Ron Paul, the prominent libertarian communicator and three-time US presidential candidate, declared this week in a Fox Business interview that it is “fantastic” that WikiLeaks revealed on Tuesday thousands of US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) documents and files.

Speaking with host Kennedy, Paul further says that the information exposed “indicates that liberty is in big trouble” and states his concern about there having been insufficient media coverage of the information and outlines the potential dangers related to technology…

Paul’s discussion raises the very crucial question “do we live in a police state?” As AntiWar’s Justin Raimondo warns, the latest wikileaks revelations tell us the answer is ‘Yes’.

WikiLeaks and Julian Assange would have gone down in history as the greatest enemies of government oppression of all kinds in any case, but their latest release – a comprehensive exposé of the US intelligence community’s cyberwar tools and techniques – is truly the capstone of their career. And given that this release – dubbed “Vault 7” – amounts to just one percent of the documents they intend to publish, one can only look forward to the coming days with a mixture of joyful anticipation and ominous fear.

Fear because the power of the Deep State is even more forbidding – and seemingly invincible – than anyone knew. Joyful anticipation because, for the first time, it is dawning on the most unlikely people that we are, for all intents and purposes, living in a police state. I was struck by this while watching Sean Hannity’s show last [Wednesday] night – yes, Fox is my go-to news channel – and listening to both Hannity and his guests, including the ultra-conservative Laura Ingraham, inveigh against the “Deep State.” For people like Hannity, Ingraham, and Newt Gingrich (of all people!) to be talking about the Surveillance State with fear – and outrage – in their voices says two things about our current predicament: 1) Due to the heroic efforts of Julian Assange in exposing the power and ruthlessness of the Deep State, the political landscape in this country is undergoing a major realignment, with conservatives returning to their historic role as the greatest defenders of civil liberties, and 2) American “liberalism” – which now champions the Deep State as the savior of the country – has become a toxic brew that is fundamentally totalitarian.

On the first point: yes, there are more than a few holdouts, like Bill O’Reilly and the neocons, but the latter are increasingly isolated, and the former is increasingly irrelevant. What we are seeing, as the role of the “intelligence community” in basically leading a seditious conspiracy against a sitting President is revealed, is a complete switch in the political polarities in this country: what passes for the “left” has become the biggest advocate of the Surveillance State, and the rising populist right is coming to the hard-won conclusion that we are rapidly becoming a police state.

Ah, but wait! That’s not the whole story: bear with me for a while.

The material in “Vault 7” is extensive: it ranges from examining the ways in which a Samsung television set that is seemingly turned off can be– and no doubt has been – used to spy on the conversations and activities of a room’s occupants, to the various ways in which our spooks infiltrate and subvert common electronic devices, such as the I-Phone, in order to gather information. “Infected phones,” we are told in the introduction to the material, “can be instructed to send the CIA the user’s geolocation, audio and text communications as well as covertly activate the phone’s camera and microphone.” The CIA is even working on remotely controlling the electronic steering systems installed in cars – a perfect route to pulling off an assassination that looks like an “accident.” Not that the intelligence services of the “leader of the Free World” would ever consider such an act.

The massive infection of commonly used software and electronic devices leads to a major problem: proliferation. As these viruses and other invasive programs are unleashed on an unsuspecting public, they fall into the hands of a variety of bad actors: foreign governments, criminals, and teenagers on a lark (not necessarily in descending order of malevolence). This plague is being spread over the Internet by a veritable army of CIA hackers: “By the end of 2016,” WikiLeaks tells us, “the CIA’s hacking division, which formally falls under the agency’s Center for Cyber Intelligence (CCI), had over 5000 registered users and had produced more than a thousand hacking systems, trojans, viruses, and other ‘weaponized’ malware.” The inevitable end result: a world infected with so much malware that computers become almost useless – and this parlous condition is paid for by you, the American taxpayer.

