AT&T Mobility, Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile USA Partnership, Mobile Payments, and a Cashless Society

Visa Responds to Launch of ISIS

"I remain highly confident in Visa's long-term growth and innovation strategy, including our plans to continue work with our partners to accelerate the adoption and usage of mobile payments," writes Bill Gajda, the company's head of global mobile product, in a post on the official Visa blog.

November 19, 2010

Near Field Communications World - In a post on the official Visa blog, Bill Gajda, the company's head of global mobile product, has responded to the official announcement this week that AT&T Mobility, Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile USA have partnered with Discover Financial Services and the US arm of UK bank Barclays to introduce commercial NFC mobile payments services in the US through a joint venture named ISIS.

In the post, entitled 'Real innovation in mobile payments', Gajda refers to a blog post at Forbes.com by veteran mobile industry analyst Bob Egan as well as to a profile in Forbes last month, which NFC World reported on here, in which Gajda explained that Visa is seeking to partner with a wide range of mobile payments innovators.

Here's what Gajda has to say:

After ISIS was announced on Tuesday, Forbes.com ran a blog post by Bob Egan in which he claimed that current mobile banking offers are "somewhat lackluster," and that there is an absence of "real innovation in payments." Respectfully, I must disagree. Mobile payments are — without question — highly innovative, rapidly evolving and, perhaps most importantly, on the threshold of being rolled out broadly across the United States over the next 12 months. But don't just take our word for it: a recent magazine edition of Forbes also published a feature by Lee Gomes, highlighting Visa’s mobile payments innovation. In the article, Gomes writes:

"It's… possible for the phone itself to replace a card, with the number that's ordinarily embedded in a card's magnetic stripe transferred to a radio-signal-emitting microchip inside the phone. A new breed of "contactless" systems is slowly being introduced, usually in high-volume operations like McDonald's or part of the New York City subway. You authorize a payment by holding your phone next to the unit; Visa is pushing the new system hard."

In addition to mobile technology like contactless payments, Visa's open network has enabled 15,700 financial institutions and tens of millions of merchants around the globe to deliver payment services to consumers. We believe the open network is well-positioned to support secure and globally interoperable mobile payments. As he covers in the feature, during our conversation, Gomes and I discussed the strength of Visa's network:

"Visa is also selling its bona fides as a partner to insurgents rather than try to compete directly. As Gajda makes the Silicon Valley startup circuit, he emphasizes the size of the Visa network and its decades of experience fighting fraud, the scourge of electronic-payment systems everywhere. 'This is a train you want to be on board,' he says.

"His best argument: the sheer complexity involved in moving money from a buyer to a seller electronically. It might be easy to build an iPhone app that lets you enter in the phone number of a co-worker you want to pay back for lunch, a common promise in the new mobile-payments world. But then someone has to do the intricate behind-the-scenes data processing that makes sure the card isn't stolen, the people involved aren't scammers, the payer's account has the necessary funds and the actual money transfer happens quickly and without a glitch."

Our collaboration with leading financial institutions like US Bank, Bank of America, Wells Fargo & Co, and JP Morgan Chase, and partners DeviceFidelity and Monitise highlight true innovation in mobile payments. Rest assured, the US is about to make a big leap forward in making mobile payments a reality. I remain highly confident in Visa’s long-term growth and innovation strategy, including our plans to continue work with our partners to accelerate the adoption and usage of mobile payments.

Telcos Partner for Mobile Payments in U.S.

November 16, 2010

Near Field Communications World - AT&T Mobility, T-Mobile USA and Verizon Wireless announced a partnership that aims to bring a national mobile payments networks to U.S. consumers in the next 18 months. Dubbed ISIS, the initial focus will be on building a mobile payment network that utilizes mobile phones and near field communications technology to make point-of-sale purchases.

Michael Abbott has been named as Chief Executive Officer of ISIS. Formerly with GE Capital, Abbott is a veteran financial services executive with experience in the payment and technology industries. In a release from the venture, Abbott says ISIS will create a mobile wallet that could be used for payments, reward cards, coupons, tickets and transit passes.

ISIS is working with Discover Financial Services’ payment network to develop an mobile payment infrastructure for the joint venture. Barclaycard US, part of Barclays PLC, is expected to be the first issuer on the network, offering different mobile payment products.

The venture will enable mobile payment and commerce services using near field communication technology. NFC uses the same technology standards as contactless payment cards. It wasn’t immediately known what form factor ISIS would enable payments with. There are a variety of options, including stickers and microSD cards as well as handsets, but there are limited handsets in circulation.

The ISIS site can be found here.

Report: China to Become Leader in Mobile Payments by 2013

November 18, 2010

Near Field Communications World - Celent has released a new report stating that China will soon lead the worldwide mobile payments market with 410 million users by 2013, according to finextra.com.

China already boasts more than 740 million mobile phone users as of 2009, making it easily the world’s largest mobile market. However, mobile payment has so far penetrated this community at a rate of only 10%. According to the report, this rate will jump 48% year-after-year until 2013.

Additionally, Celent says the number of contactless m-payment users will skyrocket to 400 million by 2015.

Celent’s report examines China’s three major m-payments players - mobile operators, banks, and third party companies - and cites their newfound cooperation as a major catalyst in the predicted m-payments boom.

Celent analyst Hua Zhang says,

“Partnerships with banks are very important for vendors who want to enter the market. Currently, the best business model in the Chinese market focuses on cooperation between operators and banks. Mobile operators and third party payment companies are also strengthening their cooperation with the banking industry for increased success.”

Read more here.

Discover Begins Rollout of Contactless ZIP Cards, Stickers

November 30, 2010

Near Field Communications World - Discover Card announced that it has begun issuing Zip contactless credit cards and stickers to its customers.

Discover’s Zip is a new payment solution that enables consumers to simply touch a payment device - in the form of either a plastic card or a sticker that can be attached to a mobile phone or any personal item of their choosing - to a Zip-enabled contactless reader to make a payment.

Acccording to Discover, there are currently more than 100,000 U.S. merchant locations offer contactless readers that accept Zip transactions at the point-of-sale, including quick service restaurants, gas station and convenient stores, retailers, pharmacies and public transit agencies.

Select Discover Card members began receiving contactless cards and stickers in the mail on November 15, with a larger scale rollout (based on consumer request) slated for January 2011.

Bank of America to Roll Out m-Payment Stickers, Contactless Debit Cards

November 23, 2010

Near Field Communications World - Bank of America has announced plans to issue contactless stickers to its credit and debit card customers next year, according to American Banker.

The new stickers can be attached to mobile phones and other device to enable contactless mobile payment at the point of sale. The bank also announced that it will begin issuing contactless debit cards in addition to its contactless credit cards.

Bank of America says that offering contactless debit cards and payment stickers is another step toward its goal of delivering more convenient, more secure and faster payment types to its customers.

U.S. Bank to Test PayWave Contactless m-Payments

November 16, 2010

Near Field Communications World - U.S. Bank is partnering with DeviceFidelity, FIS and Monitise to introduce contactless mobile payments via Visa’s PayWave technology to its customers.

U.S. Bank is one of the first major card issuers in the United States to pilot this technology, which enables customers to conduct transactions with a wave of a smart phone.

The solution leverages DeviceFidelity’s In2Pay microSD or its specially-designed iPhone case (In2Pay iCaisse). FIS and Monitise developed the application that enables customers to make mobile purchases and access account information.

U.S. Bank employees in multiple states will begin testing this month, and plans are underway to introduce it to select customers next year.

U.S. Bank has been at the forefront of innovative mobile payment solutions. Last month, the company launched a full-suite mobile banking solution with bill pay capabilities for prepaid cardholders, which it claims is the first of its kind in the prepaid marketplace. It was also the first large American bank to test the Visa Money Transfer person-to-person mobile payment service, and was one of the first banks to test the Visa Micro Tag, an early contactless mobile payment device.

DBS Launches Mobile Payments Pilot

November 29, 2010

Near Field Communications World - Some 1, 000 DBS customers with StarHub mobile plans will be the first in Singapore to use the near field communications for mobile payments.

