TRACY R. TWYMAN

Invisible Hand Episode 17: Interview with Rich N Famous of BYBBTY

twyman — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 09:44:35 +0000

This episode of The Invisible Hand features my recent interview with Rich N Famous of BYBBTY (Because Your Body Belongs to You), a group that advocates for the right for individuals to profit from the sale of their own organs.

Also, here are some of the news stories included in this edition of the podcast:

On Thursday the Senate approved the Restoring American Financial Stability Act of 2010. Weighing in at over 1400 pages and 390,000 words, it is being called the most sweeping overhaul of the financial services industry since the Great Depression of the 1930s. It creates ten new regulatory agencies to oversee virtually every conceivable form of financial transaction, from derivatives trading on Wall Street to the fees associated with debit card purchases and ATM withdrawals. There will even be a new agency called the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protections, which will be part of the Federal Reserve.
For all this, it is amazing to note that there are very few actual new policies in the bill. Rather it is mostly an enormous transfer of power from private industry, local governments, and the elected US Congress to unelected appointees at newly-created bureaucracies which will then be tasked with restructuring the US economy and creating new regulations for everyone to follow. According to the Wall Street Journal, the White House has issued a statement claiming that this will put a stop to bank bailouts, even though it is supported by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, and Former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, the three men who forced Congress to pass the bailouts in the first place.

The paper quoted Paulson as saying, “The new tools in this legislation will help mitigate and manage the next financial crisis, which is inevitable, probably within the next six to 10 years.” This echoes the statement by Senator Christopher Dodd, reported by the Associated Press, that “It will take the next economic crisis, as certainly it will come, to determine whether or not the provisions of this bill will actually provide this generation or the next generation of regulators with the tools necessary to minimize the effects of that crisis.”
If a new financial crisis is to start in 6 years, it may come just as we finally begin to recover from the present crisis. That from the Federal Reserve, whose recently-released meeting minutes, according to the London Telegraph revealed that the central bank predicts the US will not regain its fiscal footing until 2016. The minutes indicate that the Fed will soon be massively inflating the money supply again in another desperate attempt to spark stimulus. News of this immediately sent the dollar plummeting against the pound and the euro. This also comes as a new sovereign debt credit rating agency based in China has downgraded the US rating from AAA to AA.
Does your butt look big? The government wants to know. CNS News reports that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has created a new federal regulation stating that the approximate body mass index (BMI) of every American shall be recorded and stored as part of their “electronic health record (EHR), which will be available to healthcare providers on a national exchange by 2014. The EHRs were created by a new law tucked into the economic stimulus bill signed by Barack Obama in 2009. The BMI will be calculated automatically after recording the person’s weight and height, and will be used by government, health industry workers, and insurance companies to determine if a person is overweight, and what diseases he or she might be prone to. The law stipulates that doctors and hospitals must use the new record system by 2014 or lose federal subsidies.
The National Guard has announced the creation of eight new “homeland response force units” to be established in 2012. An article from the American Forces Press Service states that this is part of a “restructuring of the nation’s chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and high-yield explosive consequence management enterprise.” These units will be assigned to eight different interstate regions, and will be able to “cross state lines when needed” for “locating and extracting victims from a contaminated environment, performing mass patient/casualty decontamination, and providing medical treatment as necessary to stabilize patients for evacuation.”
A new article from the Global Post examines India’s policy of providing financial incentives for sterilization operations in an effort to meet the “Millennium Development Goals” set for them by the United Nations, which demands that India reduce its birth rate to 2 children per mother by 2015. Presently, a full 37% of India’s female population has undergone sterilization, and 1% of the male population has undergone vasectomies. Critics warn that the procedures are often done in unsanitary conditions, with many women dying during the operation, and that women who are sterilized early in life are at increased risk for gynecological health problems. Most of those targeted for sterilization are poor villagers, who are deemed too ignorant to use less dangerous temporary birth control solutions. Each operation is worth tens of thousands of rupees for all of the participants involved, including the doctors, the hospitals, and the patients. Advocates say that this policy is consensual and thus more ethical than the Indian government’s policy in the 1970s of forcing vasectomies on men with two or more children.

