What a waste of time. Dyed in the wool lib, convinced those sneaky republicans are the only evil. Explain the cromnibus, you simple fool. No problems here a president Liawatha couldn’t solve. Impressed that Warren uttered the name of citibank in her little speech? Here’s the name she didn’t dare speak. Congressman kevin yoder of kansas, the bought and sold toady who slipped the citibank provision in the bill. She should have named him while displaying his picture.
Anonymous
December 22, 2014 8:23 pm
When Edward Bernays brainwashed America, he did a very good job.
Steve Fraser is simply pointing out the behavior of dulled populations in collapsing empires.
It used to take centuries to collapse an empire but in the 20th century it could happen in decades.
In this century it can happen in a few years.
backwardsevolution
December 22, 2014 11:08 pm
starfcker – the guy came on to talk about his new book, The Age of Acquiescence”. You know, when everyone is rolling over on their backs. As he said, everyone thinks they have freedom because of the so-called “free market,” they’re all going to individually become rich, and so they don’t join hands to fight back. This guy is no fool. The fools are the people who think they have freedom.
And what he says about the labor movement is quite true. Manufacturing and industrialization was shipped overseas, so labor has very little say now. You might think that’s great, but it’s not. Of course, TPTB make sure there’s always an excess of labor, i.e. the 50,000 who just arrived from Central America, and the constant influx of illegals from Mexico.
I would have liked for he and Moyers to explore the “free market” they kept mentioning because, as we all know here, it’s anything but free. It’s bought and paid for, run by crooks, wrapped with fraud and corruption, and fed by the central banks and politicians.
Administrator
Author
December 23, 2014 7:50 am
Ukraine Central Bank Conned Into Swapping Its Gold For Lead Bricks
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 12/22/2014 23:12 -0500
Just when one thought the story of Ukraine and its (now non-existant) gold could not get any more surreal, it did.
As a reminder, it was about a month ago when we learned courtesy of an interview on Ukraine TV with the country’s central bank head Valeriya Gontareva, that Ukraine’s gold was virtually all gone, when she made the stunning admission that “in the vaults of the central bank there is almost no gold left. There is a small amount of gold bullion left, but it’s just 1% of reserves.”
That in itself would have been sufficient to explain why just a few short days later, the Netherlands shocked the world when it announced it had secretly repatriated 122 tonnes of gold from the NY Fed, and had the story of Ukraine’s missing gold ended there (or even with the criminal probe launched by Ukraine whether the central bank head had abused her power and misused her office when she “intentionally committed an extremely unfavorable transaction for the gold and forex reserves of Ukraine”), it still would have been one of the most bizarre, surreal stories of 2014.
Luckily, the story just got far better, and far, far more bizarre and surreal.
As Bloomberg reports, Ukraine opened a criminal probe after several gold bars at the central bank’s storage in the southern city of Odessa turned to be painted lead.
“The management of the central bank’s branch in Odessa asked us to investigate fraud by their employee,” Volodymyr Shablienko, head of the Odessa police’s press office, said by phone today. “We are conducting a forensic audit now.”
As Bloomberg explains, the latest gold fraud involved a central bank employee passing lead bars covered with golden paint to the storage unit, registering them as gold, the Vesti newspaper reported today, citing an unidentified person with knowledge of the matter in Odessa’s police department.
According to additional information from RT, the central bank was actually conned into buying the gold-plated lead.
Yes lead, not even tungsten.
RT adds that the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) has confirmed the theft of several kilograms of gold in the Odessa region. The cashier involved has apparently fled to Crimea, Vesti Ukraine reports. Criminal proceedings began on November 18, even though the scam apparently took place between August and October.
In other words, when Ukraine still, allegedly, had some gold left. Now it has no more gold, but at least it has some very expensive lead.
A preliminary investigation suggests the gang had someone working for them inside the bank that forged the necessary paperwork to allow the sale of the fake gold bullion. It’s also been discovered that bank staff were not regularly checked when entering or exiting the premises.
Altogether some 11 kilograms of gold worth about $420,000 are missing.
And while one can laugh at the stupidity of a central bank duped into believing gold-plated lead is the real deal, the real stunner is that according to the First Deputy Central Bank Governor Oleksandr Pysaruk, the central bank “took a principal decision that we will not buy gold any more from the population. We are making conclusions internally, including changing our procedures.”
In other words, until December, the central bank would buy any gold-plated lead, or tungsten, without any authenticity tests from any member of the population, or in other words, exchanging its existing reserves, i.e., gold (which it no longer has after converting most of it into dollars), into lead.
There is a potential silver lining here in that whoever ended up getting the bulk of Ukraine’s gold reserves, is now also the proud owner of a few hundreds kilograms of gold-plated lead.
One really couldn’t make this up, which is perhaps the point. Better for the public to be focused on the stupidity of its central bankers, than on their criminality for selling out the people’s gold (or worse, giving it away for free in exchange for political favors of the current class of US State Department muppets) to unknown buyers in exchange for a few pieces of green paper.
