Andrew Jackson, the Federal Reserve, and the Looting of America

Saturday, February 8th, 2014 | Posted by Jonas E. Alexis

“The Federal Reserve is the chief culprit behind the economic crisis. Its unchecked power to create endless amounts of money out of thin air brought us the boom and bust cycle and causes one financial bubble after another.” Ron Paul[1]

by Jonas E. Alexis

Andrew Jackson was probably one of the most intrepid men of his era to vigorously oppose a privately-owned central bank because he foresaw that eventually usurers would end up cheating the common people.[2]

Jackson knew that fractional reserve banking was a sophisticated way of cheating that always ends up killing the economy. In order to restore the economy, Jackson reasoned that he had to kill usurious bankers.
Yet some of his detractors, both past and present, have tried to dismiss him as ignorant, saying that he knew little about economy and that the Bank was not really responsible for the economic disaster.
The question is really simple: If the Bank was a responsible financial institution, why did it contribute to the national debt? If Jackson was so ignorant and unscrupulous, why did he eliminate the national debt by January 1835?[3] Historian and economist Murray N. Rothbard writes,
“Far from being the ignorant bumpkins that most historians have depicted, the Jacksonians were steeped in the knowledge of sound economics, particularly of the Ricardian Currency School.”[4]
The Jacksonians were not against all banking systems but against usurious bankers, who Jackson called “hydra-headed” monsters “eating the flesh of the common man.”[5]
Jackson fearlessly and unapologetically wrote that such bankers “are a den of vipers and thieves” who will eventually destroy families if no one stops them. He wrote,
“I have determined to rout you out and, by the Eternal, I will rout you out.”[6]
Jackson not only vowed to fight for a return to progress in the economy, but also to expose the usurious activities of bankers who were manipulating the nation for their own ends, meaning he had to get into a political fight with usurers like Nicholas Biddle, president of the Second Bank of the United States.

Nicholas Biddle

Biddle figured that economic power is like controlling the remote control of a television—you can switch it back and forth as you see fit. He put it quite bluntly:
“Nothing but widespread suffering will produce any effect on Congress. Our only safety is in pursuing a steady course of firm restriction—and I have no doubt that such a course will ultimately lead to restoration of the currency and the re-charter of the Bank.”[7]
Two authors who do not agree with Jackson and called some of his views on central banking “a handicap” wrote,
“Biddle hoped, by damaging the economy, to stir up opposition to Jackson; in the process, he showed that Jackson had not been wrong to fear the power of a major bank to distort the economy for its own purposes… Biddle was able to bribe, cajole, or otherwise pressure congressmen into taking his side against the president.”[8]
Jackson and his followers had good reason to fear what the usurious bankers could do, due to Biddle’s close, but brief, ties with the Rothschild family,[9] which was one of the “industrial forces” that controlled the financial world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
This was even admitted by socialist historian Gustavus Myers, who wrote in The History of the Great American Fortunes that
“under the surface, the Rothschilds long had a powerful influence in dictating American financial laws. The law records show that they were the power in the old Bank of the United States.”^[10]
Similarly, philo-Semitic historian Niall Ferguson writes that “the Rothschilds really did see some kind of constitutional control over public finances as desirable, if only as a way of reassuring British investors.”[11] Mooney writes that
“the Rothschild family stands out in history as the prime example of manipulating the power of international banking…By means of usury on international scale, they were able to consolidate great wealth and power to turn world affairs according to their own fancy.”^[12]

Heinrich Heine

The Rothschilds financed wars in England and America, collecting huge interest rates and making a massive profit. Jewish poet Heinrich Heine himself noted,
“No one does more to further the revolution than the Rothschilds themselves…and, though it may sound even more strange, these Rothschilds, the bankers of kings, these princely pursestring-holders, whose existence might be placed in the gravest danger by a collapse of the European state system, nevertheless carry in their minds a consciousness of their revolutionary mission.”^[13]
According to Heine, “the Rothschild ‘system’ is also potentially revolutionary in itself ” because since it
“possesses the moral force or power which religion has lost, it can act as a surrogate for religion—indeed, it is a new religion, and when the old religion [Christianity] finally goes under it will provide substitutes for its practical blessings strangely enough, it is once again the Jews who invented this new religion.”^[14]
Heine saw James Rothschilds as “a powerful destroyer of patrician privilege, and the founder of a new democracy.”^[15]

————————————————–

It is historically fallacious to say that because the Jacksonians were against usurious activity, they were also against free enterprise and a free market economy.
The fact is that they initiated a rigorous program which eventually paid off the federal debt, something that had never happened in the history of America—and some historians assert that it probably will never happen again.[16]
The first thing they did was to completely abolish central banking, which they saw as the Frankenstein behind national debt. Once again they were not against banking per se, but against fractional reserve banking.[17]
Sure enough, Biddle stopped the economy by “contracting the money supply,” which led to what today is called an economic bubble, and blamed it all on Jackson without realizing that such immoral activity would make Jackson’s case. Jackson wrote,
“The Bank is trying to kill me, but I will kill it.”[18]
Eventually, Biddle was caught, and by 1835 Jackson had undone the damage he had caused—he “reduced the national debt to zero and accumulated a surplus.”[19]
In general, there is no clear indication that the founding fathers repudiated usurious contracts, but they understood that the “industrial forces” wanted not only to exploit the poor, but to use their power to dominate the nation at large.
Abraham Lincoln and Benjamin Franklin were cognizant of those forces which are still with us today—Lincoln witnessed where usurious contracts could take the country, as government debt increased 400% over the course of only four years—between 1861 and 1865. The debt went from $66.5 million to $2.67 billion.[20]

