Thursday, June 21, 2007

The Federal Reserve, Fiat Money and the Meltdown of the US Economy

This article is inspired by G. Edward Griffin’s book ‘The Creature from Jekyll Island’ which chronicles the creation of the American Federal Reserve System. I am a great admirer of Griffin’s work principally because of the highly researched and organised way in which he approaches his subject matter and the clear and concise way in which he presents his findings.





The following story I am about to tell really only acts as an overview to his book which, I suggest, should be vital reading for everyone and particularly those who want to get a true understanding of how corrupt our western banking systems are and the power that these cartels wield over our lives.


Part 1

This story reflects the vanity of human nature. It shows how the deviation from a path of self-control can lead to a situation that gets wildly out of hand, with all of the benefits falling into the hands of the wrong people, creating a system that works directly against our own interests and well-being. It also demonstrates the deceptive skills employed by the élite ‘Illuminati’ banking families, having us believe that their banking system is in our best interests when, in fact, they are deceiving us and maintaining that deception so that when we are embroiled in high interest rates or lose our standard of living through a market crash, we end up pointing the finger of accusation in the wrong direction.


Origins and types of money


Once upon a time the transaction of goods and services was conducted by barter with exchanges made by mutual agreement on their relative values. As time went by it became apparent that some goods were more essential to the daily needs of people than others - like wheat or cattle - and there was a constant demand for such items. Because these goods had an intrinsic value they could be used as commodity money.

As man came to discover and refine precious metals which had a rarity value in themselves, coins were minted and these were eventually used as a more convenient medium of exchange for goods and services. The value of these coins would be determined by weight.

The amount of actual coinage that a merchant, for instance, might possess at any one time, might well be far more than he actually needed for his immediate requirement, so a system developed whereby he would deposit some of his coinage with a goldsmith, who would hold it in his vaults and issue the owner with a written receipt, redeemable upon presentation at any time. Soon these promissory notes were circulated to third parties with whom our merchant may have had business dealings and they, themselves could, upon presentation to the goldsmith, obtain the payment due to them by the merchant. These paper receipts became our next stage of currency, receipt money.

If we suppose that the materials and labour required in building a cart are reckoned to be equal to an ounce gold coin - a price based upon the availability of the gold coin supply and availability of carts - then one cart would cost one ounce of gold. But if the amount of gold being mined and minted into coins increases, so that the available money supply increases, then the price of a cart will rise because of the greater wealth in general circulation. Clearly, supply and demand of gold and available goods maintain an equilibrium.

The common misconception that this system is limited to the amount of gold available as currency at any one time is a misnomer since any scarcity of available gold is offset by the increased value of what is in current supply. If gold coinage is plentiful the cost of the cart will rise, if gold coinage is in short supply the price will come down.

As long as this system is left alone and governments or banks don’t intervene by cutting corners or creating paper money that isn’t 100% backed to the same value by gold, then the economy will remain stable and everyone will benefit.

But man’s impatience with such well-disciplined systems and his age-old wish to make an expedient extra buck or two soon led to the imbalancing of the mechanism.


Enter fractional and fiat money

The extra bob or two for those unscrupulous abusers of the system had kept busy hands at work filing down coins - just a little - and then re-casting the accumulated filings into new coinage. Not only goldsmiths, but governments engaged in this activity on the coins received from the public as tax payments. Now there was more coinage in circulation, but its real worth had been compromised. More coinage meant higher prices because of the seeming increase in wealth, yet the wealth had not increased, hence our first acquaintance with inflation.

But worse than this was the realisation by goldsmiths that they could literally get an extra run for their money in a quite different way. Discovering that of the available gold in their vaults at any one time left in safekeeping on behalf of depositors, only a fraction (about 15%) was ever called for on any given occasion. This led unscrupulous goldsmiths’ to offer the other 85% that was unlikely to be called upon by depositors, as loans to others and charge interest for the privilege. This allowed a goldsmith to create further money out of that which was lying idle in his vaults. But wait. That money isn't rightfully his, it belongs to the depositor who has every reason to believe that his gold coins are left in safe keeping. So the depositors' gold he is issuing as loans is being used twice, creating a most devious slight of hand and once again devaluing the actual money supply in existence. The concept of fractional money, had arrived, a highly convenient and dishonest concept that has dominated the banking system up to our present day.