What a waste of time. Dyed in the wool lib, convinced those sneaky republicans are the only evil. Explain the cromnibus, you simple fool. No problems here a president Liawatha couldn’t solve. Impressed that Warren uttered the name of citibank in her little speech? Here’s the name she didn’t dare speak. Congressman kevin yoder of kansas, the bought and sold toady who slipped the citibank provision in the bill. She should have named him while displaying his picture.
When Edward Bernays brainwashed America, he did a very good job.
Steve Fraser is simply pointing out the behavior of dulled populations in collapsing empires.
It used to take centuries to collapse an empire but in the 20th century it could happen in decades.
In this century it can happen in a few years.
starfcker – the guy came on to talk about his new book, The Age of Acquiescence”. You know, when everyone is rolling over on their backs. As he said, everyone thinks they have freedom because of the so-called “free market,” they’re all going to individually become rich, and so they don’t join hands to fight back. This guy is no fool. The fools are the people who think they have freedom.
And what he says about the labor movement is quite true. Manufacturing and industrialization was shipped overseas, so labor has very little say now. You might think that’s great, but it’s not. Of course, TPTB make sure there’s always an excess of labor, i.e. the 50,000 who just arrived from Central America, and the constant influx of illegals from Mexico.
I would have liked for he and Moyers to explore the “free market” they kept mentioning because, as we all know here, it’s anything but free. It’s bought and paid for, run by crooks, wrapped with fraud and corruption, and fed by the central banks and politicians.
Ukraine Central Bank Conned Into Swapping Its Gold For Lead Bricks
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 12/22/2014 23:12 -0500
Just when one thought the story of Ukraine and its (now non-existant) gold could not get any more surreal, it did.
As a reminder, it was about a month ago when we learned courtesy of an interview on Ukraine TV with the country’s central bank head Valeriya Gontareva, that Ukraine’s gold was virtually all gone, when she made the stunning admission that “in the vaults of the central bank there is almost no gold left. There is a small amount of gold bullion left, but it’s just 1% of reserves.”
That in itself would have been sufficient to explain why just a few short days later, the Netherlands shocked the world when it announced it had secretly repatriated 122 tonnes of gold from the NY Fed, and had the story of Ukraine’s missing gold ended there (or even with the criminal probe launched by Ukraine whether the central bank head had abused her power and misused her office when she “intentionally committed an extremely unfavorable transaction for the gold and forex reserves of Ukraine”), it still would have been one of the most bizarre, surreal stories of 2014.
Luckily, the story just got far better, and far, far more bizarre and surreal.
As Bloomberg reports, Ukraine opened a criminal probe after several gold bars at the central bank’s storage in the southern city of Odessa turned to be painted lead.
“The management of the central bank’s branch in Odessa asked us to investigate fraud by their employee,” Volodymyr Shablienko, head of the Odessa police’s press office, said by phone today. “We are conducting a forensic audit now.”
As Bloomberg explains, the latest gold fraud involved a central bank employee passing lead bars covered with golden paint to the storage unit, registering them as gold, the Vesti newspaper reported today, citing an unidentified person with knowledge of the matter in Odessa’s police department.
According to additional information from RT, the central bank was actually conned into buying the gold-plated lead.
Yes lead, not even tungsten.
RT adds that the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) has confirmed the theft of several kilograms of gold in the Odessa region. The cashier involved has apparently fled to Crimea, Vesti Ukraine reports. Criminal proceedings began on November 18, even though the scam apparently took place between August and October.
In other words, when Ukraine still, allegedly, had some gold left. Now it has no more gold, but at least it has some very expensive lead.
A preliminary investigation suggests the gang had someone working for them inside the bank that forged the necessary paperwork to allow the sale of the fake gold bullion. It’s also been discovered that bank staff were not regularly checked when entering or exiting the premises.
Altogether some 11 kilograms of gold worth about $420,000 are missing.
And while one can laugh at the stupidity of a central bank duped into believing gold-plated lead is the real deal, the real stunner is that according to the First Deputy Central Bank Governor Oleksandr Pysaruk, the central bank “took a principal decision that we will not buy gold any more from the population. We are making conclusions internally, including changing our procedures.”
In other words, until December, the central bank would buy any gold-plated lead, or tungsten, without any authenticity tests from any member of the population, or in other words, exchanging its existing reserves, i.e., gold (which it no longer has after converting most of it into dollars), into lead.
There is a potential silver lining here in that whoever ended up getting the bulk of Ukraine’s gold reserves, is now also the proud owner of a few hundreds kilograms of gold-plated lead.
One really couldn’t make this up, which is perhaps the point. Better for the public to be focused on the stupidity of its central bankers, than on their criminality for selling out the people’s gold (or worse, giving it away for free in exchange for political favors of the current class of US State Department muppets) to unknown buyers in exchange for a few pieces of green paper.
h/t Marco