————————————————–

One entity in the history of United States that has been involved in sophisticated cheating is the Federal Reserve System, which happens to be the third central banking system in the United States and is privately owned.
The Federal Reserve System was signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson on December 23, 1913, and the United States has never been the same with respect to the debt ceiling. Historian David A. Stockman writes that by 1978 “the Federal Reserve was fast becoming a warehouse for the national debt.”[21] The Fed, Rothbard stated,
“is accountable to no one; it has no budget; it is subject to no audit; and no Congressional committee knows of, or can truly supervise, its operations.”[22]
Since the Fed is only internally accountable, there are no checks and balances, and all sorts of cheating can happen—and did. The Fed would probably have been closed down long ago if it was known to the public from its inception that it was not really federal.[23]
There are important facts that must be stated here at the outset: the Fed is not federal (it is a private corporation which is being run by Zionist bankers); the Fed can print money out of thin air; the Fed is not accountable to the government; and the Fed has been involved in covert operations for a long time. Stockman writes that
“Eventually, the Federal Reserve would capitulate to the bullying of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon by throwing open the switches on its printing press. This unleashed a virulent inflation that would cause consumer prices to nearly triple between 1967 and 1980.”[24]
The Federal Reserve System was called “the engine of inflation,”[25] and Ron Paul acknowledges, “Since the Fed’s creation in 1913 the dollar has lost more than 96% of its value, and by recklessly inflating the money supply the Fed continues to distort interest rates and intentionally erodes the value of the dollar.”[26]
Thomas Sowell himself declares,
“As the Federal Reserve tightened money and credit in the early 1980s in order to curb inflation, unemployment rose while bankruptcies and business failures reached levels not seen in decades.”[27]
But the Fed’s covert operation came into full bloom in 2008 when it used taxpayer money to bail out the big wheelers. Stockman declares,
“The Fed’s horridly indefensible rescue of Long-Term Capital Management became the paradigm for what has become a permanent regime of bailouts and central banks rigging of the nation’s money and capital markets.”[28]

The Fed (along with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley) unleashed “toxic assets” upon decent Americans and “did nothing to ameliorate the huge losses being incurred by these gullible customers.”[29] Stockman continues to say,
“Instead, the Washington bailouts rescued the perpetrators, not the victims; that is, the bailout benefits were captured almost exclusively by the Wall Street insiders and fund managers who owned the common stock and long-term bonds of these two firms.
“Yet it was these punters who deserved to take punishing losses. It was they who enabled Goldman and Morgan Stanley—along with Bear Stearns, Lehman, and the investment banks embedded inside Citigroup and JPMorgan—to grow into giant, reckless predators.”[30]
Similarly, Paul Craig Roberts declares in his recent work The Failure of Laissez Fair Capitalism,
“When the bubble burst, the former bankers running the US Treasury provided massive bailouts at taxpayer expense for the irresponsible gambles made by banks that they formerly headed. The Federal Reserve joined the rescue operation.
“An audit of the Federal Reserve released in July, 2011, revealed that the Federal Reserve had provided $16 trillion—a sum larger than US GDP or the US public debt—in secret loans to bail out American foreign banks, while doing nothing to aid the millions of American families being foreclosed out of their homes.
“Political accountability disappeared as all public assistance was directed to the mega-rich, whose greed had produced the financial crisis.”[31]

