Feature Film on IRS to Debut

Aaron Russo, the accomplished Hollywood producer and director, has just completed America: From Freedom to Fascism, a feature film about the IRS, the Federal Reserve and the New World Order. The film is to be entered in the May 2006 Cannes Film Festival.

Russo's film credits, which include Trading Places (starring Eddie Murphy) and The Rose (starring Bette Midler), have received six academy award nominations. Russo has personally won both an Emmy and a Tony award and his films have also won a number of Golden Globe awards.

craigslist

This article is too long for me to read, but I'm sure some of you craigslist dorks might like it.

Iran's Really Big Weapon

A successful test of an Iranian nuclear weapon at some point in the next few years may prove less destabilizing than a simple free market economic measure that Iran is said to be planning for March of this year. Tehran is preparing to open a bourse, a mercantile exchange and potentially a futures market, where traders can buy and sell oil and gas, along the lines of the International Petroleum Exchange (IPE) in London and the NYTMEX in New York.

The differences are first, that this one would price its energy in euros, not dollars, and second, that it would not use West Texas Intermediate or Brent Crude (from the North Sea) as its standard oil for pricing. It would use a Persian Gulf-produced oil instead.

The CFR

The CFR claims not to have an agenda, but it does. That agenda — the promotion of more and more internationalism leading to world government — has been pursued for decades by both Republican and Democrat administrations.

The Twin Towers Story

If you don't like conspiracy theories, don't watch this video. It raises very serious questions about the collapse of the Twins Towers and Building 7.

Bill Bonner on Gold - Part 2

You can read the entire article here.

That gold has a sense of humor is beyond question. We hear it laughing every time Alan Greenspan opens his mouth. You'll recall that Mr. Greenspan was once a close friend of gold. The two were practically bosom buddies. Greenspan wrote that gold was indispensable to an honest money system. Of course, that was before he came to head up the largest and most cocksure central bank in history. Since then, he's hardly had time for his old pal. He has new friends in very high places.

By almost every measure, more purchasing power has been added since he has held his post at the Fed than under all the U.S. Treasury secretaries, Fed chiefs, and presidents that preceded him combined.

Gold chuckles.

What gold knows is that it is one thing to create money and credit; it is quite another to create real wealth. The first is as easy as running a printing press; the second is hard. You can inspire people to consume wealth by spreading around some spending money. You can even inspire people to make more of the things they consume. Before you know it, you'll have what looks like a boom. But if you could get rich by printing up extra currency, or by borrowing and spending...everybody would do it.

What gold also knows is that the more money and credit you make available, the less each unit of it is really worth. And if you order up enough of it, you can destroy the currency itself.

Gold chuckles knowingly again.

Greenspan is doing for central banking what the Titanic did for ocean cruises and George Armstrong Custer did for the cavalry. With a little luck, soon people won't want anything to do with it. For the first part of his career, he argued that paper money, un-backed by gold, was doomed to failure. For the last 18 years, he has worked to prove it. Not by logic or argument, but by demonstration. He has blown up the biggest bubble in money and credit the world has ever seen. When it pops, Americans will turn to gold. Gold will sell for thousands of dollars an ounce, before the dollar is replaced. And Americans will trust neither "paper" money, nor central bankers for at least the next three generations. We just hope Alan Greenspan lives long enough to see it.

Bill Bonner on Gold - Part 1

You can read the whole article here.

The big news so far this year is the steep rise in the price of gold.

The present international financial system is an experiment. It has only existed since 1971, when the United States cut the umbilical cord between the dollar and gold. Before that, gold almost always stood behind the dollar, and other paper currencies. Why? You might just as well ask us "Why do fools fall in love?" or "Why is there air?"

This is not the first time central bankers have tried a system of purely faith-based currency. Every previous experiment ended in the predictable way: the bankers created more and more "money." And as the quantity increased, the quality decreased. Eventually, the "money" was of such poor quality that people would no longer accept it. In recent history, the Argentine currency lost 90% of its value in a single year. In less-recent history, the German currency lost 999% of its value in a matter of weeks. Between the time a man ordered a beer and the time he finished it, the price might have risen two or three times.

In three years time, more dollars are added to the world's supply than the current price of all the gold ever mined since the beginning of time.

During the two terms of George W. Bush alone, the feds have borrowed more money from foreign governments and banks than was borrowed by all other American administrations put together, from 1776 to 2000. So too will more debt be added to the national burden in the eight Bush years than in the previous 224.

Gold guffaws...snorts...and chortles. It knows something, but it isn't talking. Yesterday, it rose to another new high – over $550. It's even higher than Google.

Bush Crossing the Rubicon

This article by Paul Craig Roberts is really a must read. Not long, lots of relevant history.

Dictatorships seldom appear full-fledged but emerge piecemeal. When Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon with one Roman legion he broke the tradition that protected the civilian government from victorious generals and launched the transformation of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire. Fearing that Caesar would become a king, the Senate assassinated him. From the civil wars that followed, Caesar’s grandnephew, Octavian, emerged as the first Roman emperor, Caesar Augustus.

