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Whereas some central banks have become more forthcoming on where they claim their official gold reserves are stored (see my recent blog post ‘Central bank gold at the Bank of England‘), many of the world’s central banks remain secretive in this regard, with some central bank staff saying that they are not allowed to provide this information, and some central banks just ignoring the question when asked.

In the ‘Central bank gold at the Bank of England’ article, I said that “A number of central banks refuse to confirm the location of their gold reserves. I will document this in a future posting.” As promised, this blog post explains what I meant by the above statement.

Some of those central banks may have made it into the Bank of England storage list if they had been more transparent in providing gold storage information. However, since they weren’t transparent, these banks make it into the alternative ‘non-cooperative’ list. One subset of this list is central banks, which to be fair to them, did actually respond and said that they cannot divulge gold storage information. The other subset is central banks which didn’t reply at all when I asked them about their official gold storage location details.

The below list, although not complete, highlights 7 central banks and 1 official sector financial institution (the BIS), which, when asked where do they store their gold reserves, responded with various similar phrases saying that they could not provide this information. Between them, these 7 central banks claim to hold 1,500 tonnes of gold. Adding in the BIS which represents another 900 tonnes, in total that’s 2,400 tonnes of gold where the central banks in charge of that gold will not provide any information as to its whereabouts. Much of this 2,400 tonnes is no doubt stored (at least in name) at the FRBNY and the Bank of England, with some stored in the home countries of some of the central banks.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Rejecting TPP a Matter of Human Rights

August 14, 2015

Rejecting TPP a Matter of Human Rights

Trade deal would put Canada in consort with nation plagued by trafficking, aggressive corps

Forget about the dairy farms and supply management. The real reasons Canada should withdraw from its unseemly flirtation with the Pacific Rim trade deal are that it would formalize a trade relationship with a country plagued by human rights abuses, and make local laws and regulations designed to protect health and the environment more easily struck down by multinational companies out to fatten their bottom lines.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, is a proposed deal between 12 nations. I believe Canada should withdraw from negotiations, but that is unlikely to happen given the three largest parties contesting this fall’s federal election haveexpressed some level of support for it, with NDP support the most ambiguous and Conservative the most enthusiastic. The Green party has joined the NDP in calling for public release of the draft deal before it is signed by Canada, and is the only significant Canadian party to explicitly oppose the deal.

We’ve been hearing a lot over the past few weeks about the TPP. Most of the mainstream media coverage has been obsessively focused on whether delegates from the 12 countries involved would be able to cut a deal at last minute negotiations in Hawaii. The big issues, we were told, were whether the Harper Conservatives would give away Canada’s traditional supply management arrangements for dairy products, and whether the other countries involved would yield to American pressure to re-write intellectual property laws to further enrich big U.S. based multinationals.

While these are both important issues, and arguably enough to suggest Canada should opt out, the combination of secrecy and distraction has meant that some other crucial matters have been ignored.

It is hard for anyone outside the secretive negotiations to assess these matters with any certainty, as details of the deal have yet to be made public.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

FBI says that citizens should have no secrets that the government can’t access: the Orwellian cyber police state has arrived

August 7, 2015

FBI says that citizens should have no secrets that the government can’t access: the Orwellian cyber police state has arrived

The police and surveillance state predicted in the forward-looking 1940s classic “1984” by George Orwell, has slowly, but steadily, come to fruition. However, like a frog sitting idly in a pan of steadily-warming water, too many Americans still seem unaware that the slow boil of big government is killing their constitutional liberties.

The latest sign of this stealth takeover of civil rights and freedom was epitomized in recent Senate testimony by FBI Director James Comey, who voiced his objections to civilian use of encryption to protect personal data – information the government has no automatic right to obtain.

As reported by The New American, Comey testified that he believes the government’s spy and law enforcement agencies should have unfettered access to everything Americans may store or send in electronic format: On computer hard drives, in so-called i-clouds, in email and in text messaging – for our own safety and protection. Like many in government today, Comey believes that national security is more important than constitutional privacy protections or, apparently, due process. After all, aren’t criminals the only ones who really have anything to hide?

In testimony before a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee entitled “Going Dark: Encryption, Technology, and the Balance Between Public Safety and Privacy” Comey said that in order to stay one step ahead of terrorists, as well as international and domestic criminals, Uncle Sam’s various spy and law enforcement agencies should have access to available technology used to de-encrypt protected data. Also, he believes the government should be the final arbiter deciding when decryption is necessary.

