More Space News: Grand Duchy Of Luxembourg Affirms Rights To Space …

spaceJoseph P Farrell – Just a couple of weeks ago I blogged about the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg’s attempts to position itself as a leader in space-mining finance. As I argued then, Luxembourg has long been an international banking hub, and hence its decision to move into this area is not surprising.

As I averred in that previous blog, space is a perfect way to mask all sorts of financial chicanery, and a convenient way to launder money or profits by overstating, or understating, certain numbers on one’s ledger books. After all, to catch such dubious dealings, one has to literally go out there and put boots on the asteroids, so to speak, and “see for oneself.” It’s a perfect way, in short, to extend that hidden system of finance I’ve been talking about so much over the past few years.

Not only was space perhaps “secretly collateralized,” but it provides virtually limitless opportunities for cooking the books: say “Space Mining and Widgets” claims to have found vast resources on an asteroid in X quadrillions of dollars. One really wouldn’t know if that was the case unless one went there and independently verified it, beyond the usual means of spectrographic analysis and so on. Such analysis, or space probes collecting soil samples and so on, would provide margins of error, of course, but within those margins it could be a veritable playground for clever “bookkeeping.” Physicists and chemists become “interplanetary assayers for hire”, so to speak.

Well, here’s another intriguing story that was shared by Ms. C, and you’ll note the dateline – Nov 13, 2016 – puts this story once again into that weird context of the American election and its aftermath, a temporal frame in which we’ve seen a variety of other space-related stories coming out, including those which I blogged about yesterday. This one, however, is another “whopper doozie”:

Space Mining: Luxembourg’s New Law To Give Private Companies Right To Outer Space Resources  [Link]

You’ll note that the Grand Duchy is, in effect, attempting to follow what has already essentially been decided in the US, and to become the first European country – notably an international banking hub to boot – to grant ownership of resources extracted from near Earth objects like asteroids:

“The legal framework we put in place is perfectly in line with the Outer Space Treaty. Our law does not suggest to either establish or imply in any way sovereignty over a territory or over a celestial body. Only the appropriation of space resources is addressed in the legal framework,” Etienne Schneider, deputy prime minister and minister of the economy, said in an official announcement of the draft law.

According to Article 1 of the draft law, space resources are capable of being appropriated in accordance with international law. This makes Luxembourg the first European country to provide legal ownership of external space resources.

Of course, one can quibble about the niceties of international law and what does or does not constitute “sovereignty,” but the bottom line remains that is one is extracting resources from a piece of land on Earth or elsewhere, one is in essence asserting sovereignty. And this is a pattern, like I argued last week, that could equally be applied to the “East Indies” companies of yesteryear, which effectively extended British and Dutch sovereignty via corporate cut-outs to encompass empires that engulfed lands far from The Hague or London.

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What I suspect this law does is to confirm my speculations from last week, namely, that the Grand Duchy is positioning itself, and being positioned by the powers-that-be in Europe (think France and Germany chiefly) to be the point-country for European involvement in the space-commercialization and collateralization rush.

And that’s might convenient, given the current problems of the euro (just as it’s mighty conventient for the current problems of the dollar). In effect, folks, I am suggesting we’re watching the roll-out of the “space dollar” and the “space-euro/D-mark” as the petro-based currencies like the petro-dollar are being phased out. It’s the space-race versus the Chinese silk-road race…

And that means the dollar’s reserve currency status isn’t going to go completely south any time soon.

See you on the flip side…

SF Source Giza Death Star Nov. 2016

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The War on Cash Is a War on Your Freedom to Opt Out

Charles Hugh Smith – I’ve covered the war on cash i.e. the proposed elimination of cash, a number of times, for example, The War On Cash: Officially Sanctioned Theft (June 13, 2015)

Our first question should be: just how big a share of our financial universe is cash? The answer is: vanishingly small. Look at this chart of total credit in the U.S. economy–$63 trillion–and total cash: $1.45 trillion. Cash is the thin red line at the bottom of the chart–it barely registers.

cash

Meanwhile, total household/non-profit-sector financial assets total $70.3 trillion (net $55.8 trillion minus liabilities of $14.5 trillion).

Total money (currency in circulation and demand deposits) is over $10 trillion.

If cash is such a small share of money and assets, why are governments so keen to ban cash?