In short,
“Fannie and Freddie, the Federal Reserve, the tax code, and Wall Street had all conspired to preternaturally jack up housing prices by 180 percent between 1994 and 2007, thereby paving the way for a thundering crash that since then has wiped out upward of four-fifths of the bubble-era gain in many leading markets….
“Herein lies the real evil of the Greenspan-Bernanke regime of financial repression and wealth effects levitation: it destroyed free market interest rates in the name of monetary central planning and thereby unshackled democratic politicians from the ancient fiscal disciplines.”[32]
Thomas Sowell and Milton Friedman both agreed that the Federal Reserve System’s monetary policies during the 1930s were destructive, “confused and counterproductive.”[33] As an example, Sowell writes that
“the Federal Reserve raised the interest rate in 1931, as the downturn in the economy was nearing the bottom, with business failing and banks collapsing by the thousands all across the country, along with massive unemployment.”[34]
Sowell also rightly observes that the Federal Reserve controls
“the total amount of money and credit in the economy as a whole, to one degree or another, thereby controlling indirectly the aggregate demand for the nation’s goods and services…
“An unguarded statement by the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, or a statement that is misconstrued by financiers, can set off a panic in Wall Street that causes stock prices to plummet.
“Or, if the Federal Reserve Board chairman sounds upbeat, stock price may soar—to unsustainable levels that would ruin many people when the prices come back down.
“Given such drastic repercussions, which can affect financial markets around the world, Federal Reserve Board chairmen over the years have learned to speak in highly guarded and Delphic terms that often leave listeners puzzled as to what they really mean.”[35]
But Sowell and Friedman could never bring themselves to the fact that the Federal Reserve is right in line with the capitalist system which Sowell and Friedman espouse and defend for almost their entire academic career.
Sowell and of course Friedman could never tell us who are the shadowy figures which happen to take over the Federal Reserve. We all know them by now: Donald L. Kohn, Randall S. Mishkin, Frederic S. Kroszner, Alan Greenspan, Bern Bernanke, Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, Arthur Levitt, and more recently Janet Yellen and Stanley Fishcher.
J. J. Goldberg of the Jewish Daily Forward, in his examination of two of Hollywood’s recent movies, American Hustle and The Wolf of Wall Street, declares,
“Right now America is thinking about the unending financial crisis. And when we think about the crisis, we encounter names like Lehman, Goldman and Sachs. Like Fuld, Blankfein and Greenberg. We taught ourselves and our neighbors years ago not to notice when names like those surface in these situations. Noticing can spawn ugly thoughts.
“The question is, how much longer can we expect folks not to notice? Maybe that’s what these movies are saying. Maybe something is bubbling in America’s subconscious that we need to think about.”[36]
Goldberg quotes LA Jewish Journal editor Rob Eshman saying,
“We are blessed to be living at a time of unparalleled Jewish power and wealth, and it makes us so uneasy, we prefer to talk about everything but. …We are enjoying unprecedented wealth as millions struggle on minimum wages, facing hunger, unemployment, benefit cuts, homelessness.
“We look to our rabbis and institutions for guidance, but too many of them are afraid to upset the wealthy donors upon whom they are dependent. So we talk instead about Israel, about Swarthmore, and our communities become breeding grounds for the next Madoff, the next Belfort.”[37]
Goldberg concludes, “He’s right.  We need to talk.”[38]
Indeed. Let’s open up the debate. Let’s discuss this rationally and historically.

————————————————–

Printing money out of thin air, which is what the Fed does, is a usurious enterprise, and it goes back to the early centuries. In seventeenth-century England, gold and silver were the primary means of exchange.
Since people were not able to easily carry around large stores of gold and silver, a new career cropped up: goldsmithing. The goldsmiths promised to hold the gold and silver and gave people a receipt for the amount of gold received.
This new economic method was thrilling on the surface precisely because people were tired of carrying around and storing huge amounts of gold.
However, there was a huge problem. Goldsmiths realized that only a small amount of people actually came in and demanded their gold, leaving room for the goldsmiths to cheat the system. They began to commit what one writer called “acts of embezzlement”[39] at an astronomical rate.
They printed extra receipts—paper money—and loaned them out and charged interest on them, though the economy couldn’t support it. This was called fractional reserve banking, which arose in England during the 1660s.[40]
Men such as George Washington, John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, Martin van Buren, Henry Harrison, and James K. Polk saw the dangers of this system, so they rejected paper money.[41] The Panic of 1819 convinced Polk that paper money would eventually bring economic collapse.[42]
The early goldsmiths found that they could loan out ten times as much as they actually had in stock, which is an obvious way of cheating in economics. Banks in the United States do the same thing.

Modern capitalists such as Thomas Sowell are very careful to not label this system cheating, instead calling it “vulnerable.”[43]
Milton Friedman has written an entire book on the history of money in the United States, and the notion that fractional reserve banking could be immoral is not mentioned once. On the contrary, Milton implies that fractional reserve banking could be legitimate.[44]
From the birth of paper money to the economic crisis in 2008, the goldsmiths, who gradually evolved into money changers and later usurious bankers, made huge profits off the poor and needy, and played an influential role in the economic collapse of any society.
From 1642 to 1649, the goldsmiths were the key players who financed the wars in England. By 1694, the Bank of England was created by the Whig oligarchs. Ever since, England has been in debt.
The same thing happened in America in 1690 when paper money was introduced in Massachusetts. In order to pay the soldiers, the government borrowed a huge amount of money from Boston merchants, putting the state into debt; the same thing happened in 1692.
By 1711, many observers saw that paper money was killing the economy.[45] Yet those failed experiments did not stop the spread of paper money in every colony, except Virginia.[46] It continued to create “a boom-bust economy.” Rothbard writes,
“When new paper money was injected into the economy, an inflationary boom would result, to be followed by a deflationary depression when the paper money supply contracted.”[47]
During the Revolutionary War, the Continental Congress turned back to paper money to finance the war. In 1775, they issued a sum of $6 million; in 1776, $13 million, in 1777 $64 million, and in 1778 $64 million. Over a period of five years Congress issued $225 million, a process that drove the economy into madness again.[48]
By 1782, Robert Morris, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, had fully established the first Bank of North America (not to be confused with the First Bank of the United States) and lo and behold, the bank had permission from the government to issue paper money, which took a huge toll on the “hapless taxpayer.”[49]

