A teaser from Gerald Celente’s wonderful, forward-looking quarterly journal:

“When a leader’s only means of staying in power is to use mass violence against his own people, he has lost the legitimacy to rule and needs to do what is right for his country by leaving now,” warned President Obama on 26 February 2011, making the “moral” case for war against Libya.

Two days later, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pro- claimed, “It is time for Qaddafi to go, now, without fur- ther violence or delay. We want him to leave, we want him to end his regime.” Ah, yes, Her Majesty, Queen Hillary, commanding her vassal Qaddafi, “it’s time to go” and us- ing the royal “we” as though she had been ordained to speak on behalf of all the “we’s” of the nation.

The arrogance! Two political blowhards telling a blow- hard from another sovereign nation what he “needs to do,” and “what is right for his country.” Imagine the response to Qaddafi demanding President Obama step down for all his backtracks, lies, broken promises, and foreign aggressions? In fact, the only difference between a hypothetical Qaddafi demand and a real US demand was not moral justification, but the might to enforce it. In fact, the only “right” America had to wage war was its military capacity to wage war … against an exponentially weaker opponent.

On the MILLIONTH CONSECUTIVE DAY WHEN GOLD STOCKS HAVE BEEN POUNDED!

Singularity hub reports:

India has launched an ambitious program to fit each of its 1.2 billion residents with an Unique identification number (UID). Each number will be tied into three pieces of biometric data: fingerprints (all ten digits), iris scans (both eyes), and a picture of the face. Starting this month, the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) will begin processing people in various locations around the country. UIDAI aims to slowly roll out the program through February of 2011 and to ID 600 million people in the next four years!

I pulled the relevant section on fatca from NotPC. Here it is:

Those who work in the investment business will know of a new US regulation known as ‘Fatca‘ (Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act). Fatca is an extraordinarily wide-ranging, arrogant and intrusive piece of legislation (enacted in 2010) that requires all “foreign financial institutions” – that’s non-US banks, fund managers, custodians and so on, to tell the US taxman about all US taxpayers they deal with both directly and indirectly by the middle of next year.

This is quite clearly an admin nightmare (what is an ‘indirect client’?) so you might think that most non-US institutions would simply ignore it. After all, what jurisdiction does the US have over them? You’d think wrong. No one can ignore it: if they do, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) will charge them a 30% withholding tax on all dividends, interest and sales proceeds made in the US.

The tax will begin to be deducted at the beginning of 2014. There will be no refunds. Failure to comply will also be a criminal offence under US law. How is this repression? It makes it harder for US citizens to invest abroad – already institutions, wary of the fact that they aren’t or can’t be compliant, are turning down US business until they see how the whole thing shakes down (how can you find out all you need to about all your clients and ‘sort of clients’ without running into confidentiality problems, for starters?).

The whole thing very dramatically changes the investing and tax landscape for Americans with money abroad. Worse, the crazy US rules won’t be the end of it. No, read this piece by William Hutchings in Financial News, and you will see that Fatca is about to go global.

Quoting from this Reuter’s article on bitcoin.

The Royal Canadian Mint, for example, is exploring how to issue digital currency in the future. Its chief financial officer Marc Brule said Bitcoin’s biggest problem was that it is not backed by anything.

"The system we would bring in would be backed by a fund," he told Reuters.

I wonder what Marc Brule thinks backs fiat paper currency. And what does he think backs “a fund”—more paper currency?