10 Most Influential People in the Alternative Media (2011)

The criteria we've chosen to base these rankings of the most influential alternative media figures are the following;

• people that have the courage to seek the truth no matter where the information leads them; 

• those with the courage to question 9/11; 

• those who don't buy into the false left-right political paradigm;

• those who are grounded in peace and liberty;

• those with the communication skills and platform to affect real change.

Significantly, each of the people who made our list is clearly driven by unyielding passion.  Despite some natural disagreements, they each provide a unique bridge to forbidden knowledge and they all deserve high praise for their efforts and commitment to inform the public. Sincerely, it is very encouraging to have so many talented voices leading the stampede for truth, liberty, justice, and peace.

With so many people doing great work in the real alternative media, we are sure that some deserving reporters will be left off the list. Although Activist Post has forged relationships with some of the people on this list, we've tried to remain as non-biased as possible in our observations.  At the end, we've also included a list of those who deserve honorable mention for their tireless work and talent providing the truth. 

The World According to Doug Casey by Doug Casey, Casey Research

Here’s a collection of some classic quotations from Doug Casey...

“Foreign aid might be defined as a transfer of money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.”

“[What politicians are doing] is not only the wrong thing, it is the exact opposite of the right thing.”


“The Constitution in the U.S. is a dead letter. It has been parsed and interpreted out of existence.”

“Things are going to be so bad, they’re going to be even worse than I think they’ll be.”

“I am more than a libertarian; I don’t believe in the right of the state to exist. The state is unnecessary for society to exist. Everything that needs to be done can be done by the market.”

“The U.S. dollar will eventually reach its intrinsic value.”  [Which will be zero.]


“Remember that through most of U.S. history, residential real estate was not viewed as an investment. You didn’t buy a house to make yourself wealthy selling it to someone else. It was viewed as an expensive consumer good that depreciated – you bought or built a house to live in it, just as you bought clothes to wear or a horse to ride. It was just a part of life – a necessity, a convenience, but an expense.”
 
“You don’t own your property. Try not paying your real estate taxes for a year or two, you’ll find out who really owns your property.”

“Gold will not just go through the roof, it will go to the moon. The gold mania has not even started.”

“Your biggest risk today is not an investment risk – it is a political risk. So you’ve got to diversify politically. This is absolutely critical.”

“One of the definitions of stupidity is an inability to correlate cause and effect.”

“When the food riots start in New York, LA, London, Paris, etc., I want to be good and far away.”


“I only like to do something when the odds are stacked heavily in my favor.”

“Currencies are artificial abstracts created out of thin air by the governments.”
 
“Increasingly desperate states will be the greatest risk to your wealth.”

Financial Repression: A Sheep Shearing Instruction Manual by Daniel R. Amerman, CFA

Overview

"Financial Repression" is currently a hot buzzword in the global economic community, and its effects are even worse than it sounds. Like other recent economic buzzwords such as "monetary sterilization" and "quantitative easing", the average person will never understand the meaning, if they hear the phrase at all.  That is too bad, because governments around the world deliberately and methodically stripping wealth (and therefore security and retirement lifestyle) from hundreds of millions of people is the quite explicit objective of Financial Repression.

As published in a recent working paper on the IMF website, Financial Repression is what the US and the rest of the advanced economies used to pay down enormous government debts the last time around, with a reduction in the government debt to GDP ratio of roughly 70% between 1945 and 1980.  Financial Repression offers a third way out - as it allows governments to pay down huge debt burdens without either 1) default or 2) hyperinflation.  If you are a senior government official of a nation that has a huge "sovereign debt" problem – like the United States and almost all of Europe, and you want to stay in power - this proven method is a topic of keen interest.  

To understand this miraculous debt cure for governments, you need to understand the source of the funding. As we will explore in this article, the essence of Financial Repression is using a combination of inflation and government control of interest rates in an environment of capital controls to confiscate the value of the savings of the world's savers.  Rephrased in less academic terms - the government deliberately destroys the value of money over time, and uses regulations to force a negative rate of return onto investors in inflation-adjusted terms, so that the real wealth of savers shrinks by an average of 3-4% per year (in the postwar historical example), and it uses an assortment of carrots and sticks to make sure investors have no choice but to accept having the purchasing power of their investments shrink each year.

What the IMF-distributed paper really constitutes is a Sheep Shearing Instruction Manual.  The "way out" for governments is effectively to put the world's savers and investors in pens, hold them down, and shear them over and over again, year after year.  Uninformed and helpless victims is what makes Financial Repression work, and it worked very well indeed for 35 years.  On the other hand, if you understand what is truly going on, then you do have the ability to turn this to your substantial personal financial advantage.  With a genuinely out of the box approach to long-term investment, the more heavy handed the repression - the more reliable the wealth compounding for those who reject flock thinking.

