Skolnick Chicago

"BIGGEST BRIBERY CARTEL EVER"
by Sherman H. Skolnick 12/17/05

Henry Crown Family, Jenner & Block, General Electric. and their criminal combine

In the beginning, it was a woman. She said that she was the major owner of what became in 1919, Material Service Corporation. Henry Crown was just a very young man. He stopped by her house, she later said, for sandwiches and cookies..

Yes, Crown later had ways of getting very lucrative street paviing contracts from "the city fathers" in Chicago City Hall. Simple. The City Officials were "for sale". So, he "bought them".[She told about in in a very lengthy recorded discussion.]

He ran her business in an integrated method. From sand-dump to the streets. He knew how to exert "muscle". Many decades later we chatted with a sand-pile owner.

"I understand Crown's people were here during the night. I presume they parked a few bodies. I don't look. I don't ask." He ended the talk with a worldly chuckle.

Some Europeans let over from World War Two were visiting Du Page County, just west of Cook County and Chicago. They stopped to look at the old red brick clock tower, Du Page County Courthouse.

Puzzled, they remarked, "So you have the Gestapo here now, huh? This is the color and style of building they liked for their local headquarters at the time of Hitler."

To do their "civic duty", Material Service donated an abandoned toxic dump as the site of the new Du Page Courthouse. After a few years, courthouse workers began suffering an epidemic of strange debilitating ailments. The Liars and Whores of the Press took the easy way out, proclaiming the cause as supposedly the reputed "mafia contractors" having put in a cheapo ventllation system. Press fakers know it is personally unprofitable if not also unhealthy to point an accusing finger at the Crowns.

In the 1960s, the woman claiming she was the true majority owner of Material Service Corporation sued them in Cook County Cicuit Court, to force the firm to correct their records. The Judge seemed to be siding with her and her daughter who kept track of Henry Crown as his Secretary.

Mysterious forces worked to remove the Judge, or make him disappear, or make him blotted out [take your pick of demise].   By the 1970s, the Crown Family had a 89% stake in General Dynamics, the major war-monger, maker of submarines, tanks, and many other weapons. Lester Crown became a top official of General Dynamics. But back in the Windy City, Lester had a problem. The Chief Federal Hangman said Lester was facing federal criminal indictment for his part in a bribery/extortion conspiracy involving road paving contractors.  

[We knew a lot about it. One of our secret team put together the evidence forcing the Crowns to face the music.]

Lester had two choices (1) he could wait, get indicted and prosecuted and most likely end up with a long prison term or (2) he could work an unholy deal with the Chicago Chief Federal Prosecutor, in the past always concerned about a future career in private lawyering as a "bagman" and "fixer".

[The current U.S. District Attorney in Chicago was brought in from New York. Many are ready to believe Patrick J. Fitzgerald is different! than the Chicago-types that held that job before him, that typically, historically, and politically were sooner or later "for sale".]

The Chicago-based law firm octopus, that most always got their way with the different levels of government in the past, was Jenner & Block, reputed super "bagmen". In their opinion, one event in particular is, for them, very "positive"; as to the other, they would have to accept, it was extremely "negative".

Jenner & Block senior partner/manager, Albert Jenner, Jr., sat on the Warren Commission, and helped proclaim that a lone assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, assassi nated President John F. Kennedy. Even though 85% of Americans do not accept the finding, Jenner considered the Warren Commission conclusion as "positive" as for Jenner.

In 1969, a Special Tribunal was empaneled to consider this writer's accusations that several of the judges on the Illinois Supreme Court received bribes. Albert Jenner, Jr., defended the Chief Justice who was found guilty of impropriety and removed. It was about the only case Chief Crook Jenner ever "lost". Cynically, perhaps, maybe the massive publicity caused the Special Tribunal's panel to be "honest".

TRAIN ROBBER PROTECTED

The Henry Crown Family, by dirty tricks, seized control of the Rock Island Railroad, not to run the railroad for the public good but to liquidate it for its asset value. As with other bloody work for the Crowns, super-crooks Jenner & Block did not give a hoot about damage to the public. Thousands became unemployed and many private businesses went under. Aren't there laws against protecting train robbers? 

