The Truman Show goes on, as local gas pump prices have reportedly jumped more than 10% since last evening, after unlimited quantities of dollars had been secured for the levitation of the largest member banks of the Federal Reserve System, and more generally, the entire system.
Quantitative Easing 0-1-2-3∞ & The Federal Reserve’s Love Affair with its Banks and Mortgage Bonds: Levitating The Black Hole and Beyond will test its limits against time (t) such as reported last month, Germany is scrambling to count its gold bars being held at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York-London corridor. But perhaps Germany had reportedly already quietly withdrawn two-thirds of it home in 2001 after the creation of the euro (the Federal Reserve has been printing euros for its member banks through currency swaps). Hong Kong removed its gold from London in 2009 and Venezuela in 2012, which underscores confidence in a system that relies on QE (faith-based accounting & printing money) since the banking and financial system crisis-collapse in 2008 and more broadly, sustained shifts away from the U.S. dollar observed in currency holdings over time.
Carl Bernstein, one of the two journalists who broke the Nixon-Watergate scandal, wrote an interesting 25,000-word cover story published in Rolling Stone magazine on October 20, 1977, entitled, “The CIA and The Media.”
The article was published in 1977, so we can be 99% certain (+/- 100% margin of error) that such practices have been sharply curtailed. We will soon look at the $1,000 trillion in derivatives, but in the meantime, a few interesting snippets from Bernstein on the free press, journalism:
In many instances, CIA documents show, journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements of America’s leading news organizations. The history of the CIA’s involvement with the American press continues to be shrouded by an official policy of obfuscation and deception for the following principal reasons:
■ The use of journalists has been among the most productive means of intelligence gathering employed by the CIA. Although the Agency has cut back sharply on the use of reporters since 1973 primarily as a result of pressure from the media), some journalist operatives are still posted abroad.
■ Further investigation into the matter, CIA officials say, would inevitably reveal a series of embarrassing relationships in the 1950s and 1960s with some of the most powerful organizations and individuals in American journalism.
…Other organizations which cooperated with the CIA include the American Broadcasting Company [ABC], the National Broadcasting Company [NBC], the Associated Press[AP], United Press International [UPI], Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald and the old Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald-Tribune.
By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc. The CIA’s use of the American news media has been much more extensive than Agency officials have acknowledged publicly or in closed sessions with members of Congress.
..The Agency’s special relationships with the so called “majors” in publishing and broadcasting enabled the CIA to post some of its most valuable operatives abroad without exposure for more than two decades.
■ Columnists and commentators. There are perhaps a dozen well known columnists and broadcast commentators whose relationships with the CIA go far beyond those normally maintained between reporters and their sources. They are referred to at the Agency as “known assets” and can be counted on to perform a variety of undercover tasks; they are considered receptive to the Agency’s point of view on various subjects. Three of the most widely read columnists who maintained such ties with the Agency are C.L. Sulzberger of the New York Times, Joseph Alsop, and the late Stewart Alsop, whose column appeared in the New York Herald-Tribune, the Saturday Evening Post and Newsweek. CIA files contain reports of specific tasks all three undertook. Sulzberger is still regarded as an active asset by the Agency.
■ The Columbia Broadcasting System. CBS was unquestionably the CIAs most valuable broadcasting asset.
In 1964 and 1965, Salant served on a super-secret CIA task force which explored methods of beaming American propaganda broadcasts to the People’s Republic of China. The other members of the four man study team were Zbigniew Brzezinski, then a professor at Columbia University; William Griffith, then professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology., and John Haves, then vice president of the Washington Post Company for radio TV5. The principal government officials associated with the project were Cord Meyer of the CIA; McGeorge Bundy, then special assistant to the president for national security; Leonard Marks, then director of the USIA; and Bill Moyers, then special assistant to President Lyndon Johnson and now a CBS correspondent…