————————————————–

It was quickly perceived that there was a huge difference between paper money and specie, and Morris tried to reconcile the issue by pleading that the former is better. But by 1776, Morris was fully aware that the “Continental currency,” as he called it, was weakening the economy in the United States.[50]
In the final analysis, that attempt failed, and by 1783 Morris ended up selling much of the Bank’s capital.[51]
The first Bank of America was a dismal failure, and right after it ended, the Bank of New York and the Massachusetts Bank gained some ground by trying to substitute specie with paper money, an activity that led to recession.[52]
By 1791, the first Bank of the United States was established and it began to fight against specie by printing out paper money.
By 1796, ten more banks were operating and within five years, eighteen more were functioning. The establishment of those banks would have been impossible without Alexander Hamilton.
Jefferson and his followers argued that the Constitution did not give the federal government license to establish a bank.[53] Some Hamilton sympathizers declared that he only wanted “a federal government that actively supported economic development,”[54] leaving the impression that Jefferson did not want an “economic development.” At the end of the day, Hamilton got the upper hand.
Hamilton’s mother was Rachel Levine,[55] and he attended a Jewish school which “had a thriving population of Sephardic Jews.”[56] Whether Hamilton liked it or not, he was certainly aware of the political struggle. Biographer Ron Chernow writes,
“Perhaps from this exposure at an impressionable age [during his schooling], Hamilton harbored a life-long revenge for the Jews. In later years, he privately jotted on a sheet of paper that the ‘progress of the Jews…from their earliest history to the present time has been and is entirely out of the ordinary course of human affairs.
“Is it not then a fair conclusion that the cause also is an extraordinary one—in other words that it is the effect of some great providential plan?’”[57]
In a nutshell, banks from their inception assaulted the economic order by creating massive inflation which drove the United States into massive debt. The wars opened the door for usurious bankers, the bankers precipitated massive inflation, and this inevitably led to the oppression of the poor and needy.
“From 1811 to 1815 the number of banks in the country increased from 117 to 212; in addition, there had sprung up 35 private unincorporated banks, which were illegal in most states but were allowed to function under war conditions…
“Suspensions of specie payments informally or officially permeated the economy outside of New England during the panic of 1819, occurred everywhere outside of New England in 1837, and in all states south of west of New Jersey in 1839. A general suspension of specie payments occurred throughout the country once again in the panic of 1857.”[58]
More on these issues later.

---

[1] http://www.ronpaul.com/on-the-issues/audit-the-federal-reserve-fed-hr-459-s202/.
[2] Johnson and Kwak, 13 Bankers, 19
[3] Brands, Jackson: His Life and Times, 502-503.
[4] Rothbard, History of Money, 90.
[5] Brown, Web of Debt, 1; also Jon Meacham, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House (New York: Random House, 2009), 256.
[6] Brown, Web of Debt, 78.
[7] Ibid., 79.
[8] Johnson and Kwak, 13 Bankers, 20.
[9] Bray Hammond, Banks and Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 285, 300.
[10] Gustavus Myers, The History of the Great American Fortunes (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co., 1910), 3:183-184.
[11] Niall Ferguson, The House of Rothschild: Money’s Prophets, 1798-1848 (New York: Penguin Books), 124.
[12] Mooney, Usury, 69.
[13] Quoted in Ferguson, The House of Rothschild: Money’s Prophets, 1798-1848, 214.
[14] Ibid., 213.
[15] Ibid., 214.
[16] Ferguson, House of Rothschild, 373-375.
[17] Rothbard, History of Money, 91.
[18] Ibid., 92.
[19] Meacham, American Lion, 201.
[20] Brown, Web of Debt, 79; Rothbard, History of Money, 91-92.
[21] David A. Stockman, The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America (New York: Public Affairs, 2013), 113.
[22] Mooney, Usury, 71.
[23] Murray N. Rothbard, The Case Against the Fed (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institutes, 1994), 3.
[24] Stockman, The Great Deformation, 204.
[25] Ibid., 206.
[26] http://www.ronpaul.com/on-the-issues/audit-the-federal-reserve-fed-hr-459-s202/.
[27] Thomas Sowell, Basic Economics (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 483.
[28] Stockman, The Great Deformation, 14.
[29] Ibid., 22.
[30] Ibid.
[31] Paul Craig Roberts, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2013), 32-33.
[32] Stockman, The Great Deformation, 579, 699.
[33] Thomas Sowell, Basic Economics (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 398.
[34] Ibid.
[35] Ibid., 407.
[36] J. J. Goldberg, “Is the Jewish Swindler Ready for His Close-Up?,” Jewish Daily Forward, February 7, 2014.
[37] Ibid.
[38] Ibid.
[39] Mooney, Usury, 77.
[40] See Detlev S. Schlichter, Paper Money Collapse: The Folly of Elastic Money and the Coming Monetary Breakdown (New Jersey: Wiley & Sons, 2011), chapter 2.
[41] Rothbard, History of Money, 56.
[42] See Schlichter, Paper Money Collapse, chapter 2.
[43] Rothbard, History of Money, 91.
[44] Thomas Sowell, Basic Economics, 405.
[45] Milton Friedman, A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 17, 21, 29-30.
[46] Rothbard, History of Money, 52-53.
[47] Ibid., 53.
[48] Ibid., 55.
[49] Ibid., 58-60.
[50] Ibid., 62-63.
[51] Mooney, Usury, 67.
[52] Rothbard, History of Money, 63.
[53] Ibid., 64.
[54]Ibid., 70.
[55] Johnson and Kwak, 13 Bankers, 14.
[56] Allan Mclane Hamilton, The Intimate Life of Alexander Hamilton (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1910), 3.
[57] Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (New York: Penguin, 2004), 17.
[58] For the differences between the two, see Noble E. Cunningham, Jefferson vs. Hamilton: Confrontation that Shaped a Nation (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000).

