Few Americans know what the Fed does, or from where it came. It is only in this environment of ignorance that the primary cause of the economic collapse is the same institution that Obama plans to provide more power.

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I wish we could all get a break.

On Thursday our national newspapers were splashed with front-page headlines and articles dealing with Obama's 'sweeping financial plan,' which as the Wall Street Journal suggests, would amount to an "Historic Overhaul of Financial Rules."

If we open up the Wall Street Journal to page 8, we then read, "The proposal, if passed into law, would represent one of the biggest changes ever in the Fed's role. The central bank would win power to monitor risks across the financial system, and sweeping authority to examine any firm that could threaten financial stability, even if the Fed wouldn't normally supervise the institution. The nation's biggest and most interconnected firms would be subject to heightened oversight by the central bank."

If you take President Obama at his word, the changes are necessary because, "millions of Americans who have worked hard and behaved responsibly have seen their life dreams eroded by the irresponsibility of others and by the failure of their government to provide adequate oversight."

Like most of what Obama publicly says, his remarks regarding the new proposal sound fair and reasonable by any standard. Except if one concludes that they're simply not true. What gives?

How about, before each of us chooses to waste any amount of time reading the many articles written on the subject, let us first clarify one subtle detail: and that is, even though most of us know that we're ultimately affected by Fed policy, very few of us actually understand what the Fed does, either before or after these changes.

In other words, how are we to assess the intelligence or fairness of this proposal if we:

• know essentially nothing of the Fed's history
• or why it was first created
• or how it has evolved
• or how it is now structured/organized
• or how it shapes and implements its policies
• or what the legal framework is that it now operates under
• or what legal framework originally gave this institution a public life.

Truly if you're like most Americans, if the Fed has caused enough stir in your life to get itself noticed, it continues to be that mystery of mysteries that just so happens to operate in full public view. Furthermore, as there are few among us that have the desire or patience to fully understand this mystery, let alone explain it to others, most of us continue to be lost here. And we certainly won't have this mystery explained by reading the Wall Street Journal.

Well I'm here to tell you that, whatever you may have once thought (or are now thinking) regarding the comprehensibility of monetary policy, or the desire to launch a study of it, the Federal Reserve is a subject that is easier, more interesting, and far more significant than most people could ever fathom.

Indeed, after two years of looking at broad governmental policy within the framework of my own burgeoning knowledge of the Fed (learning a good many things that I, too, did not know), I can now confidently conclude that, not only is the Federal Reserve the single most powerful institution in this country, it's probably the single most powerful (national) policy-making body in the world.

And it's precisely because we know so very little about this body that it maintains all this power.

Let us take a closer look lest our ignorance gets the better of us.

Getting Started

Say you're a biologist and you've accidentally discovered a strange bird, a previously undiscovered species. Now just because this species of bird is entirely new to you doesn't necessarily mean that you must redesign classification systems or rethink the laws of physics to understand it. Of course not. Instead, try working logically and methodically, perhaps by first noting the bird's physical characteristics, its behavior, its natural surroundings. And answer questions like, what are its color patterns? And how is it shaped? And how does it protect itself from dangers? And what does it feed on?

Asking many formulaic questions such as these, before you know it you've already started making sense of this unfamiliar bird, particularly by looking at it from within the framework of what you already know.

The same thing can be true of studying the Federal Reserve.

The thing with the Fed is, like the whale, it looks different than what it truly is. For years the whale beguiled naturalists and marine explorers because they couldn't make sense as to why this "fish" had lungs, a warm-blooded circulatory system, a mammalian reproductive system, and looking even closer, vestiges of legs by which (they later discovered) were once used to walk on land. In other words, the whale's overtly 'fishy' behavior confused humans in relation to its awkward 'mammalian' characteristics, a confusion which was cleared up only after a close, thorough, and methodical investigation.

So it goes with the Fed. As it looks just like a governmental agency, and coordinates public policy that influences us all, we tend to get confused with regard to its behavior as a central bank. And so when we discover that the Fed seems to always act in the interest of banks, we start scratching our proverbial skulls. We want to attribute this beguiling behavior to something other than what it is: either your typical run-of-the-mill political corruption; or, perhaps, a confusion with regard to its public-service role; or maybe annoying evidence of an identity crisis. And so, which is it, we ask? Is the Fed a servant of the public? Or is it a bank? It would certainly help to know.

