CHS & nsnbc,- A proposal to annually vaccinate 25 million infants in India could potentially  prevent 175 deaths from Hib meningitis over the course of 5 years. The lives of 175 children are important. 

The incidence of invasive Hib disease is low in India which makes it difficult to justify introducing Hib vaccination. Additionally, the WHO has also been promoting a new form of Hib vaccine which has caused deaths in a large number of children. The WHO vaccine has increased the price of DPT 30 fold.

Vaccination Needles, Photo Victorg.India

Beside these primary concerns,the programs are controversial because in resource impoverished areas, money spent on vaccinating 25 million infants could be spent on programs for providing safe water.  These programs could save many hundreds of thousand of lives.

So far, 21 have so far died in India in a limited experiment with the vaccine. Last week the Vietnamese Government´s Drug Regulatory Authority stopped the new form of vaccine – a Pentavalent vaccine – after the vaccine caused nine death.

The new vaccine was introduced because vaccine uptake for the previous vaccine has been poor.  The new vaccine is a combination vaccine; a Pentavalent vaccine.  This vaccine combines Hib and Hepatitis B vaccine with the widely used DPT vaccine. The vaccine is not licensed for use in the West but is promoted in Asia.

The Minz Study, a comprehensive, 2-years study sponsored by the WHO, found an incidence of Hib meningitis of  7/100000 children under-five.  The figure for a saving of 175 deaths in 5 years is suggested by a mortality of 10%.

The article by Padmanabhan Ramachandran and colleagues available here suggests:

1.       Hib was found to be the predominant cause of bacterial meningitis in young children.  Hib meningitis was responsible for 58% to 74% of children with abnormalities in the Cerebro Spinal Fluid, CSF.

2.       41% in Vellore are immunized against Hib and that is why the proportion of Hib was 58% here compared to 74% elsewhere.

3.       Hib accounted for 70% of bacteriologically confirmed meningitis.

An invited commentary accompanying the article is entitled

“Making a case for universal Hib immunization in India: over interpreting the data.”

1.       It shows that the Hib antigen was detected only in 8.75 per cent of patients with an abnormal CSF cytology and not 74% or 58% as suggested in the article.

2.   There were only 7 cases of Hib meningitis in Vellore and one was vaccinated. The incidence of meningitis among those vaccinated in Vellore was not statistically different from those unvaccinated.

3. The Latex agglutination Test (LATS) used by the study to detect the cause of meningitis, picks up 93% cases of Hib but only 39% Neisseria meningitides. Thus LATS cannot be used to look at the relative incidence of different causes of meningitis.

Conflict of Interests

The commentary says that one of the authors has a declared conflict of interest. Quoting Als-Nielsen and colleagues the reviewer says such conflict of interests has little impact on the results or data reported but it influenced the interpretation of the results and the conclusions drawn. “The fact that the data are not impacted by conflicts of interest provides persuasive reason to publish the figures from large trials such as this, regardless of the declared conflicts of interests. Publication allows data to be put out in the public domain. It can be interpreted by the scientific community, separately from the interpretations of the authors. Discerning readers and decision makers can use the data provided for health policy, based on sound cost–benefit calculations”

Via CHS edited by nsnbc

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Bill Gates’ Polio Vaccine Program Caused 47,500 Cases of Paralysis Death

One of his early achievements was to dispose of the myth of immigrant crime by demonstrating that “Hispanics have approximately the same crime rates as whites of the same age and gender.” You can imagine the uproar, but Unz won the debate.

Unz provoked and prevailed in another controversy when he concluded that Mexican-Americans have approximately the same innate intelligence as whites, with their lower IQs being due to transitory socio-economic deprivation.

He next surprised by showing the connection between the declining real value of the minimum wage (about one-third less than in the 1960s) and immigration. Americans cannot survive on one-third less minimum income than four decades ago, and the unfilled jobs are taken by Hispanics who live many to the room. A higher minimum wage, Unz pointed out, would cure the illegal immigration problem as American citizens would fill the jobs.