The trial will begin in December 2010 and will last for eight months. The project, which was collaboratively organized by DBS Bank, EZ-Link, Gemalto, MasterCard and StarHub, will involve adding an N-Flex solution enabling to turn conventional handsets into NFC-enabled mobile phone without any change to the device.



The N-Flex solution functions on SIM cards across multiple mobile handsets helping to accelerate the ubiquity of handsets supporting NFC. The conforms to the Single Wire Protocol as endorsed by the GSM Association. 



The NFC trial user will then be able to make payments with their mobile handsets at all merchant outlets that accept the MasterCard PayPass or the ez-link card, as well as on public transportation such as buses and trains. 

The trial will involve a group of participants who will receive an electronic mailer from either StarHub or DBS Bank that contains instructions on how to register their participation online.

Pilot participants will then be required to visit the StarHub Customer Service Centre at One Raffles Place (OUB Centre) or designated StarHub road shows to have the Upteq N-Flex device inserted and mapped onto the SIM cards of their mobile handsets before they can start making payments with their phones.

Read More...

Greek-style Austerity Measures

Deficit-Cutting Plan Targeting Social Security, Medicare and Taxes for Working Households Wins Bipartisan Support Before Vote

Besides increasing the Social Security retirement age, the plan calls for reducing future increases to benefits. It would cut pensions for military members and limit Medicare benefits. It would eliminate or scale back tax breaks — including the child tax credit, mortgage interest deduction, and deduction claimed by employers who provide health insurance. It would raise the federal gasoline tax 15 cents a gallon to fund transportation programs for population control, New World Order Style.

December 3, 2010

Associated Press – Defying expectations, a bipartisan majority of President Barack Obama's deficit commission has rallied behind the panel's controversial deficit-slashing proposals.

A key Obama ally, liberal Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, endorsed the plan Thursday night, joining two of the Senate's most conservative Republicans.

The plan now has public commitments of support from a majority of the 18-member commission, but it still will fall short of the 14 votes needed to officially adopt it when the deficit-cutting panel votes on Friday.

Among its many contentious provisions, the plan would raise the Social Security retirement age and scale back popular tax deductions on health insurance and mortgage interest.

Commission co-chairmen Erskine Bowles, who was chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, and former Wyoming GOP Sen. Alan Simpson have labored on the deficit issue for months, keeping all but the most partisan members involved in the commission's work. Gaining the support of Durbin, a key Obama ally, was a major development.

"Borrowing 40 cents out of every dollar we spend for missiles or food stamps is unsustainable," Durbin wrote in an op-ed piece in Friday's Chicago Tribune. "When we engage in the critical decisions about our nation's future budgets, I want progressive voices at the table to argue that we must protect the most vulnerable in our society and demand fairness in budget cuts."

An announcement Thursday by Sens. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., and Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, in favor of the politically explosive plan to cut the deficit by almost $4 trillion over the coming decade gave the measure momentum from key Senate conservatives.

But two House Republicans on the panel announced they will oppose the plan, as expected. So did Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., a panel member.

But even opponents such as the future House Budget Committee chairman, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., who also is on the commission, said it was a credible first step to build upon next year.

"It's the memo that controls the meeting," said panel member Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., a supporter.

Durbin raised eyebrows Wednesday when he endorsed gradually raising the full Social Security retirement age from 67 to 69 over the next 65 years, and he resisted heavy pressure from labor unions and others in backing the plan.

"This plan is not perfect, and it is certainly not the plan I would have written," Durbin wrote. "If we don't act now — if we pass this issue on to another Congress, another generation — the tough choices we face now only get tougher."

The plan also picked up support from the Senate's No. 3 Republican, Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, who said,

"I'm going to do my best to support recommendations like these."

Besides increasing the Social Security retirement age, the plan calls for reducing future increases to benefits in order to help control federal spending. It would eliminate or scale back tax breaks — including the child tax credit, mortgage interest deduction and deduction claimed by employers who provide health insurance — in exchange for rate cuts on corporate and income taxes. It would raise the federal gasoline tax 15 cents a gallon to fund transportation programs.

The plan, which was unveiled Wednesday, elicited catcalls from advocates on the left — over cuts to Social Security and other programs — and conservatives who oppose its estimated $1 trillion or so in higher tax revenues over the coming decade.

Baucus announced Thursday he couldn't support it. He said the plan "would cut pensions for military members, lower Social Security payments, raise the retirement age and limit Medicare benefits."

The announcements by Durbin, Coburn and Crapo mean 10 of the 18 commissioners have publicly endorsed the plan. House Budget Committee Chairman John Spratt Jr., D-S.C., is leaning in favor. His "yes" vote would bring at least 11 of the 18 commission members behind the plan, awarding Simpson and Bowles a political victory unforeseen when Obama established the deficit panel earlier this year.

Ryan and another plan critic, top House Ways and Means Committee Republican Dave Camp of Michigan, say it wouldn't do enough to curb Medicare and Medicaid costs and would raise taxes too much. Reps. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., and Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, are also against it.

Banking Crisis: Money-Spinning Scam for the Financial Giants

Fed Aid in Financial Crisis Went Beyond U.S. Banks to Industry, Foreign Firms

December 2, 2010

The Washington Post - The financial crisis stretched even farther across the economy than many had realized, as new disclosures show the Federal Reserve rushed trillions of dollars in emergency aid not just to Wall Street but also to motorcycle makers, telecom firms and foreign-owned banks in 2008 and 2009.

The Fed's efforts to prop up the financial sector reached across a broad spectrum of the economy, benefiting stalwarts of American industry including General Electric and Caterpillar and household-name companies such as Verizon, Harley-Davidson and Toyota. The central bank's aid programs also supported U.S. subsidiaries of banks based in East Asia, Europe and Canada while rescuing money-market mutual funds held by millions of Americans.

The biggest users of the Fed lending programs were some of the world's largest banks, including Citigroup, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Swiss-based UBS and Britain's Barclays, according to more than 21,000 loan records released Wednesday under new financial regulatory legislation.

The data reveal banks turning to the Fed for help almost daily in the fall of 2008 as the central bank lowered lending standards and extended relief to all kinds of institutions it had never assisted before.

Fed officials emphasize that their actions were meant to stabilize a financial system that was on the verge of collapse in late 2008. They note that the actions worked to prevent a complete financial meltdown and that none of the special lending programs has lost money. (Some have recorded healthy profits for taxpayers.)

But the extent of the lending to major banks - and the generous terms of some of those deals - heighten the political peril for a central bank that is already under the gun for a wide range of actions, including a recent decision to try to stimulate the economy by buying $600 billion in U.S. bonds.

"The American people are finally learning the incredible and jaw-dropping details of the Fed's multitrillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street and corporate America," said Sen. Bernard Sanders (I-Vt.), a longtime Fed critic whose provision in the Wall Street regulatory overhaul required the new disclosures.

"Perhaps most surprising is the huge sum that went to bail out foreign private banks and corporations. As a result of this disclosure, other members of Congress and I will be taking a very extensive look at all aspects of how the Federal Reserve functions."

The Fed launched emergency programs totaling $3.3 trillion in aid, a figure reached by adding up the peak amount of lending in each program.

Companies that few people would associate with Wall Street benefited through the Fed's program to ease the market for commercial paper, a form of short-term debt used by major corporations to fund their daily activities.

By the fall of 2008, credit had frozen across the financial system, including the commercial paper market. The Fed then purchased commercial paper issued by GE 12 times for a total of $16 billion. It bought paper from Harley-Davidson 33 times, for a total of $2.3 billion. It picked up debt issued by Verizon twice, totaling $1.5 billion.

"It is hard to say what would have happened without the facility, and how its absence might have affected GE, but overall the program was extremely effective in helping stabilize the market," GE spokesman Russell Wilkerson said by e-mail.

Verizon spokesman Robert A. Varettoni said that it was "an extraordinary time," adding that there was no credit available otherwise at the time.