Related Posts:

• The Role of Foreign Banks in US History
• Only One Solution to the Fed Debt Trap
• The Federal Reserve Cartel: Part II: The Freemason BUS & the House of Rothschild
• The Federal Reserve Cartel: Part I: The Eight Families
• Now it’s payback time! Why Obama should bust Netanyahu for 9/11

Short URL: http://www.veteranstoday.com/?p=287764

The views expressed herein are the views of the author exclusively and not necessarily the views of VT or any other VT authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors or partners. Legal Notice

Posted by Jonas E. Alexis on Feb 8 2014, With 733 Reads, Filed under Economy, Editor, Living. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

http://www.veteranstoday.com/2014/02/08/andrew-jackson-the-federal-reserve-and-the-looting-of-america/

Orange-Swirled Cheesecake Dessert

Taste of Home Bakeshop FavoritesWhip up a batch of scrumptious bakeshop delights right in your own kitchen. Click here for details! View recipe | Email Preferences

FREE PREVIEW Treat yourself to a FREE preview of Taste of Home Bakeshop Favorites! Click here for details.

RECIPES   HOLIDAYS   COOKING SCHOOLS   COMMUNITY   COOKBOOKS   MAGAZINES

Orange-Swirled Cheesecake Dessert "Swirls of homemade orange curd meander through white chocolate cheesecake bars. The special bars might remind you of a childhood treat—Orange Creamsicles." —Margee Berry, White Salmon, Washington Get Recipe > AVERAGE RATING Be the first to rate & review this recipe! Share this recipe: facebook Twitter Email

Yesterday's Recipe > More Valentine's Day Desserts > Top 10 Cheesecake Recipes >

Find more on Tasteofhome.com Chocolate Recipes Top 10 Recipes Slow Cooker Recipes Appetizers Chicken Recipes Dinner Recipes Recipe Contests Quick Dinner Recipes Holiday Recipes Budget Recipes Healthy Recipes Soup Recipes ADVERTISEMENT

Want more Taste of Home? Check us out on these social sites! Facebook Twitter Tumblr

RSS Feeds  | Email Preferences  | Sign Up  | Unsubscribe  | Privacy Policy

This email was sent to: johnmachaffie@gmail.com To ensure that you receive Recipe of the Day newsletters, please add newsletter@email.tasteofhome.com to your address book or list of approved senders. Click here for details. We'd love to hear your thoughts about our newsletters. To contact us please click here. Copyright 2014 RDA Enthusiast Brands, LLC All rights reserved. 5400 S. 60th St., P.O. 991 Greendale, WI 53129-0991

Barclays customer details up for sale: report

    Published: Sunday, 9 Feb 2014 | 5:04 AM ET

By: Phillip Tutt | Deputy Managing Editor, Digital, CNBC International

Scandal-hit U.K. bank Barclays has launched an investigation after a newspaper reported that the personal details of 27,000 customers had been stolen and sold.
Confidential customer details on their earnings and health as well as passport details had ended up for sale, "The Mail on Sunday" reported after it had been contacted by a whistleblower.
The "Mail On Sunday" report added that the customer data, which also detailed individuals' attitude to risk, had been sold to "rogue City traders" and was "worth millions on the black market because it allowed unsuspecting individuals to be targeted in investment scams".
In a statement released by Barclays Sunday, the bank thanked the newspaper for bringing the matter to its attention and added that it had contacted the U.K. Information Commission and banking authorities on Friday as soon as it had become aware of the theft.
Barclays added that initial investigations suggested the files were linked to the Barclays Financial Planning business which closed in 2011 and the stolen data dated back to 2008 or earlier.
"This appears to be criminal action and we will co-operate with the authorities on pursuing the perpetrator," Barclays said.
"We would like to reassure all of our customers that we have taken every practical measure to ensure that personal and financial details remain as safe and secure as possible."
The data leak is the latest blow for the British bank after a series of mis-selling and interest rate-fixing scandals.
Last December the bank was fined $3.75 million by U.S. regulators over an alleged decade-long failure to properly keep electronic records, emails and instant messages.
And last week the Barclays chief executive Antony Jenkins announced he had turned down his 2013 bonus, saying it would be inappropriate given the bank's hefty bill to pay for past problems.
Follow us on Twitter:

@CNBCWorld

http://www.cnbc.com/id/101401500

JPMorgan to pay $614 million to settle mortgage fraud case

    Published: Tuesday, 4 Feb 2014 |

JPMorgan Chase & Co has agreed to pay $614 million to the U.S. government to settle claims it defrauded federal agencies by underwriting sub-standard mortgage loans, the U.S. Justice Department said on Tuesday.