I wrote about some of Unz’s remarkable findings. One of my favorites is his comparison of the responsiveness of the Chinese and US governments to their publics. I found his conclusion convincing that the authoritarian one-party Chinese government was more responsive to the Chinese people than democratic two-party Washington is to the American people.

The person is rare who can take on such controversial issues in such a professional way that he wins the admiration even of his critics. In my opinion, Ron Unz is a national resource. He has established online libraries of important periodicals and magazines from the pre-Internet era, information that otherwise essentially would be lost. I have not met him, but he donates to this site and is an independent thinker free of The Matrix.

Unz’s latest article, “Our American Pravda,”http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/our-american-pravda/ is a striking account of the failure of media, regulatory, and national security organizations and subsequent coverups that leave the public deceived. Unz uses the Iraq war as one example:

“The circumstances surrounding our Iraq War demonstrate this, certainly ranking it among the strangest military conflicts of modern times. The 2001 attacks in America were quickly ascribed to the radical Islamists of al-Qaeda, whose bitterest enemy in the Middle East had always been Saddam Hussein’s secular Baathist regime in Iraq. Yet through misleading public statements, false press leaks, and even forged evidence such as the “yellowcake” documents, the Bush administration and its neoconservative allies utilized the compliant American media to persuade our citizens that Iraq’s nonexistent WMDs posed a deadly national threat and required elimination by war and invasion. Indeed, for several years national polls showed that a large majority of conservatives and Republicans actually believed that Saddam was the mastermind behind 9/11 and the Iraq War was being fought as retribution. Consider how bizarre the history of the 1940s would seem if America had attacked China in retaliation for Pearl Harbor.

“True facts were easily available to anyone paying attention in the years after 2001, but most Americans do not bother and simply draw their understanding of the world from what they are told by the major media, which overwhelmingly—almost uniformly—backed the case for war with Iraq; the talking heads on TV created our reality. Prominent journalists across the liberal and conservative spectrum eagerly published the most ridiculous lies and distortions passed on to them by anonymous sources, and stampeded Congress down the path to war.

“The result was what my late friend Lt. Gen. Bill Odom rightly called the “greatest strategic disaster in United States history.” American forces suffered tens of thousands of needless deaths and injuries, while our country took a huge step toward national bankruptcy [and a police state]. Economics Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz and others have estimated that with interest the total long-term cost of our two recent wars may reach as high as $5 or $6 trillion, or as much as $50,000 per American household, mostly still unpaid. Meanwhile, economist Edward Wolff has calculated that the Great Recession and its aftermath cut the personal net worth of the median American household to $57,000 in 2010 from a figure nearly twice as high three years earlier. Comparing these assets and liabilities, we see that the American middle class now hovers on the brink of insolvency, with the cost of our foreign wars being a leading cause.

“But no one involved in the debacle ultimately suffered any serious consequences, and most of the same prominent politicians and highly paid media figures who were responsible remain just as prominent and highly paid today. For most Americans, reality is whatever our media organs tell us, and since these have largely ignored the facts and adverse consequences of our wars in recent years, the American people have similarly forgotten. Recent polls show that only half the public today believes that the Iraq War was a mistake.”

Unz covers a number of cases of criminality, treason, and coverups at high levels of government and points out that “these dramatic, well-documented accounts have been ignored by our national media.” One reason for “this wall of uninterest” is that both parties are complicit and thus equally eager to bury the facts.

Unz is raising the question of the efficacy of democracy. Does the way democracy works in America provide any more self-rule than in undemocratic regimes? He offers this example:

“Most of the Americans who elected Barack Obama in 2008 intended their vote as a total repudiation of the policies and personnel of the preceding George W. Bush administration. Yet once in office, Obama’s crucial selections—Robert Gates at Defense, Timothy Geither at Treasury, and Ben Bernake at the Federal Reserve—were all top Bush officials, and they seamlessly continued the unpopular financial bailouts and foreign wars begun by his predecessor, producing what amounted to a third Bush term.”

In an article not long ago, I raised the issue whether Americans live in The Matrix with their perceptions and thoughts controlled by disinformation as in George Orwell’s 1984.