But still man’s insatiable desire for more money continued, especially during wars when the colossal cost of armaments had to be met at very short notice.

Fiat money first made its appearance in China during the time of Marco Polo, but was also used to disastrous ends in the American colonies. Under this system, money is conjured up out of nothing as it doesn’t have the backing of gold or anything of real tangible value. Fiat money is issued out of nothing and is declared legal tender by government, meaning that it has to be adopted as lawful tender. The flooding of a country’s economy with this worthless issuance dilutes the genuine gold-backed money in existence, so that prices inevitably rise because of the increase in money supply, but in reality everyone is worse off because their money buys less. This is inflation.

The government now has a new source of money with which to buy their armaments but it has to be paid for somehow. Whereas direct taxation would be highly unpopular with the masses, the issuance of fiat money and its devaluing effect on the money supply allows the books to be balanced through inflation - the decline of our purchasing power - the perfect hidden tax!

In colonial America this was demonstrated to disastrous effect when inflation became rampant and between 1775 and 1779 the money supply increased by 5000%! George Washington remarked in 1779 "that a wagon load of money would scarcely purchase a wagon load of provisions”.





With the drafting of the American Constitution and with the ravages of hyper-inflation fresh in the founders’ minds, it included the strong provision that the issuance of fiat money would be outlawed.

A hard lesson had been learned, but not for long.




Part 2


Modern banking comes into being

The banking business had its foundations in 14th century Europe and in many instances got off on the right foot with banks fully meeting their moral obligations by issuing paper receipts that were fully backed their by deposits. However, the craving for money among the banks’ clientele soon put pressure on them to find easier ways of creating it, rather than being tied to the value of their deposits. The long ride down the slippery slope had begun with a legacy to this day of booms and busts, bank failures and sporadic economic failures, resulting from the unbridled issuance of un-backed money, devaluing economies.

With the founding of the Bank of England in 1694, fractional-reserve banking became institutionalised. It was the world’s first central bank, introducing the partnership between bankers and politicians, a disastrous mix. This liaison would allow a revenue-hungry British government to obtain funds which were largely created out of nothing by the bank on which the government would pay interest, thus avoiding the unpopular resort of the government raising taxes. But, as we have seen, someone has to make up the financial imbalance and it is the average man and woman who ends up paying more for goods and services; the hidden tax, inflation.


Early American central banks

Even before the Constitution was drafted, America had its own central bank, the Bank of North America, taking as its lead the Bank of England practice of fractional-reserve lending; lending more money as promissory notes than it held in deposit, and its principal borrower was the government.

Predictably, America’s first venture into central banking became an exercise in fraudulence. Closing its doors in 1783, it was replaced with America’s second central bank, the First Bank of the United States. But lessons still were not being learned.

One of the most influential players in the First Bank’s operations were the Rothschilds of Europe. This infamously cunning family, whose influence has continued to covertly dominate world money and therefore world events to this day and to whom - along with the Rockerfellers, their American counterparts in crime - had devised methods which enabled them to exploit the banking system to their own ends and amass incredible fortunes. Their wealth was obtained though smuggling, urging governments to engage in wars from which they would hugely profit and - through their superior network of intelligence gathering - manipulate the stock markets to their own ends. Indeed, Mayer Amschel Rothschild’s famous saying “Let me issue and control a nation’s money and I care not who writes the laws” couldn’t be more appropriate.

Their influence on the First Bank obviously showed and in the first five years of its existence, inflation - that covert tax - had devalued people’s money by 42%. Outrage in many quarters ensued and America’s second central bank closed down. But in its wake, smaller wildcat banks operating on the same flawed principals stepped in just as the 1812 war between America and Britain needed funding. Within two years the nation’s money supply had tripled, devaluing it by a further 66%!