What could go wrong there?

Find more articles on the police state at PoliceState.news

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/050653_police_state_national_security_FBI.html#ixzz3i8PWQ4tC

MH-17 Case Slips into Propaganda Fog

July 10, 2015

MH-17 Case Slips into Propaganda Fog

Exclusive: Almost a year ago, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine killing 298 people. Yet, instead of a transparent investigation seeking justice, the case became a propaganda game of finger-pointing, with the CIA withholding key evidence all the better to blame Russia, reports Robert Parry.

The Dutch investigation into the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine last July has failed to uncover conclusive proof of precisely who was responsible for the deaths of the 298 passengers and crew but is expected to point suspicions toward the ethnic Russian rebels, fitting with the West’s long-running anti-Russian propaganda campaign.

A source who has been briefed on the outlines of the investigation said some U.S. intelligence analysts have reached a contrary conclusion and place the blame on “rogue” elements of the Ukrainian government operating out of a circle of hard-liners around one of Ukraine’s oligarchs. Yet, according to this source, the U.S. analysts will demur on the Dutch findings, letting them stand without public challenge.

Throughout the Ukraine crisis, propaganda and “information warfare” have overridden any honest presentation of reality – and the mystery around the MH-17 disaster has now slipped into that haze of charge and counter-charge. Many investigative journalists, including myself, have been rebuffed in repeated efforts to get verifiable proof about the case or even informational briefings.

In that sense, the MH-17 case stands as an outlier to the usual openness that surrounds inquiries into airline disasters. The Obama administration’s behavior has been particularly curious, with its rush to judgment five days after the July 17, 2014 shoot-down, citing sketchy social media posts to implicate the ethnic Russian rebels and indirectly the Russian government but then refusing requests for updates.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

LEAKED: How the Biggest Banks Are Conspiring to Rip Up Financial Regulations around the World

July 3, 2015

LEAKED: How the Biggest Banks Are Conspiring to Rip Up Financial Regulations around the World

WikiLeaks got its hands on part of the secret trade pact for services

It’s almost impossible to keep anything secret these days – not even the core text of a hyper-secret trade deal, the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA), which has spent the last two years taking shape behind the hermetically sealed doors of highly secure locations around the world.

According to the agreement’s provisional text, the document is supposed to remain confidential and concealed from public view for at least five years after being signed! But now, thanks to WikiLeaks, it has seeped to the surface.

The Really, Really Good Friends of Services

TiSA is arguably the most important – yet least well-known – of the new generation of global trade agreements. According to WikiLeaks, it “is the largest component of the United States’ strategic ‘trade’ treaty triumvirate,” which also includes the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the TransAtlantic Trade and Investment Pact (TTIP).

“Together, the three treaties form not only a new legal order shaped for transnational corporations, but a new economic ‘grand enclosure,’ which excludes China and all other BRICS countries” declared WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange in a press statement. If allowed to take universal effect, this new enclosure system will impose on all our governments a rigid framework of international corporate law designed to exclusively protect the interests of corporations, relieving them of financial risk, and social and environmental responsibility.

Thanks to an innocuous-sounding provision called the Investor-State Dispute Settlement, every investment they make will effectively be backstopped by our governments (and by extension, you and me); it will be too-big-to-fail writ on an unimaginable scale.

Yet it is a system that is almost universally supported by our political leaders. In the case of TiSA, it involves more countries than TTIP and TPP combined: The United States and all 28 members of the European Union, Australia, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Hong Kong, Iceland, Israel, Japan, Liechtenstein, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Pakistan, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, South Korea, Switzerland, Taiwan and Turkey.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Obama: TPP a secret treaty because ‘US War on Terror requires secrecy’

June 24, 2015

Obama: TPP a secret treaty because ‘US War on Terror requires secrecy’

(Satire): President Obama announced at a White House press conference today that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade treaty details must remain secret because the now 14-year-old US War on Terror requires secrecy from terrorist enemies, secrecy is the founding principle of American freedom, and that secrecy equals safety. Press conference excerpts:

President Obama: As you know, secrecy is a foundational principle of American freedom. From the Founding Father’s secret “Committees of Correspondence,” to Boston’s Old North Church spy signal of “one if by land, two if by sea,” to Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay using the secret name, “Publius,” to publish The Federalist Papers to win support for our Constitution, American patriots have used secrecy to protect our great nation. Secrecy equals freedom.