Unz adds to this perspective. He tells the story of Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky’s plan to transform Russia into a make-believe two-party state complete with heated battles fought on divisive and symbolic issues. Behind the scenes the political elites would orchestrate the political battles between the parties with the purpose of keeping the population divided and funneling popular dissatisfaction into meaningless dead-end issues. In such a system, self-serving power prevails. After describing Berezovsky’s plot, Unz asks if Berezovsky got his idea from observing the American political scene.

Thinking further about the propagandistic nature of the US media, Unz writes:

“Individuals from less trusting societies are often surprised at the extent to which so many educated Americans tend to believe whatever the media tells them and ignore whatever it does not, placing few constraints on even the most ridiculous propaganda. For example, a commentator on my article described the East German media propaganda he had experienced prior to Reunification as being in many respects more factual and less totally ridiculous than what he now saw on American cable news shows. One obvious difference was that Western media was so globally dominant during that era that the inhabitants of the German Democratic Republic inevitably had reasonable access to a contrasting second source of information, forcing their media to be much more cautious in its dishonesty, while today almost any nonsense uniformly supported by the MSNBC-to-FoxNews spectrum of acceptable opinion remains almost totally unquestioned by most Americans.”http://www.theamericanconservative.com/american-pravda-reality-television/ 

Unz’s view of the US media as propagandists for power is consistent with that of John Pilger, one of the last remaining real journalists who refuses to serve power, and with Gerald Celente, who sums up the sordid American media in one word–”presstitutes.” I know from my own media experience that an independent print and TV media no longer exists in the West. The American media is a tightly controlled disinformation ministry.

Those few Americans who are free of the constraints imposed by dogmas on their ability to think and to process information have a huge responsibility for their small number. The assault on the rule of law began in the last years of the Clinton regime, but the real destruction of the US Constitution, the basis for the United States, was achieved by the neoconservative George W. Bush and Obama regimes. Wars without declarations by Congress, torture in violation of both US and international law, war crimes in violation of the Nuremberg standard, indefinite detention and assassination of US citizens without due process of law, universal spying on US citizens without warrants, federalization of state and local police now armed with military weapons and uniforms, detention centers, “your papers, please” (without the Gestapo “please”) not only at airports but also on highways, streets, bus terminals, train stations, and at sporting events.

On May 5 Obama gave the commencement address at Ohio State University. No doubt that the graduates thought that they were being honored by being addressed by the world’s greatest tyrant.

Obama told the graduating class, to applause, that their obligation as citizens is to trust the government. Outdoing George Orwell’s Big Brother, Obama said in public to a graduating class of a great university without shame: “You have grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as . . . some sinister entity that’s at the root of all our problems; some of these same voices also doing their best to gum up the works. They’ll warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices.”

Listen to my propaganda, not to those constitutional experts, legal authorities, and critics of me, the First Black President, who tell you to beware of unaccountable government. Due process is decided by the demands of the war on terror. If there is a war on terror, do you want a fair trial or do you want to be safe? I am going to make you safe by not giving defendants accused of terrorism, who some liberal-pinko-commie judge would set free, a fair trial.

Making you safe by enveloping you in a police state is a nonpartisan undertaking. Just listen to Lindsay Graham and Peter King and John McCain. These Republican leaders are demanding the police state that I am providing.

As my own legal department, The US Department Of Justice, decided, the Dictator, I mean, elected president, has the power to save the country from domestic and foreign terrorists by abrogating the US Constitution, an out-of-date document that binds our hands and prevents us from keeping you, our serfs and minions, I mean our cherished citizens, safe.

Trust me. That is your obligation as a US citizen. Trust me and I will make you free, happy, employed sometime later in this century when the Amerikan Empire controls the world.

The US Constitution was written by people who opposed Empire. These people were misguided, just like the Roman Republicans who did not understand the need for a Caesar. The American Empire, as the neoconservatives have made clear, is what keeps you free from terrorism. We have to kill them over there before they come over here. And those who are over here will be killed too. We tolerate no dissent. That part of the Constitution is gone, along with the rest of it.

Now give me my honorary doctorate, another sign of approval of my usurpation.