Despite this rampant inflation, at the end of the war, rather than reign in the excesses of the wildcat banks, Congress merely sought to protect them and perpetuate the system by founding America’s third central bank, the Second Bank of the United States and it was business as usual for the fractional lending fraud. With its enhanced connections with the wildcat banks, which were situated right across America, the inflationary boom and bust cycles were now felt everywhere.

By 1820 the pendulum was beginning to sway back in favour of sound monetary control and the principal voice in this crusade was Democrat, Andrew Jackson. A period of battle between Jackson and the Second Bank’s head Norman Biddle followed, but in the end Jackson won and the Second Bank closed its doors.


Civil War and beyond

By the time the Second Bank had closed the country was entering a ‘bust’ cycle as the money supply was being limited following rapid inflation. But with now no central bank, bad old practices and some bad new ones dominated while no-one tackled the real cause of this continual financial disruption, fractional reserve banking. It was this continuing economic crisis and the weak state of the economy, making exports in the North uncompetitive, which really triggered the American Civil War and not the issue of slavery which is popularly touted as its driving force.

While the Confederate South and industrialised North enjoyed mutual trading, the South also successfully traded cotton to Europe which annoyed the North whose exports were deemed uncompetitive because of cheaper goods being imported from Europe. In order to counter this imbalance the North imposed protectionist embargoes on imported European goods which forced the southern states to have to buy from the North at higher prices. Also the North’s embargo on European imports was retaliated by Europe taking similar measures on imported cotton from the South causing outrage among the Confederates.





European money men and governments wanted to use this split between the North and South to weaken America for their own secret expansionist policies, thus America had now become embroiled in global economic politics with the Rothschild dynasty and the London-based House of Morgan being a significant cause, but more significantly they were the financial beneficiaries of the blood spilt during the Civil War.


The Jekyll Island Meeting

America’s banking industry, following the demise of the Second Bank, was a myriad of rules and regulations, controls and privileges, none of which struck at the heart of the boom and bust cycle, namely the proliferation of marginal reserve money. Banks together with the trusts and cartels that had grown up following the loss of a central bank, could still be prone to collapse under this chaotic economic system. There was a pressing need - particularly in New York where banking had largely become consolidated into two large rivals, the Rockerfellers and the Morgans - to resolve the problem, but in a way that would suit the bankers and not the well-being of the country or its economy.

What they wanted was a system that would create a lender of last resort to supply unlimited amounts of money should any of the banks suffer insolvency from runs and currency drains. They also wanted to stifle the competition so that a closely-knit banking cartel could operate in exclusivity with its affiliates agreeing to strict controls that would keep them interlocked. It was agreed that the federal government must be part of the new set up to provide that function of control.

One winter’s night in 1910, this coterie of bankers met on the remote Jekyll Island just off the coast of Georgia. They comprised of Abraham Piatt, Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury; Frank A Vanderlip, president of the National City Bank of New York and representing William Rockerfeller; Henry P Davison, of the JP Morgan Company; Charles D Norton, president of JP Morgan’s First National Bank of New York, Benjamin Strong, head of JP Morgan’s Bankers Trust Company, Paul M Warburg, partner in Kuhn, Loeb & Company and representing the British and French Rothschild banking dynasty and Senator Nelson W Aldrich the Republican senate ’whip’, chairman of the National Monetary Commission, associate of JP Morgan and father-in-law to John D Rockerfeller, Jr. It was here that the framework of the Federal Reserve was laid out, a system that would strangulate America for the next 100 years.

The idea had to be sold to Congress without making it appear that the Federal Reserve would in reality be a cartel - which would have brought strong opposition - so this new structure would be comprised of 12 regional institutions to give it the appearance of a decentralised organisation, whereas, in reality, it was to follow the model of the Bank of England.

