The Examiner Sheds Light On PANDA
P.A.N.D.A. People Against The NDAA
August 30, 2012
The fight against the NDAA gets some help from the examiner!
http://www.examiner.com/article/panda-s-fight-to-end-ndaa-once-and-for-all
Is There Going To Be A Stock Market Crash In The Fall?
The Intel Hub
August 29, 2012
Is the stock market going to crash by the end of this year? Are we on the verge of major financial chaos on a global scale? Well, this is the time of the year when investors start getting nervous.
We all remember what happened during the fall of 1929, the fall of 1987 and the fall of 2008. However, it is important to keep in mind that we do not see a stock market crash in the fall of every year.
Some years the stock market cruises through the months of September, October, November and December without any problems whatsoever. But this year conditions certainly seem to be right for a “perfect storm” to develop.
Technical indicators are screaming that a stock market decline is imminent and sources in the financial industry all over the world are warning that a massive crisis is on the way.
What you are about to read should alarm you. But it is not a guarantee that anything will or will not happen.
When Ben Bernanke gives his speech at the Jackson Hole summit on Friday he could announce to the rest of the world that the Federal Reserve has decided to launch QE3 and that the Fed will be printing up trillions of new dollars.
If that happened global financial markets would leap for joy. So it is always a dangerous thing when anyone out there tries to tell you that they can “guarantee” what is about to happen in the financial world.
There are just so many moving parts. But if we do not see major intervention by the governments of the world or by global central banks a major financial crisis could rapidly develop this fall. The conditions are certainly right for a stock market collapse, and we could easily see a repeat of what happened back in 2008.
The truth is that the second half of 2012 looks a little bit more like the second half of 2008 with each passing day.
Just check out what Bob Janjuah of Nomura Securities has been saying….
Based on the reasons set out earlier and also covered in my two prior notes, over the August to November period I am looking for the S&P500 to trade off down from around 1400 to 1100/1000 – in other words, I expect over the next four months to see global equity markets fall by 20% to 25% from current levels and to trade at or below the lows of 2011! US equity markets, along with parts of the EM spectrum, will I think underperform eurozone equity markets, where already very little hope resides.
Others are issuing similar warnings. For example, the following is what a couple of Bank of America analysts said in a report the other day….
Our strategists see an unusually high number of macro catalysts over the next 3-6 months that could take markets lower. We expect economic growth to disappoint in the second half of the year in anticipation of the fiscal cliff. This would exacerbate any slowdown from the deepening recession in Europe and decelerating growth in emerging markets. There is also the ongoing tension in the Middle East, the potential for a US credit downgrade and accelerating downward analyst estimate revisions. To top it off, September is seasonally the weakest month of the year for stock price returns.
There has been an unusual amount of chatter in the financial world about the September to December time frame.
That could mean something or it could mean nothing.
But is is very interesting to watch what some top financial insiders are doing with their stocks right now.
Dennis Gartman, the publisher of the Gartman Leter, has dumped all of his stocks at this point.
As I have written about previously, George Soros has dumped all of his stock in banking giants JP Morgan, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs.
Are they just being paranoid?
Or do they know something that we do not?
If you are looking for the next “Lehman Brothers moment” in the United States, you might want to watch Morgan Stanley. Morgan Stanley was heavily involved in the Facebook IPO disaster, earlier this year their credit rating was downgraded, and now there are persistent rumors that Morgan Stanley is in big trouble and that it will be allowed to fail. You can check out some of these rumors for yourself here, here and here.
But of course as I have said all along the center of the coming crisis is going to be in Europe, and many analysts agree with me. For example, the following is what the chairman of Casey Research, Doug Casey, had to say during a recent interview….
Europe is a full cycle ahead of the U.S. Its governments and its banks are both bankrupt. It’s a couple of drunks standing on the street corner holding each other up at this point. Europe is in much worse shape than the U.S. It’s highly regulated, highly taxed and much more socially unstable.
Europe is going to be the epicenter of the coming storm. Japan is waiting in the wings, as is China. This is going to be a worldwide phenomenon. Of course, the U.S. will be in it, too. We’re going to see this all over the world.
Much of southern Europe is already experiencing depression-like conditions. Unemployment in both Greece and Spain is well above 20 percent and both economies are steadily shrinking.
Money is flowing out of Spanish banks at an unprecedented rate right now. Just take a look at these charts. The only thing that is going to keep the Spanish banking system from totally collapsing is outside intervention.