The data revealed that the Fed continued making purchases into the summer of 2009 - after the official end of the recession - showing that it was still concerned about a fundamental part of the financial system even as economic growth was returning.

The disclosure shows "how really profound the financial crisis was in the fall of 2008 and the firepower the Fed mustered in response," said analyst Karen Shaw Petrou of Federal Financial Analytics.

Foreign-owned banks also benefited from the Fed's commercial-paper facility. The Korean Development Bank, owned by the South Korean government, used the program to the tune of billions of dollars, including a $407 million short-term loan on a single day. Many foreign banks, including the French BNP Paribas, the Swiss UBS and the German Deutsche Bank, took extensive advantage of various programs. Even a major bank in Bavaria benefited, as well as another one headquartered in Bahrain, a tiny island country in the Middle East.

Another Fed program allowed investment banks for the first time to borrow directly from the Fed as officials sought to stem the panic that had taken down Wall Street titan Bear Stearns. The central bank assisted 18 companies through this program. Among the biggest beneficiaries was Citigroup, which in a single day in November 2008 borrowed $18.6 billion from the Fed.

The data also demonstrate how the Fed, in its scramble to keep the financial system afloat, eventually lowered its standards for the kind of collateral it allowed participating banks to post. From Citigroup, for instance, it accepted $156 million in triple-C collateral or lower - grades that indicate that the assets carried the greatest risk of default.

Dallas Federal Reserve President Richard Fisher defended the Fed's actions during the financial crisis, saying the central bank "stepped into the breach" in its role as a lender of last resort.

"That's what we are paid to do," he said. "We took an enormous amount of risk with the people's money," he acknowledged. But the crisis lending programs are now all closed, he said, "and we didn't lose a dime, and in fact we made money on every one of them."

The banks universally hailed the Fed on Wednesday.

"In late 2008, many of the US funding markets were clearly broken," Goldman Sachs said in a statement, echoing similar comments made by Bank of America and Citigroup. "The Federal Reserve took essential steps to fix these markets and its actions were very successful."

By 2009, Goldman and other Wall Street firms were reporting their best profits ever. That allowed these banks to pay out huge salaries again, but it also drew the ire of lawmakers and ordinary Americans.

Sanders, for one, said these banks got off easy while receiving extraordinary aid. In rescuing these firms, the Fed never required them to lend to small businesses, modify the mortgages of homeowners or invest in a way that would create jobs.

"We bailed these guys out, but the requirements placed upon them had very little positive impact on the needs of ordinary Americans," Sanders said.

Federal Reserve May Be 'Central Bank of the World' After UBS, Barclays Aid

December 2, 2010

Bloomberg - Federal Reserve data showing UBS AG and Barclays Plc ranked among the top users of $3.3 trillion from emergency programs is stoking debate on whether U.S. regulators bear responsibility for aiding other nations’ banks.

UBS was the biggest borrower under the Commercial Paper Funding Facility, with $74.5 billion overall, more than twice as much as Citigroup Inc., the top U.S. bank recipient, according to the data released yesterday. London-based Barclays Plc took the biggest single amount under another program that made overnight loans, when it got $47.9 billion on Sept. 18, 2008.

“We’re talking about huge sums of money going to bail out large foreign banks,” said Senator Bernard Sanders, the Vermont independent who wrote the provision in the Dodd-Frank Act that required the Fed disclosures. “Has the Federal Reserve become the central bank of the world? I think that is a question that needs to be examined.”

The first detailed accounting of U.S. efforts to spare European banks may add to scrutiny of the central bank, already at its most intense in three decades. The Fed, which released data on 21,000 transactions, said in a statement that its 11 emergency programs helped stabilize markets and support economic recovery. The Fed said there have been no credit losses on rescue programs that have been closed.

The growth of the U.S. mortgage-backed securities market and the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency enticed overseas banks such as Zurich-based UBS to buy assets in the country before 2008. They paid for the holdings with U.S. dollars, and when funding seized up, the Federal Reserve refused to take the risk that European firms would unload the assets and further depress markets for housing-related investments.

‘Much Worse’

“Things would have been worse if they hadn’t lent to foreigners,” said Perry Mehrling, senior fellow at the Morin Center for Banking and Financial Law at Boston University and author of The New Lombard Street: How the Fed became the Dealer of Last Resort. “We’re finally getting to understand the role of the Fed in the world.”

Fed spreadsheets showed the central bank became the world’s lender of last resort as dollars flowed to European banks as well as Bank of America Corp. and Wells Fargo & Co., among top borrowers from the Term Auction Facility at $45 billion each.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc., which posted record profit last year, borrowed more than $24 billion from another program. Milwaukee-based Harley-Davidson Inc. and Fairfield, Connecticut- based General Electric Co. sold commercial paper, a form of short-term debt, to the Fed under a program that lent as much as $348.2 billion at its peak.

Sanders, the Vermont senator, said yesterday he plans to investigate whether banks profited by borrowing from the Fed and investing the funds in Treasuries, benefiting from the difference in interest rates.

‘Bailout Protection Act’

U.S. Representative Mike Pence, an Indiana Republican, said he planned to introduce a “European Bailout Protection Act” to restrict the flow of International Monetary Fund loans to European countries. He said he was responding to reports that U.S. officials might bolster a European fund designed to deal with this year’s debt crisis, which has spread from Greece to Ireland.

Edwin Truman, a former Fed official who is a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, said any push to confine the Fed’s role to U.S. banks would create a “massive exercise in financial protectionism.”

“It would lead to retaliation, so U.S. banks in London or Tokyo would expect the same kind of treatment,” Truman said. William Poole, senior economic adviser to Merk Investments LLC and a former Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis president, said he was surprised by the extent of non-U.S. bank borrowing.

Commercial Paper

“I was under the impression that each country bore the responsibility for supervising the banks headquartered in their borders,” Poole said in an interview.

The $74.5 billion received by UBS through the CPFF, which bought short-term debt, represents total borrowings by UBS over the life of the program. The total outstanding at any point in time never exceeded about half that sum, said Karina Byrne, a UBS spokeswoman.

Byrne said the bank’s tapping the Fed fund “should be seen in the context of our overall desire to maintain flexibility and diversification in our funding sources.”

The loan to a Barclays unit came from the Primary Dealer Credit Facility, created to make sure U.S. securities firms and foreign firms’ U.S. affiliates had cash to satisfy clients’ financing demands.

Barclays took the loan the week in September 2008 that it acquired the U.S. operations of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. Mark Lane, a spokesman for Barclays, declined to comment.

‘A Big Operation’

Paris-based Natixis borrowed $27 billion under the commercial paper program.

“We’ve got a big operation in the U.S.A.,” Victoria Eideliman, a spokeswoman for the bank said. “It was, for us, natural that we participate in this program like all the banks. When we participated, the liquidity situation was very tense.”

The $182.3 billion rescue of American International Group Inc. spared European banks that traded with the New York-based insurer from having to raise as much as $16 billion in capital, according to a June report from the Congressional Oversight Panel, which reviews bailout spending.

Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke addressed questions in a 2009 Congressional hearing about why non-U.S. banks benefited from the AIG rescue.

‘The Obligation’

“I would point out that the Europeans have also saved a number of major financial institutions, and the issue of whether those institutions owed American companies money has not come up,” Bernanke said. “So I think that there is a sense that we all have the obligation to address the problems of companies in our own jurisdictions.”

Three of the top seven borrowers under the CPFF program were private firms. New York-based Hudson Castle received $53.3 billion in aggregate, BSN Holdings took $42.8 billion, and Liberty Hampshire Co., a unit of Guggenheim Partners LLC, drew $41.4 billion, Fed data show.

Hudson’s website says it develops “customized debt products.” A person who answered its phone said no one was available to comment. A Guggenheim spokesman didn’t return phone calls.

BSN Capital Partners Ltd., which was associated with BSN Holdings according to a 2006 Standard & Poor’s note, was founded by John Burgess, a former Deutsche Bank AG managing director. Burgess declined to comment.

