open a Canadian bank account without a tax ID number and without a Social Security Number:
http://www.InvisibleBanking.com
Storm clouds are gathering around us but we can find comfort knowing that we’ve taken the steps to protect ourselves. With that final thought I’ll leave you a link to one of my favorite songs and videos:
Thanks to EPJ for this:
But consider the gigantic differences. The Vietnam protest movement had a clear goal. It wanted to end the war. It had a clear enemy: the politicians and bureaucrats who wanted the war to last forever. It had a clear message: this war is wrong. It had an intense motivation: the protesters were terrified of being drafted to kill and be killed. This is what standing up to power is all about.
So far as anyone can tell, the Occupy movement has none of this clarity. Ten thousand articles have been written on these people and there is still no consensus concerning what the issue really is. The goals of the movement are posted here and there, but not everyone among the protesters agrees with them. The motivation is just as amorphous and varied: unemployment, sinking job prospects, sinking incomes, blowback from the bailouts, the desire to slum around in a decadent sort of way, and the destructive urge to trample down the pea-patch of life itself.
Worse, from my point of view, is that the movement isn’t really standing up to power. It is standing in for power to urge that the state take on more responsibilities and control people’s lives even more than it does already. They imagine that they are demanding human rights, but the main agenda as listed in public websites amounts to a list of ways for the government to violate human rights, or at least intrude aggressively upon them.
Raising the minimum wage, for example, amounts to a limitation on the rights of workers to negotiate their own employment contracts. The minimum wage says: you have no right to offer less for your services than the state gives you permission to offer. Thus, the minimum wage not only promotes unemployment; it restrains the human right to associate on any terms of a person’s choosing.
Likewise, the demand to nationalize health interferes with the rights of doctors and patients to negotiate their own contracts. The demand for tariffs interferes with the rights of people to peacefully trade with anyone from around the world, and effectively entrenches the nation-state as the only permitted geographic range of economic associations.
The imposition of new taxes takes people’s property. This is property acquired through their own labor which is then forcibly taken by the state to use for political purposes. This demand is a prescription for further impoverishment.
The push for refunding domestic infrastructure denies private entrepreneurs the opportunity to use their resources and talents to rebuild on a for-profit basis and in a manner that that can actually be maintained. There is a reason that state infrastructure always seems to be crumbling: it is built by the state with all the inherent economic irrationality of most state projects.
The real problem with the OWS movement is its political naiveté. The protestors imagine that by attacking free enterprise and the capitalist system they are upholding the rights of the common man. The exact opposite is true. The only real alternative to free enterprise is an economy owned and administered by society’s most ruthless and cruel elements, who always seems to gravitate toward statist means.
If OWS is successful, it will wake up to a world that is lorded over by federal bureaucrats and jack-booted enforcement thugs. The entire world will be run like the Post Office, the TSA, the IRS, and the Customs Bureau. This has nothing to do with freedom and nothing to do with human rights.
For this reason, the OWS protest is not really a threat to the establishment. So far, its message has been that the state needs to be truer to itself, that the worst aspects of both the Democratic and Republican platforms need to be implemented with a vengeance. This is a movement the state can come to love. Indeed, the White House has drawn closer and closer to this movement, saying that Obama “will continue to acknowledge the frustration that he himself shares.”
Again, the contrast with the Vietnam protests of the 1960s cannot be starker. The White Houses hated these people. The politicians of both parties were terrified of what “people power” meant in those days.
If we had the equivalent movement as it relates to economics today, it would be calling for an end to the Fed, privatization of education, privatization of health care, the right to global free trade, an end to state robbery of persons and their businesses, and a right to keep what you own. In short, a truly radical protest movement would be calling for a consistent and authentic capitalism as a corollary to the peace agenda in international politics.
Now that would be radical.
Regards,
Jeffrey Tucker
November 18th, 2011
Imagine you’re a 26 year old high-school dropout working as a factory grunt for a measly $100 a month. And that’s 2010 dollars, not some distant past when that was worth something. You’d probably be pumping your fist against the bourgeoisie in your Che Guevara T-shirt down at Occupy Wall Street right now. But what if you knew that just 6 years later, if you played your cards right, you’d be managing your own factory employing more that 100 people? And what if this wasn’t some economic miracle, but it was a normal occurrence for enterprising young entrepreneurs? Wouldn’t you want to know how it was possible? Well the answer is the black market.
See, that’s a true story. It happened to Cai Shuxian, and it happens to many entrepreneurs in Wenzhou, China where every road eventually leads back to the company that built it. The saying goes among the Wenzhounese, “the mountains are high and the emperor is far away” because for the past 30 years private citizens have virtually nullified government central planning simply by ignoring it, and the government just doesn’t have the resources to crack down. Private firms now build roads, bridges, highways, and even airports to bring their goods to market, and even though it’s not always pretty it is crudely efficient. There’s still a taxation bureaucracy, but tax evasion is typical, even routine. The primary role of local government has been to protect the city from higher levels of government.
When state-run banks became averse to lending to small private enterprise citizens of Wenzhou developed an underground financial system of their own. So called, “gray-market” lending, though technically illegal, is used by nearly 90% of individuals and 60% of companies according to official figures from the People’s Bank of China (China’s central bank). Non-bank lending of venture capital has been the single most important development to the economic success of Wenzhou, and that combined with a blasé disregard for regulatory laws has produced a business environment that borders on market anarchism.
