Bank Run Fears: Customers Being Forced to Provide Evidence For Why They Need Cash
by Mac Slavo
Activist Post
Jan 26, 2014
In early 2013 the country of Cyprus locked down private banking accounts and restricted access to depositor funds. It was the first widely documented instance of a “bail-in,” as bank officials and European regulators determined that bad loans taken on by the banks were now the responsibility of the banks’ customers. This led to a country-wide confiscation of 10% or more of all customer funds. In the heat of the Cyprian financial panic banks limited cash withdrawals to around $300 and ramped up security to prevent angry Cypriots from breaking down the doors.
What happened in Cyprus was big news all over the world, but within a few news cycles, once European and American officials assured the people it was a limited-scope event, the general population swept potential fears under the rug.
No one really reported on the fact that the European Union quickly instituted new regulatory policies that would force bail-ins across the entire continent should such a crisis take hold again. Likewise, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke assured Americans that the crisis in Cyprus and Europe posed no risk to the US financial system, citing FDIC insurance for U.S. bank depositors as the safety net that would prevent a similar situation in the United States.
The United States, Europe, China and all of the world’s developed economies are, if officials are to be believed, completely immune to what happened in Cyprus. The current belief by the best and brightest is that these countries are simply too big to ever be faced with a total collapse of their banking systems.
But what if they were wrong? What if private debt reached such obscene levels that the loans taken on by lenders could never be repaid? What if a country like China, which holds trillions of dollars in cash reserves and has modern central banking regulations, did face such a problem?
The New Great Game Round-Up: January 26, 2014
by Christoph Germann
Boiling Frogs Post
January 26, 2014
Western mainstream media reporting about China’s fight against the “liberation of East Turkestan” follows some basic rules, one of which is to highlight the oppression of the Uyghur population at any given opportunity. So Western media outlets widely covered the arrest of Uyghur economics professor Ilham Tohti. European and American officials, led by U.S. State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki, voiced their concern and demanded an explanation. The Chinese government, not amused by all this hype, decided to set the record straight and explained why the West’s new darling had been detained [emphasis mine]:
Leave no chance for malicious preaching
The nearly live coverage shows a particularly close link between Tohti and the West.
Indeed, Tohti is no ordinary Joe. Closely watched by the World Uyghur Congress, he is known to have often given aggressive lectures in class. He founded the Uighur Online website in 2006, which was very active around the riots in Urumqi, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in 2009, which left nearly 200 people dead.
The authorities must resolutely crack down on the terrorists, as well as the “brains” behind them. Without the brains, the terrorists will be like a clueless mob.
…
Xinjiang’s Never-Ending Struggle
Beijing knows of course that the real “brains” behind the terrorists are to be found in Washington but it is arguably more difficult to put them behind bars. According to Xinjiang’s police, Tohti engaged in separatist activities and “colluded with overseas East Turkistan separatist forces”, which include among others the NED-funded World Uyghur Congress. While Western media reported extensively about the arrest of the Uyghur economics professor, another incident involving the Turkic ethnic group received considerably less coverage, although the information came from the West’s preferred source, CIA propaganda project Radio Free Asia (RFA):
Uyghur Attack on Police Station Leaves Three Dead, Two Injured
Chinese authorities have shot dead three Uyghurs who attacked a police station in northwestern China’s restive Xinjiang region, officials said Wednesday, calling the attack an act of “separatism.”
The assault on the Yengieriq town police station in Aksu prefecture’s Awat county is the latest in a string of raids by Uyghurs who exile rights groups say could be retaliating for discrimination by Chinese authorities against the ethnic minority group.
…
As usual, Radio Free Asia portrays the attack as inevitable consequence of government discrimination against the Uyghur population.