Agenda 21 and Sustainable Development

Apartment Rents Set to Rise, Fueling Inflation: NAR

November 29, 2010

AFP — US apartment rents are expected to climb next year as the economy recovers from recession, a rise that may fuel inflation, a real-estate industry group said Monday. Multifamily real estate will star in an overall modest improvement in commercial property markets in 2011, the National Association of Realtors said in an outlook report.

NAR said ailing commercial real-estate markets -- office, industrial, retail and rental housing -- were flattening out after a steep plunge amid the worst recession in decades. Lawrence Yun, NAR chief economist, predicted a rise in demand, as the economy slowly recovers from the downturn that officially ended in June 2009.

The number of people setting up a new home has plummeted amid high unemployment and plunging home values after a housing bubble collapsed more than three years ago.

"Multifamily housing is the one commercial sector that has held on relatively well in the past year, and can expect the best performance in 2011," he said.

Yun predicted apartment rents could rise by one to two percent in 2011, after having fallen in 2009 and showing no growth this year.

"This rent rise therefore could start to force up broader consumer prices as well," he said.

The cost of rent or mortgages is the biggest component in the government's consumer price index, accounting for 32 percent of its total weight, he noted.

Multifamily vacancy rates were forecast to decline from 6.4 percent in the current quarter to 5.8 percent in the fourth quarter of 2011.

Consumer price inflation has remained subdued in recent months despite a rise in energy prices, while the core inflation has trended lower, the Federal Reserve noted last week in the minutes of its last policy-setting meeting.

The central bank used weak inflation as a key justification for its controversial plan to buy an extra 600 billion dollars in Treasury bonds to juice the flagging recovery. Critics, including several participants in the November 2-3 Federal Open Market Committee meeting, have said the plan risks spurring inflation.

NAR said the outlook for the office and industrial markets had improved, with modestly declining vacancy rates expected in 2011, while the retail sector would essentially hold steady.

Vacancy rates stuck in double digits, nevertheless, signal rents would remain under severe pressure.

"High vacancy rates imply falling rents," Yun said.

New $1.1 Billion Henderson Fund Targets U.S. Apartments

By Reuters
September 17, 2010

Henderson Global Investors has launched a new $1.1 billion fund targeting the U.S. apartment market, saying it was the best-placed property sector for rent growth and occupancy over the next five years.

CASA V is the fifth in Henderson's CASA Partners U.S. Multi-Family Housing series of funds, which use low-cost, tax-exempt bond financing, Henderson said on Friday.

The fund manager is targeting an initial equity raise of $100 million by end-2010, and a total of $400 million. It will target properties with 200-plus units in suburban and urban areas with strong economic trends.

"Apartments are anticipated to have the most favorable occupancy and rent growth conditions of all asset classes," Henderson said in a statement, adding it was the best-placed property sector over the next five years.

It believes newly acquired, unleveraged apartments can offer net total returns of 7-9 percent over a five-year horizon, adding it expects tax-exempt bond financing to provide the lowest-cost means of financing apartment investments.

"For tax-exempt bond financed apartment properties, total return expectations are for annual returns of 11-13 percent (net) over the next five years," it said in a statement.

"Apartments have historically proven less volatile than other property sectors, and core apartments are likely to offer attractive total returns with a strong income component."

The Incentive to Foreclose Rather than Modify Homeowners’ Mortgages

If you want to destroy the middle class, destroy the value of their major assets: their retirement accounts and their home equity. Americans have recently lost over $2 trillion in their retirement portfolios and $2 trillion in the value of their homes.

October 25, 2010

FireDogLake.com - Fannie Mae seems to be as eager to foreclose on homeowners as the banks. But Fannie-Mae may be willing to take a three-month detour in "trial" modifications, as opposed to "permanent" modifications, before putting pressure on its servicers to resume the foreclosure process. Reason: each trial modification (of at least three months) results in bonuses to Fannie.

Fannie and Freddie Mac, as holders of more than 50% of all mortgages, and as virtually nationalized bankrupt entities, were supposedly designated to be the chief vehicles and examples of modifying mortgages (by reducing both principal and interest payments), so that more people can remain in their homes rather than face foreclosure.

To date they’ve failed in their supposed mandate. According to a report by the Congressional Oversight Committee:

Oversight Committee findings

The panel’s report says the government’s mortgage modification program has three key problems:

• The kinds of mortgages that will make up growing numbers of foreclosures exceed the program’s eligibility requirements.


• With a goal of modifying only 25,000 to 30,000 loans a week, fewer than half of the predicted foreclosures would be avoided. One in eight homes are currently in foreclosure or default and 250,000 additional foreclosures are initiated monthly.


• Many modifications so far are still in a three-month trial period. As of Sept. 1, only 1,711 homeowners had received permanent modifications under the federal program. And after five years, many will see higher payments.

"The result for many homeowners could be that foreclosure is delayed, not avoided," the report says.

In spite of its dismal record on mortgage-loan modifications, Fannie cracks the whip on foreclosures:

Fannie Mae says it will begin fining loan servicers who take too long to complete foreclosures once it’s been determined that delinquent borrowers don’t qualify for a loan modification or other alternatives like short sales.

As indicated in the Oversights Committee report, the overwhelming number of loan modifications have been "trial" modifications, rather than "permanent" modifications.

Why have so few mortgages been permanently modified, nineteen months after HAMP was initiated?

HAMP started in March, 2009

Fannie Mae instructed companies that service loans it guarantees to allow modifications to borrowers who made payments during a trial period but did not meet all income document requirements under the initial terms.

On March 18, Fannie Mae issued Lender Letter 2010-04 instructing servicers how to resolve active trial modifications under the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP)…

Among the possible reasons: a) Some homeowners are not going to be able to finance their mortgages under any circumstances; b) The terms of HAMP and HAMP alternatives are still too onerous for many homeowners (particularly those that are "underwater"), and should be loosened up to allow more homeowners to qualify; c) Fannie-Mae doesn’t really have any incentive to go beyond the three-month trial period and aim for permanent modification, since it receives government bonuses (from Treasury)immediately after enrolling a homeowner in the trial program.

These incentives/bonuses were implicated as a main reason for the dearth of pemanent modifications by a Fannie Mae whistleblower:

Fannie-Mae, like the banks, are looking out for their short-term gain, rather than the interests of homeowners

Caroline Herron, a former Fannie vice president who returned to the mortgage giant in 2009 as a high-level consultant, claims that the homeowner-relief effort was marred by delays, missteps and executives preoccupied with their institution’s short-term financial interests.

“It appeared that Fannie Mae officers were focused on maximizing incentive payments available to Fannie Mae under various federal programs – even if this meant wasting taxpayer money and delaying the implementation of high-priority Treasury programs,” she claims in the lawsuit.

One issue inside Fannie was its push to put as many borrowers as possible into short-term trial modifications, at the expense, Herron maintains, of getting qualified borrowers into permanent modifications.

Herron charges that Fannie Mae continued in headlong pursuit of “trial mods” even though it knew many had little chance of becoming permanent. As late as September 2009, barely 1 percent of trial modifications had converted to permanent modifications by the end of their three-month trial, a Congressional oversight panel found. Nevertheless, Fannie preferred doing trials, Herron alleges, because it was eligible to receive incentive payments from the Treasury Department for trial modifications it booked before the end of 2009.

As of February 2010, 83 percent of the 1 million active modifications being handled by HAMP were trials rather than permanent arrangements. Barofsky, the special inspector general, criticized HAMP’s focus on trial modifications in a recent report.

“If HAMP ends up being a foreclosure mitigation program that merely delays foreclosures rather than preventing them, the program will be of questionable value, particularly in light of the huge investment of taxpayer funds,” Barofsky wrote. “A program that helps borrowers permanently avoid foreclosure is preferable (and far less wasteful of taxpayer dollars) to one that merely kicks the proverbial foreclosure can down the road.”