Ladies and Gentlemen: The Federal Reserve

In case you weren't aware, the Federal Reserve is, in fact, a privately-owned banking cartel. In other words, it is nothing less than a coordinated policy-making body composed of the largest and most powerful banks.

Taking our classification analogy into account, we ask ourselves, what does a bank do? How does it feed itself? What is the natural environment that it thrives in? How does it protect itself from dangers? What are its dangers? What does it want? How does it reproduce? How does it prosper? And because it's a strange bank, a unique species of bank, how does operate differently than other banks?

Let us ask these questions. But let us never overlook the fact that THE FED IS A BANK.

After a closer look we can make the following observations:

1. Although a private banking cartel, the Federal Reserve advertises itself as an institution of government.
2. This public-relations deception is how the institution protects itself; how it survives.
3. This deception is intentional, drawn up by the founders of the system itself.
4. What this deception hides is that, not only is the Fed a private banking cartel, it is a private banking cartel that acts independently any governmental oversight. In other words, the Fed is completely independent of the U.S. Government.
5. We don't know exactly who really controls the Federal Reserve, although we do know it isn't us.
   

Secrecy, Deception, Protection

In 1910, the founders of the Federal Reserve System, which were a handful of directors from the largest Wall Street banks, understood that, if the public ever found out that the banking bill they were then drafting was really a bank takeover, a banking monopoly upon the currency, the bill would never be passed. At the time, these founders still had to address getting the bill passed, and so they had to find a way to sell it before the public. Therefore, it was decided, the reality of the Fed must be concealed--must be veiled--by its hollow image as a public servant, which it most certainly is not.

Take the name. The original seven founders argued over many proposals as to what to call this new institution. The reason the "Federal Reserve System" was finally chosen was because, as Paul Warburg explained, each of these words convey the exact illusion the banks needed for the bill to be passed, and for the bank to survive.

The word "federal" provided the illusion of the institution being governmental, not private, and therefore acting in the public interest. The word "reserve" offered an image of strength and stability; in other words, the notion that the institution would be capable of providing monetary stability. As the banking bill was supposed to be created as a remedy for runs on currency, or "bank runs," stability was a crucial notion to convey. As we shall see, the notion that the Federal Reserve has "reserves" is a huge deception.

And the word "system" literally provided the final illusion, the closing argument so-to-speak, that of de-centralization; of it not being controlled by a single center of financial power. On the surface, the Federal Reserve System is a de-centralized banking system with 12 regional banks, spread out across the country. Although it's true that these regional banks at firstde facto center of power. Not only were the headquarters of the country's largest financial concerns originally centered around Wall Street. But in subsequent years, as the industry continued to consolidate (consequent to Fed policy), other regional commercial centers became merely different markets for the powerful banks in New York to operate in.

Legal Protection

In the last year, many investigative journalists have filed FOIA requests to force the Fed to disclose where TARP recipients were spending the taxpayer money these banks received. The Fed then proved that, as it is a PRIVATE BANK, and independent of oversight, the Fed was under no obligation to disclose that information, and so it wasn't disclosed.

As another example, even though there are a handful of private shareholders that own stock in Federal Reserve branches (just as in any corporate body), these shareholders are no longer publicly disclosed. When the system was first set up, the disclosed shareholders were listed as banking magnates and their families, the very same individuals that worked in secret to put the Federal Reserve System together. These family names read like a who's-who of early-Twentieth Century industry and finance: Rockefeller, Morgan, Rothschild, Schiff, Warburg, Harriman, Aldrich, Vanderbelt, and Kuhn-Loeb. Originally these families bought Fed shares, which also included legal stipulations that the shares could not be forcefully expropriated under any circumstances.

Today, after the numerous banking industry consolidations since 1913, the public has absolutely no idea who owns Fed shares or how these shares are distributed. Do the same banking families own these shares today? Probably. But whatever the case, the controlling interests of this independent, unregulated, policy-making body operate in complete secrecy. As they do, in fact, exercise public policy, perhaps the public would like to know who these people are.

How the Fed Operates

The Fed has two principle monetary functions: first, as an instrument of money creation or money destruction through "buying" or "selling" of government debt; and, secondly, as the lender-of-last resort to participating commercial banks. Let us first scrutinize its role in creating money through government debt.