This is why the current Trans-Pacific Partnership treaty, TPP, is a classified national security secret that cannot be disclosed to the public, even four years or more after it is passed into law. Secrecy keeps Americans safe.

I also remind everyone that America is fighting a War on Terror, and that even after 14 years of brave combat and support of the American public, the terrorists are not defeated. War requires secrecy to keep our troops as safe as possible. TPP makes America stronger, which supports our troops.

Q: Sir, what about the “fast track” that violates the US Constitutional requirement that all treaties be ratified by the Senate under at least 2/3 vote?

Obama: The United States is a democracy. Fast track authority was passed into law by Congress. When Congress has the votes and the President approves, that’s the law of the land.

Q: I’m sorry, Mr. President; but how can Congress and you violate the Constitution by ignoring the 2/3 vote requirement just because you say so?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Big Pharma Revealed As Puppetmaster Behind TPP Secrecy

June 11, 2015

Big Pharma Revealed As Puppetmaster Behind TPP Secrecy

It is no secret that US healthcare corporations have been among, if not the biggest beneficiaries of Obamacare: by “socializing” costs and spreading the reimbursement pool over the entire population in the form of a tax, pharmaceutical companies have been able to boost medical product and service costs to unprecedented levels with the help of complicit insurance companies who have subsequently passed through these costs to the consumer, in the process sending the price of biotech and pharma stocks to levels not seen since the dot com bubble.

But when it came to the highly confidential TPP, it was unclear just which corporations were dominant in pulling the strings.

Now thanks to more documents published by Wikileaks, and analyzed by the NYT, it appears that “big pharma” is once again pulling the strings, this time of the Trans Pacific Partnership, which if passed will “empower big pharmaceutical firms to command higher reimbursement rates in the United States and abroad, at the expense of consumers” according to “public health professionals, generic-drug makers and activists opposed to the trade deal.”

In other words, just like the narrowly-passed Obamacare was a gift for big Pharma, so America’s legal drug dealers are now trying to go for another price boosting catalyst, one which however will involve not just the US but some 12 countries in the Asia-Pacific region. Worst of all, the negotiations for the next price increase is taking place in utmost secrecy where “American negotiators are still pressing participating governments to open the process that sets reimbursement rates for drugs and medical devices.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Government Is Using Secrecy As a Weapon

June 8, 2015

Government Is Using Secrecy As a Weapon

“Everything Secret Degenerates”

Everyone knows Lord Acton’s famous quote:

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

But few have heard this equally profound quote from Lord Acton:

Every thing secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity.

Likewise, US Supreme Court Justice Brandeis said:

Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.

But government secrecy is at an all-time high. Government is more hostile to the press than ever before.

The government prosecutes cases based upon “secret evidence” that they don’t show to the defendant … or sometimes even the judge hearing the case.

Government is “laundering” information gained through mass surveillance through other agencies, with an agreement that the agencies will “recreate” the evidence in a “parallel construction” … so the original source of the evidence is kept secret from the defendant, defense attorneys and the judge. A former top NSA official says that this is the opposite of following the Fourth Amendment, but is a“totalitarian process” which shows that we’re in a “police state”.

The government uses “secret evidence” to spy on Americans, prosecute leaking or terrorism charges (even against U.S. soldiers) and even assassinate people. And see this and this.

Secret witnesses are being used in some cases. And sometimes lawyers are being prevented from reading their own briefs.

Moreover:

A neocon “advocacy” group [was] immunized from the law, because the U.S. government waltzed into court, met privately with the judge, and whispered in secret that he had better dismiss all claims against that group lest he harm national security …

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Forget the TPP – Wikileaks Releases Documents from the Equally Shady “Trade in Services Agreement,” or TISA

June 6, 2015

Forget the TPP – Wikileaks Releases Documents from the Equally Shady “Trade in Services Agreement,” or TISA

Screen Shot 2015-06-05 at 11.17.16 AM

If it sounds complicated, it is. The important point is that this trade agreement contains a crucial discussion of governments’ abilities to meaningfully protect civil liberties. And it is not being treated as a human rights discussion. It is being framed solely as an economic issue, ignoring the implications for human rights, and it is being held in a classified document that the public is now seeing months after it was negotiated, and only because it was released through WikiLeaks.

The process is also highly secretive—in fact, trade agreement texts are classified. While the executive branch does consult with members of Congress, even congressional staffers with security clearance have until recently been prevented from seeing the texts. Furthermore, certain trade industry advisers are allowed access to U.S. negotiating objectives and negotiators that the public and public interest groups do not have.