This is, in effect, the cybernetic equivalent of the Iraq war – an invasion that led to such unintended consequences as the rise of ISIS, the devastation of Syria, and the empowerment of Iran. In short, a war that made us less safe.

One aspect of the Vault 7 data dump that’s drawing particular attention is the CIA’s Remote Devices Branch’s “Umbrage group,” which, we are told, “collects and maintains a substantial library of attack techniques ‘stolen’ from malware produced in other states including the Russian Federation.” The idea is to mask the Agency’s cyberwar operations by attempting to hide the unique forensic attributes of its techniques. The process of attribution, WikiLeaks explains, is “analogous to finding the same distinctive knife wound on multiple separate murder victims. The unique wounding style creates suspicion that a single murderer is responsible. As soon one murder in the set is solved then the other murders also find likely attribution.”

So how does the CIA hide its “fingerprints”?

It simply draws on computer code used by its adversaries – and not only Russia – and inserts it into its own handcrafted malware and other invasive programs, thus leaving Russian (or Chinese, or North Korean) fingerprints on the handiwork of CIA hackers.

Now you’ll recall that the attribution of the DNC/Podesta email hacks was “proved” by the DNC’s hired hands on the basis of the supposedlyunique characteristics of the programs used by the supposed Russian hackers. One of these alleged Russians even left behind the name of Felix Dzerzhinsky – founder of the Soviet KGB – embedded in the code, hardly the height of subtlety. So now we learn that the CIA has perfected the art of imitating its rivals, mimicking the Russians – or whomever – in a perfect setup for a “false flag” scenario.

After months of the nonstop campaign to demonize the Russians as “subverting our democracy” and supposedly throwing the election to Donald Trump by hacking the DNC and Podesta, a new possibility begins to emerge. I say “possibility” because, despite the craziness that is fast becoming the norm, there has got to be a limit to it – or does there?

No, I’m not suggesting the CIA hacked the DNC and poor hapless John Podesta. Yet others are suggesting something even more explosive.

In an appearance on Sean Hannity’s Fox News television program, retired Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer, a former senior intelligence officer, told the audience that he had heard from his intelligence contacts that retired NSA officials were responsible for hacking the DNC and Podesta, and then releasing the materials to WikiLeaks His co-guest, William Binney, a former NSA insider who was among the first to expose the extent of that agency’s surveillance of American citizens, agreed.

This is nothing new: Judge Andrew Napolitano said the same thing months ago. The alleged motivation was animus toward Mrs. Clinton.

Although “the Russians did it” is now the accepted conventional wisdom, which hardly anyone bothers to question anymore, the level of evidence proffered to support this conclusion has been laughably inadequate. And you’ll note that, although the CIA and the FBI, along with other intelligence agencies, advanced this hypothesis with “high confidence,” the NSA demurred, awarding it with only “moderate” confidence.

And one more thing: I found it extremely odd that, when the hacking of the DNC and John Podesta’s email was discovered, party officials refused to let the FBI and other law enforcement agencies examine either their server or Podesta’s devices. Instead, they gave it over to CrowdStrike, a private firm that regularly does business with the DNC. CrowdStrike then came out with the now-accepted analysis that it was a Russian job.

Could it be that the “explanation” for the hacking was determined in advance?

I don’t know the answer to that question. Nor do I necessarily buy Col. Shaffer’s thesis. What I’m saying is that it’s entirely possible – indeed, it is just as likely, given what we know now, as pinning the blame Vladimir Putin.

So what is the lesson of all this?

We have created a monster, a Deep State with such unchecked power, armed with such Orwellian technology, that it represents a clear and present danger to our constitutional republic. This threat is underscored not only by the latest WikiLeaks revelations, but also by the intelligence community’s intervention in our domestic politics, which has been documented in the headlines of the nation’s newspapers for the past few months.