Invisible Hand Episode 16: Interview with Michael Shanklin

twyman — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 14:03:17 +0000

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This episode of The Invisible Hand features my recent interview with Michael Shanklin. Mr. Shanklin is an activist for Libertarianism and Austrian Economics who has a weekly podcast at BlogTalkRadio, and frequently writes for several websites, including PeaceFreedomProsperity.com and shanklinmike.blogspot.com.

Also, here are some of the news stories included in this edition of the podcast:

The Washington Post reports that, for the first time ever, the United States has opened itself up to a full-scale review of its financial sector by the International Monetary Fund, something that is routine for other G20 members, but which the US has always refused in the past. The results are what the paper describes as “a bitter pill”, as the IMF strongly criticized the government’s debt-to-income ratio, recommending that the latter be sharply increased while dramatically decreasing the former. Specific steps suggested by the organization included decreasing social security payments, increasing fuel taxes, and eliminating income tax deductions for home buyers.
The report comes as President Obama has recently promised the G20 group, at their meeting in Toronto, that he was committed to cutting the budget deficit in half by just 2013, something the IMF doubts will be possible, according to their report. Officials from the Obama administration downplayed the accuracy of the report, claiming that it was overly bearish on the future of the US economy. Speaking off the record, one official told the Washington Post that the IMF’s figures were “overly pessimistic” compared with those of independent analysts hired by the administration. One of the reasons for the divergence in opinion stems from the fact that the IMF is assuming for their purposes that the US will have to borrow money at a higher interest rate in the future because of a lowered credit rating, which the President’s projections do not include.
Gordon T. Long of Market Oracle is warning of a new credit crisis if BP files for bankruptcy which could be greater than that caused by the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008. This is because of BP’s activities as a provider of credit, and their involvement in the global over-the-counter derivatives market. Since BP has historically been a cash-generating giant, it has been able to borrow tremendous amounts of money at low interest and loan it out for higher interest. According to Moody’s, the bankruptcy of BP, or any of the other companies and subsidiaries involved in the oil spill, could affect a full 18% of the total global market of Collateralized Synthetic Obligations.
BP has already been dropped to BBB by the credit rating agency, while two other companies connected to the Deepwater Horizon disaster, Transocean and Anadarko, were recently downgraded from “stable” to “negative.” The article on Market Oracle noted that BP has recently been “aggressively repositioning trillions of dollars in global currency, swap, derivative, options, debt, and equity portfolios,” and that major banks, like Bank of America, have significantly shifted their BP holdings lately, all of which indicates a potentially seismic “credit event” is about to unfold. The article quotes an analyst named Jim Sinclair as saying “God only knows how many assets around the planet are dependent on credit and finance extended from BP. It is likely to dwarf any banking entity in multiples.”
Knight Ridder reports that the Legislative Assembly of Costa Rica has voted 31-8 to allow the US to deploy 7000 marines to “circulate the country in uniform without any restrictions,” along with dozens of warships and submarines that will be sent to the area. The purpose is allegedly for “anti-narcotics operations and humanitarian missions.” The operations are set to take place now through the end of December. The dissenting votes came from opposition parties who complained of a loss of domestic sovereignty, disproportionate force, and the potential of collateral damage from the operations. Some websites, including Survivalist News and WeLoveCostaRica.com, have suggested that this is being done to move troops currently stationed at US Southern Command or SOUTHCOM, based in Miami. Both websites speculated that the US military is trying to quietly evacuate military assets from the Gulf of Mexico due to fears for the health and safety of the personnel.
the Daily Mail is reporting that an airport in China was closed on July 9th because of a UFO sighting. Several dozen flights were diverted as a strange lighted vehicle with a bright comet-like plume trailing behind it was spotted in the sky by several residents, many of whom were able to photograph it. According to the paper, “some Chinese experts claimed that the strange sight was actually debris from a US intercontinental ballistic missile.” Officials for the Chinese government later disclosed that the object was known to them, but that they couldn’t discuss further details because of a “military connection.”