– From the Slate article: Privacy Is Not a Barrier to Trade

If you haven’t heard about about the Trade in Services Agreement, aka TISA, don’t worry, you’re not alone. While I had heard of it before, I never read anything substantial about it until today. What sparked my reading interest on the subject were a series of very troubling articles published via several media outlets following a document dump by Wikileaks. Here’s how the whistleblower organization describes the TISA leak on it document release page:

WikiLeaks releases today 17 secret documents from the ongoing TISA (Trade In Services Agreement) negotiations which cover the United States, the European Union and 23 other countries including Turkey, Mexico, Canada, Australia, Pakistan, Taiwan & Israel — which together comprise two-thirds of global GDP.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Effort by Japan to Stifle News Media Is Working

April 28, 2015

Effort by Japan to Stifle News Media Is Working

It was an unexpected act of protest that shook Japan’s carefully managed media world: Shigeaki Koga, a regular television commentator and fierce critic of the political establishment, abruptly departed from the scripted conversation during a live TV news program to announce that this would be his last day on the show because, as he put it, network executives had succumbed to political pressure for his removal.

“I have suffered intense bashing by the prime minister’s office,” Mr. Koga told his visibly flabbergasted host late last month, saying he had been removed as commentator because of critical statements he had made about Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Later in the program, Mr. Koga held up a sign that read “I am not Abe,” a play on the slogan of solidarity for journalists slain in January at a French satirical newspaper.

The outburst created a public firestorm, and not only because of the spectacle of Mr. Koga, a dour-faced former top government official, seemingly throwing away his career as a television commentator in front of millions of viewers. His angry show of defiance also focused national attention on the right-leaning government’s increased strong-arming of the news media to reduce critical coverage.

Many journalists and political experts say the Abe government is trying to engineer a fundamental shift in the balance of power between his administration and the news media, using tactics to silence criticism that go beyond anything his predecessors tried and that have frustrated many journalists. These have included more aggressive complaints to the bosses of critical journalists and commentators like Mr. Koga, and more blatant retaliation against outlets that persist in faulting the administration. At the same time, Mr. Abe has tried to win over top media executives and noted journalists with private sushi lunches.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement and The Covenant of Secrecy

April 27, 2015

The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement and The Covenant of Secrecy

The TTIP and TPPA, both sounding like ominous injections of political disaster, continue their march towards belittling, and corroding the democratic content of its participating countries. The holder of the needle remains US President Barack Obama, while the incentive is that grand fantasy that the more parties cooperate, the merrier will be the international scene when it comes to making money in a tariff-free world. Negotiate, in other words, with “like-minded” partners, and your limited leverage becomes far more significant.

In this regard, the US Congress has proven a funny old thing. Having made such a fuss about the issue of any nuclear deal with Iran and its necessary involvement, it has proven less enthusiastic about meddling in the matter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, or economic instruments with vast consequence. This is one of the centrepieces of Obama’s policy, central to his “shift” towards the Asia-Pacific and containing the increasing shine of Chinese development.

Nor is the equivalent agreement covering Europe, known as the Transatlantic Trade Investment Partnership, is not proving as big a bother as it should. The GOP members have not been opposed to Obama in one key aspect: that he remains the classic lobbyist on the issue that America’s business has always been business.

Last Thursday saw the Ways and Means Committee pass a bill by 25-13 that would actually accelerate trade deals, effectively curbing Congressional power to amend them. That vision stemmed largely from the work of such figures as Senate Finance Committee Chair Orrin Hatch (R-Utah). Debate in the chamber would be restricted, leading, instead, to mere “yes-or-no votes”. Effects of trade, it seems, is something exclusively reserved to the wisdom of the executive.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Death of the Republic

April 26, 2015

The Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Death of the Republic

“The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.”

— Article IV, Section 4, US Constitution

A republican form of government is one in which power resides in elected officials representing the citizens, and government leaders exercise power according to the rule of law. In The Federalist Papers, James Madison defined a republic as “a government which derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people . . . .”

On April 22, 2015, the Senate Finance Committee approved a bill to fast-track the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a massive trade agreement that would override our republican form of government and hand judicial and legislative authority to a foreign three-person panel of corporate lawyers.

The secretive TPP is an agreement with Mexico, Canada, Japan, Singapore and seven other countries that affects 40% of global markets. Fast-track authority could now go to the full Senate for a vote as early as next week. Fast-track means Congress will be prohibited from amending the trade deal, which will be put to a simple up or down majority vote. Negotiating the TPP in secret and fast-tracking it through Congress is considered necessary to secure its passage, since if the public had time to review its onerous provisions, opposition would mount and defeat it.