The rather misleading title of the Federal Reserve was adopted; ‘Federal’ implying that it was an offshoot of government, and ‘Reserve’ implying that it was backed by reserves of tangible assets, both implied definitions being completely untrue.

The cartel needed a sympathetic champion who would see this new central bank become a reality and they found it in Woodrow Wilson, whose close intellectual minder, Colonel House, had intimate ties to the cartel. Because of Wilson’s unshakable faith in House’s abilities, the Colonel was regarded as the unseen President of the United States.

After much political skulduggery, the Federal Reserve Act under its presentational title of the Glass-Owen Bill passed into law on December 23, 1913. Some ameliorating amendments had been made, but the essential framework was there. America now had a central bank to out-class the iniquities of all of the former central banks as time would soon tell.



Part 3


The Federal Reserve had been born. With its falsely-sounding government title, it was believed that it would bring about monetary reform and prevent the spates of bank failures that had been plaguing the US economy. It was expected that it would be a central regulatory, presidentially-elected and senate-controlled body in which the public would be protected through a sharing of power, melding of interests, with a system of checks and balances so that according to Woodrow Wilson “the banks may be instruments, not the masters, of business and of individual enterprise and initiative”. But, in common with many of the rest of those who were involved in the passing of the Bill, they had little or no understanding of the real modus operandi of its proposers, the bankers, or indeed how their deceitful financial mechanism was to work.

The hidden intentions behind the forming of the Federal Reserve were:
  • To stop the growing influence of the smaller banks, and concentrate the nation’s financial resources in the hands of the governing cartel by pooling their reserves into one large fund to protect themselves from currency runs and drains
  • Reverse the trend of private capital formation and gain dominance over the industrial loans market
  • Shift the liabilities of the cartel to the taxpayers.

The mechanism at work

The clearly defined, but publicly undeclared principles adopted by the Federal Reserve in practice work like this.
  • The Federal Reserve System allows commercial banks to create chequebook money out of nothing. Therefore, the US dollar bill has no real value, is not backed by an equal quantity of gold or any other tangible asset - it is pure fiat money - which is created out of debt, which you could rightly argue is less than nothing!
  • It is the lending of money which allow the banks to derive profit from the interest charged on the loan. So when a loan is granted to a borrower, it is first conjured out of nothing as a series of figures on a computer screen, then the amount of that loan is entered in the bank’s ledger as an asset as it is earning interest and should eventually be paid back.
  • To keep the bank solvent, it must ensure that its loans - especially the larger ones - are not defaulted on, so every effort is made to keep those loans on the books and, at least, receive the interest from them. The maintenance of this state of affairs is usually achieved by increasing the size of the loans to potential defaulters, allowing the borrower additional capital to spend while maintaining the flow of interest repayments. This is called ‘rolling over the debt’. This way the bank’s book assets are maintained although the problem of the borrower’s inability to repay that loan is not solved, just merely postponed.
  • Should that debt become unpayable even after the ‘rolling over’ procedure has been repeated, the Federal Reserve system comes into play. They convince Congress that to allow the borrowing company to die would not be in the national interest. Thousands of jobs might be lost and add a further burden to the economy. This action, with the sanction of Congress allows the Federal Reserve banking cartel to create fresh money out of nothing to allow the lending bank to write off the outstanding debt from its ledger, and that fresh money now flooding the economy, means higher prices because through the increased money supply, transferring the burden to the taxpayer as inflation - the result of higher prices charged for goods and services.

Examples of the Federal Reserve at work

Let’s see how this mechanism has worked in the real world and the damage it has caused to the American economy at the expense of this infamous banking cartel.

The Penn Central Railroad In 1970 it became bankrupt. The lending banks’ took over the directorship of the Penn Central while continuing to pour money into it - which in turn came from the Federal Reserve - so allowing dividends to be continued to be paid to shareholders giving them the impression that all was OK. At the same time the directors then began to offload their shares at unrealistic prices, so that when bankruptcy came, the recipients of those shares were left with nothing. As the final resort the Federal Reserve made its case to Congress that the need to keep the Penn Central alive was paramount to public interest. Congress then responded by issuing loan guarantees worth $125m, thereby underwriting the banks’ losses.