If Herron is to be believed, then we have Fannie-Mae having an incentive for short-term modifications, up to three months; but then pushing their servicers to foreclose as quickly as possible, in order to stem their losses and recoup whatever then can from foreclosure.

(And, not surprisingly, we have the big banks rooting for Fannie from the sidelines, because the banks still have no desire to reduce the principle on mortgages that they hold, rather than interest rates, since the big banks are for all practical purposes insolvent, and sitting on a mountain of bad debt. The same applies for the banks as servicers of mortgage-backed securities that have dubious or no paperwork indicating who is the current holder of the loan note/mortgage. And since the banks’ reluctant strategy of loan modification have proven that it’s not mitigating homeowners’ inability to pay their monthly mortgages, the banks, as servicers themselves, have their own incentives to the fees collected for foreclosing on as many houses as possible.)

All in all, a continuing and growing disaster for millions of Americans panicked and stressed-out at the prospect of being kicked out of their homes.



See: Foreclosure vs. the Short Sale

Congress Will Try – By Secret Vote – to Retroactively Legalize Foreclosure Fraud and Forgery By the Big Banks

What makes HR 3808 all the more outrageous is that both the Congress and the Senate passed this bill WITHOUT a record of how individual legislators voted (check out HR 3808 on Govtrack). They did not disclose their positions on the bill, because they obviously knew the public would explode in anger, rewriting laws after the fact, in order to help banks cover up their continual mistakes. - How Did This Pass?, Reader's Comment, New York Times Blog, October 8, 2010

November 17, 2010

Washington’s Blog - As I’ve previously noted, forgery of mortgage documents is systematic and widespread. See this, this, this, this and this.

Yves Smith pointed out last month that congressional bill H.R. 3808 is an attempt to paper over rampant criminality by the big banks regarding forged mortgage documents:

We are seeing more recognition of the consequences of this [widespread problem] , which in more polite company might be called, “My dog ate your mortgage.”

***One sighting (hat tip 4ClosureFraud) is the effort by the Ohio Secretary of State to enlist support against a proposed measure to allow for electronic notarizations. The Secretary hints strongly that this measure being put forward is directly related to the revelation of affidavit improprieties, which further suggests that the banks might regard this as a remedy for this particular, um, lapse:

H.R. 3808 is known as the “Interstate Recognition of Notarizations Act.” It passed the House under a suspension of the rules in April 2010. It requires federal and state courts to recognize any notarization that is lawful in the state where the notary is licensed. Now, in one day, it passed in the Senate.

When I learned of it last Thursday, it sounded innocuous to me, but then I started looking at the timing of the bill. GMAC, owned by Ally, had just suspended its foreclosure actions in 23 states, including Ohio. I had already referred Chase Home Finance, LLC, on August 23, 2010, to the U.S. Department of Justice, asking it to review and investigate Chase’s document notarization practices in home foreclosures (18,000 documents per month were being notarized by 8 people, along with other irregularities). I license notaries in the State of Ohio. Even though I don’t have the power under state law to investigate or prosecute, I couldn’t stand idly by without acting. That’s why I’m asking you to email or call the President at 202-456-1111 to ask him not to sign the bill.

Last Wednesday, the day before I announced the DOJ referral, JPMorgan Chase announced it was having third party counsel review its document procedures for foreclosures. Just two days before, the U.S. Senate had rushed through H.R. 3808. Something didn’t seem right. Since then others agree with me.

Yves here. This development reveals how this battle is likely to play out. Now that judges in some states are starting to take these dubious, potentially fraudulent measures seriously, the next line of attack is to get the more bought and paid for Federal government to intercede on behalf of the banks. As the e-mail by the Ohio Secretary shows, this is a state versus Federal rights issue. And the problem is that these solutions will be depicted as “efficient,” just as securitizations and other “innovations” were.

And while efficiency in theory is a good thing, it must always be kept secondary to the overall integrity of the system, otherwise, you run the risk of breakdown. Using dubious arguments to overturn well settled law to get the banking industry out of a monster mess it created is a Faustian bargain. It makes it abundantly clear what is really at stake here, which is the rule of law. Banks that were quick to defend unjustifiable pay deals by invoking “sanctity of contract” have no inhibition about ignoring their own contracts to pad their bottom line, and ultimately, the wallets of top executives.

Rather than deal with the considerable consequences of these abuses, the banks are prepared to bulldoze well settled state laws to give them an easy way out. And I’m not basing my view on this story alone; I had a conversation yesterday with a Congressional staffer who matter-of-factly said (but with little understanding of the underlying issues) that Congress would intervene on behalf of the industry, via its authority over national banks.

The result is that we institutionalize kleptocracy while keeping largely gutted forms of due process as theater. The powers that be hope that the broad public will remain unaware of what is really at work.

Obama's Deficit Panel Wants Painful Spending Cuts and Tax Increases

Obama's Deficit Panel's Painful Package of Spending Cuts and Tax Increases Draws Challenges

December 1, 2010

Associated Press – A painful package of spending cuts and tax increases drew sharp challenges from both the left and right on President Barack Obama's deficit commission Wednesday, putting approval in doubt. However, both parties' Senate budget point men embraced the plan, and even opponents called it a starting point for efforts next year to control the nation's ballooning debt.

"It's a template that gives people an opportunity to start discussing what we have to do to get our fiscal house in order," said Rep. Xavier Becerra, a California Democrat on the panel who hasn't said whether he'll support the package.

The 18-member bipartisan commission scheduled a vote on the plan for Friday. But as Wednesday's meeting demonstrated, the co-chairmen, Democrat Erskine Bowles and Republican Alan Simpson, face a difficult chore in rounding up the 14 votes needed to officially send the plan to Congress for consideration.

Winning over lawmakers who are also panel members appeared to be the biggest remaining challenge, given the politically incendiary nature of many of the proposals. The tax increases it includes are deal-breakers for some Republicans, likewise social program cuts for some Democrats.

The plan calls for sweeping tax changes that would affect millions of Americans, including trimming or doing away with many popular tax breaks such as the home mortgage deduction. It would also make deep cuts in military spending, slash the federal work force, raise the retirement age for full Social Security benefits and make cuts in Medicare. It aims to reduce federal red ink by nearly $4 trillion within a decade.

Although prospects for the plan are unclear, the attention it has received has helped awaken the nation to the depth of the economic hole the country is in and the need for bold action to dig out, suggested Bowles, who was former President Bill Clinton's White House chief of staff. Simpson is a former Republican senator from Wyoming.

"The American people get it now. People want this to happen," Bowles said.

While the deficit commission grappled with longer-term economic woes, congressional Democrats and Republicans worked separately to strike a deal with the White House on a more immediate financial issue: extending Bush-era tax cuts that expire Dec. 31. And despite talk of finding common ground, neither side seemed willing to yield much as negotiations began with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Budget Director Jacob Lew.

Both Democrats and Republicans seem willing to extend most of the tax cuts. But Democrats want to let cuts for the wealthiest Americans expire, citing damage to the federal deficit from lost revenue as a main argument.

Meanwhile, as the deficit commission — formally the president's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform — began moving toward a final decision, Sens. Kent Conrad and Judd Gregg, the Democratic chairman and top Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, threw their high-voltage support behind the plan. Still, both expressed some misgivings.

Gregg, the New Hampshire Republican who is retiring from the Senate, took issue with some proposed tax hikes in the plan, sounding a familiar GOP theme that taxes should be lower, not higher, to promote growth.

Still, he said, the overall plan was "moving dramatically in the right direction."

Conrad, D-N.D., said there were "things in this plan that I dislike intensely."

Yet, he said he was prepared to support it "and support it strongly. I don't see another alternative."

They were joined in supporting the package by panel members Alice Rivlin, White House budget director in the Clinton administration,David Cote, CEO of Honeywell International,and Ann Fudge, a former chief executive of Young & Rubicam.

"This is the framework for us to move forward," Fudge said.

Counting Simpson and Bowles, that put seven of the panel's 18 members on the record in support for the proposal. House Budget Committee Chairman John Spratt Jr., D-S.C., who lost a re-election race last month, said he's leaning toward supporting it, and Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., seemed to lean in favor as well.