Invisible Hand Episode 13: Interview with John David van Hove, a.k.a. “Johnny Liberty”

twyman — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 09:14:32 +0000

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This episode of The Invisible Hand features my recent interview with John David Van Hove, a.k.a. “Johnny Liberty.” Van Hove is an author, educator, researcher, business developer, and public speaker on many topics, including sovereignty, freedom, liberty, history, law, economics, money, leadership, and the true nature of power. He is also the founder of the Institute for Communications Resources, which aims at building local, regional, and global resource center networks that facilitate the emerging consciousness of sustainability and freedom. More information about that can be found at icresource.com. Mr. Van Hove is also the author of a notable work called The Global Sovereign’s Handbook, and also one of the co-founders of the Cascadia Hours alternative monetary exchange that we discussed a couple of weeks ago when I interviewed John Poling.

Liberty Cap Press will be facilitating a lecture by Van Hove called “A Vision for a New America”, which will take place on Friday, July 2nd at 7:30 PM at the Kenton Masonic Lodge in Portland, Oregon. Tickets are just $15, and those who purchase tickets online in advance will receive a free booklet written by me, Tracy R. Twyman, called Corporate Frankenstein, which I am personally offering as a free gift exclusively to these people. It’s a gesture on my part, and in no way means that John David Van Hove endorses anything that I’ve said in this essay. It’s just my own thoughts after conducting my own research. These booklets will be autographed and hand-numbered, and you’ll receive yours when you arrive at the venue.

Also, here are some of the news stories included in this edition of the podcast:

Russian President Medvedev is once again pushing for a new global reserve currency, and he wants the Russian ruble to be a major part of the basket of currencies that backs it. As reported by Bloomberg News, Medvedev spoke to the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum on June 18th, where he said: “Only three, five years ago it seemed like a fantasy to create a new reserve currency. Now we are seriously discussing it.” He said that talks with China on the subject are continuing as Russia also continues the process of divesting itself of US treasury bonds. The Russian President made headlines at a G20 meeting in 2009 when he presented the delegates with a sample gold coin that he proposed as the design for the new currency. Stamped upon it were the words: “Unity in Diversity: United Future World Currency.” Mevedev also told the audience in St. Petersberg that, “We really live at a unique time, and we should use it to build a modern, prosperous and strong Russia… that will be a co-founder of the new world economic order.”
European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso has warned that Spain, Greece and Portugal will fall into the hands of dictators, and that democracy will disappear, if they do not immediately implement the austerity measures recommended by the International Monetary Fund to tackle their debt problems. This, the Daily Mail reports, came out just as information was being leaked to the press about an EU bailout plan for Spain that will run into the hundreds of billions of Euros. The article pointed out that Spain and Portugal were ruled by dictatorships well into the 1970s, while Greece fell victim to a military coup in 1967 that ousted the monarch, Constantine II, and lasted until a democratic revolution in 1975. A colleague of Barroso’s, John Monks, told the Daily Mail that Barroso had said to him privately: “Look, if they do not carry out these austerity packages, these countries could virtually disappear in the way that we know them as democracies. They’ve got no choice, this is it.”
US authorities want drones to fly over the skies of US cities, just like in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they’re pressuring the Federal Aviation Administration to approve it. The AP reported this week that the FAA has been asked by state police departments, local police departments, and Homeland Security to issue flying rights for unmanned aircraft for a wide range of uses, including law enforcement. The drones range in size from a small airliner to the size of a bird, capable of flying through a window. Police want to be able to use them to chase fleeing suspects, and to photograph speeding motorists. But the FAA has been reluctant to approve them so far due to concern about possible collisions and other safety hazards. Hank Krakowski, head of air traffic operations, is quote by the AP as saying: “There is a tremendous pressure … to fly unmanned aircraft… We are having constant conversations and discussions, particularly with the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security…”
A letter sent from Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal to Defense Secretary Robert Gates and posted on the governor’s website reveals that the National Guard is preparing to evacuate the communities along the Gulf coast impacted by the oil leak. The letter reads: “Currently, our Soldiers and Airmen are staging for and are engaged in the planning of the effort to evacuate and provide security and clean up for the coastal communities expected to be impacted by the oil spill… I believe these National Guard operations are necessary and appropriate to protect this region of our nation from a significant national event with potential catastrophic loss of natural resources.” This threatens to become a repeat of some of the worst human rights abuses that occurred during Hurricane Katrina, when the National Guard forced thousands to evacuate at gunpoint, confiscating their weapons and insisting that they abandon their pets to starvation, and their property to looters. Hopefully that will not occur in this instance.
The Department of the Interior is being accused of changing a report on recommendations made by scientific experts on offshore oil drilling from the National Academy of Engineering after obtaining their signatures on the document. McClatchy Newspapers reports that the original report recommended that new exploratory drilling at depths beyond 1000 feet should be temporarily halted for six months while further research on safety is conducted. However, the final document released by the Interior Department recommended that all new drills from floating rigs be banned for 6 months. Texas oil consultant Ken Allen told McClatchy that this may actually increase the probability of more spills, as companies will be working to obtain more oil from the existing wells and that this may lead to more risky practices.