The losers were the shareholders, Joe Public because of a further influx of money supply helping up inflation, and the Railroad which eventually failed anyway, while the winners, as always, were the central banks who were laughing all the way to their collective front doors.

Lockheed The same year and the same story. This time Congress agreed to guarantee $250m in new loans and so the Fed Res banking cartel had ensured that Lockheed was now 60% deeper in debt than it had been before. But since the government was acting as guarantor, in order to ensure that Lockheed didn’t go bust, it made sure that it was granted lucrative no-bid defence contracts. The winners, once again were the banks, while the increased money supply kept the man in the street picking up the tab.

And so it went on.

New York City
Year: 1975, impending insolvency
Pretext: the curtailment of public services which would be a disgrace in the eyes of the world
Bailout: $2.3bn, doubling the size of New York City’s current debt
Beneficiaries: the banks continue to receive their interest.

Chrysler
Year: 1978, on the verge of bankruptcy
Pretext: to allow the company to fold would be a blow to the economy and reduce competition in the car industry
Bailout: $1.5bn
Beneficiaries: The banks’ previously uncollectable debt was now guaranteed by government backing ensuring the continued flow of interest.

Commonwealth Bank of Detroit
Year: 1972, insolvency, following large loans from the Chase Manhattan Bank to invest in risky high stakes ventures
Pretext: financial hardship to the public
Bailout: $60m loan from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) (an insurance arm of the Fed Res), plus federal guarantees of repayment
Beneficiaries: Commonwealth saved and sold to an Arab consortium, Chase saved converting its potential loss into government-backed assets.

Chicago Continental Illinois Bank (world’s seventh largest bank)
Year: 1982, insolvency following overseas banks withdrawing their deposits creating the world’s first electronic bank run
Pretext: it would be unthinkable to have such a leading bank fail
Bailout: $4.5bn by the FDIC in return for an 80% ownership in the bank.
Beneficiaries: CCI Bank is saved although the $4.5bn collateral being in the form of government stock, effectively made the CCI Bank government-controlled!

In all of these instances and scores of others, the Federal Reserve had acted as ‘lender of last resort’ and had saved each institution from insolvency, saving the banks’ continued ability to trade and coin in interest from its loans, but placing an enormous burden upon the general public through artificial money creation with the resulting inflation and devaluation the nation’s wealth.


The game goes global


But this whole scam wasn’t just being enacted on the American stage, it was going global. This time the stated pretext wasn’t just a banking system that would protect the American people, it was to be a banking system that would save the world from poverty, through facilitating international trade and stabilising exchange rates.

So, at Bretton Woods in New Hampshire in 1944 the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was born. Acting as a global bank, like the Federal Reserve it would conjure money out of thin air and through the creation of the World Bank transfer that fiat money, described as loans, to third world, underdeveloped countries.


The Bretton Woods Meeting

This was no altruistic move on the part of this banking cartel. It’s true goal was that the ‘loans’ would stimulate the demise of free enterprise in these third-world countries, thus tying them to the central world bank and so embroiling them in perpetual debt. In reality the money wouldn’t go to those people who needed it most, the deprived, hungry and starving, but would be handed to their governments, many of which had been established with deliberate western coercion as crooked dictatorships. Nine times out of ten, these ‘loans’ would end up being used to expand government bureaucracy and be frittered away by the governing élite and/or be used to build their military status.

Since the money for these loans originated from the industrialised countries, principally the US, this manufacture of fiat currency covertly undermined that country’s wealth, but was doing nothing to alleviate the hardships of those in third-world countries to whom popular thought supposed it was to be designated. Once, again, the banks were the prime beneficiaries.