Paul Craig Roberts via The 4th Media

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. His latest book, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West is now available.

Related article on media maniulation:

Let’s Talk About Tiananmen Square, 1989 My Hearsay is Better Than Your Hearsay

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Yet, Western governments and their dysfunctional news media defy rational thinking – and the glaring truth – by referring to the perpetrators in one country in positive tones as “rebels” while in the other country the pejorative term “terrorists” is permitted in discourse. That is what you call “doublethink” – an absurd inability to see or tell the truth.

The file photo shows militants in Syria. Photo via Press TV

We are talking, of course, about Syria and Iraq – two countries that share so much of humanity’s heritage of ancient civilization – that are now each being ripped apart by mercenaries with guns and bombs who have no value for human life. It’s not just that the exact same heinous methodology of indiscriminate violence against civilians is being used in both countries. The protagonists of terror have themselves declared unity in organization, personnel, and ideology – the Al Nusra Front in Syria and al-Qaeda in Iraq.

So there’s no need to beat around the bush. These self-styled Jihadist groups are the ones waging war on Syria and Iraq. In Syria, the so-called Free Syrian Army that the West has elevated with grandiloquent nonsense is merely the window-dressing to prettify the cutthroats and rapists of Al Nusra/al-Qaeda.

But, laughably, the Western governments and media call the vile operators in Syria “rebels” and are busting to find a legal loophole by which they can begin overtly sending assault rifles, anti-aircraft missiles and anti-tank mines.

Meanwhile, in Iraq, the Western media report that violence is perpetrated by, well, “terrorists.” The way that this common violence is being reported in news bulletins – sometimes back-to-back this week – is an exercise in consummate doublethink and mental somersaulting. A bomb goes off in Baghdad and, plainly, it is terrorist. But a bomb goes off in Damascus, and it somehow is acceptable or at least excusable.

One can imagine the public paroxysm if Washington, London or Paris proposed to fund the al-Qaeda car bombers in Iraq or were soliciting for their participation in future political negotiations with the government in Baghdad. Even though that, in essence, is what the Western governments are proposing to do in Syria.

The only way that the Western governments and their servile media can square the circle of illogic (and immorality) on Syria and Iraq is by asserting without any foundation that the government of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria is illegitimate. For the past two years, the Western governments and their dutiful media have tried every trick to malign Assad and to traduce him as a despot who has no mandate from his people. But the problem for the Western regime-changers is that Assad has a mandate, and it is only the Syrian people who have the sovereign right to decide otherwise, when the country goes to national elections next year.

The risible quality about doublethink is that those who suffer from the condition cannot see how absurd they are.

Advocating the illegal Western regime-change agenda in Syria are the Persian Gulf dictatorships, which have never had an election in their entire history as artificial colonial states ruled by absolute despots and corrupt family cronies.

Furthermore, it is these Western-backed Persian Gulf tyrants who are behind the awful re-ignition of sectarian violence in Iraq, as they have been all along in Syria for the past two years.

Iraq’s violence has returned with a vengeance after some years of relative quiet. Last month saw some 700 people killed in bombings and shootings – the highest monthly death toll in five years and reminiscent of the sectarian bloodbath during the criminal American-led military occupation of that country between 2003-2012.

This week, more than 80 people were killed in Iraq on one day alone when 10 bombs blasted the capital, Baghdad, on Monday and two explosions ripped through the southern port city of Basra. As usual, no group claimed responsibility for the mass murder. But the callous killings have all the hallmarks of extremists operating under the franchise of al-Qaeda. The indiscriminate, no-warning bombings targeted mainly Shia Muslim districts.

As we know, al-Qaeda in Iraq, as in Syria and elsewhere, is driven by the extremist Wahhabi ideology, whose adherents view Shia as heretics with a pathological death wish.

Few people would claim that Iraq’s mainly Shia government of Nouri al-Maliki is perfect.

But the sectarian bloodlust and indiscriminate terrorism that has rebounded in Iraq is way out of proportion to any ostensible political grievance that the minority Sunni population may harbour against the mainly Shia central authorities in Baghdad.