But the truth is that all of Europe is in big trouble. Even German companies are slashing job right now. For example, check out what Siemens is up to….
German engineering conglomerate Siemens (SIEGn.DE) is in early internal talks to cut thousands of jobs in response to a weakening economy, particularly in Europe, a German newspaper reported.
Decisions could be made in October or November, according to daily Boersen-Zeitung, which did not specify its sources.
A Siemens spokesman declined to comment.
We are living in the greatest debt bubble in the history of the world, and at some point that bubble is going to burst in a very messy way.
It is vital that people understand that our system is not even close to sustainable.
Knowing exactly when it will collapse is not nearly as important as understanding that a collapse is absolutely inevitable.
I think what former World Bank economist Richard Duncan had to say recently is very helpful….
“The explosion in credit drove economic growth in the U.S. and around the world, and now that’s the only thing that’s keeping us from collapsing in a debt/deflation spiral,” he said. “[What] I think everybody needs to understand is that the kind of economy that we have now, it’s not capitalism. It has very little in common with capitalism. Capitalism was an economic system in which the government played very little role …. Under capitalism, gold was money and the government had nothing to do with it. Now the central bank creates the money and manipulates its value.”
And he is very right.
We aren’t seeing a failure of capitalism.
What we are witnessing is the failure of debt-based central banking.
And if you think that the global elite are not aware of what is happening then you have not been paying attention.
This summer the global elite have been preparing very hard. Either they are getting very paranoid or they know things that we do not.
If you want to catch up on what the global elite have been up to recently, check out these three articles that I have published previously….
-”Are The Government And The Big Banks Quietly Preparing For An Imminent Financial Collapse?”
-”Jacob Rothschild, John Paulson And George Soros Are All Betting That Financial Disaster Is Coming”
If you are waiting for the nightly news to tell you what to do, then you have not learned anything.
Did anyone in the mainstream media warn you about what was about to happen back in 2008?
Of course not.
The “authorities” insisted that everything was going to be just fine and many average Americans were absolutely wiped out.
So don’t expect someone to come along and nicely inform you that your retirement savings are about to be absolutely devastated.
In this day and age it is absolutely critical for people to learn to think for themselves.
Barack Obama is not going to save you.
Mitt Romney is not going to save you.
The U.S. Congress is not going to save you. They are too busy living the high life at taxpayer expense.
The system is not looking out for you. Nobody is really going to care if your financial planning gets turned upside down. This is a cold, cruel world and you need to understand how the game is played. The financial insiders are looking out for themselves and most of them usually are able to avoid financial disaster.
Average folks like you and I are normally not so fortunate.
There are lots of warning signs that indicate that this fall could be a very turbulent time for global financial markets.
Ignore them at your own peril.
St. Paul Police Officer Kicking Unarmed Defenseless Man In The Throat! [video]
YouTube — EzioEzel
August 29, 2012
Eye Witness Accounts: FSA Delivered the Bloody Massacre in Daraya
Friends of Syria
August 29, 2012
Exclusive: The first Western journalist to enter the town that felt Assad’s fury hears witness accounts of Syria’s bloodiest episode
by Robert Fisk
The massacre town of Daraya is a place of ghosts and questions. It echoed with the roar of mortar explosions and the crackle of gunfire yesterday, its few returning citizens talking of death, assault, foreign “terrorists”, and its cemetery of slaughter haunted by snipers.
The men and women to whom we could talk, two of whom had lost loved ones on Daraya’s day of infamy four days ago, told a story different from the version that has been repeated around the world: theirs was a tale of hostage-taking by the Free Syria Army and desperate prisoner-exchange negotiations between the armed opponents of the regime and the Syrian army, before President Bashar al-Assad’s government forces stormed into the town to seize it back from rebel control.
Officially, no word of such talks between the enemies has been mentioned. But senior Syrian officers told The Independent how they had “exhausted all possibilities of reconciliation” with those holding the town, while residents of Daraya said there had been an attempt by both sides to arrange a swap of civilians and off-duty soldiers – apparently kidnapped by rebels because of their family ties to the government army – with prisoners in the army’s custody. When these talks broke down, the army advanced into Daraya, six miles from the centre of Damascus.
Being the first Western eyewitness into the town yesterday was as frustrating as it was dangerous. The bodies of men, women and children had been moved from the cemetery where many of them were found; and when we arrived in the company of Syrian troops at the Sunni Muslim graveyard – divided by the main road through Daraya – snipers opened fire at the soldiers, hitting the back of the ancient armoured vehicle in which we made our escape. Yet we could talk to civilians out of earshot of Syrian officials – in two cases in the security of their own homes – and their narrative of last Saturday’s mass killing of at least 245 men, women and children suggested that the atrocities were far more widespread than supposed.