THE BILDERBERG SYNDROME, Part One
by Sherman H. Skolnick 7/1/02

Every year, for almost half a century, they meet in a different country. Their first meeting was in Holland, in 1954. It was arranged by the Dutch Monarchy. It took place in the Bilderberg Hotel, which became the name of this secret society, one of several, forbidden to be discussed by the oil-soaked, spy-riddled monopoly press.

Mutually pledged to sealed lips are those invited to the annual meeting. Members of the aristocracies attend of various nations, consisting of the elites of high finance, politics, espionage, academia, media, and other titles.

I once interviewed, on tape, the wire desk editor of the Chicago Sun-Times. "Why does your paper censor stories about the secret society, the Bilderberg?" Most media honchos pretend never to have heard of this gang of plotters. But he responded candidly, a rarity, "Well, if we went and then told about it, we couldn't go anymore. What should we do? Go and talk about it, or not be able to go?"

The meetings of the Bilderberg Group are about the only place that competing financial forces sit with one another. The Rockefellers, for example, are always there. So are their apparent enemy, the French Rothschilds. Sitting as a sort of neutral intermediary always is a top official of the Wallenberg banking monopoly of Sweden and northern Europe.

[In 1978, when John D. Rockefeller 3rd was assassinated on the road to their upstate New York fortress, we were the ONLY journalists (unpaid, free lance journalists, at that), who dared inquire. He was the father of John D. Rockfeller 4th, who to be cute, calls himself "Jay", a supposed Democrat, U.S. Senator from West Virginia. The Rockefellers like to dominate states with sizeable geography and minerals, but a small population, such as also Arkansas. In a pinch, to dominate the state it would not cost that much to buy most every voter and most every media propaganda instrument in the state.Returning the "favor" of political murder was eighteen years later when the top member of the French Rothschild Family was murdered in Paris. The American monopoly press was ordered not to mention in detail, if at all, the death of Rothschild. Or, just run an innocent little item that the French International baron died of a "heart attack". Presslord/swindler Rupert Murdoch ordered his print and electronic media outlets to avoid, if at all, mentioning the death.

The hotel in different countries where they meet each year, are announced as "closed", for "remodeling", or a "wedding party". One year they picked a resort hotel on top of a Swiss mountain, difficult to reach except by air. The host nation agrees to supply a huge, almost secret security force prepared to brutalize intruders, follow any hardy reporters who may be encamped nearby, and by various brutality and trickery stop any public knowledge. Hotel employees are likewise pledged to secrecy, which if they violated it, would be severely dealt with. Such as never to be able to work again in that nation.

When the Bilderberg met in 1991, in Baden-Baden, Germany, a purported health resort, invited was a then obscure Governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton. They anointed him as the next President of the United States. The election would be a mere set up. The pressfakers present agreed not to mention, if at all possible, what they all knew. That Clinton was a walking, talking scandal. Not every American voter can bring themselves to know or believe reality. Namely, every candidate for high office is selected because they are blackmailable. The Establishment has to reserve the right to pull on the chain, any time they felt like it, to shut down such a candidate if somehow elected to high office. This, anytime the "powers that be" deemed it necessary, to shut him or her up, to remove them, or, scare them into silence with weird violence directed against the candidate/president's circle.

Groomed since a teen-ager by the American CIA, Clinton in the1992 Presidential election shadow-boxed with his mentor, George Herbert Walker Bush, former head of the secret political police. Daddy Bush has been with the espionage cartel since 1959, when they helped set him up with six hundred worldwide affiliates for "his" petroleum drilling empire, Zapata Oil, later, Zapata Offshore, later Pennzoil, still later, Pennzoil/Texaco.

Earlier, as Arkansas Governor, Clinton participated in the hundreds of millions of dollars involved in the dope traffic through the southern states, run by the American CIA, in part through the espionage airport at Mena, Arkansas. Clinton's partners were Daddy Bush, Ollie North, and Congressman Henry Hyde (R., Ill.), who was also head of the CIA "black budget", funds for covert operations including domestic and overseas political assassinations. Return shipments of air-shipped weapons, went to unlawfully aid the Contras in Nicaragua.