Federal Reserve Act of 1913 gave this banking cartel a complete monopoly to "create" the nation's money right out of thin air, out of nothing. Read that again. The Fed "lends" our government money, but only through giving our government money the bank never previously had. And this "lending" of nothing is exercised AT INTEREST to the government, to the taxpayer.

The process is fairly simple to grasp. First the "Federal Reserve Open Market Committee" authorizes a "purchase" of U.S. Treasury Bonds on the open market, just as you or I could also buy Treasury Bonds from an authorized bond dealer. As bonds are essentially maturing government debt, the bonds are therefore backed by the government's explicit promise to pay (x+interest) at a future date, which is dictated by the time-length of whatever bond one purchases. What happens when the Fed "purchases" T-Bills is that it buys them with money it never had, essentially "purchasing" government debt with nothing of value. In this way, the Fed essentially "creates" money out of nothing.

Is it now looking more like a bank?

It is true that the U.S. Constitution provided Congress with the power to coin our money debt-free. This power was abdicated by Congress through passage of the National Banking Act of 1864, and reaffirmed by the Federal Reserve Act in 1913.

The Complementary Role of the IRS

What would you say if I told you that it's no coincidence that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) was created the same year as the Fed, in 1913? And that the functional role of the IRS has been to essentially collect taxes on a perpetually ballooning government debt, much of it interest paid to the Fed for "lending" our government money it created out of thin air?

This took some doing. The U.S. Constitution prohibited a direct tax on incomes, as the language of the document clearly stipulated that any "direct tax" (like income tax) must be apportioned, meaning, collected equally across the board. The first "income tax" arrangements, then, were flat tax arrangements, and levied on property ownership, not on wages. As the IRS system levies an "unapportioned" (or unequal) "direct tax" on incomes (including wages), the IRS system could only be authorized by passing a new Constitutional Amendment, in this case the 16th. This amendment was passed in February of 1913.

Read the 16th Amendment. It states: "The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration." (my emphasis)

Looking closely at the IRS with these observations in mind, we see that the our tax laws were conveniently created to ensure a state-sponsored insurance for our government's expanding government debt to the banks. We also see that the federal government had lived within its means until 1913. It had to. As taxes were unpopular to raise, and as the money supply wasn't then controlled by the banks, the federal government hadn't the means, nor the motivation, to exert itself on just any whim it could manufacture. But after the passage of the Federal Reserve Act, and after the creation of the IRS, government debt began a steady climb. The government could raise revenues through both taxes and inflation. And so by the mid-thirties, after over twenty years of Fed-sponsored monetary policy and an economic depression, the U.S. Government declared itself officially bankrupt. Today, as we can see, our situation is far worse.

Let us remind ourselves that the debt paid to the Fed is really our government paying for something that never previously existed. Paying for money that our government could coin or print for free. And can't we then see that, under this monetary system (under our current legal tender laws), the only way to pay off government debt is to create even more government debt? Which is, again, just more "debt" that is entirely fictional.

Our monetary policy is officially insane.

Private Banks and the Fractional Reserve System

Furthermore, the private banking system the Fed set up is nothing less than a legalized pyramid scheme.

Take you're local neighborhood bank. The present system allows this bank (and all other member banks) the legal authority to lend out money they don't have. Unlike the Fed, these individual member banks cannot "create" just any amount of money they want. Instead, banks from Wells Fargo to Citigroup to the small independents, these banks are legally required to 'anchor' their lending by only a "fraction" of their lending debts, meaning, they can create money to exceed (many times over) the total assets in their "reserves." In reality this usually translates to a "fractional reserve ratio" of around 10%.

And so the sum total of bank deposits and other assets (total assets) constitute the anchor by which each bank can build upon by 1000%. As money the banks "lend" will probably be redeposited at some point by the recipient of the loan, this newly redeposited money can also serve as a base for further money creation. In mathematical terms, and taking the entire banking system as a whole, the legally acceptable amount of money that can be created from originally-issued Federal Reserve legal tender is approximately 1000 times greater than the legal tender itself.

One might be tempted to call this "institutionalized inflation," or "naked wealth redistribution." Either of these descriptions will work.

Let us look at the "fractional reserve system" from another angle. This system allows banks to charge interest for "loans" they never even had. This usurious practice is a huge source of profits to the banks, and conversely a huge (and fraudulent) expense to consumers. Truly this is why banks have the collective power they do; and why bank buildings are always the biggest in town. Their business is legal theft; wealth redistribution; reverse robin hood; whatever you want to call it. And with this money--our money--they buy up property, industry, media, law, politics, you name it. As Illinois Senator Dick Durbin recently claimed about Congress, "the bankers own the place."