JPMorgan, the largest U.S. bank by assets, is admitting in the settlement that for more than a decade it approved thousands of loans that were not eligible for insurance by the Federal Housing Administration or the Department of Veterans Affairs, the department said in a statement.
As a consequence, "both the FHA and the VA incurred substantial losses when unqualified loans failed and caused the FHA and VA to cover the associated losses," the Justice Department said.
The settlement was filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and was approved by Judge J. Paul Oetken, according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney's Office in Manhattan.
The bank said in a statement that the "settlement represents another significant step in the firm's efforts to put historical mortgage-related issues behind it."
The company said it has already recorded reserves for the settlement and does not expect the deal to have any significant additional financial impact.
Last year, the company agreed to about $20 billion in settlements in its drive to clear up legal claims. The deals covered claims over other mortgage issues, as well as derivatives and power trading.
On Monday, the company agreed to pay $1.45 million to settle four-year-old allegations brought by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that the bank had maintained a sexually hostile environment for women in a mortgage loan center on Ohio.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/101390271

HOW TO SEPARATE EGG YOLKS FAST. AMAZING!!

http://www.youtube.com/embed/iAp8pEaWB1Y

M.

Corruption and Fraud at the IMF and World Bank

Corruption and Fraud at the IMF and World Bank
Topic: International

With the world waiting for economic relief, the G-20 struck an agreement in April identifying actors who will ride to the rescue: Nearly $1 trillion will be given to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) so that they can help “the vulnerable in the poorest countries.” But these very institutions are culpable of accelerating the spread of poverty as the developing world confronts the crisis. In a frenzy of deregulation and poorly planned privatization, the IMF and the World Bank (the largest MDB) cut away both oversight of the private sector and social safety nets for the poor beginning in the 1980s.

As a consequence, by 1998, these institutions were presiding over a spectacular financial collapse in East Asia, Russia, the former Soviet republics and Brazil, which was in hindsight, a harbinger of things to come. Three years later, Argentina (the IMF’s best student) went bust and half of its people were suddenly poor. After years of hewing to IMF financial dictates, citizens lost their jobs, bank accounts, savings and pensions overnight.

But let’s forget the “poverty-fighting” track record of these organizations for a moment. Where does each stand in relation to the systemic problem that caused the panic in the first place – lack of oversight? The IMF and World Bank are themselves without any real external oversight. They are virtually impenetrable by the legislatures of their member governments. ...

Labyrinthine bureaucracies, coupled with immunities from national and international laws, have become, for them, impunity.

Neither institution has answered for its track record because no one is entitled to ask. Neither Bank nor Fund officials can be subpoenaed by national legislatures, nor can they be obliged to testify in court. No government can demand internal documents from them. While each has some disclosure policies, these often remain unimplemented because the organizations cannot be sued. This is the stunning contradiction of the G-20 action: the signatories declared, “the era of bank secrecy is over,” but then dumped a trillion dollars of public money into the most secretive financial institutions in the world.

To make matters worse, IMF and Bank staff members who witness corruption or fraud (and there are plenty) are not allowed to inform affected governments or the press, except under the most stringent constraints. If they do, they risk deportation back to their home countries. This assures perpetual corruption instead of beneficial reform.

One would think that steps to ensure whistleblower protections would have followed in the wake of the Bank’s biggest black mark in history – the resignation of president Paul Wolfowitz, forced by anonymous staffers who exposed his cronyism, favoritism, incompetence, and improper political dealings. Lost in his girlfriend-salary scandal were the revelations of coordinated support he received from the Bank’s general counsel, the Department of Institutional Integrity (INT), human resources, and the Ethics Committee of the Board of Directors. The whistleblowers in the Wolfowitz affair have since been relentlessly pursued.

But protections from retaliation weren’t strengthened. The bank adopted a “whistleblower protection policy” last year that staff members already recognize as a trap: confidentiality may be breached; investigative reports remain hidden; grievance hearings to address retaliation are neither impartial nor external; and guaranteed reinstatement rights (if a whistleblower is vindicated) don’t exist.

In the past year, the federal government has given away hundreds of billions of dollars without first ensuring an honest accounting for it. The results of such actions are not surprising – improper bonuses and wasteful spending has outraged the public. We cannot forget this episode so soon – if an institution is going to collect public money, then it must be accountable to the public. It must have in place the governance measures that ensure that corruption and fraud can be safely exposed by those who witness it. And neither the World Bank nor the IMF passes that test.

