Tag Archives: Default

07/18/15

James O’Keefe Goes Undercover in Greece During Financial Crisis

Project Veritas

As you can see in today’s news, the Greek parliament just effectively disenfranchised the voters who recently enacted opposing austerity reforms in their country. Last night, the Greek politicians voted to accept bailout terms from their European creditors while protestors and police lobbed Molotov cocktails and tear gas at each other in the streets.

In our latest undercover video, we predicted this outcome.

“It looks like a deal will be made,” said James O’Keefe in the video narration which was produced before the parliamentary vote was cast. “Greece will get a bailout. It will be business as usual… until the next time Greece can’t pay its bills. Not everyone is happy. And many feel betrayed by their Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras.”

With banks closed and riots in the street, what’s truly scary is what’s happening in Greece could happen anywhere — even here in the United States. For example, the U.S. territory Puerto Rico just defaulted on a major debt payment.

“We are the first… you are the next,” said a Greek nationalist protestor. “You should think about that.”‘

So while you are thinking about what it will be like in the United States when we are finally forced to pay the bills we are racking up with one unbalanced budget after another, consider what the mainstream media refuses to show you, presumably for fear for their lives.

As we show in the video, the Greek communists, anarchists and even the far right wing neo Nazi party are all opposed to the referendum and many of their demonstrations get out of hand. One journalist explained to us on film that when the anarchists come, they put their cameras down so they don’t get beaten up.

“Whenever they come, don’t shoot ,” said one of the journalists. “And you never get close to them.”

“One day we burn, not only parliament, parliament, police stations,” said one of the anarchists we caught on hidden camera. “We attack the police stations, we burn them, so the building… maybe one day also the parliament will be all black.”

While it’s a bleak vision of America’s possible future, it’s important that people watch our video to see what could happen here when we become unable to pay our nation’s bills.

Also, we promised we’d show you what happened when James O’Keefe tried to vote in the Greek elections. As you’ll recall, James would have been allowed to vote in 19 out of 20 attempts in last year’s North Carolina election, we showed that dead people could vote in New Hampshire — and one of our reporters could have gotten away with voting in the name of former US Attorney General Eric Holder. If you’re even remotely curious about how tough or easy it is to cast a fraudulent vote in Greece, check out our latest video here.

05/12/15

This one policy has correlated with higher unemployment, more bankruptcies and greater inequality. Can you guess what it is?

By: Benjamin Weingarten
TheBlaze

In a new book titled “The Floating Kilogram,” former long-time Wall Street Journal editor and founder of the New York Sun Seth Lipsky makes an impassioned, reasoned, common sense case for returning America to sound money in the form of the gold standard.

Much like Steve Forbes and Jim Grant with whom we have touched on this issue before, as Seth and I discussed during an in-depth interview, Lipsky believes there is significant economic and moral merit to backing currency with a tangible asset, with benefits for all Americans.

One of his more interesting and overlooked arguments concerns some of the devastating consequences for the country since we officially severed the link between the dollar and gold under President Nixon in 1971. Lipsky explains:

From 1947 when [the] Bretton Woods System really got operating to 1971, when the dollar was convertible into gold at a 35th of an ounce, unemployment in America averaged 4.7 percent. And then we got rid of the Bretton Woods system — we defaulted on it — we went to fiat money, and in the years from 1971 to today, unemployment has averaged significantly above 6 percent. Low unemployment: gold standard. High unemployment: fiat money.

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But it’s not just unemployment. The bankruptcy rate which Elizabeth Warren likes to focus on was one point something per thousand for years, and suddenly it shot up. When did it do that? The mid-1970s when we went off the gold standard and moved to the age of fiat money.

And you’ve no doubt read about this economic Thomas Piketty who likes to warn about the inequality rate. It was trending gently downward for years and suddenly it began to shoot up. That was the mid-1970s when we abandoned the gold standard and went to a system of fiat money.

So there are a lot of reasons to start looking at this and to see whether the absence of a sound dollar is the root cause of our system of growing inequality and high unemployment and lack of jobs and high bankruptcy rate, and to see whether something can be reformed so as to bring us back to a system of sound money. [Links ours]

The title for Lipsky’s book, “The Floating Kilogram,” reflects an editorial published in 2011 in his New York Sun, in which Lipsky asked the question, “Why don’t we let the kilogram float?” The implication is that if weights and measures are no longer defined, why shouldn’t the kilogram — a man-made measure which the New York Times noted may have been losing mass — fluctuate just as a dollar fluctuates in value. Lipsky wrote:

[H]ere in the modern age, the members of the Federal Reserve Board don’t worry about how many grains of silver or gold are behind the dollar. They couldn’t care less. And when the value of a dollar plunges at a dizzying rate, the chairman of Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, goes up to Capitol Hill and, in testimony before the House, declares merely that he is “puzzled.” No “new urgency” to redefine the dollar for him. The fact is that we’ve long since ceased to define the dollar, and it can float not only against other currencies but against the 371 ¼ grains of pure silver.

So why not the kilogram? After all, when you go into the grocery to buy a pound of hamburger, why should you worry about how much hamburger you get — so long as it’s a pound’s worth. A pound is supposed to be .45359237 of a kilogram, of course. But if the Congress can permit Mr. Bernanke to use his judgment in deciding what a dollar is worth, why shouldn’t he — or some other PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology — be able to decide from day to day what a kilogram is worth?

During our interview which you can listen to in full below, we discuss the fundamental flaws in and immorality of floating fiat money and several other topics including:

Note: The link to the book in this post will give you an option to elect to donate a percentage of the proceeds from the sale to a charity of your choice. Mercury One, the charity founded by TheBlaze’s Glenn Beck, is one of the options. Donations to Mercury One go towards efforts such as disaster relief, support for education, support for Israel and support for veterans and our military. You can read more about Amazon Smile and Mercury One here.