This cancer has been allowed to grow, undiagnosed and unopposed, within the vitals of our government in the name of “national security.” Accelerated by our foreign policy of perpetual war, the national security bureaucracy has accumulated immense power, and our elected leaders have neglected to provide any oversight. Indeed, they are at its mercy.

The latest WikiLeaks revelations should be a wake-up call for all of us who want to preserve what’s left of our constitutionally-guaranteed liberties. Either we slay the monster or it will enslave us.

Mar 11 2017

When This All Blows Up…

by Tyler Durden

Authored by Chris Martenson via PeakProsperity.com,

This report marks the end of a series of three big trains of thought. The first explained how we’re living through the Mother Of All Financial Bubbles. The next detailed the Great Wealth Transfer that is now underway, siphoning our wealth into the pockets of an elite few.

This concluding report predicts how these deleterious and unsustainable trends will inevitably ‘resolve’ (which is a pleasant way of saying ‘blow up’.)

The Ka-POOM Theory

In terms how this will all end, we favor the scenario put forth by Eric Janszen in 1998 called the Ka-POOM theory.

This theory rests on the belief that the Federal Reserve along with the other world central banks looked at Japan’s several decades of economic stagnation and decided that deflationary recessions are to be avoided at all costs — even if that means blowing asset bubbles and then cleaning up the destruction left behind in their aftermath.

Because the Fed, et al. have a limited playbook (which is: print, and then print some more), the Ka-POOM model calls for limited periods of disinflation, followed by massive money printing sprees that then produce high inflation.

Despite the trillions and trillions in thin-air money printed by the world’s central banks over the past 8 years, a common rebuttal we hear is “But there’s been no inflation so far!” To which I reply, “Yes, that’s what we’re being told. But that’s not actually true.”

Remember: inflation is simply “too much money chasing too few goods.” We can detect today’s excess of money in the rising prices in our cost of living — but those higher prices are symptoms, not causes. Inflation is not “higher prices”. Inflation is “too much money”.

Next, inflation is not an evenly-distributed event. It’s not like the price of everything rises 10% at the same time. The inflation rate is an average, which contains some prices going up, while others stay flat or even go down going down. It’s always a lumpy experience. The reason why is that money is not evenly distributed across the economy, and it doesn’t always chase (or desire) the same things.

So the Fed and other central banks have printed up trillions and trillions of dollars, euros and yen, which they then essentially handed over to the financial markets and the very few people who work within them (as well as their biggest clients). As a direct consequence, we’ve seen enormous inflation in the prices of things that relate to that tiny universe of people – stocks, bonds, trophy city apartments, Gulfstream 5 jets, fine art, and rare gems.

These items have all gotten massively more expensive over the past decade. Just as would have happened if the Fed had printed up a trillion dollars and given them everyone living in a trailer park in the American South, with the restriction that the money could only be used to buy other trailers in the region. Do you have any doubt that the price of trailers in the South wouldn’t explode upwards?

Well, that’s exactly analogous to what has happened to financial and trophy assets. The amount of money created and poured into the financial markets by that central banks has been incredibly enormous. As a first-order event, it raised the prices of nearly all financial assets. And then, as a second-order derivative, it then flowed into the properties and cherished possessions of the financial industry insiders.

The summary is that we’ve already had lots of inflation – but it has (so far) been mostly contained to the areas where the freshly-printed money was first directed. No surprise there.

But it’s certainly not only been limited to the rarified items the rich enjoy. Anyone who is currently looking to purchase a home, car or college education has a pretty good idea how prices have jumped substantially over the past decade.

Here’s the thing about the attempts by central banks to circumvent the workings of the actual economy by simply printing up money: It is doomed to fail. It always does; one cannot simply ‘print up’ prosperity. Printing up money merely creates the illusion of free wealth for those with first access to it. In reality, what happens is that it secretly transfers the wealth from everyone else to those lucky few.

The Fed and the rest of the central banking cartel are consciously and very pointedly picking winners and losers.