But Rep. Jan Schakowsky, a liberal Democrat from Illinois, told the panel she could not support the plan, contending it proposed disproportionate cuts in social programs, particularly federal help for seniors. She said it should have paved the way toward "a more robust Social Security."

Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., a sponsor of a competing deficit-reduction plan, signaled that he would likely oppose the proposal, saying it "doesn't sufficiently fix the health care problem." Ryan, who is expected to chair the House Budget Committee next year, said the plan envisions going forward with Obama's health care overhaul law and would raise taxes by a total of $1 trillion over the next decade.

Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, also seemed to imply he could not support the plan, citing concerns about higher taxes.

Bowles and Simpson have acknowledged it will be hard to assemble the 14 votes needed to give the deficit-reduction plan a direct ticket to congressional consideration, but they and other commission members have noted that Congress can still take up the ideas.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said the commission's recommendations would be evaluated as the administration puts together its budget for next year.

He declined to comment on the mixed statements at Wednesday's session, saying "let me not get too far out on the commission until they've had a chance to complete their work."

Republicans generally complain about tax increases, and the trimming of popular tax breaks like the home mortgage deduction. Meanwhile, Democrats have cried out the loudest over proposed cuts in social programs, including raising the Social Security retirement age and cuts to Medicare.

Bowles and Simpson, who floated a preliminary version of their plan three weeks ago, put forth a revised, 59-page proposal on Wednesday that they titled "The Moment of Truth."

To attract Democrats, there's now an exemption from the higher Social Security age — the plan would raise the normal retirement age to 68 by 2050 and 69 by 2075 — for people who perform physical labor. Spending cuts for agency budgets would be accelerated, in an attempt to win over GOP Sens. Coburn of Oklahoma and Mike Crapo of Idaho.

Also, in a sweetener for some of the tough medicine, Bowles and Simpson said that to help economic recovery Congress should consider a "temporary payroll tax holiday" in 2011 that would allow workers to forgo paying Social Security taxes for a year.

The report said that, while this would cost $50 billion to $100 billion in lost revenue, it would result in "significant short-term economic growth and job creation."

Proposed cuts in payments to hospitals that serve more Medicaid patients were dropped, while cuts to agriculture subsidies were scaled back sharply to attract the vote of Conrad. Tax breaks like the earned income tax credit and the deduction for charitable contributions were added back.

The plan includes major health care belt-tightening, biting deeper than the cost-control measures in Obama's overhaul law.

For the first time, the government would set — and enforce — an overall budget for federal health care programs that cover more than 100 million people, from Alzheimer's patients in nursing homes to premature babies in hospital intensive care.

Workers with solid coverage on the job, drug companies, trial lawyers, hospitals, seniors, doctors, state governments, federal employees and home health care providers would all face a hit.

The proposal would leave in place Obama's signature health care law expanding coverage to more than 30 million uninsured, but it would repeal a new long-term care program included in the legislation, calling it "financially unsound."

For Medicare recipients the biggest change would be an increase in cost sharing for medical services. Supplemental insurance plans that many seniors purchase to plug gaps in Medicare would no longer be able to offer complete wraparound coverage.


After applauding the passage of a bill to increase the federal debt limit by $1.9 trillion to $14.3 trillion (which Obama signed into law four days before signing into law the stimulus bill, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009), Congress wants to now reduce the federal debt. They increased the limit to fund the stimulus package, which in turn is funding their New World Order Agenda, and now they want to direct austerity measures at the people by cutting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, among other things. Big labor, big banks, big business, big government (one entity) are taken care of while the average tax-paying citizen gets screwed.

The Global Financial Oligarchy Eyes Government Cuts from Greece to New York

June 15, 2010

The Excavator - Five years ago, at the height of the housing bubble, President Bush spoke at Greece Athena Middle and High School in Greece, New York, about the political resistance in Washington to Medicare and Social Security cuts. The attendees were sympathetic to the President's remarks, and even applauded his blunt admission that the nature of his job requires endlessly repeating a few talking points.

The President said:

"As I mentioned to you earlier, we're going to redesign the current system. If you've retired, you don't have anything to worry about -- third time I've said that. (Laughter.) I'll probably say it three more times. See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda (Applause)."

Reading it now, what's most revealing about the comment is not that Bush confirmed people's worst impressions of him in a moment of honesty, but that he is capable of speaking the truth far more than the current President is. In my book, that means Bush is a better man than Obama.

Food Policies and Agenda 21

Despite Massive Protests, U.S. Senate Passes S.510 Food Safety Bill

November 30, 2010

NaturalNews - The new Food Tyranny Act — called the “Food Safety Modernization Act” in the U.S. Senate — has been passed by the senate today. It would give the FDA vast ew powers to criminalize and imprison farmers and food producers while doing absolutely nothing to address to real root of the food contamination problem: Factory animal farm operations (which are regulated under the USDA, not the FDA).

The bill passed 73 to 25, with Sen Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma) emerging as the greatest “voice of reason” in the debate. His last-ditch amendment to reduce the scale of the bill was defeated this morning.

Here’s the official vote record: http://www.senate.gov/legislative/L…

Notably, there wasn’t a single Democrat who opposed the bill.

This bill, as originally written, would have outlawed most nutritional supplements through “harmonization” with European laws. It also would have authorized ten-year prison sentences for farmers selling raw milk to their neighbors. Both of those provisions were eventually stripped out of the bill thanks to some last-minute amendments, but it gives you an idea of the outright police state mentality of the original bill authors who attempted to put in place complete government control over food, gardens, raw milk and more.

To give you an idea of how clueless U.S. Senators are about food, the New York Times is reporting that when Senate staff members met to discuss this bill, they would eat Starburst candies and jellybeans. As the NYT reports,

“In the midst of negotiations, the negotiators — nearly all women — took a field trip to a nearby food market so that a Republican staff member could teach the Democrats how to buy high-quality steaks.”

So what we have here is a new food tyranny law that was essentially negotiated by a group of women who eat dead foods, animals products and candy.

No wonder they still don’t get it. The contamination of lettuce and other fresh produce is caused by factory animals farms, not by produce farms. (E.coli can only thrive in the digestive tracts of animals, not plants.)

The “small farms” exclusion will soon be meaningless

The Tester Amendment of the bill did manage to exclude some smaller farmers from the more tyrannical provisions of the bill. As currently stated, this would exclude small farms that sell less than $500,000 worth of food and which sell most of their food locally.

However, Senators failed to consider what’s going to happen when the Federal Reserve keeps printing counterfeit money, devaluing the dollar, and causing massive food price inflation. A farm that right now produces merely $100,000 worth of food (which could be a small, two-person farm) will soon find itself producing $500,000 worth of food (or more) due to the rapidly falling value of the U.S. dollar.

This is how the Federal Reserve’s money counterfeiting actions will further destroy America and place small family farms under the tyranny of the FDA...

Senate Rubberstamps S.510; Food Dictatorship Birthed

Senates passes overhaul of food safety system

November 30, 2010

Another Voice (Rev. 18:4) - The Senate voted 73-25 to pass the bill. The House of Representatives backed a different version in July 2009. With their post-election session due to end by mid-December, lawmakers have just weeks to resolve their differences and send legislation to President Barack Obama to sign into law.

The legislation would deliver the biggest changes in the U.S. food safety system since 1930s.

The Senate measure would give the FDA more access to food processors' records. It also would require food makers to have a written food safety plan describing risk at their facilities and controls they use to prevent contamination.

A key difference between the two versions of the bill passed by lawmakers is language in the Senate measure applying a softer regulatory hand to small farms and food processors than to big companies.

Family-farm groups said the Senate language was a common-sense recognition that small producers who market directly in their regions operate in a different setting than multi-state or national food processors and retailers.

But industry groups like the National Cattlemen's Beef Association said there should be a single, uniform federal standard when it comes to food safety.

"Overhaul" is the Orwellian-doublespeak buzzword for NWO takeover. Within that single word is contained every provision necessary to 'set in motion' the absolute and final control-network over any particular industry.