Let us telescope our investigation into the sub-prime crisis and get a closer to where the real action takes place.

All of those infamous "sub-prime" mortgage loans that have been going belly-up during the ongoing economic crisis; all of these admittedly fraudulent loans were originally secured by the properties the borrowers were then purchasing (i.e. collateral on mortgage agreements), much like cars and businesses and other commercial loans are also secured by real assets--legal arrangements that supersede any borrower's ability to pay. It follows that if the borrower then fails to make good on the loan (a popular trend as of late), the bank can legally repossess the full value of the property (or collateral asset) that backed the original agreement.

Put in plain English, at all times with a fractional reserve system in place, real values are used as collateral for fictional values.

Which means that, even if a borrower makes good on the loan payments, the bank still collects compounding interest, which is its 'legal privilege' for lending money it never owned.

Again, we should remember that this is the system set up and executed by the Fed; or, rather, by a small group of private banks that control (and also directly profit from policies executed by) the Fed. And as the Fed is fronting for the largest, most powerful banks, these banks then benefit disproportionally from the rest in the system they regulate.

I will allow Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan to take it from here. As you listen to Greenspan hem and haw his way through an explanation of the sub-prime bubble, and how we should see it as "human nature" at work, let us instead try seeing his explanations as those coming from the public face of a secretive banking cartel. Ask yourself, how would the most powerful banks benefit from Greenspan's "authoritative" explanation of the sub-prime collapse? What would the bankers think the public needs to know?

And especially note his candid explanation (at 7:40) about how truly independent the Fed is.

Interest Rates and Sub-Prime Collapse

Before we get into a detailed analysis of Greenspan's comments, allow me to touch upon the Fed's other notable function, which is the manipulation of the central bank's interest rate to private member banks.

Why these interest rates are so important is, again, perfectly illustrated by the sub-prime collapse.

As Greenspan surreptitiously noted, the inflating housing market was a result of many (supposedly 'anarchic') market influences, one of which was outright fraud. Here we're in agreement. But what is important to not overlook here (and that which Greenspan won't dare dwell upon), is that none of these factors had any teeth without the influx of "easy money" into the economy as a consequence of the Fed's interest rate policy. Easy money is always what makes a bubble possible, as history illustrates time and again. Just as "tight money" is always the cause of economic collapse; both points of which Greenspan is well aware. Both easy and tight money are direct consequences of Fed policy, and are accomplished exclusively through their overnight lending rates to member banks.

Greenspan's blaming of the post-Cold War international market is only partially true, only to a point. What his words have done is paint a picture, an "historical drama," a play with chaos and greed and anarchy driving the plot. Yet somehow the main characters are missing from the stage. Is it any mistake that these same missing characters just so happen to be Greenspan's friends on Wall Street--namely, those same individuals that employed him at the Fed?

The dissolving Soviet Bloc did indeed create a massive power vacuum in Eastern Europe and Southern Russia, a reality which set the ravenous Anglo-American financiers in motion. As the heavy Russian blanket was pulled back, new opportunities were revealed; new markets for which to expand; and all of this happening at an unprecedented rate. Times like these are where the Fed's 'flexible' monetary policy comes in handy.

If these banks would have limited themselves to a sound and steady monetary policy, a sustainable monetary policy (by living within their means), the Anglo-American banking empire would have probably lost out on huge opportunities to expand their financial and commercial monopoly around the globe. In other words, they would have been forced to compete with other international aspirants in a real-world, and this they couldn't have. And so the U.S. financial system used Greenspan's "malleable" Federal Reserve interest rate policy, including assistance from government (defense, etc.), coordination with heavy industry and big oil; all providing a coordinated effort to help the Anglo-American finance have their way. What else can one expect from a financial system (and a government) that is coordinated and controlled by the banking system itself?

This is the murky reality that Greenspan sadly claimed was out of the Fed's control. These policies were to catch up with us soon enough. After years of "easy money" flooding the system, member banks could capitalize on national markets as well, expanding national commercial activity in unhealthy ways. Here we see the fraudulent sub-prime market joined up with other destabilizing factors, regulatory oversight, etc. All of which is to say that Greenspan's interest rates were the primary cause of the stone-cold reality we see today.