Clinton, as known to his handlers and partners, was clearly subject to blackmail and being terrorized.

He was selected to be an Oxford College, Great Britain student by the Rhodes Trust. As not widely known, but nevertheless true, the Rhodes fortune is pledged to overthrow the American Republic, to return this continent to puppet colonies, and the American inhabitants to be subjects of the British Monarch in London. [Visit our website series, "The Overthrow of the American Republic".]

While in England, Clinton, a sexual predator, suffering from having his flag up too often, priapism, raped a British woman. He was forced to terminate his studies at Oxford and abruptly leave Great Britain, with the proviso that he would not be criminally prosecuted as long as he never returned. In the 1992 Presidential Election, Daddy Bush and Clinton agreed not to bring up each other's dirty laundry. Clinton would not mention the treasonous deal done by the Elder Bush in Paris, October, 1980, to arrange weapons shipments to Iran, in return, Iran would refuse to return the 52 U.S. hostages from the Teheran Embassy, until the Reagan/Bush ticket was safely inaugurated in January, 1981. If incumbent President Jimmy Carter could have avoided seeming to be a wimp and get the return of the hostages right before the election, it would, to Bush, be the dreaded "October Surprise". And Clinton agreed not to mention Daddy Bush's treason in the Iran-Contra scandal.

Over and above the blackmailable items known as to both Clinton and Bush, was Clinton's position with the aristocracy that gathers each year as the Bilderberg Group. The person using the name "Clinton" should rightfully be called William ROCKEFELLER Clinton. Our interviews with middle-level members of the Rockefeller Family, convinces us of the validity of our position. Namely, that "Clinton" is the illegitimate great grandson of old John D. Rockefeller, founder of the infamous petroleum monopoly, Standard Oil.[Other such details, see our website series on Wal-Mart, headquartered in Arkansas.]

Several terms prior to "Clinton", Winthrop Rockefeller was Arkansas Governor. He was known to have fathered, throughout the U.S., at least five illegitimate children. [The legitimate great grandson of John D., is "Jay" Rockefeller whose wife, Sharon Percy Rockefeller, is a top mogul of public tv and radio. We call it National Petroleum Radio.]

Throughout his career as Governor and President, "Clinton" was kept on a chain, by among other things, terror-tactics. A strange one-motor airplane with an already dead pilot, somehow eluded all the measures to protect the White House, and came within a few feet of crashing right through President Clinton's White House bedroom window. The White House rooftop battery of missiles was somehow turned off that night. The plane had to be guided, that is vectored, from accomplices on the ground, to steer around all the obstructions and buildings in its path. Remote controlled? Perhaps. During his Presidency, more than a hundred of his confidants, friends, circle of friends, and such were murdered. His Little Rock campaign chief, Jerry Parks, was murdered, mobster-style. Various of his U.S. Marine and other guards, who knew a lot about him, were one by one, snuffed out in strange, so-called "accidents". His pal, Vincent W. Foster, Jr., was murdered and explained away as a "suicide". Other websites have compiled a lengthy list of these happenings. In simple terms, those who meet at the Bilderberg Group, are aristocrats, the handlers of their retainers, stooges, spy chiefs, bank bosses, and such. Seemingly little understood is the basic premise of aristocracy. When one nation's aristocracy, Establishment, whatever you want to call them, has a falling out with that of another nation, that is grounds for war. If bad enough, it becomes a World War. One group plans to have more power, consolidate their territorial position, and silence the grumbling of unemployed ordinary people, through the drums of war, to the destruction and detriment of the opposing aristocracy. Used to foment bloody conflict are a massive media campaign of hate against the Establishment of the opposing Ruling Class, now designated as an Enemy, previously having been business partners. To get the ordinary populace into the right mode, they become bombarded around the clock with martial music, and appeals to flag, God, and such terms as Fatherland and Mother Russia.. In plain terms, the aristocracy goaded, pumped up, poorly informed workers to murder, for flag and country, the counterpart workers of the opposing aristocracv. In some instances, one aristocracy still does business with the other, in the midst of the War. [See, "Trading With the Enemy", by Charles Higham.]