Abdicating the Judicial Function to Corporate Lawyers

James Madison wrote in The Federalist Papers:

The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, . . . may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny. . . . “Were the power of judging joined with the legislative, the life and liberty of the subject would be exposed to arbitrary control, for the judge would then be the legislator. . . .”

And that, from what we now know of the TPP’s secret provisions, will be its dire effect.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

SECRECY SHROUDS UNKNOWN ROLE OF TOP UK GOVERNMENT OFFICIAL

April 11, 2015

SECRECY SHROUDS UNKNOWN ROLE OF TOP UK GOVERNMENT OFFICIAL

The British government is refusing to disclose the job title and taxpayer-funded salary of one of the most senior law enforcement officials in the United Kingdom, claiming the details have to be kept a secret for security reasons.

Cressida Dick (pictured above) was formerly one of the highest ranking officers at London’s Metropolitan Police, the largest police force in the U.K., where she headed the Specialist Operations unit and oversaw acontroversial criminal investigation into journalists who reported on Edward Snowden’s leaked documents.

In December, Dick announced she was leaving the London police to take up a top job with the government’s Foreign Office. But her new role is being shrouded in intense secrecy.

In response to Freedom of Information Act requests from this reporter, the Foreign Office has repeatedly declined to disclose even the most basic details about Dick’s position.

Government officials handling the requests say that members of the public are not entitled to know anything about Dick’s job title, role and responsibilities, or the amount of money she is earning – despite the fact that specific salaries earned by senior Foreign Office officials, as well as their job titles, are usually routinely made available online.

In two separate refusal letters issued in February and March, the Foreign Office said that it would not hand over the information because it relates to “bodies dealing with security matters,” and so the government was “not obliged to consider the public interest in disclosure.” It would acknowledge only that Dick has been appointed in a “director general” position.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

THE CIA CAMPAIGN TO STEAL APPLE’S SECRETS

March 11, 2015

THE CIA CAMPAIGN TO STEAL APPLE’S SECRETS

RESEARCHERS WORKING with the Central Intelligence Agency have conducted a multi-year, sustained effort to break the security of Apple’s iPhones and iPads, according to top-secret documents obtained byThe Intercept.

The security researchers presented their latest tactics and achievements at a secret annual gathering, called the “Jamboree,” where attendees discussed strategies for exploiting security flaws in household and commercial electronics. The conferences have spanned nearly a decade, with the first CIA-sponsored meeting taking place a year before the first iPhone was released.

By targeting essential security keys used to encrypt data stored on Apple’s devices, the researchers have sought to thwart the company’s attempts to provide mobile security to hundreds of millions of Apple customers across the globe. Studying both “physical” and “non-invasive” techniques, U.S. government-sponsored research has been aimed at discovering ways to decrypt and ultimately penetrate Apple’s encrypted firmware. This could enable spies to plant malicious code on Apple devices and seek out potential vulnerabilities in other parts of the iPhone and iPad currently masked by encryption.

The CIA declined to comment for this story.

The security researchers also claimed they had created a modified version of Apple’s proprietary software development tool, Xcode, which could sneak surveillance backdoors into any apps or programs created using the tool. Xcode, which is distributed by Apple to hundreds of thousands of developers, is used to create apps that are sold through Apple’s App Store.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Crunch Time for the Global Corporatocracy

March 2, 2015

Crunch Time for the Global Corporatocracy

As Sir Winston Churchill is alleged to have said, democracy is the worst form of government, except all the others that have been tried. However, in this age of increasingly globalized governance the future of democracy is very much in question.

Already many key economic decisions affecting our lives are being taken and implemented in complete secrecy behind hermetically closed doors. In the negotiations for the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade agreement between 12 nations including the U.S., Mexico, Canada, Australia, Japan, Singapore and New Zealand, an army of over 600 corporate advisers have been allowed access to the accompanying text while the public and even members of Congress have largely been kept in the dark.

Indeed, the only way for the uninitiated to learn about some – but far from all – of the potential repercussions of today’s trade agreements is through leaked documents. The current negotiations for a US-EU trade deal (TTIP) are so clandestine that the few Members of the European Parliament that are granted access can only view the plans in their original documentation, in a secure location, with the threat of espionage charges hanging over them if they are caught making copies or sharing the details with the public.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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