The ulterior motive

One of the prime intellectual driving forces behind the Bretton Woods agreement was John Maynard Keynes, economist and leading member of the Fabian Society.


The Fabians and Communists both shared the notion of a classless, stateless society, devoid of private enterprise, where the state would, in essence, control all. They differed only on the way this end should be achieved. The Communists favoured force, whereas the Fabians preferred a gradual coercion of nation states into this framework by stealth.

The creation of the World Bank and IMF was, in fact, a means of achieving this goal of centralised power, but on a global scale with a view to eventually creating a one world bank with a one world currency.

Strong nation states like the US, born on the ethos of free enterprise - the reverse of what was being proposed - were to be the prime lenders to third world nations, through the World Bank, thus bleeding their economies through inflation and devaluation of their currencies. As we see today, the dollar is being deliberately stripped of its world status through the unbridled issue of fiat currency, both in military spending and international loans - most of which have no hope of being repaid, the only beneficiaries being the banking and military-industrial cartels, who are literally hi-jacking the country. As the dollar finally collapses and America is brought economically to its knees, rescue will come in the form of a new, more broadly-based currency with a subsequent loss of sovereignty.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the coin, third-world and other less well developed nations are being enticed into this global collectivist web, by hooking their respective governments and despot leaders - more often than not covertly coerced into power by the very nations who are currently bankrolling them - on loans they will never repay, because of their innate desire for money and power, ensuring those funds are wasted and not put to use in helping their countries’ citizens. The IMF and World Bank are literally buying these countries with the wealth of the American and other Western industrialised nations to eventually bring them into a world collectivist, communist-style environment.

Now that the former Soviet bloc and China have been enticed into the IMF/World Bank web, they join Latin America and Africa who are already hopelessly embroiled in indebtedness to this global juggernaut of financial oppression, beholden to the one-world doctrine of those who have devised the system which grew out of the doctrines of Jekyll Island and Bretton Woods.




The future?

Today the US national debt is quoted as $8.8 trillion. Given an estimated population in the United States of just under 302.3 million, that equates to the share of debt per citizen of just in excess of $29,000! And this national debt has been increasing at the rate of $1.05bn per day since September 29, 2006.

The federal government payroll has increased dramatically while the manufacturing industry has declined, with more people receiving government paychecks than those paying income taxes. Add to this the entitlements, such as social security and medicare which, in 1992, represented 52% of federal outlays together with the 14% being soaked up in interest payments on debt and you see a country being bled dry.

National assets such as docks, ports and other major infrastructure have been sold off to foreign interests, environmentalism has led to millions of acres of timber and farm land to be taken out of production, while mandatory legislation in the workplace has been eroding the viability of much of the private sector.

Because of constant inflation, as the money supply is constantly topped up by more fiat money, the standard of living has declined in real terms and the number of Americans who own their homes has dropped. Over 90% of all Americans are officially broke by retirement age.


All part of the plan

It seems that just about every step is being taken to kill America. Why is this reckless state of affairs allowed to continue?

It appears that this is all part of a greater stratagem formulated many decades ago. The goal is one-world government in which all former nations are coerced into a global collectivist state with one central government, central bank and army. The building blocks of this horrific end game are already in existence. The IMF and World Bank are its financial progenitors, while the United Nations army is to be its military overseer and the United Nations the global governor. In this scenario, no sovereign state remains and to achieve this goal, preeminent, strong self-contained sovereign countries like America - and particularly America - with its legacy of free-enterprise and strong economy, must cease to exist if the world is to become one large collectivist state, which is the aim.

The effect of global monetary control is the key to this end goal and the assembly of regional global economic blocs (America - the NAFTA trade agreement currently in formation, Europe - the EU already in position and expanding and Asia - far eastern countries already looking to a common currency and economic amalgamation) are already forming as initial stepping stones to this end.

Diagram: acknowledgements to David Icke


Seen in this light, the destruction of the American economy, its constitution and spirit of free-enterprise, makes sense. It is seen as vital to weaken her both militarily and financially.