Two thousand years later in Germany, Adolf Hitler’s rise to dictator from his appointment as chancellor was rapid. Hitler used the Reichstag fire to create an atmosphere of crisis. Both the judicial and legislative branches of government collapsed, and Hitler’s decrees became law. The Decree for the Protection of People and State (Feb. 28, 1933) suspended guarantees of personal liberty and permitted arrest and incarceration without trial. The Enabling Act (March 23, 1933) transferred legislative power to Hitler, permitting him to decree laws, laws moreover that "may deviate from the Constitution."

Is Iran Building Nuclear Weapons???

Who cares? I don't. Neither does Charley Reese. See Iran's Bomb.

Presumably, we didn't want Israel to have the bomb, but the Israelis built them anyway. Ditto Pakistan, India and North Korea. In the end, despite the hot rhetoric, if the Iranians want a bomb, they will probably end up building it.

I'm not one of those people who think the world will end with a nuclear explosion. There have been a lot of nuclear explosions. We dropped two on Japan, and all the nuclear powers tested their bombs in the atmosphere as well as underground. Despite the urban legends about plutonium, we are all still here. A nuclear weapon is, after all, a bomb, and like all bombs there is a limit to its radius of destruction. As Brother Dave Gardner put it, the place to be when a nuclear bomb goes off is wherever you can say, "What was that?"

Osama bin Laden

International terrorist, book critic.

Easy Money

This guy, Bill Bonner, writes some interesting financial articles from London I think. He also has a newsletter (I don't read it). Here are some gems from his recent article on LRC.

Last year, a new record was set for personal bankruptcies in the U.S. – more than two million people went broke.

In the last two weeks, the money supply has shot up $93.5 billion.

If you owe $12,000 on a credit card, dear reader, and you make minimum payments of 1% of principal each month, it will take you 30 years to pay off your debt. And you will have paid more than $17,000 in interest.

And now Iran says it will introduce a new oil market, calibrated in euros rather than dollars. Some people think this marks the beginning of the end for the dollar. Others think it marks the beginning of the end of civilization; the United States will use nuclear weapons if necessary, they say, to prevent Iran from selling oil in euros.

NFL PICKS

Divisional Playoffs: Straight Up 2-2 vs. Line 1-3
Season: Straight Up 169-95 vs. Line 125-133-6

CONFERENCE CHAMPIONSHIPS

@Denver -3 Pittsburgh
PIT/PIT

@Seattle -3.5 Carolina
SEA/CAR

Scarlett Johanson

Further proof of God's existence

Scandals

It seems D.C. is now more scandalous than The O.C. Not surprising says Ron Paul.

The only effective way to address corruption is to change the system itself, by radically downsizing the power of the federal government in the first place. Take away the politicians' power and you take away the very currency of corruption.

NFL PICKS

Wildcard Weekend: Straight Up 4-0 vs. Line 4-0
Season: Straight Up 167-93 vs. Line 124-130-6

DIVISIONAL PLAYOFFS

@Seattle -9.5 Washington
SEA/WAS

@Denver -3 New England
NE/NE

@Indianapolis -9.5 Pittsburgh
IND/IND

@Chicago -2.5 Carolina
CAR/CAR

Stupid in America

Don't miss John Stossel's Stupid in America tonight on 20/20 on ABC at 9pm Central. It's nice to have at least one Libertarian on a major network.

Investing in 2006

by Mark Thornton

If you don't feel like reading this short article, I'll sum it up in two words: BUY GOLD.

For those who invested in oil and gold it was a good financial year, with gold stocks up 25% and energy stocks up 40%. In contrast, the major stock indexes did poorly with the S&P 500 up 3%, the NASDAQ Composite up 1.4%, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average down 0.6%.

Here is Mark's system for buying gold. I've heard of other people using this system too. Sounds good to me.

1. Save up some money.
2. Buy some gold mining stocks or precious metal mutual funds.
3. After the stocks or mutual funds appreciate, sell some and use the profits to buy gold coins.

Remember, nobody ever went broke buying gold. And if you can't afford gold, buy silver, the poor man's gold.

Congratulations Horns

Enjoy it while you can.

Griffin on the Liberty Dollar

G. Edward Griffin, who wrote The Creature from Jekyll Island, answers a very common question about the Liberty Dollar.

Why do you support the American Liberty Dollar when there is such a large difference between its price and the underlying silver? Click here to see his analysis.

BTW, the Creature is probably the best book ever written about the history of money and banking and it's one of the main reasons Bernard von NotHaus invented the Liberty Dollar.

NFL PICKS - WILDCARD WEEKEND

Week 17: Straight Up 10-6 vs. Line 4-12
Season: Straight Up 163-93 vs. Line 120-130-6

WILDCARD WEEKEND

@Tampa Bay -1.5 Washington
WAS/WAS

@New England -7.5 Jacksonville
NE/NE

@NY Giants -2.5 Carolina
CAR/CAR

Pittsburgh -3 @Cincinnati
PIT/PIT

Google World Takeover Con't

Now an operating system? Oh snap.

Google will unveil its own low-price personal computer or other device that connects to the Internet.

Sources say Google has been in negotiations with Wal-Mart Stores Inc., among other retailers, to sell a Google PC. The machine would run an operating system created by Google, not Microsoft's Windows, which is one reason it would be so cheap — perhaps as little as a couple of hundred dollars.

The Best of LRC 2005

The 10 most popular articles from LewRockwell.com for 2005.