It’s not in their power to make everyone a winner. So they have decided to throwing granny (and savers and pensions) under the bus while financial elites and well-connected speculators (e.g. JP Morgan and other large banks) extremely wealthy in the process. Wealth is being transferred from Parties B-Z to Party A – from the many to the few.

What the Fed promised would happen along with all of this money printing has not materialized. There has been no return to rapid economic growth. And there won’t be, because we have massive structural problems in our economy that can’t be papered over forever.

This stark fact makes the Fed’s entire money printing misadventure not just pointless, but dangerously destabilizing from a social and political perspective. The world’s central banks, especially the Fed, have done an enormous amount of damage. These institutions, as well as the decision-makers within them, are going to have a heck of lot to answer for when the inevitable crack-up comes.

A Quick Re-Cap

And so here we find ourselves, at the final torturous, grinding part where the final bubble top is formed. The über-bubble. The Greatest Of Them All.

A bubble this spectacular requires a top worthy of its size. A long, massive top, full of increasing exuberance — until the very last investor is sucked in.

Where I’ve noted humans’ remarkably silly behavior during bubble episodes in the past – tulip bulbs, railroads, swampland – I still struggle to understand or even explain this one.

It’s so obvious at this point. And yet, like its brethren bubbles of the past, a lot of otherwise thoughtful and careful people are getting sucked in by its siren song.

I guess the best economic description of it might be “a credit bubble” with sub-components like sovereign and household debt, and sub-sub-components like Toronto real estate and the IPO price for SNAP shares (that’s Snapchat, which soon after its launch, had a valuation of $40 billion. This mind you, is a company that has no identifiable revenue model).

A credit bubble occurs when the issuance of credit grows faster than income supporting it. Here’s what that looks like on a national scale for the US. The bottom red line is income (GDP) and the top blue line is Total Debt. We can see that debt has been growing at twice the rate of GDP since 1970:

Debt to GDP

You have to be quite delusional to think that debt can be compound at twice the rate of income forever. Unfortunately, there are more than a few of those ungrounded optimists working in central banks and governments the world over. Their thinking is simply, The sky’s the limit!

Those of us living in reality find this mindset puerile and insulting. And, of course, dangerously reckless. And it’s also maddening to hear the media cheerleaders for Wall Street selling us this bunk as if it were somehow sensible. It is not.

Look, millions — likely billions — of people are at risk of getting badly hurt. When this bubble blows, it’s going to be enormously destructive and take out a lot of wealth along the way. Millions of jobs will be destroyed. What people think of as wealth will evaporate as though it never existed in the first place (it didn’t). Political dynasties and major financial institutions will be ruined.

As I wrote recently, this will be widely and popularly referred to a period of wealth destruction. It will feel that way to must, but it will be actually be a period of wealth transfer:

The summary here is this: We are still printing and borrowing enormous amounts of money and credit, but the world is not growing any larger in response. The pressure is building. Nobody knows when all of that money and credit will have to be ‘trued up’ against the amount of real stuff out there. But it will. History shows us that it always does.

And that moment will be referred to by most as a period of wealth destruction. 401ks will be shredded, bonds will become worthless, defaults will spike, institutions and entire countries will fail – but the truth is that all of that paper ‘wealth’ was an illusion. People’s faith in it had been betrayed long before, when those in power started abusing the system by creating too many tertiary claims.

After the dust settles, there will be winners and losers, and those with the proper framework will understand that what actually happened was that all of the wealth was transferred from those who thought they owned it, to those who actually did.

The biggest remaining question is whether the wealth transfer comes about in the form of an inflationary destruction, like in Venezuela today, or as a deflationary bust more in the fashion of Greece.

(Source)

The only thing that capable of preventing this coming carnage would a resumption of rapid economic growth. And I mean growth that exceeds the rate of debt creation.

But that’s simply not going to happen.