The Council on Foreign Relations - the American-based executive arm of the New World Order élites, working through the back door of the US government - is the prime mover in arranging this state of affairs. Its members' aspirations aren't bound to nation-state loyalty, but to world economic and political dominance. High US government positions are totally commandeered by CFR representatives, positioned in the heart of the administration, ideally poised in the driving seat to achieve this end.


Conclusion

And so we see that that fateful meeting in 1910 at Jekyll Island, was just one initial step in the long road to world financial dominance by a group of men, whose mechanism would eventually engulf the entire globe. The Federal Reserve System together with the IMF/World Bank is the outcome. The strangulation of the American economy through social handouts, the selling off of chunks of national infrastructure, the run-down of its manufacturing industry, the expansion of a financially burdensome government bureaucracy, the set-aside of millions of acres of agricultural land (touted as environmentalism), the flooding of the US with millions of Mexican immigrants providing cheap labour and the back-door amalgamation of Mexico and Canada along with the US into one large collectivist socialist state with a new common currency - the Amero - are the tools by which this can become reality, acting as another stepping stone toward the new global reality.

Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Back off Blair!

In one of Blair’s last speeches before standing down, he has dealt a parting blow at the media, branding it a “feral beast, just tearing people and reputations to bits,”.

But in addition he lambasted the alternative on-line media, blogs (such as this) and online forums saying that they "can be even more pernicious, less balanced, more intent on the latest conspiracy theory multiplied by five".

Obviously things are getting pretty hot for the likes of Blair and his minders who realise that their pernicious games are being laid fair and square for all to see by that very alternative media.

At the behest of those same minders, Blair’s ten-year stint in office has been nothing short of appalling, curbing most of our civil liberties and rights in the name of a phony international war on terror, banning public demonstrations in many areas in the capital, instigating, almost on a daily basis, more restrictions in the build-up of a police state which pokes its nose into every aspect of our lives, taking the country to war in Iraq on the back of trumped-up false evidence of WMD, getting caught with its trousers down in the cash-for-honours scam... the list goes on. And he has the arrogance to clamp down on an alternative media that is rightly bringing these gross injustices and breaches of executive power into public light!

The freely available flow of information on the web has been one of the greatest enabling tools that man has ever been given, a true democratic platform on which free debate and dissemination of un-censored news is available.

For once in the entire history of mankind can we now use this information to build up a picture of the realities of life, not the sanitised and spun versions of reality fed us by the mainstream media, who have, despite Blair's finger of accusation, been under the scrutiny of government and those who manage our government, for many a long year.

Through the Internet and web I have been able to disseminate a vast amount of alternative views on geopolitical affairs - some completely wide of the mark, but much of which helps me to identify and glean the truth behind many of the serious problems in the world today. In addition, the web’s resources have greatly helped me with my health, leading me to sources of information that the NHS would rather not inform me of, because it isn’t in the interest of those controlling elite who manage big pharma who in turn manipulate the health system.

Under Blair’s proposed media regulator, will all of this vital information simply evaporate, leading us into a new dark age?

You bet your life it will, because it’s current availability works against the interests of the global cartel of which Blair is one of its sorry scivvies, who want us to be kept uninformed, and merely their acquiescing lap dogs.

While the mainstream TV news in Britain now only concentrates on police state issues like paedophiles, ASBOs, curbs on this, that and everything else, interlaced with mindless drivel about pop superstars, and programming devoid of any serious, balanced debate about world or social affairs, concentrating instead on game shows and reality TV - all part of the deliberate dumbing-down of society to nullify brains and divert attention - the web, a few independent publishers' book titles and one or two independently produced magazines - who tell it like it really is - are all we have left to keep our minds informed and in balance.

Try to take that away Blair (or Brown) and you will have the wrath, outrage and opposition of honest and decent human beings to deal with, whose aim is to seek the truth in an attempt to make this place a better world. This is one step too far!