Remember how everybody could get money for homes, cars, business loans, lifestyle improvements, etc? The banks were operating in a lending environment where nobody could lose. Taking the fractional reserve advantages into account, these banks could cheaply pump up their balance sheets (using it as an expanding base to multiply by the hundreds)...and so why wouldn't banks loan to just about everybody? There was almost no risk!

Greenspan conveniently shifts blame from the Fed by attracting attention to "fraud." He alluded to the greediness of "human nature." I say to Mr. Greenspan, in this institutional environment of easy money and fractional reserve; in this environment of rewarding risk, and of punishing caution; so-called human natural becomes fraud.

Of course Alan Greenspan already knows that. And everything starts making more sense if you see Greenspan's comments as those coming from the chairman of a banking cartel, shielded by its illusory role as a "public servant" (please read this article)

But that's not all. Then came the "tight money," the coordinated (and predictable) freeze in credit. And then the collapse.

Once banks started going bust as a result of the housing and credit market defaults, and as the whole fractional reserve banking pyramid started crumbling piece by piece, the Fed then acted with immediacy to authorize yet more currency creation (TARP, creative lending, etc.)--not to help families save their homes; not to keep our industrial sector up and running; not to help small business enterprise survive--but to save the corrupt institutions that sponsored the bust. AIG. Goldman Sachs. Citigroup. JP Morgan Chase. Bank of America. Fannie and Freddie. Trillions of new tax-payer sponsored money, printed up and lent to banks for next to nothing!

These same institutions also coordinated to absorb the assets of those unfavored institutions that (it was decided) must go out of business. Over 60 banks have now failed within the last year. This number will continue to grow. And yesterday, today, tomorrow...the public (shareholders and taxpayers) will continue to take all the losses, as the "too big to fail" zombie banks absorb markets, deposits, and low-risk assets.

Who's side are these guys on?

New Regulatory proposals

And so now we finally come to President Obama's new regulatory proposals (full text of document can be found here), which is the the reason I started writing in the first place.

To introduce this thing, I'm merely going to quote from an article I found on page 1 of section B of Thursday's New York Times, which is one of a handful of articles that I read about the proposal. The choice of this particular article (over the others) is irrelevant, I found, as the same style of state-sponsored presentation and analysis can be observed in each one. The Times article indicates:

"The architects of the plan, Timothy F. Geithner, Treasury Secretary, and Lawrence Summers, director of the National Economic Council, said it was essential to give the Fed more authority to avert or at least minimize future market crisis.

"'While I don't think there is any regulator that doesn't look back with a great deal of regret' Mr. Summers said at a news briefing, 'it's important to recognize that many of these problems didn't happen in areas that the Fed touched and, in fact, they often involved companies that managed to escape the Fed's jurisdiction.'"

Both of Summers' assertions are highly misleading, a creative use of reasoning that borders on outright fabrication.

Because the Fed didn't then have direct "jurisdiction" over some of the delinquent firms, this certainly doesn't mean that Fed policy didn't have an intimate (and controlling) role in promoting these firms' behavior.

Take the American International Group (AIG) as a prime example. AIG's Financial Products Division single-handedly created trillions of dollars in risky securities trading. And after the bottom fell through, AIG became a main conduit of TARP money, through which billions of taxpayer dollars poured into delinquent banks around the world. Now one could imagine that AIG had no idea that the Treasury and Fed would provide the company with billions in free taxpayer 'insurance' for their role in the collapse. That is, unless one takes into account that AIG's largest shareholder, Maurice Greenberg, is himself a former chairman of the New York Fed, and now sits on the Federal Reserve's advisory board (read this); and that, additionally, he is both an honorary director of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a member of the Trilateral Commission, both Rockefeller-created institutions that direct national and international policy. Knowing this, the role of companies like AIG start making a lot more sense.

Take this into account as you continue to read:

"The Fed, for example, did not supervise any of the major financial company failures like Bear Stearns, the American International Group (AIG), Lehman Brothers and Countrywide Financial. But it has supervised the holding companies at some of the largest banks, including Citigroup, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo.

"[Summers] said the other alternatives that some have proposed, a committee of regulators to police the system, simply would not work.

"'Experience in financial regulation, in government and in life in general suggests that collective responsibility means no responsibility, or at least no accountability,' Mr. Summers said.

"Mr. Geithner said the administration had studied a range of alternatives and had found that those countries that split functions of systemic regulator and central banker often suffered deeper financial problems during periods of crisis.

