Here is an interesting interview with him:

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See yourself:

Update: There is a second interview with Mr. Tice the day after:

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You can take the 33-question quiz here.

I couriously tried the test and scored a 60.61% as a non-US citizen. Doesn’t this qualify me for US congress?

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»Zeitgeist: Addendum« is a sequel to the documentary »Zeitgeist« from 2007:

Zeitgeist: Addendum, attempts to locate the root causes of this pervasive social corruption, while offering a solution. This solution is not based on politics, morality, laws, or any other “establishment” notions of human affairs, but rather on a modern, non-superstitious based understanding of what we are and how we align with nature, to which we are a part

The movie portraits the Venus Project – a life long futuristic vision of Jaques Fresco of a sustainable society. Unfortunatly the site looks like a study site for futuristic industrial design and technology and thus fails to generate interest for the socio-political subtext of Frescos work.

Unfortunatly, while the movie does extensively talk about a global vision, it remains a US centric view as the critisism is focusing on the US agenda. And thus it falls short in the ideas of how to initiate change in the system.

But much of the movie very well explains the problem of the current monetary system and how it came into being.

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And even now — as the information is presented to legislators – it seems that politicians come to very different conclusions about wether or not there should be a bailout of the failing banks. And the matter is so complex, that obviously only few people understand the issues and the pro’s and con’s of all options.

There have been other desasters where information has been presented in a fashion that allowed it to be ignored or misinterpreted too easily. I assume that the pretext of the current financial crisis is full of examples of such kind.

People seemed to be surprised by the financial crisis. But market experts have been ringing bells for quite some time.

For instance Thorsten Polleit from the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management. In an article about the increasing “credit crisis” he wrote in early Februrary 2008 for the Ludwig von Mises Institute:

A crisis must be feared, however, if it has been caused by government action, and if the obvious signs of the crisis provoke ever greater doses of government intervention. In this case, the market would be prevented from doing its job properly. Bad decisions would be perpetuated, and the ultimate crisis may become nasty.

Polleit has written many other very interesting articles for the Mises Institute. Many reflect on the theories of Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises. For instance an article from early August 2008 about the problems of a government money-supply monopoly:

There is no escape from the costs of correcting the damage inflicted by government paper-money standards. However, when looking for monetary-reform proposals, Mises’s work must be given highest public attention: he proposed ending the government money-supply monopoly — which he identified as the root of the problem — and returning money to the free market. Only in this way can the costs of the final monetary and economic collapse be prevented from becoming disastrously high. Mises wrote, “The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.

I found this site through a clip from a Duck Tales episode on YouTube that may be understandable for kids as well:

Why is the Duck Tale episode so relevant?

There have been apologets of free market and sound money whose theories seem to be neglected by the Bailout Bill suggested by the US administration. Here is a 42 minute documentary about the US monetary system and the Federal Reserve:

You want more?

The Ludwig von Mises Institute has compiled a good Bailout Reader with articles related to the financial crisis.

If you really want to be up to date what happens in the US the site cpsanjunkie.org collects the most important video clips.

Private control over the monetary system?

If you are leaning towards conspiracy theories — you may think how private control about the money system came into being:

Corrupt Federal Reserve:
Part 1: Robbing Americans since 1913
Part 2: The Secret Government
Part 3: The Media’s Main Stranglehold

Ron Paul has recently interacted with Bernard Bernake, the chairman of the Federal Reserve during a hearing before the House Financial Services Committee. When questioned about the powers of the Fed to create money Bernake only responds with the 1913 Federal Reserve Act:

But as you can see in this video here, Ron Paul thinks that this Act is against the US consitution:

My current question here now is: Would better design of the information needed in the context help to make better decisions in the future?

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Look at this clip here for instance, where Barack Obama confronts John McCain with the fact, that his assumptions ahead of the Iraq war were dead wrong:

Here is another one showing a blunt lie from John McCain about wether or not her saw the financial crisis coming:

The problem with these clips is that — while fundamentally characterizing the deceptive nature of a candidate — they get lost in the stream of other news that are much less critical. And critical clips in itself immediatly attract criticism of being “biased” and “partisan”.

The first clip has only 6,301 views last day – the second only 11,628. Compared to other “hot clips” these are fairly low numbers on YouTube. It is fair to say that the impact of such clips is low unless they are made public by national broadcasters.

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Look at this piece here:

»Privatize gains to a few and socialize the losses to the many.«

Congress member Marcy Kaptur seems to get it right. The whole event, way it came into being, the time, the way it is handled… everything is more than obscure.

Jason Linkins from Huffington Post points a finger on a very odd sentence in the proposal of the White House regarding the $700 trillion Dollar bailout plan:

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency. (in Section 8; see full text of proposal)

This is really strange. $700 trillion Dollars “donated” to an institution that will take “non-reviewable” actions? It could finance anything – even a private army – without public intervention?

I mean… wait a minute… Decisions … may not be reviewed by any court or administrative agency?