Depressions, on the other hand, are a combination of an orchestrated event combined with the cycles of circumstance. The aristocracy plans to grab up the real estate, commercial and residential, the collapsed bank funds written off, the bloated pie in the sky stock ownership, and other assets of the powerless suckers, for a few pennies on the dollar. All the while, the ultra rich, through their press whores, falsely proclaim that the return of prosperity is just around the corner. [It may take fifteen years and another instigated war to do that.]

What is plotted and agreed upon, as shown by the circumstances of a secret society like the Bilderberg Group should NOT be described or labeled as merely a "conspiracy". And we are NOT "conspiracy theorists" [You do not succeed in putting bribe-taking judges in jail, as we have, for decades, by foolishness and "conspiracy theories".] These are the known ways of the Establishment, the Ultra Rich, the Aristocracy, by whatever label. Bred into them from birth is this mindset for power and enrichment little-understood by generally good-hearted, ordinary people who would not instigate a bloody war for profit.

So, sooner or later, the way the plutocrats conduct their horrors of bloodshed and financial smash-ups, leads to Revolution. Europe, to their credit, have had more or less genuine upheavals, Revolutions. America never has had such.

[A useful primer is Ferdinand Lundberg's great documented work, "The Rich and the Super Rich", first published in 1968, but timely even now. His earlier work has a lot of even more revealing details, published in 1937, still on hand in some large lirbraries, "America's Sixty Families".]

To understand the ways of the Bilderberg Group, you have to have a sharp eye for calendar events and circumstances. You have to carefully notice what happens usually in the month or so AFTER their annual secret meeting. Note these happenings within thirty days of the Bilderberg Group meeting, May 30 to June 2, 2002 (they actually adjourned a day earlier), at a hotel at Chantilly, Virginia.

===Suddenly the monopoly press, headed by those presslords who attended the meeting, such as Donald Graham, head of the Washington Post, Conrad Black, Canadian/U..S. press empire, and others, on behalf of the Ultra Rich started a series of scandal disclosures. Such as that the second largest long distance service in the U.S., WorldCom, parent of MCI, had concealed book-cooking of almost four billion dollars. And thus, WorldCom stock plummeted from about sixty dollars per share to eight pennies per share, and faces bankruptcy.. Such as, Xerox, the original copy machine empire, to apparently falsely show a profit instead of huge losses, cooked their books to the tune of six billion dollars. Such as Clear Channel Communications, owner of 1200 U.S. radio stations, had reportedly likewise cooked their books. "Clear Channel Says No Accounting Issues", Business-Reuters, Los Angeles, June 27, 2002. Another sudden revelation within the thirty days after the Bilderberg meeting in 2002, the advertising giant, OMNICOM, had reportedly likewise cooked their books by way of gobbling up other advertising and marketing agencies. "Omnicom gutted on debt review", CBS.MarketWatch.com, June 27, 2002.[OMNICOM are the parent of DDB Chicago, which represented the advertising and marketing, at the same time apparently, of supposedly competing soda pop companies, Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola. See the details, many in the court record, but little known, in our website series, "Coca-Cola, CIA, and the Courts.]

===The British-owned newspaper now gaining large circulation as well in the U.S. is Financial Times of London. On a Chicago dateline story, by their correspondent Jeremy Grant, they opened up the reputed scandal that mammoth General Motors had cooked their books. For a while, General Motors stock was suspended in trading on the Big Board. "GM denies accounting problems", Financial Times, June 27, 2002.

===A few weeks BEFORE the Bilderberg 2002 meeting, the New York Times suddenly attacked a previous sacred cow, General Electric, implying G.E. engages in book-cooking. New York Times bigshots often attend Bilderberg meetings. "Wait a Second What Devils Lurk in the Details?", by Gretchen Morgenson, New York Times, April 14, 2002.

===And then there was the story that bigshots of Apple Computer sold millions of dollars of their shares in the company just before really bad news was disclosed.

