Max Keiser

Below is a link to an excellent hour long interview with Max Keiser on Bonnie Faulkner’s Guns and Butter.

Countdown to Currency Collapse

Although Keiser, a former Wall Street broker (and fellow expatriate living in France), is extremely knowledgeable about Wall Street and global banking, I find his own programs on RT and Press TV a little frustrating because they are usually limited to a brief overview and tend to be full of quantum leaps.

Faulkner is a superb interviewer and is great at pinning him down when he doesn’t explain himself clearly. Although he makes several points I disagree with, the interview provides an excellent overview of all the factors contributing to an extremely unstable global economy.

Keiser makes an analogy between the current precarious position of global currency and an impending avalanche. All it will take is one snowflake, one minor financial crisis somewhere, and the whole house of cards will come tumbling down. This relates in part to hundreds of trillions of dollars of worthless money that has been created as government debt, but even more to trillions of dollars of speculative derivatives created by investment banks since 2008.

J.P Morgan Chase isn’t the only investment bank that’s technically insolvent (i.e. that has more debt on their books than assets). They all are. And because industrial society is totally dependent on private banks to create the money we exchange for goods and service, the whole economy will collapse when they do.

Keiser seems to think a hyperinflation event (like they had in post-World War I Germany and recently in Zimbabwe) is most likely. George Soros and other billionaires and millionaires (and China) seem to agree, which is why they’re dumping their stocks like mad to buy gold. He also reports that China is dumping their US Treasury Bills and dollar reserves.

Historically people have used gold to buy groceries when their money becomes worthless. I’m not sure hoarding gold will work this time – not when grocery shelves are empty due to the global food (and water) crisis.

Keiser says it’s difficult to predict the exact timing of the collapse. He identifies April 2013 as a potential date, as US income tax returns are due April 15^th. He predicts the abysmal tax take will cause the dollar to collapse. I question this reasoning, as only a tiny fraction of Americans wait till April to pay their taxes. The IRS requires employers to submit withholding taxes on a monthly basis, whereas self-employed Americans are required to submit quarterly estimated payments.

My favorite part of the interview is where Keiser predicts the collapse of the US military – which burns as much oil as most countries – when gasoline hits $12 a gallon.

According to Brendan Fischer of PR Watch, Marcus Owens, former chief of the Internal Revenue’s non-profit division has just filed a complaint with the IRS that the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has violated the terms of its nonprofit status by lobbying on behalf of its corporate members. Owens is a nationally recognized expert on nonprofit tax law. He filed the complaint on behalf of Clergy VOICE, a group of Christian ministers in Ohio.

ALEC is an organization composed of conservative thinkers, state legislators of both parties, corporations dedicated to drafting to draft research, policy papers and model legislation to assist and influence state legislatures and promote free-market and conservative ideas. Until recently, most major American corporations belonged to it.

ALEC and Florida’s Stand Your Ground Law

Over the past six months, ALEC has received a lot of negative publicity regarding specific model laws they have written. The Florida “Stand Your Ground Law,” which George Zimmerman invoked after shooting and killing Treyvon Martin, the unarmed black teenager, is the most notable. ALEC is also responsible for drafting anti-union legislation in Wisconsin, Ohio and Indiana to limit collective bargaining rights of public sector unions, as well as Arizona’s anti-immigration law. They are also the driving force behind efforts to privatize the US post office.

The model laws ALEC writes often benefit the financial interests of its corporate members, which Owens emphasizes in his complaint. He gives the example of the asbestos liability act, which specifically shields ALEC member Crown Holdings from asbestos liability claims, and the Drug Liability Act, which benefits ALEC member pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer and Merck by protecting them from lawsuits when their products injure or kill patients.

Owens Demands Criminal Penalties

In his complaint, Owens notes that ALEC and those who helped prepare ALEC’s deceptive IRS filings are liable to civil penalties, fines, and potentially criminal charges. ALEC could also be stripped of its tax-exempt status. This is because ALEC has deliberately lied, under penalty of perjury, in completing their annual IRS Form 990 about lobbying and payments to state officials. They claimed to have spent zero dollars on lobbying, as well as denying any payments to state officials. Both are blatantly untrue.

The IRS is still processing two prior complaints about ALEC lobbying in violation of its nonprofit charity status. The Campaign for Media Democracy filed one in March, and in April Common Cause filed a “whistleblower” complaint based on similar charges.

Read more here: http://www.prwatch.org/node/11627