As with Syria, the violence in Iraq is being driven by external forces with an agenda of subversion and regime change.

The common linkage here is the money, weapons, and Wahhabi ideology that is flowing from the Persian Gulf dictatorships of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates into Iraq and Syria.

During the American-led occupation of Iraq, the Saudis in particular were major sponsors of the Jihadist groups that gravitated under the rubric of al-Qaeda. That relationship goes back to the Saudi sponsoring of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan during the 1980s against the Soviet Union. American and British military intelligence also share in the creation of that terrorist network that has since become a global utility for Western powers, for example in destabilizing Libya or the Russian Caucasus – despite all the spurious rhetoric about “war on terror.”

That the Americans and the British military were confronted in Iraq partly by terror groups that they had previously engineered, and which their Saudi allies were sponsoring, is one of the ironic intrigues of blowback. But for the American and British ruling elite, they could hardly care less if some of their cannon-fodder troops were being killed and maimed when their corporate interests had one of world’s richest oil countries – Iraq – to gain. And besides the Western counterinsurgency doctrine of setting up counter terror gangs and sectarian conflict is a central part of imperial control and justification.

It is no secret, however, that the Saudis were not happy with the outcome of the American and British so-called nation-building (regime-change) project in Iraq, when the new governing apparatus that took over from Saddam Hussein reflected the majority Shia population.

That Saudi peevishness has only grown deeper since the American military departure at the end of 2011 and the Maliki government has shown some backbone in its foreign policy, by developing Iraqi cordial relations with Iran and Syria – all three of which share a common Shia heritage.

This is why the terrorist flames are consuming Iraq again. The Saudis and their Persian Gulf autocrats are trying to mould Syria, Iraq, and the region to suit their twisted agenda of sectarian control. We can be sure that Saudi and Qatari blood money is flowing again into Iraq since at least last year, fuelling the apparently mindless violence and attempting to turn Iraq into a failed state, as in Syria.

It is anathema to these illegitimate Persian Gulf despots for Iran to enjoy the regional kudos that it deserves based as it is on Tehran’s independence and democratic governance, vast energy resources, just foreign policy towards neighbours, and defiant resistance to Western imperialist aggression and in particular the Zionist garrison terror-state of Israel. That is why the insanely jealous and insecure Houses of Saud and Al Thani, which are nothing more than country-selling Western dependencies, want to tear down Syria and Iraq with the most despicable violence, chaos, and mayhem – to open up the bigger assault path on Iran.

That is ultimately, of course, exactly what the Western powers want as well. And to that end, these powers are content to unleash the hounds of hell across the Middle East. But, in order to conceal the obvious criminality of this regime-change project, the Western governments and their media have to indulge in the most absurd illusions. Hence Syria and Iraq, as indeed the entire Middle East, is a morass of Western duplicity and doublethink.

Finian Cunningham via PRESS TV

Related articles:

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The Syria War, Preventing a General War in the Middle East, Europe and Beyond ( 1/3)  

PKK Peace Offer; Phase Two of US/NATO Subversion of Syria, Iraq and Turkey

The figure was revealed by Interior Affairs Minister Miguel Rodriguez Torres while offering the first results of the government’s “Safe Homeland” plan, which was implemented in four areas of Caracas last week.

Soldiers of the FANB patrolling a sector of Greater Caracas (AVN)

The initiative involves members of the Bolivarian Armed Forces (FANB) patrolling communities which suffer the highest crime rates in conjunction with national and local police forces. 3,000 soldiers were deployed in last week’s pilot phase in the Venezuelan capital.

Torres suggested that the 55% homicide reduction, recorded in the Petare neighbourhood in Miranda state, gave “interesting signals” about the effectiveness of the “Safe Homeland” plan.

Crime has become a major issue in Venezuela over recent years, with UN statistics suggesting that the country has the third-highest homicide rate in the Americas, at 45.1 per 1000 inhabitants.

The government of President Nicolas Maduro has pledged to tackle crime and is pursuing a number of anti-crime initiatives including civilian disarmament strategies and the promotion of a community “movement for peace” in the country’s barrios, or poorer neighbourhoods.