Jason continues:

In short, the so-called “mother of all bailouts,” which will transfer $700 billion taxpayer dollars to purchase the distressed assets of several failed financial institutions, will be conducted in a manner unchallengeable by courts and ungovernable by the People’s duly sworn representatives. All decision-making power will be consolidated into the Executive Branch – who, we remind you, will have the incentive to act upon this privilege as quickly as possible, before they leave office. The measure will run up the budget deficit by a significant amount, with no guarantee of recouping the outlay, and no fundamental means of holding those who fail to do so accountable.

And if that is not enough… George W. Bush does not seem to be willing to explain details of this proposal or take any questions about it. Instead the White House is putting extraordinary pressure on Congress to pass this economic bill within days, while — attention! — White House Deputy Press Secretary Tony Fratto claims that this bill has been put together »had been drawn up as a contingency over previous months and weeks by administration officials«. (Keith Koffler from Roll Call reports)

Ron Paul comments on CNNpolitics.com and sees prior actions of the government is repsonsible for the distortions of the market that caused the crash — and obviously the current government does not seem to learn from its own failure:

Using trillions of dollars of taxpayer money to purchase illusory short-term security, the government is actually ensuring even greater instability in the financial system in the long term.
The solution to the problem is to end government meddling in the market. Government intervention leads to distortions in the market, and government reacts to each distortion by enacting new laws and regulations, which create their own distortions, and so on ad infinitum.

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Interestingly there are many experts that tell their own story about what this all means on the long run.

Someone may wonder where this money is coming from. And very simply said there are two sources:

a) Nothing… Thin air!

This could be done by simply done by “claiming” that there’s $700.000.000.000 dollars more in the world. This is suggesting that this money is covered by something else and it also allows the value of the dollar to degrade for anybody (but there are other reasons as well). In 2008, for example, it took $21.57 to buy what $1 bought in 1913 (Source)

Experts like Peter Schiff are punding the topic of the collapse of the dollar since years – and other experts try to cover it up. Just watch this piece:

Peter Schiff is also favouring the gold standard:

b) The future

The “future” is… the future taxes, prices and hard work. The “average Joe” is paying it with less social security, less pansion, less money in the pocket for more and longer work.

The only politician in the US that obviously does not try to cover it up seems to be – who else – Ron Paul. Watch his comment here:

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MSNBC has a poll online that asks if people would impeach George W. Bush. Out of 678898 people that participated in that poll 89% think he should be.

Just yesterday Dennis Kucinich presented a very long lists of articles to Congress. Here is a PDF with the transcript of his presentation.

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The reports show that the Bush administration actively ignored available intelligence to press ahead with an agenda that will ultimately lead to the installment of permanent U.S. military bases in the Middle East.

The reports give examples that there was no intelligence that supported

• statements and implications by the President and Secretary of State suggesting that Iraq and al-Qa’ida had a partnership, or that Iraq had provided al-Qa’ida with weapons training, were not substantiated by the intelligence.
• statements by the President and the Vice President indicating that Saddam Hussein was prepared to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups for attacks against the United States were contradicted by available intelligence information.
• statements by President Bush and Vice President Cheney regarding the postwar situation in Iraq, in terms of the political, security, and economic, did not reflect the concerns and uncertainties expressed in the intelligence products.
• statements by the President and Vice President prior to the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iraq’s chemical weapons production capability and activities did not reflect the intelligence community’s uncertainties as to whether such production was ongoing.
• the statement of the Secretary of Defense that the Iraqi government operated underground WMD facilities that were not vulnerable to conventional airstrikes because they were underground and deeply buried was not substantiated by available intelligence information.
• repeated statements of the Vice President that the Intelligence Community did confirm that Muhammad Atta met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in 2001.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein concludes:

»Even though the intelligence before the war supported inaccurate statements, the Bush administration distorted the intelligence in order to build its case to go to war. The executive branch released only those findings that supported the argument, did not relay uncertainties, and at times made statements beyond what the intelligence supported.«

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It is the first time I feel there is a presidential candidate does not need a spin doctor to tell him what to say on TV screen. He is not scared of public statements that people may not like to hear – and at the same time looking to solve issues by looking at the monetary issue.

Two selections from a public debate on ABC television early January 2008:

Interview at Google in July 2007:

Here is speech almost 25 years ago where Ron Paul about the dilemma with paper money vs. gold… and the habit of creating purchasing power out of thin air:

This ultimately leads to his critizism of the Federal Reserve system:

Here is a interview with Ron Paul in Aaron Russo’s documentary “From freedom to facism” that addresses this topic:

Update:

I found this interesting clip of a US soldier on YouTube on a skirmish between Huckabee and Paul about Iraq:

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See Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5.

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This is a “flaw by design” which ultimately turns private banks onto a track to a “one world government” by implementing tools for control, that mimic those of facist and communist states. Russo does start the story by reporting that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is threatening people that deny to pay income tax even though there is no constitutional law that protects this. To me as a foreigner is not so easy to get this, because I pay income tax. The story here is that the goverment tolerates violation of consitutional rights. And I suppose it is a good way to play the card.