The Mechanics Of Financial Repression

The specifics of financial repression took somewhat different forms in each of the advanced economies, but they shared four characteristics:  1) inflation; 2) governmental control of interest rates to guarantee negative real rates of return;  3) compulsory funding of government debt by financial institutions; and 4) capital controls.

CHART OF THE DAY: The Housing Double Dip Is "CONFIRMED" And There's No Relief In Sight

"Confirmed" is the word used in the latest announcement from Case-Shiller, which showed a surprise 3.61% year-over-year decline in home prices.
This line stands out from the announcement:

“This month’s report is marked by the confirmation of a double-dip in home prices across much of the nation. The National Index, the 20-City Composite and 12 MSAs all hit new lows with data reported through March 2011. The National Index fell 4.2% over the first quarter alone, and is down 5.1% compared to its year-ago level. Home prices continue on their downward spiral with no relief in sight.” says David M. Blitzer, Chairman of the Index Committee at S&P Indices.

See the dotted line here to see that markets have now fallen to fresh lows, below the previous dip.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-march-case-shiller-2011-5#ixzz1OVXhRopz

Mobius Says Fresh Financial Crisis Around Corner Amid Volatile Derivatives

Mark Mobius, executive chairman of Templeton Asset Management’s emerging markets group, said another financial crisis is inevitable because the causes of the previous one haven’t been resolved.

“There is definitely going to be another financial crisis around the corner because we haven’t solved any of the things that caused the previous crisis,” Mobius said at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan in Tokyo today in response to a question about price swings. “Are the derivatives regulated? No. Are you still getting growth in derivatives? Yes.”

"Destructive capability is no substitute for freedom" by Simon Black

During my own career, I realized that the military was little more than a blunt instrument for bureaucrats to achieve political gain. I remember the night before the invasion of Iraq in 2003 so clearly: as all the forces were huddled at the border in Kuwait waiting to advance, I couldn’t stop thinking about the people on both sides who were about to die because George W. Bush had something to prove.

In the subsequent years, little has come from that conflict other than shattered lives, lost limbs, and a mountain of debt.

You can peel back the onion further and question the benefits of nearly every conflict– Mogadishu under Clinton, Panama under Bush I, Grenada under Reagan, the entirety of the Vietnam War under five presidents, the invasion of Greece in 1947, the occupation of Haiti in the 1920s… Cuba, the Philippines, Mexico, etc.

There are scores of other instances going all the way back to the late 1700s. And for what? To install a ruthless, puppet dictator? To maintain the country’s addiction to oil? To expand America’s domain until it matches the size of its government’s ego?

Libya is simply the latest in an endless string of folly. This logic of “let’s indiscriminately bomb a country in order to protect the civilians” can only come from the mind of a politician who quantifies benefit in votes and awards taxpayer money to defense contractors that make warfare more lethal.

Consider that there are entire industries with some of the most brilliant minds on the planet dedicated to making the military more ‘powerful’, i.e. deadly.

Today, politicians can watch a predator drone or stealth bomber rain death and destruction on a foreign population from his plasma screen. They brag about their smart bombs (which are racking up the civilian death toll) or how powerful their nuclear arsenal is, as if the efficiency of one’s destructive power is honorable.

Donald Rumsfeld famously used the phrase “shock and awe” as a promotional tool during the invasion of Iraq. It was something for the press to latch onto and fill the country with a dreamy spin on the military’s ability to exterminate foreigners like cockroaches.

They show us videos of massive explosions and Americans shriek like chimpanzees in boastful approval. Not exactly a far cry from the Roman Colosseum, is it?

In reality, there’s nothing romantic about this; the ability to kill efficiently should not be a source of pride. And the fact that a small group of elites has the power to send thousands of people to fight, die, and kill, as well as cajole an entire society into tacit support, is a total aberration of humanity.

Our descendents will surely look back on this time and wonder how we could have been so foolish– to let these people rob our freedoms; destroy our economies; kill foreigners on their home soil; and shower themselves with Peace Prize medals… all while keeping society quietly subdued with games, tricks, and bombastic patriotism.

They tell us to wave the flag, to buy yellow ribbon bumper stickers, and to remember the fallen on days like today. Truthfully, though, the memories of the fallen would be much better honored if the government quit making more of them… and stopped destroying the freedom that they supposedly died to defend.

* If you have ever doubted that freedom is on the decline, just watch this video recently shot at the Jefferson Memorial of all places.

State and local governments may cut 450,000 jobs in FY2012

Around 450,000 people who work for U.S. states, counties, cities, towns and villages could get pink slips in fiscal 2012, sharply up from the 300,000 positions shed this year, a report said on Monday.

The number of job cuts will rise mainly because the federal stimulus program is ending while the cost of Medicaid is "spiraling," said the report by UBS Investment Research.

States got billions of extra dollars primarily for education and Medicaid from the stimulus plan. Medicaid is the state-federal health plan for the poor and disabled.