Today the “Safe Homeland” plan is to be expanded to the states of Zulia, Lara and Carabobo, with 12,000 officers of the FANB participating.

President Maduro asked the population to “support” the measure, affirming on his twitter account yesterday that “Safe Homeland is the objective that we will achieve for the happiness of all”.

Ewan Robertson via Venezuelanalysis 

In a press release, the center demanded the Egyptian Authorities to open the terminal without any delays, and to refrain from involving the Palestinians in internal issues in Gaza and Egypt.

It also demanded providing the Palestinians, stuck on the terminal, with temporary shelter and the needed care, and added that the border crossing must be continuously operating as agreed upon during meetings and arrangements, and called for applying all related laws.

Egypt closed the Rafah Border Terminal more than four days ago, leaving 2400 Palestinians stuck on the crossing, and preventing thousands of Palestinians from leaving the coastal region.

The Rafah Terminal is the only crossing point that the Palestinians in Gaza can use when traveling abroad, due to the fact that Israel controls all other terminals, including commercial crossing in the Gaza Strip.

Saed Bannoura via IMEMC

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The migration is beginning today, 25 May and it may take us a couple of days before everything is completed. Until then you can eventually experience that we go off-line for a very brief period. I am sorry if it may cause you any inconvenience. It will only be for very brief periods.

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The vehicle’s licence plate corresponds to that of the Israeli military with a black background and the letter Tsade (צ) (see image below)

Images via Globalresearch

Al Qseir is a strategic border town on the Northern frontier of Lebanon. Occupied by rebels, it was taken back by Syrian forces on Monday.

Al-Qseir  controls the highway which runs from The Lebanese to Homs. It is through this border city that weapons and foreign mercenaries have entered Syria.

According to SANA, quoting (unconfirmed) media source:

“The seizure of an Israeli military vehicle which terrorists had been using in al-Qseir refutes the allegations made by Israel to justify its aggression on Syria and proves the scale of Israel’s military and intelligence involvements in the events in Syria.”

“The source said that the Israeli military support for the armed terrorist groups proves the involvement of Qatar, Turkey and Israel in the aggression on Syria which is waged through a single central operations room.

The source pointed out that the Israeli military support for terrorism in Syria proves once more that Israel was and still is adopting the policy of organized state terrorism, stressing that the world must act to confront this terrorism.

The source said that the questions raised by the seizure of the Israeli military vehicle and the surveillance and jamming equipment in al-Qseir show that the armed terrorist groups with all their different names are merely headlines for a single structure led by Israel, Qatar and Turkey.”  (SANA, May 20, 2013)

According to Press TV quoting Lebanese TV Station Al Mayeem

The Lebanese channel al-Mayadeen broadcast the video of the confiscated vehicle on Monday.

The report also said that military uniforms as well as wiretapping and jamming equipment were found in the vehicle, but it did not display the items.

The Syrian army has restored security in al-Qusayr in the central province of Homs, after taking back control of 50 percent of the city from foreign-backed militants.

The army said it has killed two militant commanders during the operation in the strategic city, which is located near the border with Lebanon.

Fierce battles are still going on in the city as the Syrian army continues its operations there, while large numbers of militants abandon their weapons and flee the city.

The Syrian army entered the strategic city from every front on Sunday following weeks of battle.

The Syrian army says it has also found Israeli-made rockets in a weapons cache seized from militants in Homs province.(Press TV, May 20, 2013)

The issue of the vehicle requires confirmation.

The capture of an Israeli military vehicle does not in itself confirm the involvement of Israeli forces. Israeli registered military vehicles would not normally be used in covert operations by Israeli special forces.

Michel Chossudovsky contributed to this report.

Via Global Reaserch News

My explanation that the sudden appearance of an unprecedented 400 ton short sale of gold on the COMEX in April was a manipulation designed to protect the dollar from the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing policy has found acceptance among gold investors and hedge fund managers.

The sale was a naked short. The seller had no gold to sell. COMEX reported having gold only equal to about half of the short sale in its vaults, and not all of that was available for delivery. No one but the Federal Reserve could have placed such an order, and the order came from one of the Fed’s bullion banks, one of the entities “too big to fail.”