These scandalous details, pave the way for foreign aristocracies to get an armlock on American business. These details were apparently long-known to the accounting firms, but not revealed until Bilderberg Group gave the signal, "Wreck them now! Get them!" Little known, most of the big accounting firms have as their parent firm, a foreign enterprise. Such as Arthur Andersen is owned by a Swiss outfit. Deloitte & Touche is actually owned by a Japanese firm, Tohmatsu. As we have detailed, Great Britain, at least since the war of 1812 when they burned down our Capitol, has planned to grab this continent back. And for that purpose, they were involved in the political assassination of three U.S. Presidents. [Visit our extensive website series, "The Overthrow of the American Republic".]

Of course, the Liars and Whores of the press will not link up these happenings. Remember, if good witnesses or documents are hard to get, circumstances alone, on occasion, are even sufficient to send a criminal defendant to the electric chair.

Wars, Depressions, vast theft of properties and assets, and political murders are not merely purely accidental. They are not a conspiracy. Just the day to day, month to month, year to year, and decade to decade way of conducting matters of the Establishment and their meeting clubs, their secret societies, of which Bilderberg is just one.

More coming. Stay tuned.
The Gold Gamecocks, Part One
by Sherman H. Skolnick 6/17/02

For many years the Chicago Gold Conference met in the Windy City. In years past, I used to go to their annual meeting in my home town. Funny thing. I was the only reporter that showed up. And I am only an unpaid, freelance reporter that heads a court reform group investigating and researching banks and such. We coined the term Banker-Judge to label the way the corrupt Bench and Bar operates.

I learned a lot interviewing gold mining engineers from all over, top officials of the World Gold Council, sellers of shares in smaller mines, and an audience of gold bugs.

In the 20th Century, gold had a sorry history in the U.S. In the 1932 Presidential Election, candidate Franklin Delano Roosevelt pledged that he was going to keep gold as the backing of the U.S. Currency. At the time, gold was pegged at twenty dollars per ounce. Workers, like my elders, enjoyed having gold coins in their pockets as payment for their labors.

Considered a patrician, Roosevelt seemed to oppose the very aristocracy of his origin. But not really. Right after being inaugurated in 1933, Roosevelt declared a Bank Holiday. Many smaller, community banks did not survive the closing down of the banking system. Ordinary folks seemed to like FDR. Yet, he rescued the big banks, the J.P. Morgans and such, at the expense of the small fry.

[At the time of the Great Depression, there was a large foreign-born element in the U.S. and they were satisfied to sleep under bridges when it rains. As long as they were the bridges in America. So there was no basis for a revolution.]

A proper study of the 1930s would inevitably show Roosevelt was one of the leading counter-revolutionaries in American if not world history. He saved the ass of the Ruling Class. The Chicago Tribune, long a backward, reactionary apologist for the rich and their mistreatment of minorities and workers, used to rail against Roosevelt as "That rotten cripple in the White House!"

The Tribune got their newsprint from Canada, by a 19th Century Charter signed by the King of England with the blessings of the Jesuits, in Canada.

Up to the time when the Tribune Company stock went public in the early 1980s, the media giant was openly anti-Black and anti-Jew. We call them the "Queen's Newspaper", since a large amount of their stock is owned by the British Royals. The Tribune remains viciously anti-Irish, forever panning Irish public figures in Chicago.

About twelve years before becoming President, Roosevelt, as an adult, was stricken with infantile paralysis, polio. The U.S. Secret Service, when he was President, saw to it that no photographer dared make a picture of him sitting with his braces in his wheelchair. Such photographers knew their cameras, if not their heads, would be broken by Roosevelt's guards. When I got polio as a child, my impoverished parents successfully appealed by letter directly to President Roosevelt, to open the doors of hospitals closed to us as poor people and Jews. For a while Roosevelt was my hero.

Now, years later, since 1991 I do a taped weekly public access Cable TV Show in Chicago. Our specialty? Fingering local media skunks as being a foul smoke-screen of the secret political police, the FBI and the American CIA. I get feedback of what the media s.o.b.'s among themselves hollar about me. "That paranoid Jew cripple on the tv!" is their favorite put-down of our long-time popular non-commercial show, "Broadsides".

