Suddenly the calm is over and the storm is upon us, at least in the North West USA if not yet in financial markets. That said the trouble brewing in those markets looks about to turn into a once-in-100-year storm too.
US political instability is a frightening prospect but that looms large with a very close race for the White House and uncertainty over the composition of the legislature after the elections on November 6th. The automatic austerity of the US ‘fiscal cliff’ on January 1st is far from being automatically avoided and markets loathe this sort of uncertainty.
In a harbinger of what may be coming our way in the Fall of 2012, billionaire financier George Soros has sold all of his equity positions in major financial stocks according to a 13-F report filed with the SEC for the quarter ending June 30, 2012.
Soros, who manages funds through various accounts in the US and the Cayman Islands, has reportedly unloaded over one million shares of stock in financial companies and banks that include Citigroup (420,000 shares), JP Morgan (701,400 shares) and Goldman Sachs (120,000 shares). The total value of the stock sales amounts to nearly $50 million.
What’s equally as interesting as his sale of major financials is where Soros has shifted his money. At the same time he was selling bank stocks, he was acquiring some 884,000 shares (approx. $130 million) of Gold via the SPDR Gold Trust.
When a major global player with direct ties to the White House, Wall Street, and the banking system starts off-loading stocks and starts stacking gold, it suggests a very serious market move is set to happen.
While often lambasted for his calls to centralize global banking, increase government intervention in the economy and his support of what he has called an “emergence of the new world order,” if there’s anyone with an inside track of where things are headed next it’s Soros.
Soros, who has written extensively of a coming global paradigm shift in his book The Crash of 2008 and What It Means, calling the current economic and political model ”an end of an era,” hasrecently suggested that the financial and economic situation across the world is so serious that Europe could soon descend into chaos and conflict. He also notes that the world is entering “one of the most dangerous periods in modern history”, and foresees violent riots in America and a brutal clamp-down by the government that will dramatically curtail civil liberties.
This is an individual who not only predicted the collapse of 2008 and took action to insulate himself, he also proposed the various fixes that governments in Europe and the US would eventually implement in order to stave off a deflationary depression. In his aforementioned book he suggested that central banks infuse the system with massive amounts of monetary expansion, but also warned that not injecting enough money would simply extend the onset of deflation and printing too much could lead to hyperinflationary currency collapse.
Based on recent activity in Soros’ US held accounts, it seems that governments and central banks have failed at those efforts to stabilize the system. As such, Soros is getting out of those companies which are most at risk should the financial system buckle like it did in 2008 and he’s shifting his assets into what may be the only asset class left standing when it’s all said and done.
It is said that as California goes, so goes the nation. The Golden State is about to experience what the rest of the nation will experience after the globalists phase in their carbon-free agenda under the demonstrably bogus global climate change scam.
“California’s electricity grid operator issued a rare statewide alert on Thursday warning residents to curb power usage in coming days as a heat wave threatens to strain its already taxed network,” Reuters reported on Monday.
The alert instructs residents and businesses to “curb use” during the peak consumption hours of 11:00 AM to 6 PM. The “alert” will last through Sunday.
California Independent System Operation (CAISO) is said to be bracing for a heat wave that is moving toward the state. It will struggle to compensate for the loss of 2,150-megawatts produced by the San Onofre nuclear plant. The plant will remain down through the rest of the summer due to a small radiation leak detected earlier this year.
Reuters reports that an alert issued by CAISO “may serve as a reality check for state leaders and grid officials who are struggling to deal with increasing demands for more carbon-free electricity over the next few years.”
California plans to drastically cut back on traditional sources of electric generation and rely “on renewable power sources, such as solar and wind, while shutting a number of ocean-side plants that supply power around the clock will challenge power grid operators to keep the lights on.”
The federal government is moving ahead with plans to shut down traditional energy plants. In 2011, Obama Energy Secretary Steven Chu launched an effort to bankrupt the coal industry through EPA regulations. The Obama administration’s strict enforcement of draconian EPA regulations has led to new clean-burning coal-fired plants being mothballed and other existing ones being shut down, Infowars.com reported in February of 2011.
During his presidential run, Obama said that “if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them because they are going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted…. Under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”
“The deliberate deindustrialization of America has nothing to do with protecting the environment. Whereas the competitiveness of America’s energy industry is being crippled by the EPA and the White House, China and Mexico are building dozens of new power plants every year which fall well short of the clean-burning technology standards adhered to in the United States,” Alex Jones and Paul Joseph Watson wrote on Monday.
“This is about the implementation of the UN’s Agenda 21, which operates under the guise of ‘sustainable development’ yet is clearly part of a stealth agenda to centralize control over energy, bankrupting America in the process as part of the move towards a crony system of one world governance.
Mozilla is first Silicon Valley entity to denounce bill
Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
Wednesday, May 2, 2012
Tech giant Mozilla has publicly slammed the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) which passed the House last week, labeling the legislation an “alarming” threat to privacy.
“While we wholeheartedly support a more secure Internet, CISPA has a broad and alarming reach that goes far beyond Internet security. The bill infringes on our privacy, includes vague definitions of cybersecurity, and grants immunities to companies and government that are too broad around information misuse. We hope the Senate takes the time to fully and openly consider these issues with stakeholder input before moving forward with this legislation,” Mozilla, which is best known for its Firefox browser, said in a statement.