************

Bea Edwards is the International Reform Director of the Government Accountability Project, the nation’s leading whistleblower protection organization, www.whistleblower.org

 

IMF World Bank Debt Governance and Corruption

"The World Bank, IMF, affiliates, staff while performing duties on their behalf, are protected by immunity granted to Intergovernmental Organizations - by now we know this only too well. No suing, prosecuting, accountability, admitted. However, say for the sake of Negotiation, they have committed mischief, backed by facts and evidence, leading to serious consequences and ramifications they rather cover up for various reasons.

 

I read with a knowing smile words: 'they... have committed mischief.' For those who invest the time to make themselves knowledgeable by reading about the corruption and debt governance, particularly from trusted reputable sources online, there can be little doubt that the business of the World Bank, IMF and FED is to commit mischief and crimes against humanity. As a negotiator, it's crucial that you start by getting to understand the history and nature of the other party before you start to influence them. 

IMF & World Bank: Two major levers of US economic hegemony

The IMF & World Bank are UN agencies, it’s sovereign eating un-elected dictator technocrats are UN agents."The UN & its agencies are immune to laws of countries where they operate” – Wikipedia The UN produces nothing, sends no revenues back into the economies, is expanding into every activity in the world. Did you know we're funding the UN's 'World Tourist Agency'? Do you think the UN is there for you? “In fact, her IMF salary of $467,940 plus an $83,760 additional allowance is not subject to any taxes. See Christine Lagarde, Scourge of Tax Evaders, Pays No Tax. No taxes is the norm for most United Nations employees …” Economist and writer John Perkins was deeply involved in Washington's economic schemes to create a global empire. Now he tells the world what's come out of it - and who really controls the world's biggest economy.

IMF and World Bank policies are opening national markets to US-dominated "multinational corporations" effectively destroying the homegrown economy of poor countries all over the world from Latin America to Africa to Asia. The program was essentially about enriching a few ruling families by kickbacks and bribes accompanying loans that opened the borrowing countries to American companies. Since the borrowing countries could never pay the loans back, the economic hitmen returned asking for cheap oil and minerals, favorable business deal, etc.

THE GIRL WITH THE APPLES!

Folks, after I read this i looked up the gentleman's name and he is a real person living in Miami, Florida, and even got his telephone number and address.  I think I am going to write to him.   This is a MOST INTERESTING STORY.

THE GIRL WITH THE APPLES!

Please read this interesting story that is about to be into a movie. The girl with the apples.  A true story of survival from the Holocaust and the mysterious ways of God that drew people together here in America after their lives had touched in the dark days of Hitler.

August 1942.   Piotrkow, Poland

The sky was gloomy that morning as we waited anxiously.
All the men, women and children of Piotrkow's Jewish ghetto had been herded into a square.

Word had gotten around that we were being moved.  My father had only recently died from typhus, which had run rampant through the crowded ghetto.  My greatest fear was that our family would be separated.

'Whatever you do,' Isidore, my eldest brother, whispered to me, 'don't tell them your age.  Say you're sixteen.

'I was tall for a boy of 11, so I could pull it off.  That way I might be deemed valuable as a worker.

An SS man approached me, boots clicking against the cobblestones.  He looked me up and down, and then asked my age.

'Sixteen,' I said.  He directed me to the left, where my three brothers and other healthy young men already stood.

My mother was motioned to the right with the other women, children, sick and elderly people.

I whispered to Isidore, 'Why?'
He didn't answer.
I ran to Mama's side and said I wanted to stay with her.
'No, 'she said sternly.
'Get away.  Don't be a nuisance.  Go with your brothers.'

She had never spoken so harshly before.  But I understood:  She was protecting me.  She loved me so much that, just this once, she pretended not to.  It was the last I ever saw of her.

My brothers and I were transported in a cattle car to Germany.

We arrived at the Buchenwald concentration camp one night later and were led into a crowded barrack.  The next day, we were issued uniforms and identification numbers.

'Don't call me Herman anymore.'  I said to my brothers.  'Call me 94983.'

I was put to work in the camp's crematorium, loading the dead into a hand-cranked elevator.aomi

I, too, felt dead.  Hardened, I had become a number.

Soon, my brothers and I were sent to Schlieben, one of Buchenwald 's sub-camps near Berlin.

One morning I thought I heard my mother's voice.

'Son,' she said softly but clearly, I am going to send you an angel.'

Then I woke up.  Just a dream.  A beautiful dream.

But in this place there could be no angels.  There was only work. And hunger.  And fear.

A couple of days later, I was walking around the camp, around the barracks, near the barbed wire fence where the guards could not easily see. I was alone.

On the other side of the fence, I spotted someone: a little girl with light, almost luminous curls.  She was half-hidden behind a birch tree.

I glanced around to make sure no one saw me.  I called to her softly in German.  'Do you have something to eat?'

She didn't understand.