Invisible Hand Episode 12: Interview with Delia Lopez

twyman — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 09:25:32 +0000

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This episode of The Invisible Hand features my recent interview with Delia Lopez, the Republican Party nominee for US Congressional District 3 in Oregon, which includes Portland. Delia is a libertarian Ron Paul-style “small r republican” who supports states’ rights, ending the Federal Reserve, pulling back from global empire, legalizing cannabis, and freeing domestic food production from the death grips of both the federal government and corporate monopolies.

Also, here are some of the news stories included in this edition of the podcast:

The mainstream media is now fully awoken to the fact that the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is way more than just a single leak. BP now says they’ll have the leak down to “a relative trickle” in a few days through the construction of relief wells. But now Senator Bill Nelson of Florida, fueled by reports from scientists, has suggested that the well casing underneath the ocean floor may have ruptured, in one or several other places, and that oil is leaking through the sea bed. This would explain at least partially the gigantic, several miles long underwater oil plumes that have formed which don’t appear to be issuing directly from the known leak site. Last week, anonymous sources cited as “BP officials” were quoted by the Washington Post as saying that the ruptures were discovered during Top Kill, the recent attempt to plug the leak with mud. The quote read:
“We discovered things that were broken in the subsurface, and that the mud being pushed into the well to prevent oil from coming out was making it out to the side…”

There is now a fear that any additional attempts to plug the well will create too much pressure underneath and cause a “underground blowout,” which would lead to what oil industry expert Bob Cavnar calls “uncontrolled flow to the sea floor … the doomsday scenario.” In a way, this may explain what some commentators have noted, which is BP’s desire to come up with solutions that keep the oil flowing rather than capping it. While it has been suggested that this is because they want to make the best of their investment so that they can continue selling oil from it, which only makes sense, it may also be that capping it would cause a blowout, or at the very least just cause the oil to come out from the other leak points in greater quantity. Here’s Cavnar on Countdown with Keith Olbermann explaining the danger.
Ben Bernanke is reportedly confused about the recent surge in the price of gold. The Chairman of the Federal Reserve has presided over an exponential increase in the supply of US dollars throughout the world, and is directly responsible for essentially forcing the federal government to vastly increase its sovereign debt by bailing out failing banks and failing European countries. He has seen the Moody’s credit rating agency threaten to downgrade the US because of our debt to income ratio, and he knows that the US dollar, just like the Euro and several other currencies, is on the brink of total collapse because of this. Yet he claims to not understand the inverse relationship between the price of gold and the value of the dollar, which is directly related to the size of the money supply and our debt to income ratio. Bernanke, who, prior to his appointment as Fed chairman, actually supported a return to the gold standard, is quoted by the Wall Street Journal as saying “I don’t fully understand movements in the gold price.”