[Although many of those who manage the network media outlets have Jewish surnames, they are merely the stooges, NOT the owners. In the U.S., on the television, there are few actual Jews reading the news or commenting on current events. And, few, if any, senior citizens. And almost no one who sits in a wheelchair or walks with crutches or a walking device. A good reference is the book, "The New Crowd The Changing of the Jewish Guard on Wall Street", by Judith Ramsey Ehrlich and Barry J. Rehfeld, Little Brown & Co., 1989. The book documents how the big Wall Street investment bankers with Jewish surnames have not been actual practicing Jews for more than three generations, having converted to other religions.]

Returning to the timeline, in 1934, less than a year after Roosevelt was installed as President, in violation of his pre-election pledge, he ordered that the possession of gold by Americans is illegal. He devalued the paper money to a little over 35 dollars per ounce of gold. Roosevelt's big money pals, however, were not effected. More than a month before he was inaugurated, they had shipped THEIR GOLD to Switzerland and elsewhere out of the U.S. The aristocracy had a bonanza through their offshore connections and their out-of-the-U.S. gold.

As a child I used to ask my elders, "You had a few gold coins. Why did you surrender them?" Their answer was, "We liked Roosevelt. He ordered it. Besides, the Secret Service would grab us if they found out we had gold after 1934." The Federal law outlawing gold for Americans stayed in effect until 1975. A gold promoter was silenced, in Indianapolis, when he was murdered by being thrown out of a high building window.

One crusader for the truth was Tom Valentine. He ran in Chicago a national magazine, the National Tattler, demanding that there be an audit of Fort Knox, supposedly the repository of U.S. gold. After much todo, one vault of Fort Knox was opened. Guess what? The only stuff found were some very impure, orangish colored metal substances. Apparently melted down coin metal from what was seized in 1934. No actual gold bars. So where was the gold horde?

A U.S. General, at a later date, stated off the record to some, that he headed a military convey of trucks that took the Fort Knox gold to the East Coast, where it was shipped to England in the 1960s, to stem a run on the Bank of England. The British had a lot of trouble caught repeatedly denying they were going to devalue the Pound Sterling. Amid their bank panic, some other countries apparently ended up with the U.S. Fort Knox gold.

As the bankers for the Vatican, the French Rothschilds have always influenced the gold markets. In the early 1980s, amid a liquidity crisis in the U.S., gold briefly reached over 800 dollars per ounce. By the late 1990s, the French Rothschilds together with other European bankers started a campaign to assist the greedy investment bankers of Wall Street, the bullion bankers. Such as Goldman Sachs & Co. (we call them Goldman Sucks), and J.P. Morgan, bullion banker for the British Monarchy. For a while the scheme worked. The private central banks, as a cabal, supposedly were selling portions of their gold treasury. The price of gold by 1999, was driven down to 252 dollars per ounce. The liars and whores of the press, the paper money crowd, kept circulating stories that the price of gold was going down to at least 200 dollars per ounce.

Actually, the private central banks, as a cartel, leased out their gold at rates as low as one per cent, enabling the investment fakers to falsely pump up the stock market to catch in suckers and amateurs. The Bank of England, as an example, drove down the price of gold falsely offering gold that did not belong to them. About 1990, with the downfall of the Soviet government in Moscow, thousands of tons of THEIR gold were stolen and conveyed OUT OF THE COUNTRY by the corrupt bureaucrats in Moscow. Having custody of the purloined gold were bankers in Holland who permitted the Bank of England to fake up gold auctions, offering this stolen gold. Was the gold ever turned over to those who supposedly bought it at auction?

At the time gold was driven down to 252 dollars per ounce, the American pressfakers propagandized with stories, like "Gold has no purpose", "Gold is a barbaric metal. There is no need for any modern country to have it.." Contrary viewpoints, of course, were not allowed.

Notice what happened in 1987. Somehow, I predicted, six months ahead of time, the exact October Monday date of the Stock Crash. I told acquaintances and friends who I believed where in the markets, with a blunt statement, "You better get your hind quarter ouf of Wall Street, sucker!" With a sneer, most of them simply insulted me, "Who the hell are you, Sherman? You are not a college graduate, have no MBA. Your main thing is you run after what you claim are crooked judges. You don't know nothing about business." (They disregarded our investigations of Banker-Judges. That is, those who often own and operate, for corrupt purposes, the bank across the street or across the alley from the courthouse. Such as shown by the biggest judicial bribery scandal in U.S. history, touched off by us, detailed in the book "Illinois Justice", by Kenneth Manaster, published in the fall of 2001. The scandal caused the downfall of Illinois' highest tribunal, the Illinois Supreme Court.)