Bill Kaye of the Greater Asian Hedge Fund in Hong Kong and Dave Kranzler of Golden Returns Capital have filled in the details of how the manipulation worked. Being sophisticated investors of many years of experience, both Kaye and Kranzler understand that the financial press runs with the authorized story planted to serve the agenda that has been put into play.

Institutional investors who have bullion in their portfolio do not want the expense associated with storing it securely. Instead, they buy into Exchange Traded Funds (ETF) and hold their bullion in the form of a paper claim. The largest, the SPDR Gold Trust or GLD, trades on the New York Stock Exchange. The trustee and custodian is a bankster, and only other banksters are able to turn investments into delivery of physical bullion. Only shares in the amount of 100,000 can be redeemed in gold.

The price of bullion is not set in the physical market where individuals take delivery of bullion purchases. It is set in the paper futures market where short selling can drive down the price even if the demand for physical possession is rising. The paper gold market is also the market in which people speculate and leverage their positions, place stop-loss orders, and are subject to margin calls.

When the enormous naked shorts hit the COMEX, stop-loss orders were triggered adding to the sales, and margin calls forced more sales. Investors who were not in on the manipulation lost a lot of money.

The sales of GLD shares are accumulated by the banksters in 100,000 lots and presented to GLD for redemption in gold acquired at the driven down price.

The short sale is leveraged by the stop-loss triggers and margin calls, and results in a profit for the banksters who placed the short sell order. The banksters then profit again as they sell the released gold into the physical market, especially in Asia, where demand has been stimulated by the sharp drop in bullion price and by the loss of confidence in fiat currency. Asian prices are usually at a higher premium above the spot prices in New York-London.

Some readers have said “don’t bet against the Federal Reserve; the manipulation can go on forever.” But can it? As the ETFs such as GLD are drained of gold, their ability to cover any of their obligations to investors diminishes. In my opinion, these ETFs are like a fractional reserve banking system. The claims on gold exceed the amount of gold in the trusts. When the ETFs are looted of their gold by the banksters, the gold price will explode, as the claims on gold will greatly exceed the supply.

Kranzler reports that the current June futures contracts are 12.5 times the amount of deliverable gold. If more than 8 percent of these trades were to demand delivery, COMEX would default. That such a situation is possible indicates the total failure of federal financial regulation.

What the Federal Reserve has done in order to maintain its short-run policy of protecting the “banks too big too fail” is to make the inevitable reckoning more costly for the US economy.

Another irony is the benefactors of the banksters sale of the gold leeched from the gold ETFs. Asia is the beneficiary, especially India and China. The “get out of gold line” of the US financial press enables China to unload its excess supply of dollars, accumulated from the offshored US economy, into the gold market at a suppressed price of gold.

Kranzler points out that not only does the Fed’s manipulation permit Asia to offload US dollars for gold at low prices, but the obvious lack of confidence in the dollar that the manipulation demonstrates has caused wealthy European families to demand delivery of their gold holdings at bullion banks (the bullion banks are essentially the “banks too big to fail”). Kranzler notes that since January 1, more than 400 tons of gold have been drained from COMEX and gold ETF holdings in order to satisfy world demand for physical possession of bullion.

Again we see that institutions of the US government are acting 100% against the interests of US citizens. Just who does the US government represent?

____

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal, has held numerous university appointments.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts via The 4th Media

Dr. Hanan Ashrawi – PNN

“Such a decision to legalize four illegal settler outposts that were supposed to be demolished in 2003 in the territory of the State of Palestine shows the truth of an ongoing Israeli policy to create facts on the ground. Ashrawi said, “It preempts the Secretary of State John Kerry’s visit to the region next week, and makes a mockery at any attempt to launch viable negotiations.”

“These actions send a clear message to both the Obama administration and the Palestinians that Israel is only committed to more land theft and leas peacemaking.” she said.