Designer babies: Chinese company working on technology to allow parents to pick ‘smartest’ embryos
by Jonathan Benson, staff writer
Natural News
Jan 25, 2014
(NaturalNews) Eugenics is quickly becoming big business in China, where at least one genomics company is attempting to pave the way for parents to literally pick and choose the “best” embryos to obtain the smartest possible children. Quartz reports that the cognitive genomics (CG) division at the Shenzhen-based genomics company BGI is currently working on the controversial project, which could one day allow for pregnancies with “designer” babies.
Like the plot of a bizarre sci-fi flick, the goal is to create detailed maps of the genes of smart individuals (e.g., math geniuses, thinkers and the like) for the purpose of identifying and selecting those genes in the embryos used for in vitro fertilization. Since as much as 80 percent of what determines IQ level is believed to be inherited, researchers believe that it may be possible to identify certain “smart” genes in human embryos that could be used to predict intelligence later in life.
In this case, the BGI team is looking for genes directly associated with intelligence. Once identified, these genes could potentially be used as markers for choosing only those embryos that possess them in the proper sequence. Embryos that do not meet the intelligence threshold, on the other hand, could simply be discarded as “defective,” a controversial proposition that stands to open up a Pandora’s box of both ethical and moral dilemmas.
“Imagine what a couple might pay to ensure that they get the best out of 10 or 50 possible offspring, optimizing over their choice of heritable attributes,” writes Stephen Hsu, a CG lab member currently working on the project, on his blog.
VIDEO — Fashion Fakes: Cheap Chinese clothes force Italian brands out
RT
Jan 12, 2014
In the midst of a financial storm, Italians are turning their backs on the designer brands that have made their country world-famous. And they are increasingly turning to Chinese producers for cheap goods, sometimes even labeled ‘Made in Italy’.
RT LIVE http://rt.com/on-air
Subscribe to RT! http://www.youtube.com/subscription_c…
Like us on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/RTnews
Follow us on Twitter http://twitter.com/RT_com
Follow us on Instagram http://instagram.com/rt
Follow us on Google+ http://plus.google.com/+RT
RT (Russia Today) is a global news network broadcasting from Moscow and Washington studios. RT is the first news channel to break the 1 billion YouTube views benchmark.
Wal-Mart recalls donkey meat tainted with fox meat from stores in China
by Rebecca Winters
Natural News
Jan 10, 2014
(NaturalNews) As if anyone even needs yet another reason to be wary of the food coming out of China, Reuters is reporting that Wal-Mart customers there are outraged to learn that their donkey meat was recently found to contain “the DNA of other animals,” including fox.
Wal-Mart issued an apology and has announced that customers who purchased “Five Spice” donkey meat will be reimbursed. Confoundedly, Reuters went on to note, “The scandal could dent Wal-Mart’s reputation for quality in China’s $1 trillion food and grocery market….” Really?
China and Wal-Mart: an inimitable combination to say the least
Wal-Mart has been involved in everything from child labor scandals and mislabeling organic products to being fined over $80 million earlier this year for violating EPA regulations on improperly disposing hazardous waste. Currently, the company is under a Department of Justice investigation over possible Foreign Corrupt Policies Act violations regarding some $24 million in bribes to build 19 stores in Mexico and other alleged misconduct in Brazil, India and, again, China. Closer to home, the media was splashed around the holidays by reports that Wal-Mart stores across the U.S. were setting up donation boxes for employees to give Thanksgiving food… to other Wal-Mart employees who couldn’t afford a decent Thanksgiving dinner, because apparently they don’t earn enough.
China’s food and drug scandals read like a House of Horrors checklist. Babies dying from industrial chemical-tainted infant formula? Check. Rat meat sold as lamb meat? Check. Some 600 dogs dropping dead after eating pet jerky treats made in China? Check. Glow-in-the-dark blue “Avatar” pork? Check. “Gutter oil” scavenged from drains beneath Chinese restaurants being using to cook one of every ten meals in Chinese restaurants? Check. Farmed, powdered cockroaches being sold to pharmaceutical companies as medicine? Check. The list goes on and on.