Perhaps this is because he didn’t take into account the effect created by recent revelations of gold market manipulation and gold counterfeiting coming from the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee. This group has accused the US central bank, along with JP Morgan Chase, the International Monetary Fund, and the London Bullion Market Association, of colluding to suppress the price of gold and silver. Stories of vaults of gold-plated tungsten bars and gold sellers leveraging their clients holdings by 100 to 1 (in other words maintaining a fractional reserve of 1 actual gold bar for every 100 sold to gullible clients) has caused gold bugs to demand their bullion in hand. This is causing a dramatic market squeeze and driving up prices at just the wrong time for the Federal Reserve, which relies on gold market suppression to prop up the value of the dollar. Perhaps what Mr. Bernanke is confused about is how quickly the whole scheme is unraveling.
Japan may be one of the next countries on the brink of economic collapse. The country’s new Prime Minister and former finance minister Naoto Kan was recently quoted by Business Insider as saying that, “As we can see from the eurozone confusion that started in Greece, there is a risk of default if growing public debt is neglected and trust lost in the bond market.”
This follows the patterns set by Greece and Hungary, in which a new government comes into power, immediately announces that the previous administration has run the country’s finances into the ground, and implements strict austerity measures in accordance with dictates laid out by the International Monetary Fund. On Friday, Japan’s banking minister, Shizuka Kamei, who had advocated loose spending and monetary policy, resigned under pressure from the new administration Columbia University professor Gerald Curtis is quoted by the Manila Bulletin Publishing Association as saying, ”It’s a good thing, because Kamei was constantly baiting the prime minister and undermining the authority of the office.” Now Kan will be free to forge ahead with his austerity plans.
The Pentagon is hunting for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, whom they believe to be in possession of sensitive State Department intraoffice memos about diplomatic relations with Iraq and Afghanistan. The Daily Beast reports that the documents were leaked by Army intelligence specialist Bradley Manning, now in custody in Kuwait. Manning also claims to be the source that leaked the now-infamous video of US soldiers in Iraq fatally shooting Reuters reporters, and the family of civilians who stopped to help them.

Mr. Assange lives a life of international intrigue and mystery, and never stays in one place for very long. His current whereabouts are unknown, but he recently cancelled a speaking engagement at the International Reporters and Editors conference in Las Vegas that was scheduled for Friday June 11th.

Assange has denied possessing the State Department cables. A communique sent out via Assange’s Twitter account recently stated “Any signs of unacceptable behavior by the Pentagon or its agents towards this press will be viewed dimly.” According to the Daily Beast, this was taken by Pentagon officials as a threat to release the documents on Wikileaks if they get too pushy.
Mysterious sinkholes are appearing all over the nation of China, and it’s scaring people. China’s state-run news agency Xinhua recently ran the headline “Cave-ins found in many areas of China.” The article noted several cases that have occurred over the last year in which large, very deep, and perfectly-circular holes have been formed by a sudden collapse, most recently on Zhejiang Huang Qu Nan Highway on June 4. This follows the recent appearance of similar holes in rice fields and on hill tops, including the sudden collapse of an entire pond into a giant abyss.
Daily Telegraph correspondent Peter Foster noted the similarity between these holes and that which recently swallowed a three-story building in Guatemala at the end of May this year after Tropical Storm Agatha. While the hole in Guatemala was blamed on the storm officially, unofficially many are still puzzled about why it is so large and symmetrical, and the internet is abuzz with talk of HAARP, underground flying saucers, earth changes caused by Planet Nibiru and/or the end of the Mayan calendar, and even the opening of the very gates of Hell.

In his blog post on the Telegraph website, Peter Foster mentioned the sudden appearance of giant craters in the Earth in last year’s disaster movie 2012, in which changes in solar activity cause a pole shift on Earth, leading to major crustal displacement, effectively ending all life on the planet. But in the film, China is the place where a small contingent of specially-chosen elite humans flee to safety in “arks,” built in secret with the cooperation of the world’s governments.