"'The president believes there is not a better way to prevent and manage a future crisis without putting the authority in one place...'"

Again, we see President Obama, Larry Summers, Timothy Geithner (himself the most-recent New York Fed Chairman) and the press, obscuring the true nature of the Federal Reserve, and to the detriment of truth and fairness. By now it should be obvious as to why.

And so their new proposal 'seems,' on face value, to make fair and stable sense to poor and middle-class families, to people like you and me; regular sorts with no real stakes in the game. And without knowing the nature of their deception, we can then easily "believe" (as Obama claims to "believe") that centralizing authority in this one "governmental institution" will provide the sound stability we need.

But because we now know what the Fed truly is, where it's coming from, and what it wants, we see that Obama's restructuring plan as nothing less than economic tyranny, handing over dictatorial economic authority to a handful of the world's most powerful banks.

As former Illinois Senator (and current president) Barack Obama is fond of quoting President Lincoln, allow me to provide a Lincoln quote of my own, this one written in November of 1864, only a few short months before his assassination:

"The money power preys upon the nation in times of peace and conspires against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy."

I sure do wish President Obama wasn't so selective with his Lincoln quotes.

Conclusions and Solutions

Although what I have offered is only a broad overview of how the Federal Reserve System works, I can assure you (and you can find this out for yourself) that nowhere--not in any newspaper, not on any television program--will the producers provide the type of information I have just offered.

Whatever the reason (and I have numerous speculations), we are largely without responsible journalism here. And so we must then work extra dilligently to figure out this truth for ourselves.

In this spirit, allow me to make some observations with regard to Obama's proposal:

1. As the Federal Reserve System is already a monstrous tyranny, creating a world where real power has been unfairly built with fictional instruments;
2. And as any sane stance toward the Fed would set about abolishing the institution, including each of the fraudulent practices that now provide it power: specifically, the fractional reserve system, and debt-based money;
3. And as our current income tax and spending debate should not be how broad (or how limited) our government services should be, but what nonesense we spend our taxes on:
   
4. Then passing this proposal to give the Fed more authority is merely providing this private banking concern with more direct control over each of our lives. As it will further monopolize national and international market competition, which will cheapen the value of all goods and services; as it will exercise even greater control over both labor conditions and wages; as it will provide a greater impetus for more bold (and needless) government spending projects; as it will ensure the federal government will become an even more 'captured market' for unnecessary spending; and as it will ultimately provide more war, more lies, more needless suffering:
   
5. Then sanity suggests that we absolutely cannot allow this to happen.
   

Let me re-emphasize that the only reason the Fed can do this is by capitalizing upon (and promoting) public ignorance, as the legal framework they operate in must be manipulated in full public view. In other words, for the Fed to enlarge its share of control, it must either sell this flimsy argument before the public, or hope the public doesn't notice. It will do both.

Arguments can be sold in many ways. As we saw last September (and as we see nearly all the time), a helpful element in selling legislation, especially unfair legislation, is fear--fear generated by catastrophic events we imagine to be outside of our control. The government always poses as the savior to the problem they somehow couldn't prevent. Remember that as this proposal moves forward.

And if the economy starts imploding once again, and once again our national leaders start selling greater Fed authority as a response to this "uncontrolled" economic chaos (which may happen), remember that our fears can be only be conquered through converting our gullibility, our impressionability and our ignorance into empowerment. Only then can we make some sense of this state-sponsored "chaos" to make better, more educated choices.

That way if we decide to "let go," or to look away, we do so on our terms, not theirs.

Authors Website: http://colorrevolutionsandgeopolitics.blogspot.com

Authors Bio:
I'm a 36 year old male, living in Portland, Oregon, gainfully employed, earning little, caring even less. I have a BA in History from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

My interests are solitary pursuits normally, lots of book reading, movie watching, writing, listening to music, hanging out with small groups of friends.

Friedrich Nietzsche is probably my favorite writer at the moment, which should indicate a little of how I think. His approach to morals and ethics from within the framework of human survival is a revolutionary concept, a solid foundation to build upon.

I have one published book so far, a narrative/photographic memoir (with Tim Klempay) documenting our trip to Cuba in 2007, entitled, "Cuba's Threshold: Culture, Streets, and Tourism After Castro." For purchasing inquiries, please either email me, or contact the publisher (Gallo Crow Publishing--address found on web)