“The PLO also strongly denounces the repeated intrusions and attacks on al-Aqsa Mosque by extremist groups under the protection of the Israeli Army and Police.” Dr. Ashrawi added, “This constitutes a deliberate provocation to Muslims everywhere and threatens to unleash a religious conflict of dangerous proportions.”

“Furthermore, the danger inherent in the settler violence is becoming increasingly visible in the reign of terror by settlers attacking innocent Palestinians, particularly in remote villages and rural areas, and their deliberate destruction of property and the uprooting of trees” Ashrawi said, “It is evident that such patterns of behavior threaten to plunge the entire region into instability and violence and undermine global security.”

“Such violations make it more imperative that Palestine accedes to international agreements and conventions to protect our rights and to join international agencies and organizations to ensure multilateral protection for Palestine and judicial accountability for Israel, the Palestinian official concluded, “We call on the United Nations, the European Union, the United States and members of the international community to undertake their responsibility in curbing Israeli deliberate violations of international law and Palestinian human rights. Israel must be held accountable with bold measures and initiatives before all chances for peace, stability, and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state are destroyed”.

IMEMC via PNN

On May 15, 1948, Israel was declared a nation on the ruins of more than 500 townships and 800,000 expelled Palestinians. In December 1948 the international community adopted UN resolution 194, calling on Israel to allow the return of Palestinian refugees “at the earliest practicable date”.

Palestinian refugees in tents 1948 (image by sabbah.biz)

This became one of more than three dozen resolutions ignored by Israel.

To pre-empt this and similar UN resolutions, Israel is demanding recognition as a nation for the Jewish people. Hence, it is reducing the status of non-Jewish natives to interlopers and elevating the status of Ashkenazi European converts to original inhabitants.

It is worth noting that the vision of Jewish exclusivity started to take shape at the end of the 19th Century.

Theodor Herzl, founder of modern political Zionism, articulated these objectives in his 1895 diary. “When we occupy the land… we shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border… while denying it any employment in our country,” he wrote.

Following a UN vote to divide Palestine in November 1947, Israel’s founder David Ben-Gurion reiterated the same goals when he voiced concerns that the partition plan would result in a Jewish state of only a 60 per cent majority, declaring that: “Such a composition does not provide a stable basis for a Jewish state.”

After a six-month campaign of terror, the Zionists succeeded in reducing the “vexing” population by more than 90pc.

Institutional racism targeting the remaining natives – today representing 20pc of the total population – was complemented by a rabbinic edict signed by several Israeli Jewish religious scholars, among them the late Rabbi Yaakov Yosef, forbidding Jews to employ Arabs or rent them apartments.

Yosef also endorsed Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira’s book The King’s Torah, a rabbinical manual permitting the killing of non-Jews.

It even rationalises the slaughter of “babies… because of the future danger they may present, since it is assumed that they will grow up to be evil like their parents”.

Last month, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu anointed Yosef as a “Torah giant, teacher and arbiter of Jewish law”.

Following in the footsteps of his father, the once chief Israeli Rabbi Ovadia Yosef pontificated in a 2010 sermon that God created Gentiles (non-Jews) “to serve us – without that they have no place in the world, only to serve the people of Israel”.

Even apartheid South Africa would have been ashamed to exalt advocates of “baby killers”, but in Netanyahu’s “Jewish State” rabbinical deviants are lauded as “Torah giants”.

Israel’s ethnocentric, racist view of non-Jews is not limited to Palestinians.

A survey conducted last summer by Tel Aviv University statistician Camil Fuchs found that nearly 60pc of 12th grade Jewish students believed that black African refugees should be expelled. Following a visit to Israel, Nobel peace laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu – who experienced firsthand South African apartheid – lamented that he was reminded “so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa”.

Ethnocentric programmes have always ended up in disaster. After 65 years of the Palestinian Nakba, Zionism is constructing the basis of another tragic human experiment. Israel is the only nation where religious ethnicity is an automatic qualifier for citizenship and where the rights of indigenous people are denied for “deficient” maternal genetics. In fact, it is the only country in modern history demanding recognition not as a country, but as a nation of a single creed, for a people of one kind.

Jamal Kanj via A Palestine Story, also published at Gulf Daily News