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Pope, “Climate Change,” WW3 And Defeating Drug Cartels

popeKatherine Frisk – In Pope Francis’s latest on “Climate Change” (driven by the Malthusian Hans Joachim Schellnhuber who claimed that the earth’s capacity is only 1 billion people), many wondered what Schellnhuber , the Vatican and the Pope in particular intended to do with the other 6.5 billion? After all, they do not support family planning, birth control or abortion. So what is left?

War? Another opportunity to take a pot shot at Russia and the Orthodox Christian Church, something that has been in their line of sight for ONE THOUSAND YEARS since they successfully brought down the Haggia Sophia, Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire through “mercenaries,” which even today they claim they had no influence over. Sort of in the same way that Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, Israel and the US claim that they have had no influence over ISIS/ISIL, and yet they had been funding, training and planning the destruction of Syria for a number of years. Iran is next on the cards. As regards Eastern Europe and Russia in particular, The Inquisition, Napoleon, WWI, the Communist Bolsheviks and WWII were only partially successful in removing the Orthodox Christian Church from the face of the earth. Today under Putin it is making a major come back and dedicating Russia to the Virgin Mary looks as distant as ever.

But there is another way to destroy communities, societies and nations other than war as the Chinese know only too well. Through the drug trade. In the last 45 years, narcotics has been made fashionable thanks to Hollywood. “Drugs, sex and rock n roll!” Catchy little phrase isn’t it? And co-ordinated by the CIA. So what do the CIA and the drug cartels have to do with the Pope?

Keep in mind that the South American cocaine industry is worth billions run by Langely Virginia (CIA), and the Bush crime family syndicate. The opium industry in Afghanistan is booming, over $200 billion dollars a year network where it is shipped out through NATO bases and transported into Europe through the Balkans. Eastern Europe as a result has become a degenerate cess pitt of drug rings, prostitution, human trafficking and organ trafficking. The Slavic people, by and large Orthodox Christians, are now rotting from within. Throw in a couple of “colour revolutions,” coups and a civil war in Ukraine, as they did in South America with Chile and Argentina, and Eastern Europe is about to go the same way as Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria and Greece of course that has been successfully raped and pillaged by the EU and the IMF. Greece is the home of the Orthodox Christian Church. And then there is also Armenia, another Orthodox Christian country about to be beset by some Nuland treatment and a “color revolution.” Continue reading

Jaw-Dropping Crimes Of The Big Banks

ZeroHedge March 15 2013

Preface: Not all banks are criminal enterprises. The wrongdoing of a particular bank cannot be attributed to other banks without proof. But – as documented below – many of the biggest banks have engaged in unimaginably bad behavior.

You Won’t Believe What They’ve Done …

FinanceHere are just some of the improprieties by big banks:

  • Funding the Nazis
  • Financing illegal arms deals, and funding the manufacture of cluster bombs (and see this andthis) and other arms which are banned in most of the world
  • Launching a coup against the President of the United States
  • Engaging in mafia-style big-rigging fraud against local governments. See this, this and this
  • Shaving money off of virtually every pension transaction they handled over the course of decades, stealing collectively billions of dollars from pensions worldwide. Details here, here,here, hereherehere, here, hereherehere, here and here
  • Manipulating gold prices … on a daily basis
  • Charging “storage fees” to store gold bullion … without even buying or storing any gold . Andraiding allocated gold accounts
  • Committing massive and pervasive fraud both when they initiated mortgage loans and when they foreclosed on them (and see this)
  • Pledging the same mortgage multiple times to different buyers. See this, this, this, this andthis. This would be like selling your car, and collecting money from 10 different buyers for the same car
  • Cheating homeowners by gaming laws meant to protect people from unfair foreclosure
  • Committing massive fraud in an $800 trillion dollar market which effects everything from mortgages, student loans, small business loans and city financing
  • Manipulating the hundred trillion dollar derivatives market
  • Engaging in insider trading of the most important financial information
  • Pushing investments which they knew were terrible, and then betting against the same investments to make money for themselves. See this, this, this, this and this
  • Engaging in unlawful “frontrunning” to manipulate markets. See this, this, this, this, this andthis
  • Engaging in unlawful “Wash Trades” to manipulate asset prices. See thisthis and this
  • Otherwise manipulating markets. And see this
  • Participating in various Ponzi schemes. See thisthis and this
  • Charging veterans unlawful mortgage fees
  • Helping the richest to illegally hide assets
  • Bribing and bullying ratings agencies to inflate ratings on their risky investments
  • Violently cracking down on peaceful protesters

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