The Problem With Growth

We can dispense with the idea of “solving” our too-much-debt problem by a resumption of rapid economic growth either by deduction or observation. Both work just as well on their own, but each tells a similar story in this case.

The deductive route notes that economic growth stimulated by ever-higher amounts of borrowing simply requires greater and greater debt loads to accomplish. Eventually debt levels simply become too high, and pinch off growth.

We can also deduce that because economic growth is tightly linked to energy consumption, lower amounts of usable energy flowing through an economy will cause that economy to stall out as well. Because we know that both the quantity as well as the net yield we get from our energy-producing activities are flattening, this explains why GDP growth is flattening too.

Thus, from a deductive standpoint, combining what we know about high levels of debt and flattening energy returns energy there’s really no more room for confusion about why GDP growth is, and will remain, anemic (at best).

Observationally, we now have more than a full decade of sub-par (i.e., ‘too low’) world GDP growth:

Debt to GDP

(Source)

Notice that the last year of data, 2016, is coming in at the lowest reading since the Great Recession, while the next two years are estimated to also come in at less than 3%. The world hasn’t averaged 3% GDP growth in a decade. Even the mighty US has gone more than ten straight years without breaking into the 3% range.

We have to ask: How many years does it take to finally admit that there’s something seriously wrong with our hopeful story line that robust growth is going to save our debt-ridden bacon?

Just for the record, things are not shaping up any better here in 2017 either…

Atlanta Fed GDPNow model predicts 1.2% 1Q17 growth

And, just for kicks, we might also note that the GDP forecasting agencies of the world have consistent in over-estimating future growth. Of course, this doesn’t deter them from continuing to predicting higher future growth each year. As a case in point, here are the IMF’s predictions for world growth over the past 6 years:

Debt to GDP

(Source)

Each of those colored lines is a forecast. Each of them foresaw growth going notably higher in the near future. Not only was every one of them utterly wrong in direction, each failed at getting even the next quarter anywhere close to right. See how none of those lines ever dips below 3%? See in the prior chart how global growth never breached 3% in any of these same plotted years?

For a variety of reasons, with aging demographics being a huge factor, future growth in the OECD countries must slow:

Debt to GDP

(Source)

My ‘prediction’ is that these projections will turn out to be far too high. Mainly because I include declining net energy in my views and no mainstream economist ever does. But the track records of these outfits shows that taking the ‘under’ side of the over/under bet offers incredibly safe odds.

At any rate, the main story here is that the only way we can begin to justify the astronomical levels of debt currently on the books, let alone slathering on new tranches just to keep the whole thing form imploding, is to have a story of endless, rapid future economic growth. Which is, we’ve already shown, a delusional fantasy.

Stagnating growth, ever more trillions of debt, and a finite amount of depleting net energy all adds up to an unsustainable mess. With asset price bubbles everywhere and wealth transfer mechanisms already in place, the end-game involves a very few winners and a lot of losers.

Anything that is this unsustainable will someday end. But how? And how should we position ourselves for it?

In Part 2: The Ka-POOM! Survival Guide, we detail in depth the most likely progression predicted by the Ka-POOM! model. First, a punishing crash in prices as natural market forces eventually overwhelm the Fed’s doomed efforts to print the world to prosperity. Think of the 2008 crash, but on steroids.

Then will come the inevitable response from the central banking cartel: Set the printing machines on maximum speed! While this may seem to work for a brief while, it will soon collapse the world’s currencies in a hyperinflationary deluge.

This will be a very tricky time for preserving wealth as things swing violently from disinflation to inflation. Understanding the mechanics and knowing what to expect will be critical — not just for safeguarding your money, but for taking advantage of what will surely be some of the best bargains of our lifetime.

Click here to read the report

Mar 11 2017

COMEY & THE FBI

That is one thing that the constitution did not allow and made an issue of it. So how did congress allow this out of control invasion of privacy to get started.