But China has perhaps become most well-known lately for its vast amounts of air, soil and water pollution. Shanghai recently suffered what the media dubbed an “airpocalypse” – choking, toxic smog so heavy and thick that it closed down major airports, roadways and public schools for over a week. A deputy minister of China’s Ministry of Land and Resources has also just announced that 3.3 million hectares of Chinese farmland is so polluted, it is literally unsafe to grow crops on it. Estimates are that a whopping 90 percent of groundwater supplying China’s cities is severely contaminated, to the point that Chinese people reportedly do not even trust the bottled water sold there. NGOs, Chinese media and academics have estimated that China is home to over 450 “cancer villages” – residential areas built up around power, chemical or pharmaceutical plants where people are riddled with above-average levels of illness and disease. The Chinese Ministry of Environmental Protection even mentioned these villages in one of its latest reports.
There are no limits on how close crops can be grown to chemical plants or how much pollution the water spayed on crops can contain in China. All of that toxic runoff and pollution finds its way into rivers and soil used to grow Chinese crops and feed livestock. The food and water is ingested by the Chinese people, and that food is exported to the rest of the world as well.
Chinese food failures coming to a grocery store near you?
As Natural News has reported before, you may be eating more food imported from China than you think. Back in 2007, CNN declared that avoiding Chinese food ingredients is nearly impossible. The U.S. imports billions in food from China every year.
Just a few months ago, the USDA announced its intention to allow processed, cooked chicken from China to be exported to the U.S., as the agency determined that China’s poultry inspection process is “equivalent to that of the United States”.
The “certified organic” label has also come under scrutiny (and rightfully so) after it was revealed that the USDA was licensing organic certifiers to operate in China as well. These certifiers may have rules about whether or not added petroleum-based fertilizers, pesticides or synthetic hormones in the case of animal feed are allowed; they are not required to test for limits on toxic heavy metals like arsenic, mercury, lead or cadmium – heavy metals found contaminating the food grown in China all the time. The FDA wouldn’t know anyway, considering that the agency inspects less than 2 percent of the food imported from China.
Stories like fox-tainted donkey meat just continue to highlight the fact that, if its marked “Made in China,” it’s a safe bet you don’t know what’s in it.
Sources for this article include:
http://science.naturalnews.com
[h/t: DavidIcke]
Thailand: Uprooting Wall Street’s Proxy Regime
November 26, 2013 (Tony Cartalucci) – Unprecedented protests have taken to the streets in Bangkok, now for weeks, where at times, hundreds of thousands of protesters have appeared. Estimates range from 100-400 thousand people at peak points, making them the largest protests in recent Thai history.
Images: Scenes taken from across Bangkok showing masses of people protesting the current government in Thailand. Unlike the government’s mobs of “red shirts” centrally directed by Thaksin Shinawatra himself, these rallies are led by a myriad of leaders and interest groups, from unions to political parties and media personalities. The numbers now present dwarf any effort by Thaksin and his political machine to fill the streets with supporters. Currently, the “red shirts” have failed to fill even a quarter of a nearby stadium, after two earlier abortive attempts to raise a counter-rally.
The protests aim at ousting the current government after it ignored a recent court ruling finding their attempts to rewrite the constitution illegal.
The current government of Thailand is being openly run by a convicted criminal, Thaksin Shinawatra, who is hiding abroad and running the country through his own sister, Yingluck Shinawatra and his vast political machine, the “Peua Thai Party” (PTP). PTP is augmented by street mobs donning bright red shirts, earning them the title, the “red shirts,” as well as a myriad of foreign-funded NGOs and propaganda fronts.
While it would seem like an open and shut case, regarding the illegitimacy of the current government, Western nations have urged protesters to observe the “rule of law” and have condemned protesters taking over government ministry buildings. Why is the West now seemingly defending the current Thai government, after nearly 3 years of backing protests around the world against other governments it claimed were overtly corrupt and despotic?
PN 