I inched closer to the fence and repeated the question in Polish.  She stepped forward. I was thin and gaunt, with rags wrapped around my feet, but the girl looked unafraid.  In her eyes, I saw life.

She pulled an apple from her woolen jacket and threw it over the fence.

I grabbed the fruit and, as I started to run away, I heard her say faintly, 'I'll see you tomorrow.'

I returned to the same spot by the fence at the same time every day. She was always there with something for me to eat - a hunk of bread or, better yet, an apple.

We didn't dare speak or linger.  To be caught would mean death for us both.

I didn't know anything about her, just a kind farm girl, except that she understood Polish.  What was her name?  Why was she risking her life for me?

Hope was in such short supply, and this girl on the other side of the fence gave me some, as nourishing in its way as the bread and apples.

Nearly seven months later, my brothers and I were crammed into a coal car and shipped to Theresienstadt camp in Czechoslovakia .

'Don't return,' I told the girl that day.  'We're leaving.'

I turned toward the barracks and didn't look back, didn't even say good-bye to the little girl whose name I'd never learned, the girl with the apples.

We were in Theresienstadt for three months.  The war was winding down and Allied forces were closing in, yet my fate seemed sealed.

On May 10, 1945, I was scheduled to die in the gas chamber at 10:00 AM.

In the quiet of dawn, I tried to prepare myself.  So many times death seemed ready to claim me, but somehow I'd survived.  Now, it was over.

I thought of my parents.  At least, I thought, we will be reunited.

But at 8 a.m. there was a commotion.  I heard shouts, and saw people running every which way through camp.  I caught up with my brothers.

Russian troops had liberated the camp!  The gates swung open. Everyone was running, so I did too.  Amazingly, all of my brothers had survived;

I'm not sure how.  But I knew that the girl with the apples had been the key to my survival.

In a place where evil seemed triumphant, one person's goodness had saved my life, had given me hope in a place where there was none.

My mother had promised to send me an angel, and the angel had come.

Eventually I made my way to England where I was sponsored by a Jewish charity, put up in a hostel with other boys who had survived the Holocaust and trained in electronics.  Then I came to America, where my brother Sam had already moved.  I served in the U. S. Army during the Korean War, and returned to New York City after two years.

By August 1957 I'd opened my own electronics repair shop.  I was starting to settle in.

One day, my friend Sid who I knew from England called me.
'I've got a date.  She's got a Polish friend.  Let's double date.'
A blind date?  Nah, that wasn't for me.  But Sid kept pestering me, and a few days later we headed up to the Bronx to pick up his date and her friend Roma.

I had to admit, for a blind date this wasn't so bad.  Roma was a nurse at a Bronx hospital.  She was kind and smart.  Beautiful, too, with swirling brown curls and green, almond-shaped eyes that sparkled with life.

The four of us drove out to Coney Island.  Roma was easy to talk to, easy to be with.  Turned out she was wary of blind dates too!

We were both just doing our friends a favor.  We took a stroll on the boardwalk, enjoying the salty Atlantic breeze, and then had dinner by the shore.  I couldn't remember having a better time.

We piled back into Sid's car, Roma and I sharing the backseat.

As European Jews who had survived the war, we were aware that much had been left unsaid between us.  She broached the subject, 'Where were you,' she asked softly, 'during the war?'

'The camps,' I said.  The terrible memories still vivid, the irreparable loss.  I had tried to forget.  But you can never forget.

She nodded.  'My family was hiding on a farm in Germany, not far from Berlin,' she told me.  'My father knew a priest, and he got us Aryan papers.'

I imagined how she must have suffered too, fear, a constant companion.  And yet here we were both survivors, in a new world.

'There was a camp next to the farm.'  Roma continued.  'I saw a boy there and I would throw him apples every day.'

What an amazing coincidence that she had helped some other boy. 'What did he look like?  I asked.

'He was tall, skinny, and hungry.  I must have seen him every day for six months.'

My heart was racing.  I couldn't believe it.  This couldn't be.
'Did he tell you one day not to come back because he was leaving Schlieben?'

Roma looked at me in amazement.  'Yes!'

'That was me!'

I was ready to burst with joy and awe, flooded with emotions.  I couldn't believe it!  My angel.

'I'm not letting you go.'  I said to Roma.  And in the back of the car on that blind date, I proposed to her.  I didn't want to wait.

'You're crazy!' she said.  But she invited me to meet her parents for Shabbat dinner the following week.

There was so much I looked forward to learning about Roma, but the most important things I always knew: her steadfastness, her goodness.  For many months, in the worst of circumstances, she had come to the fence and given me hope.  Now that I'd found her again, I could never let her go.

That day, she said yes.  And I kept my word.  After nearly 50 years of marriage, two children and three grandchildren, I have never let her go.

Herman Rosenblat of Miami Beach , Florida

This story is being made into a movie called The Fence.
This e-mail is intended to reach 40 million people world-wide.
Join us and be a link in the memorial chain and help us distribute it around the world.

Please send this e-mail to 10 people you know and ask them to continue the memorial chain.

Please don't just delete it.
It will only take you a minute to pass this along. Thanks!