One woman, who gave her name as Leena, said she was travelling through the town in a car and saw at least 10 male bodies lying on the road near her home. “We carried on driving past, we did not dare to stop, we just saw these bodies in the street,” she said, adding that Syrian troops had not yet entered Daraya.
Another man said that, although he had not seen the dead in the graveyard, he believed that most were related to the government army and included several off-duty conscripts. “One of the dead was a postman – they included him because he was a government worker,” the man said. If these stories are true, then the armed men – wearing hoods, according to another woman who described how they broke into her home and how she kissed them in a fearful attempt to prevent them shooting her own family – were armed insurgents rather than Syrian troops.
The home of Amer Sheikh Rajab, a forklift truck driver, had been taken over, he said, by gunmen as a base for “Free Army” forces, the phrase the civilians used for the rebels. They had smashed the family crockery and burned carpets and beds – the family showed this destruction to us – but had also torn out the internal computer chip parts of laptops and television sets in the house. To use as working parts for bombs, perhaps?
On a road on the edge of Daraya, Khaled Yahya Zukari, a lorry driver, had been leaving the town on Saturday in a mini-bus with his 34-year-old wife Musreen and their seven-month-old daughter.
“We were on our way to [the neighbouring suburb of] Senaya when suddenly there was a lot of shooting at us,” he said. “I told my wife to lie on the floor but a bullet came into the bus and passed right through our baby and hit my wife. It was the same bullet. They were both dead. The shooting came from trees, from a green area. Maybe it was the militants hiding behind the soil and trees who thought we were a military bus bringing soldiers.”
Any widespread investigation of a tragedy on this scale and in these circumstances was virtually impossible yesterday. At times, in the company of armed Syrian forces, we had to run along empty streets with anti-government snipers at the intersections; many families had barricaded themselves in their homes.
Even before we set out for Daraya from the large military airbase in Damascus – which contains both Russian-made Hind attack-helicopters and T-72 tanks – a mortar round, possibly fired from Daraya itself, smashed into the runway scarcely 300 metres from us, sending a column of black smoke towering into the sky. Although Syrian troops nonchalantly continued to take their open-air showers, I began to feel some sympathy for the UN ceasefire monitors who departed Syria last week.
Perhaps the saddest account of all yesterday came from 27-year-old Hamdi Khreitem, who sat in his family home with his brother and sister, and told us of how his parents, Selim and Aisha, had set out to buy bread on Saturday. “We had already seen the pictures on the television of the massacre – the Western channels said it was the Syrian army, the state television said it was the “Free Army” – but we were short of food and Mum and Dad drove into the town. Then we got a call from their mobile and it was my Mum who just said: ‘We are dead.’ She was not.
“She was wounded in the chest and arm. My Dad was dead but I don’t know where he was hit or who killed him. We took him from the hospital, covered up and we buried him yesterday.”
Prominent Syrian National Council member quits
Al Arabiya
August 28, 2012
by REUTERS
BEIRUT
A prominent figure in the Syrian National Council (SNC), resigned on Tuesday, the latest of several senior members to leave the leading Syrian opposition group this year.
The others have cited personal rivalries within the leadership and have suggested that the SNC is not doing enough to back the increasingly militarized 17-month revolt against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
‘NAM states must use collective power’ [video]
Press TV
August 29, 2012
Ghana’s Foreign Minister Alhaji Muhammad Mumuni has urged the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) members to use their collective power to improve bilateral relations.
“The 16th NAM summit is a very crucial one, especially in the presence of the world economic dynamics. It is important that small countries, developing countries, come together … to strengthen their voices and raise their own profile,” Mumuni said in an interview with Press TV on Wednesday.
He went on to say that even though the NAM member states might stand in danger of being marginalized, “when they come together they are able to have collective power.”
‘US becoming increasingly isolated’ [video]
Russia Today
August 29, 2012
The United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has arrived in Tehran to take part in the Summit of the Non-Aligned movement… that’s a bloc of countries that don’t consider themselves in union with the U.S.
Washington has voiced criticism of the UN chief’s visit to Iran and of the gathering in general.
Despite Iran’s willingness and ability to help find a solution to the Syria crisis, any ideas put forward by Tehran could be met with resistance, says author and journalist Afshin Rattansi.
PN 