The statement is important because it marks the first time any Silicon Valley entity has denounced CISPA, with an array of powerful companies lining up in support of the legislation which passed the US House of Representatives 248 to 168 and now heads to the Senate.
Facebook, Microsoft, IBM, Intel, Oracle, Symantec, AT&T and Verizon have all backed the bill, with Microsoft re-affirming its support yesterday after rumors the company was getting cold feet, while Google has refused to take either side.
CISPA has been identified by many as a greater threat to privacy than SOPA, which was opposed by a deluge of major tech firms after a viral online opposition campaign, but because CISPA has received less attention, corporate giants have found it easier to stay mute.
Not only would CISPA mandate ISPs to share Internet data of users with government “notwithstanding any other provision of law,” it also empowers the Department of Homeland Security to monitor the communications of the federal courts and Congress, and intercept tax returns sent to the IRS.
The bill “gives companies a free pass to monitor and collect communications and share that data with the government and other companies, so long as they do so for ‘cybersecurity purposes,’” the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has noted. “Just invoking ‘cybersecurity threats’ is enough to grant companies immunity from nearly all civil and criminal liability, effectively creating an exemption from all existing law.”
“The government would be able to search information it collects under CISPA for the purposes of investigating American citizens with complete immunity from all privacy protections as long as they can claim someone committed a “cybersecurity crime”. Basically it says the 4th Amendment does not apply online, at all. Moreover, the government could do whatever it wants with the data as long as it can claim that someone was in danger of bodily harm, or that children were somehow threatened—again, notwithstanding absolutely any other law that would normally limit the government’s power,” writes TechDirt’s Leigh Beadon.
As we have documented, the Obama administration’s threat to veto the bill is little more than a crude stunt and carries no more weight than Obama’s promise to veto the National Defense Authorization Act, which he signed on New Year’s Eve after the White House itself lobbied for the NDAA’s most egregious provisions to be included.
Indeed, the White House’s primary beef with the legislation appears to be the fact that it doesn’t hand enough power to the Department of Homeland Security.
CISPA now moves to the Senate where it will be amalgamated with one of two other bills before heading to Obama’s desk. Don’t hold your breath on that veto.
The House passed the controversial CISPA cybersecurity bill on Thursday, defying a White House veto threat and throwing the issue squarely into the Senate’s lap.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) said the bill was “needed to prepare for countries like Iran and North Korea so that they don’t do something catastrophic to our networks here in America.”
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The final tally was 248-168, enough to pass the bill but not enough to override the threatened veto. Forty-two Democrats voted for the measure, and 28 Republicans voted against it.
The administration and Democratic critics opposed the bill because of privacy and civil liberties concerns. The other main sticking point was that, unlike a Senate bill by Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), CISPA would not mandate new security requirements for a critical infrastructure network.
But the measure enjoyed support from some Democrats — who weren’t happy with their colleagues’ opposition to the bill, nor with the White House.
“It was disappointing, I think it could have been handled differently,” Rep. Jim Langevin, (D-R.I.), a CISPA co-sponsor, said of the White House move. “To do it at this stage I don’t think it was very helpful to get an information-sharing bill through.”
Langevin and other supportive Democrats say CISPA is needed to counter the possibility of a major cyberattack.
“This is not a perfect bill, but the threat is great,” Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.), Rogers’s chief Democratic ally, said on the House floor on Thursday.
Speaker John Boehner said Thursday that the White House was in “a camp all by themselves.” Nevertheless, most Democrats voted against the bill.
“CISPA would trample the privacy and consumer rights of our citizens while leaving our critical infrastructure vulnerable,” an administration official said Thursday in response to Boehner. “We need Congress to address this critical national and economic security challenge while respecting the values of freedom, privacy, openness and innovation so fundamental to our nation.”
The House adopted several amendments to the bill before passing it, including one by Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.) that added a five-year sunset to the bill.
But lawmakers voted to reject a motion to recommit by Rep. Ed Perlmuttter, who sought to add language specifying that nothing in the bill could be construed to allow employers and the government from mandating that employees and job applicants disclose confidential passwords without a court order. The defeated motion also would have added language saying that nothing in the bill could allow the government from blocking access to the Web through “the creation of a national Internet firewall similar to the ‘Great Internet Firewall of China.’”
The tech sector immediately applauded the House action on Thursday.
“We strongly urge the Senate to swiftly take up this issue because the United States cannot afford to wait to improve our nation’s cybersecurity posture,” TechAmerica CEO Shawn Osborne said in a statement. “Standing pat will only further risk our national security.”
But civil liberterians were unhappy with the outcome.
“Cybersecurity does not have to mean abdication of Americans’ online privacy. As we’ve seen repeatedly, once the government gets expansive national security authorities, there’s no going back,” ACLU legislative counsel Michelle Richardson said. “We encourage the Senate to let this horrible bill fade into obscurity.”
This article first appeared on POLITICO Pro at 7:13 p.m. on April 26, 2012.
Obama is a puppet of the Banksters, but the Office of the President itself is being transformed into a dictatorial command and control system. Congress has now been told that they are merely ceremonial, while the military is openly training to wage war on the American people during a staged economic collapse!
October 30, 2012 
WRC559 