The Saturday after Black Monday, the October, 1987 Crash, was a family get together. I guess I sometimes cannot hide my sarcastic streak.

"So, did you get your ass out of the market like I predicted?" They did not bother to hurl an insult. They simply picked up their plate of food and moved away from me. As they walked away, I added my cynical remark, "I guess you lost big, sucker, huh?"

In the weeks after the 1987 Crash, the business press fakers, like the Wall Street Journal, said nothing about the fact that the Federal Reserve, a private central bank masquerading as tied to the U.S. government, intervened in the six weeks after the debacle, to keep gold from topping 500 dollars per ounce. Then the price subsided. From having gone over the years to the Chicago Gold Conference, I learned that most of the savvy sorts there believed that there was a secret financial trip-wire. That is, that the Federal Reserve would create a false emergency to absolutely stop gold from topping 410 dollars per ounce.

In the fight between the gold bugs and the paper money crowd, those who like gold gloat, "Hey, sucker, we are in with the killer yellow metal. Who are YOU in with?" The bottom line is that gold is independent money, beholden to neither dictators or presidents or prime ministers. Simply put, if gold goes up, paper money goes to Hell. More about gold.

Stay tuned.

Drones

The Coming Drone Attack on America

By Naomi Wolf, Guardian UK

22 December 12

Drones on domestic surveillance duties are already deployed by police and corporations. In time, they will likely be weaponised

eople often ask me, in terms of my argument about "ten steps" that mark the descent to a police state or closed society, at what stage we are. I am sorry to say that with the importation of what will be tens of thousands of drones, by both US military and by commercial interests, into US airspace, with a specific mandate to engage in surveillance and with the capacity for weaponization - which is due to begin in earnest at the start of the new year - it means that the police state is now officially here.

In February of this year, Congress passed the FAA Reauthorization Act, with its provision to deploy fleets of drones domestically. Jennifer Lynch, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, notes that this followed a major lobbying effort, "a huge push by […] the defense sector" to promote the use of drones in American skies: 30,000 of them are expected to be in use by 2020, some as small as hummingbirds - meaning that you won't necessarily see them, tracking your meeting with your fellow-activists, with your accountant or your congressman, or filming your cruising the bars or your assignation with your lover, as its video-gathering whirs.

Others will be as big as passenger planes. Business-friendly media stress their planned abundant use by corporations: police in Seattle have already deployed them.

An unclassified US air force document reported by CBS (pdf) news expands on this unprecedented and unconstitutional step - one that formally brings the military into the role of controlling domestic populations on US soil, which is the bright line that separates a democracy from a military oligarchy. (The US constitution allows for the deployment of National Guard units by governors, who are answerable to the people; but this system is intended, as is posse comitatus, to prevent the military from taking action aimed at US citizens domestically.)

The air force document explains that the air force will be overseeing the deployment of its own military surveillance drones within the borders of the US; that it may keep video and other data it collects with these drones for 90 days without a warrant - and will then, retroactively, determine if the material can be retained - which does away for good with the fourth amendment in these cases. While the drones are not supposed to specifically "conduct non-consensual surveillance on on specifically identified US persons", according to the document, the wording allows for domestic military surveillance of non-"specifically identified" people (that is, a group of activists or protesters) and it comes with the important caveat, also seemingly wholly unconstitutional, that it may not target individuals "unless expressly approved by the secretary of Defense".

In other words, the Pentagon can now send a domestic drone to hover outside your apartment window, collecting footage of you and your family, if the secretary of Defense approves it. Or it may track you and your friends and pick up audio of your conversations, on your way, say, to protest or vote or talk to your representative, if you are not "specifically identified", a determination that is so vague as to be meaningless.