For example, these recent industry 'overhauls' that have also resulted in the 'setting in motion' of the globalist takeover of the respective industry:

• After 'package-bomb' chaos' TSA to overhaul air cargo industry 11-3-10; and
  
• the Wall Street overhaul 9-17-10; and
  
• we mustn't forget the three month old Financial overhaul 7-17-10

Globally tracking all foodstuffs and everybody who touches it, start to finish, including, for instance, suppliers of manufacturing equipment, suppliers of packaging materials, etc., the trucking companies...right down to point of sale, you name it, wherever the money is changing hands -- at every point along the line, they will have their hands in it...taking a cut no doubt. All eventually tied into a single databank for total control of the food industry.

This is what will be set in motion regardless of the exact details of the final bill after being reconciled with the house version. The takeover is on.

One interesting thing to watch, as mentioned in the above, is the issue of some proposed 'exemptions' for "small producers that market directly to their regions." Bingo. Local farms 'marketing in their own regions' is straight out of the Agenda 21/'sustainable community' plan. It is exactly how the communitarian green-system is designed to work. Essentially each local-region feeds itself is the idea.

At these local-regional levels, the Agenda 21 plan calls for 'community based management'. In other words, in the new green world, each local-regional area takes care of itself. While it is made to look as if they are getting a break now, certainly the "small producers" will eventually find themselves unable to operate without becoming part of the community based scheme.

When fully put together, nobody will operate outside the system. Same system that the medical, banking, insurance, automotive, and now air-cargo, etc. are being put into. The bible calls it the 666...'And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark'.

It is developing before your eyes.

For as a snare shall it come on all them that dwell on the face of the whole earth. (Luke 21:36)

Food Takeover S.510 Slated for Vote in Senate Tonight

November 29, 2010

Another Voice (Rev. 18:4) - Update on: S.510 Pushed Forward for Passage: 75-25 'Yes' for Cloture (November 17, 2010)

On Monday, November 29, 2010, Congress will be back in session at 2:00 PM, and here is some of what will be happening with the Food Safety bill.

• S. 510 is basically Obamacare for the food industry.


• It will create 17,000 new bureaucrats, whose job is going to be to harass small farmers.


• It will create huge regulatory burdens for small family farms and even for those who want to grown their own food. This will choke out small farms.


• For those who like to buy their own healthy food, forget it. It will no longer be available.

At 4:00 PM, Senate will resume consideration of S.510... as provided for under the previous order.

At 6:30 PM, the Senate will proceed to a cloture vote on the substitute amendment to S.510. Under the agreement reached on Thursday, if cloture is invoked, four motions to suspend the rules would be in order. Upon disposition of the motions, the Senate will proceed to vote on passage of the bill, as amended.

Senator Reid would like to complete action on the Food Safety bill on Monday. As a result, senators should expect a late night of voting.

With the Wiki fake [just like last time, on August 27, 2010, here] and the fake N. Korean conflict dominating all the MSM headlines, the NWO U.S. Senate is moving toward closing the deal on the draconian food industry takeover, aka S.510...possibly even finishing the deed late tonight...under the cover of darkness. fyi.

"He will keep the feet of His saints, and the wicked shall be silent in darkness; for by strength shall no man prevail." (1 Samuel 2:9,10)

See: S.510, the Food Safety Bill to Create 17,000 New Bureaucrats



Related:
Top ten lies about Senate Bill 510

Senator Michael Bennet Admits Political Process is Rigged

Americans still cling to the naive belief that government corruption is exceptional and that most of the institutions of society — the courts, the press, and law enforcement agencies — still largely comply with the Constitution and the law in important matters.

Hot Mic Picks Up Discussion on Senate Floor: ‘It’s All Rigged’

November 30, 2010

The Daily Caller - A hot mic left on during a Senate vote Tuesday morning on the Food Safety Act caught a senator complaining that process of setting the agenda during the lame-duck session is “rigged.”

“It’s all rigged. The whole conversation is rigged,” said Colorado Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet. “The fact that we don’t get to a discussion before the break about what we’re going to do in the lame duck. It’s just rigged.”

The remark was picked up live on C-SPAN 2, although microphones are usually turned down during voting times. An aide quickly realized the mistake, jumped up and had the sound cut off.

Bennet Chief of Staff Guy Cecil stood by the senator’s comments.

“It’s something he’s been talking about from day one,” Cecil told The Daily Caller in an interview outside the Senate chamber. “The whole process being rigged against having a real conversation about tax cuts, the estate tax and the defense authorization. We’re not having a lot of those conversations. It’s just a symptom of Washington being broken.”

Hapless Senator Admits Obvious: Political Process a Rigged Game

November 30, 2010

Infowars.com - Colorado Democrat Senator Michael Bennet made the mistake of admitting what many of us already know – the political process in the district of criminals is a rigged game.

“It’s all rigged. The whole conversation is rigged,” said Bennet over an open C-Span mic during debate on the Food Safety Act. “The fact that we don’t get to a discussion before the break about what we’re going to do in the lame duck. It’s just rigged.”

Soon after Bennet made his comment, an aide realized the C-Span microphone was open and switched it off. Senate floor microphones are usually turned off during debate.

Bennet Chief of Staff Guy Cecil told The Daily Caller that the senator stands by his comments.

“The whole process being rigged against having a real conversation about tax cuts, the estate tax and the defense authorization. We’re not having a lot of those conversations. It’s just a symptom of Washington being broken,” Cecil said outside the Senate chamber.

The political process is not broken. It is working exactly as the elite want. Taxes, defense authorization, and virtually every other political issue taken up by Congress is decided by the financial elite well before it is discussed on the Senate floor. Congress is a dog and pony show designed to make the plebs believe they live in a democracy where they actually have a say.

“While people have recognized for more than 150 years that the rich and powerful often corrupt individual officials, or exert undue influence to get legislation passed that favors their interests, most Americans still cling to the naive belief that such corruption is exceptional, and that most of the institutions of society, the courts, the press, and law enforcement agencies, still largely comply with the Constitution and the law in important matters,” the Constitution Society noted in 1994.

They expect that these corrupting forces are disunited and in competition with one another, so that they tend to balance one another…. Mounting evidence makes it clear that the situation is far worse than most people think, that during the last several decades the U.S. Constitution has been effectively overthrown, and that it is now observed only as a façade to deceive and placate the masses. What has replaced it is what many call the Shadow Government. It still, for the most part, operates in secret, because its control is not secure.

Occasionally the shadowy machinations of the secret government and the elite are exposed, as in the case of Michael Bennet’s comments.

The corporate media, of course, ignored Bennet’s comment. The Washington Examiner and the Grand Junction Sentinel reported the story, but across the corporate media the story received a stony silence.

Instead of reporting how the political system really works, the corporate media continues to orchestrate high-tech bread and circuses and high definition distractions.

Climate Change Treaties and Carbon Rations

Climate Alarmists Push Forced Relocation At Cancun Summit

A tax on carbon emissions (humans and animals exhale carbon dioxide, so it is a tax on breathing) is key to financing the takeover of the world by the international banking cabal.

November 30, 2010

Infowars.com - Not content with merely pushing world war-style rationing and the complete de-industrialization of the planet, global warming alarmists meeting in Cancun, Mexico, this week will propose the forced relocation of entire populations in the name of offsetting man-made climate change.

The shocking proposal appears on page 6 of the executive summary of the Special Climate Change Program.

As a means of mitigating climate change, encouraging sustainability, and reducing CO2 emissions, the document calls for “the implementation of relocation programs for human settlements and infrastructure in high risk areas.”

Relocation of populations has historically been achieved by force at the hands of an authoritarian ruling elite, to the “substantial harm” of the target settlement, with loss of private property and harrowing social dislocation and, in some cases, genocide, these being three primary outcomes. The most odious example in recent history was, of course, the forced transfer of Jews from wartime Germany by the Nazis.

