Fed Program to “Monitor Conversations” Is Intimidation Tactic

US Army was monitoring protests against Federal Reserve in 2008

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Monday, September 26, 2011

The blogosphere has exploded with interest over the Federal Reserve’s move to follow in the footsteps of the Obama campaign’s “Attack Watch” by monitoring and identifying its critics, but many seem to have missed the obvious intention of the announcement – it’s an intimidation tactic designed to chill dissent.

As Zero Hedge explains, the Federal Reserve, “Is requesting the creation of a “Social Listening Platform” whose function is to “gather data from various social media outlets and news sources.” It will “monitor billions of conversations and generate text analytics based on predefined criteria.” The Fed’s desired product should be able to “determine the sentiment [ED:LOL] of a speaker or writer with respect to some topic or document”… “The solution must be able to gather data from the primary social media platforms – Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, Forums and YouTube. It should also be able to aggregate data from various media outlets such as: CNN, WSJ, Factiva etc.” Most importantly, the “Listening Platform” should be able to “Handle crisis situations, Continuously monitor conversations, and Identify and reach out to key bloggers and influencers.”

If the Federal Reserve was really that concerned about what people on the Internet were saying about it, then this program would have been launched several years ago, and not after a heap of vitriol has already been spewed.

The announcement that the Fed is monitoring dissent and attempting to identify individual bloggers is little more than an intimidation tactic designed to chill anti-Fed rhetoric and make people think twice before they criticize the private, run for profit entity that poses as a part of the government yet is no more federal than Federal Express.

Intimidation has been the name of the game when it comes to the Fed for years before this announcement was made.

When the first “End the Fed” protests were started back in 2008, no less than the US Army itself was put on alert.

An advisory released in November 2008 by the US Army Reserve warned its personnel of the demonstrations in advance. “The United States Army Reserve Command is publishing this Force Protection Advisory to advise all Army Reserve personnel of the planned protests at all Federal Reserve Banks and office locations within the United States on 22 November 2008,” read the document. “This message provides situational awareness and recommended mitigation measures.”

On November 22, 2008, Alex Jones led a rally at the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas Texas. The Dallas protest is specifically mentioned in the official Army document. Ron Paul’s brother was also in attendance.

The Army had already “established relationships” with local law enforcement and the FBI regarding the protests, who had then promised to keep the Army updated on developments.

This proves that the US government and the Federal Reserve were already well aware of the growing anti-Fed movement, and indeed using the Army as a bulwark against it, three years prior to the announcement of their intention to create a “Social Listening Platform” in order to monitor dissent.

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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show.

Labels: Fed, Federal Reserve, Paul Joseph Watson

Big banks are government-backed: Fed's Hoenig

CHARLOTTE, North Carolina (Reuters) - Big banks like Bank of America Corp and Citigroup Inc should be reclassified as government-sponsored entities and have their activities restricted, a senior Fed official said on Tuesday.

The 2008 bank bailouts at the height of the financial crisis and other implicit guarantees effectively make the largest U.S. banks government-guaranteed enterprises, like mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, said Kansas City Fed President Thomas Hoenig.

"That's what they are," Hoenig said at the National Association of Attorneys General 2011 conference.

He said these lenders should be restricted to commercial banking activities, advocating a policy that existed for decades barring banks from engaging in investment banking activities.

"You're a public utility, for crying out loud," he said...[Full Article]

Labels: Bank of America, Citigroup, Fed, Federal Reserve

The Illusion of Economic Recovery: The Fed Creates Money Out of Thin Air

by Bob Chapman

Well, it's just the same old, same old, business as usual in America. The Fed creates money out of thin air, uses it to keep the economy from teetering over the edge of destruction as ludicrous salaries and bonuses are collected by Wall Street Illuminists and as US consumers are deceptively informed that we have green shoots sprouting up and that recovery is just around the corner. So go out and borrow, borrow, borrow, and spend, spend, spend, so US Illuminist transnational conglomerates can continue to generate their off-shore, untaxed profits to pay Illuminist salaries and bonuses for their henchmen in Corporate America. Then you have the President's Working Group on Financial Markets (aka the Plunge Protection Team, aka the PPT for short), rigging markets around the world 24/7 with the money created out of thin air by the Fed via the repo pool.

Meanwhile, the Illuminist banks that have borrowed money created out of thin air from the Fed through its myriad of borrowing facilities at little or no interest use some of their money to join the speculation party with all the inside information that has been provided to them courtesy of the PPT as the public gets taken to the cleaners because that don't have any illegal, front-running algorithms designed by their government like the players on Wall Street, who have few if any losing days in their proprietary trading offices. And lest we forget that whatever money is not used by the Illuminist banks that they have borrowed from the Fed at near zero interest to speculate with is parked with the Fed at 2.5% risk-free, a gift of the US taxpayer because we just love to get hosed by our criminal syndicates aka "too-big-to-fail" Illuminist banks. And never mind the fact that there are no longer enough idiots left in the world to buy our Treasury paper anymore, because, well, if you don't have enough buyers, then you just make them up out of thin air, like our Federal Reserve Notes.

But first, we ignore things like monthly hundred billion plus mathematical discrepancies between the amount of the government's deficits and the amount of treasury bonds being sold. Then we give the proceeds from the bogus excess treasury sales to foreign countries, foreign central banks and sovereign wealth funds as well as Cayman Island hedge funds so they can do what with it? Why, so they can buy US treasury paper and agency paper, among other things. Yep, we set up the straw men, fund them with counterfeit money illegally created out of thin air beyond what is needed to fund the ever-increasing deficit being created by the drunken sailors running the US government, and we then magically create categories of new mega-buyers in our financial reports to show everyone how our treasury paper is just as "beloved" as in the old days. Why, even the totally bankrupt UK has magically created $180 billion for the express purpose of buying up those treasuries to keep the whole rip-off party going. We'll let our subscribers decide where the totally bankrupt UK came up with that amount of money for US treasury paper of all things. Ah, life in the US of A. You just can't make stuff like this up!...

[Full Article]

Labels: Bob Chapman, Fed, Federal Reserve

Fed Gets More Power, Responsibility

After fending off most challenges to its independence and winning new powers to oversee big financial firms, the Federal Reserve has emerged from a bruising debate on the overhaul of U.S. financial rules as perhaps the pre-eminent regulator in the sector. But that could only bring it added blame if things go wrong again.

Just a few months ago, amid populist anger at the Fed for failing to prevent the financial crisis of 2008 and bailing out Wall Street, Congress was talking of stripping the central bank of its supervisory oversight of banks or forcing it to submit to congressional audit of its interest-rate decisions.

Instead, the new law gives the Fed more power and a better tool box to help prevent financial crises. It will become the primary regulator for large, complex financial firms of all kinds, such as American International Group, the insurer which built a massive derivatives portfolio that regulators didn't see until it was too late...

[Full Article]

Labels: Fed, Federal Reserve

The Fed as Giant Counterfeiter

San Jose State economics professor Jeffrey Rogers Hummel tells all his students that the easiest way to understand the Federal Reserve is to think of it as a giant, legalized counterfeiter. I had always known that the Fed and other central banks were like counterfeiters, but I still thought that the actual mechanics of open-market operations and so forth actually provided some important distinctions.

In large part because of my frequent email exchanges with Hummel, I now realize that I was being naïve. Once you understand the details of modern central banking, you are able to step back and see that it truly is a way for the government to use the printing press to pay its bills. All of the complicated process of targeting interest rates through buying Treasuries simply hides this essential point — and perhaps deliberately so...

Labels: Fed, Federal Reserve