What happens to those images, that audio? "Distribution of domestic imagery" can go to various other government agencies without your consent, and that imagery can, in that case, be distributed to various government agencies; it may also include your most private moments and most personal activities. The authorized "collected information may incidentally include US persons or private property without consent". Jennifer Lynch of the Electronic Frontier Foundation told CBS:

"In some records that were released by the air force recently … under their rules, they are allowed to fly drones in public areas and record information on domestic situations."

This document accompanies a major federal push for drone deployment this year in the United States, accompanied by federal policies to encourage law enforcement agencies to obtain and use them locally, as well as by federal support for their commercial deployment. That is to say: now HSBC, Chase, Halliburton etc can have their very own fleets of domestic surveillance drones. The FAA recently established a more efficient process for local police departments to get permits for their own squadrons of drones.

Given the Department of Homeland Security militarization of police departments, once the circle is completed with San Francisco or New York or Chicago local cops having their own drone fleet - and with Chase, HSBC and other banks having hired local police, as I reported here last week - the meshing of military, domestic law enforcement, and commercial interests is absolute. You don't need a messy, distressing declaration of martial law.

And drone fleets owned by private corporations means that a first amendment right of assembly is now over: if Occupy is massing outside of a bank, send the drone fleet to surveil, track and harass them. If citizens rally outside the local Capitol? Same thing. As one of my readers put it, the scary thing about this new arrangement is deniability: bad things done to citizens by drones can be denied by private interests - "Oh, that must have been an LAPD drone" - and LAPD can insist that it must have been a private industry drone. For where, of course, will be the accountability from citizens buzzed or worse by these things?

Domestic drone use is here, and the meshing has begun: local cops in Grand Forks, North Dakota called in a DHS Predator drone - the same make that has caused hundreds of civilian casualties in Pakistan - over a dispute involving a herd of cattle. The military rollout in process and planned, within the US, is massive: the Christian Science Monitor reports that a total of 110 military sites for drone activity are either built or will be built, in 39 states. That covers America.

We don't need a military takeover: with these capabilities on US soil and this air force white paper authorization for data collection, the military will be effectively in control of the private lives of American citizens. And these drones are not yet weaponized.

"I don't think it's crazy to worry about weaponized drones. There is a real consensus that has emerged against allowing weaponized drones domestically. The International Association of Chiefs of Police has recommended against it," warns Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst at the ACLU, noting that there is already political pressure in favor of weaponization:

"At the same time, it is inevitable that we will see [increased] pressure to allow weaponized drones. The way that it will unfold is probably this: somebody will want to put a relatively 'soft' nonlethal weapon on a drone for crowd control. And then things will ratchet up from there."

And the risk of that? The New America Foundation's report on drone use in Pakistan noted that the Guardian had confirmed 193 children's deaths from drone attacks in seven years. It noted that for the deaths of ten militants, 1,400 civilians with no involvement in terrorism also died. Not surprisingly, everyone in that region is traumatized: children scream when they hear drones. An NYU and Stanford Law School report notes that drones "terrorize citizens 24 hours a day".

If US drones may first be weaponized with crowd-control features, not lethal force features, but with no risk to military or to police departments or DHS, the playing field for freedom of assembly is changed forever. So is our private life, as the ACLU's Stanley explains:

"Our biggest concerns about the deployment of drones domestically is that they will be used to create pervasive surveillance networks. The danger would be that an ordinary individual once they step out of their house will be monitored by a drone everywhere they walk or drive. They may not be aware of it. They might monitored or tracked by some silent invisible drone everywhere they walk or drive."

"So what? Why should they worry?" I asked.

"Your comings and goings can be very revealing of who you are and what you are doing and reveal very intrusive things about you - what houses of worship you are going to, political meetings, particular doctors, your friends' and lovers' houses."

I mentioned the air force white paper. "Isn't the military not supposed to be spying on Americans?" I asked.

"Yes, the posse comitatus act passed in the 19th century forbids a military role in law enforcement among Americans."

What can we do if we want to oppose this? I wondered. According to Stanley, many states are passing legislation banning domestic drone use. Once again, in the fight to keep America a republic, grassroots activism is pitched in an unequal contest against a militarized federal government.