Political scientist Norman Finkelstein notes that forced relocations are often justified by the ruling authorities as a necessary solution to a drastic crisis, which is precisely the rhetoric used in the Cancun document.

The proposal by climate alarmists to forcibly relocate communities against their will is yet another revealing indication that the green movement has dispensed with all pretense of liberal legitimacy and has openly bared its teeth as an authoritarian and despotic undertaking.

Yesterday we reported on how ultra elitist environmental group The Royal Society published a series of papers to accompany the conference, which stated that wartime-style crisis rationing should be implemented by Western governments in order to reduce carbon emissions.

Such a move would see “limits on electricity so people are forced to turn the heating down, turn off the lights, and replace old electrical goods like huge fridges with more efficient models. Food that has travelled from abroad may be limited as well as goods that require a lot of energy to manufacture,” the London Telegraph reported.

Of course, the move has nothing to do with halting global warming, which even The Royal Society itself admits is slowing, despite accelerating carbon emissions, and everything to do with lowering living standards in the West as part of the globalist drive to completely dismantle the middle class and, thereby, remove the primary obstacle to instituting an autocratic global government.

A prominent member of The Royal Society is James Lovelock, an eco-fascist who advocates ending democracy and instituting an authoritarian elite to oversee global climate management and a radical stemming of the human population in order to combat climate change. He is also a patron of the Optimum Population Trust, a notorious UK-based public policy group that campaigns for a gradual decline in the global human population, which it refers to as “primates” or “animals,” to what it sees as a “sustainable” level.

Leading climate skeptic Lord Christopher Monckton, who is in attendance at Cancun over the next ten days, appeared on The Alex Jones Show yesterday to warn that globalists are attempting to play down the significance of the summit in an effort to impose world government treaties by stealth.

Monckton stated that the alarmists were proposing “lunatic measures” like forced resettlement of populations and concentration camps, as well as food rationing in the West, all concepts familiar to socialists and communist enforcers. He said that the ideas were deliberately extreme in order to make what actually comes out of the conference look reasonable and rational so that “we almost breathe a sigh of relief when the world government takes over.”

Watch the interview below.

Final Push for World Government

6 Reasons to Start World War III If You Are a Globalist

November 28, 2010

Activist Post - The average person can barely imagine why World War III would be anything but a civilization-ending event. And, yet, we have heard Neocons ramping up rhetoric that suggests a new world war would be a viable option to correct a dying dollar and economy. Or, perhaps it is simply a sound investment if you are a Globalist.

RAND Corporation documents point to a desire for total war abroad and at home. The recent reactivation of North and South Korea tensions could be a potential catalyst in an East-West World War scenario possibly involving nukes. However, the next World War doesn’t necessarily need to be a conflagration; it could be a steady, slow, coldly calculated design to plunge the globe into austerity and totalitarian control through regulations such as those proposed by Codex Alimentarius and Agenda 21.

So, if one puts on the thinking cap of a sociopath, one might find the following 6 reasons are perfect to start World War III, by nukes or by stealth, and further the agenda of world governance.

Distraction: Regional conflicts both military and financial are being exposed as blatant economic looting and divide-and-conquer techniques. Protests are erupting across the globe as people are waking up to their enslavement en masse. Simultaneously, the high-tech police state is unfolding; endgame legislation is being passed to criminalize independence and control the Internet; and a reduction in the standard of living is minimizing the ability to purchase even simple distractions like cable TV. The greatest awakening is that an exponential number of people are beginning to realize that their voice has no meaning in the political arena. The left-right political paradigm is in grave danger, and has been made even more glaringly obvious by recent actions such as Obama awarding the medal of freedom to Bush, Sr. Add to this the calls for arresting Bush, Jr. as a war criminal (and the subsequent questioning of why Obama would not support such a trial) and we begin to see indications that people are seeing through The Quigley Formula. With such a populist uprising against all forms of oppression, the time appears to be ripe for the ultimate distraction.

Boost the Dollar: The first thing that happened when shots were fired between North and South Korea was a flight to the dollar, just like every other crisis. Russia and China just announced that they quit the dollar, and yet the dollar refuses to collapse despite fundamentals that are truly sickening. It is almost as if there are too many crises for the Russia-China announcement to even matter. Perfect timing. Rather, it would be a fine strategy for the dollar to rebound before being dissolved into a global currency, as the dollar backs the premier world superpower. We now have a twin storyline of both financial and military wars leading toward the same goal. This could be the beginning of a monetary and real WWIII strategy set up to coordinate a universal collapse to benefit global interests. And let’s not forget on which currency it actually reads New World Order.

Global Hegemony: The elimination of “rogue nations” is at the heart of the Globalist agenda, which seeks consolidation into the hands of a few powerful regions. In fact, it has been the stated goal of The Trilateral Commission since its inception in 1973 under Rockefeller and Brzezinski. Brzezinski’s response in 1974 to the question, What is The New World Order? says it all: “We need to change the international system for a global system in which new, active, and creative forces — recently developed — should be integrated.” Since then, integration has been used to great effect by the U.S. to start wars where “terrorist” regimes can be subverted or dismantled, and their flags (resources) captured. China is in a similar position with the vassal rogue state of North Korea where they can cattle prod it to action when convenient. China is now being pressured by the global community to rein in the regime. Perfect, they can consolidate their holdings in a similar fashion to what the U.S. has already done with South Korea. This new Korean conflict could have the perfect dual effect of the Western world running to the safety of the Anglo-American establishment (and the dollar), while the East seeks the backing of China to correct instability in the region. And all the while Russia and Iran are there for a potential final solution.

A “Feel Good” War: For those not attuned to the larger Globalist agenda, America is in dire need of a feel-good war . . . another Nazi Germany-style threat possessing undisputed intentions of global dominance. Enter China from stage left. Communist China has not condemned North Korea for their latest actions, and has given early warnings to the U.S. about naval exercises in their “exclusive economic zone.” If this continues, they only enhance their position as the perfect common enemy of the West. Those who are naturally opposed to Globalism see China as the prime example of the policies which will lead to global tyranny. A war with China, or Communism in general, will give the West more than just a bogeyman in a cave, but one that truly is seen as a physical and economic threat to Western civilization. Mass opposition to the lies that led to wars in the Middle East have all but exhausted the Bin Laden version of Goldstein pushed in that Orwellian storyline. Time to roll out the real threat, as the Globalist agenda accelerates toward its endgame.

Investment in the Military-Industrial Complex: 54% of the U.S. Federal budget is spent on the military in all of its forms, as it continues to expand at warp speed overseas and on the streets of America. Traditional weapons of physical destruction, as well as high-tech weaponry and mind-controlled soldiers straight out of science fiction are set to align with the surveillance and tracking capabilities of biometrics and predictive behavior criminology. New wars are always needed; particularly small-scale regional conflicts such as those suggested over and over again by Zbigniew Brzezinski and other Globalist geo-politicians. However, their own writings indicate a time when the regional conflicts must morph into a global one in order to fulfill the final agenda of an integrated scientific global dictatorship which comes after the consolidation required by Word War III. The final war won’t have a name because it will be global governance unabashedly unleashed against the people it has systematically enslaved. This final war has one goal:

Depopulation: This part of the agenda is still difficult for most people to grasp, but it is imperative to ask the question, What will global governance offer once its objectives of “order out of chaos” are achieved? We need only look at the results on a country-by-country basis when Globalist organizations like the World Bank and IMF have taken over: more poverty, more sickness, and a decrease in life expectancy. They already have been operating by stealth with soft-kill weapons designed to weaken resistance and cause sterility. The Russian geopolitical analyst, Konstantin Sivkov, who believes WWIII has begun already stated that, “History shows that the ‘elite’ of selfish civilizations do not get stopped by human sacrifices if there is a guarantee that they, themselves, will survive in bunkers.”

They have the bunkers.

We may or may not hear WWIII announced on the evening news, but we can look for the signs of global consolidation that defines the agenda of the New World Order. With every new conflict and every new piece of legislation it seems that those signs are becoming more obvious by the day.