There are a number of people interviewed and cited and I think many people would recognize these as authorities on the subject: Congressman Ron Paul, Mike Ruppert, Edward Griffin… just to name some. There are also important quotes by Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson about the fact that money should be controlled by the government.

Here is also an interview with Mr. Russo on his movie, where he critizises Michael Moore that his award-winning Farenheit 9/11 documentary (official site) is playing into the system by just polarizing Republicans versus the Democrats. Russo’s film does target beyond that political game and questions the system on a more fundamental level.

There is also an interview with Mr. Russo, where he claims Nick Rockefeller told him eleven month ahead of 9/11 that there is “going to be an event after which US will invade Afghanistan and Iraq”. Mr. Russo leaves no doubt actually, that Mr. Rockefeller knew at least a year ahead of the “war on terror” what is going to happen:

And if you have any doubt if it is possible to fool “average American” by media spin about this subjects look at this clip oth this clip here and ask yourself how these people came about to know (or not know) what they think they know (or don’t know).

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Kenneth Adelman, another Reagan era hawk who sat on the Defence Policy Board until last year, drew attention with a 2002 commentary in the Washington Post predicting that liberating Iraq would be a “cakewalk”. He now says he hugely overestimated the abilities of the Bush team. “I just presumed that what I considered to be the most competent national security team since Truman was indeed going to be competent,” Mr Adelman said. (Source here).

Well….

I remember very clearly Perles position before war. I glad to be able to quote it from that old article (because I blogged it back then):

Having spent decades in and out of office, feeding journalists and seeing his “genius” promoted in return, Perle has employed his semi-oracular status to promote war with Iraq while consistently underestimating its likely costs. As Perle told US News & World Report: “The Iraqi opposition is kind of like an MRE [meals ready to eat, a freeze-dried Army field ration]. The ingredients are there and you just have to add water, in this case U.S. support.” Testifying before Congress in 2000, Perle insisted, “We need not send substantial ground forces into Iraq when patriotic Iraqis are willing to fight to liberate their country.” Last year, he conceded that the US troop requirement might go as high as 40,000. (Source here)

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Just some examples:

• Commentary: Olbermann on the Murder of Habeus Corpus
• Report: Clinton interviewed by FoxNews
• Keith Olberman comments on the Clinton interview
• Satire: Stephen Colbert at the White House correspondents dinner
• Satire: Keith Olbermann interviewed by Stephen Colbert
• Documentary: Trues and Lies of 9-11 (Lecture from Nov’01)
• Documentary: From Freedom to Fascism
• Documentary: The Oil Factor: Behind the war on terror
• Documentary Peak Oil: A summary

And there is a lot of similar examples of material available.

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[via Tim Bruysten]

There is also a video of the presentation. I especially found interesting what the presenter was saying about designers. He was showing this slides like this one:

And then he said things like this

• »There are people that know how to deal with these tools. It’s just that those guys and girls didn’t go to a statistics course, so they don’t know about data. So they don’t manage to get that data in their design tools….«
• »These things are dificult for designers to make look nice, because it’s so much data….«
• »The weather forecast every day …. nice graphics, they have data…. humidity, wind …. they don’t show these numbers… they get a lot of publicitiy with their weather forecast just by drawing nice suns, beautiful colors… so these are the guys to copy in social science!«

I wouldn’t say that drawing »nice suns« is what is the secret to good weather forecasts, but the statement reminded me of the fact that few years ago I planned to offer a seminar called »Forecast« and it was supposed to examine this topic with this intention: to learn how to deal visually with huge data sets. Unfortunatly most of the students thought it is a boring idea to design weather forecasts and so they didn’t share my excitement. So the course never came into being. Not yet.

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The President rushed out this morning in the wake of this front page story in USA Today and declared the government is doing nothing wrong, and all this is just fine. Is it? Is it legal? Then why did the Justice Department suddenly drop its investigation of the warrantless spying on citizens because the NSA said Justice Department lawyers didn’t have the necessary security clearance to do the investigation. Read that sentence again. A secret government agency has told our Justice Department that it’s not allowed to investigate it. And the Justice Department just says ok and drops the whole thing. We’re in some serious trouble, boys and girls”

There are som many people in the US that probably just don’t care. I don’t know. All I know is if one single institution in the government starts to circumvent any elected representatives then you can’t tell if you still have a democracy or not. It is a serious issue. Saddam Hussein would have loved this: a political system that only appears to be a democracy.

Here are some comments by House members.

Update 6/26/2006: Why NSA spying puts the U.S. in danger

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It’s a little bit hard to see in the video: These people don’t recognize the displaced country names on the map. Maybe half of the US public thinks Syriana is the name of a country?

Update on 05/16/06: After more than three years of combat and nearly 2,400 U.S. military deaths in Iraq, nearly two-thirds of Americans aged 18 to 24 still cannot find Iraq on a map, a study showed. [Source]

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