I Need More Than Everyone

Well, now that I’ve got access to Dalaran, I figured I might as well take on a favorite target of mine, travel.

Getting To Northrend
Each faction currently has three ways to get to Northrend (not counting your hearthstone). Level 74 mages can learn the traditional portal spell to Dalaran (level 71 mages can learn the self-port to Dalaran via a simple quest, three levels before other classes are allowed to access the city). Otherwise, it’s the boat for the Alliance or the blimp for the Horde, sending players to the first quest hub in either Borean Tundra or Howling Fjord. (The Horde win this exchange because both of their blimps depart from major cities, while one of the Alliance boats departs from Menethil Harbor, a griffon ride away from IF; not the longest flight in the game, but certainly longer than the time it takes to get to the Horde blimp towers). One presumes that Engineers will get their traditional teleports at some point down the line, but this is not yet implemented in beta.

Leaving Northrend
The above options all allow you to leave, as do the Druid Moonglade port and the Death Knight “Death Gate” portal. The latter is significant because it deposits the player in EPL, home to the only Death Knight trainers in the game. Again, minor victory for the Horde here because the flight to the Undercity is significantly shorter than the flight to Ironforge for the nearest bank, which is the only thing Death Knights need from the old cities. (Engineers have the luxury of bank access at either Gadgetzan or Area 52 depending on specialty.) The other way out of Northrend is via the Magical City of Dalaran (yes, they actually call it that in game, sounds like a ride at Disneyland), which offers portals to all major cities (including Shattrath), restricted to cities of your own faction.

Getting Around Northrend
I’m not familiar with the Horde flightpaths within Northrend, but I’m presuming their situation is similar. In general, getting around the zone that you’re in is not that bad. Most zones have more than one flight point, which allows you to get to within a reasonably short epic ground mount ride from wherever you need to be. (Remember, no flying mounts in Northrend until level 77.)

Unfortunately, the picture for travel between zones is not so pretty. The neutral Tuskarr faction also has a turtle boat line that, I presume, offers more rapid travel from Borean Tundra to Dragonblight and from the Dragonblight to the Howling Fjord. This may or may not be quicker (I don’t dare brave the turtle boat after getting disconnected into limbo repeatedly by the Daily Quest Blimp), and it’s certainly cheaper than auto-flight (flying directly across the continent will actually cost you 2G since individual flights are more expensive and you need several of them). On the other hand, you don’t get to go AFK on boats the way you can with flight paths.

Meanwhile, if you want to get from any inland location (e.g. Dragonblight, Grizzly hills) to one of the boat/blimp locations, you’re in for a lengthy flight. That’s bad news because there are no trainers in Northrend (except for mages, who can teleport to the trainer of their choice anyway, so Blizzard broke down and put one in Dalaran), and Dalaran owns Northrend’s only bank (well, there are two actual banks in the city, but you know what I mean), as well as its arena, battlemasters, and the usual selection of tradeskill vendors/trainers. (There are also a variety of not-yet-implemented novelty vendors, but no Auction House, as is traditional.)

Speaking of Dalaran….
Access to Dalaran from the ground currently requires that players have already been up to the city at least once. A Kirin Tor questgiver will “helpfully” offer you a quest at level 74. What’s funny about this is that it’s a regular old quest, so it’s not like you need to DO anything for them to be let into their city (which is the only real lore justification for not letting people in). Further, the Alliance version that I did opened up in a camp that I’d cleared three levels previously, and I would have had no idea where to find it if I had not known that I was allowed into Dalaran at level 74. (I’m told that mage portals currently circumvent the whole process and let you in at any level, meaning that you’re going to want to buy a portal for any and all alts in order to set your hearthstone in Dalaran ASAP for instant access to five separate locations.)

Independently of the teleporter issue, Dalaran seems to be a bit less centrally located than Shattrath was, so you’re in for a decently long flight from there to wherever you’re heading.

How to Hearthstone effectively
If you’re not a mage or an Engineer, you’re probably going to want to bind your Hearthstone in one of the boat/blimp locations until you get access to Dalaran. This will save you the most travel time in the short run, as it can instantly get you across Northrend if needed, and, more importantly, can get you BACK to Northrend after heading to Azeroth by whatever means.

Gnomish Engineers may find that their portal to Toshley’s Station satisfies their once-per-level training needs via a short epic flyer flight (or autobird if you’re Alliance) to Shattrath, freeing up your hearth for anywhere you want to put it. I leveled Cheery relying on the flight back to IF for my banking needs, but this was pretty darned annoying because you get so much soulbound gear that’s all side-grades off of other pieces that, even with 18-20 slot bags you’re going to be traveling back frequently.

Should the mage portal shortcut method to Dalaran in order to bind your hearthstone remain intact, I would probably recommend it, with the slight caveat that the flight from Dalaran to Howling Fjord/Borean Tundra is lengthy, so you may be slightly regretting it until you clear those two zones. Alternately, you can portal to a city with a boat/blimp for your training needs and use that to get back, inscribers can use the scroll of recall to get back to Dalaran after training, and other classes can simply log off for the night and hearth back to Dalaran when they get back on in the morning, if you’ve timed things well.

The Bottom Line
Travel in Wrath is not as bad as I’d expected. A big part of this is that each individual quest hub seems to be more densely packed than in TBC; you don’t have very many quests that are one or two steps and done. Typically you’ll be in one place for long enough that it’s worth the travel time to get there. I’d still like speedier travel, especially if you’re questing in BOTH Borean Tundra and Howling Fjord (the beta offered Walrus Captain Placeholder equivalents when I was doing this, and that trek was still painful), but I’m prepared to live with things temporarily as long as travel isn’t eating up too much of my tim

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On November 13, 2007 Fulford received a tip that David Rockefeller was on his turf, and without hesitation Fulford arranged to meet with him to ask some questions. It is not odd for a reporter who’s career has been filled with Financial News jobs, to sit down with the former head of Chase Bank, Except when its Benjamin Fulford and David Rockefeller.

Benjamin Fulford was Asia-Pacific Bureau Chief for Forbes Magazine for seven years, until 2005 when he quit because of the “extensive corporate censorship and mingling of advertising and editorial at the magazine.

Outfoxed examines how media empires, led by Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, have been running a “race to the bottom” in television news. This  film provides an in-depth look at Fox News and the dangers of ever-enlarging corporations taking control of the public’s right to know

Since the late 18th century American legal decision that the business corporation organizational model is legally a person, it has become a dominant economic, political and social force around the globe. This film takes an in-depth psychological examination of the organization model through various case studies.

What the study illustrates is that in the its behavior, this type of “person” typically acts like a dangerously destructive psychopath without conscience. Furthermore, we see the profound threat this psychopath has for our world and our future, but also how the people with courage, intelligence and determination can do to stop it.

Panic struck on Wall Street, as the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged a thousand points between July and August, and commentators warned of a 1929-style crash. To prevent that dire result, the U.S. Federal Reserve, along with the central banks of Europe, Canada, Australia and Japan, extended a 315 billion dollar lifeline to troubled banks and investment firms. The hemorrhage stopped, the markets turned around, and investors breathed a sigh of relief. All was well again in Stepfordville. Or was it? And if it was, at what cost? Three hundred billion dollars is about a third of the total paid by U.S. taxpayers in personal income taxes annually. A mere $188 billion would have been enough to repair all of the 74,000 U.S. bridges known to be defective, preventing another disaster like that in Minneapolis in July. But the central banks’ $300 billion was poured instead into the black hole of rescuing the very banks and hedge funds blamed for the “liquidity” crisis (the dried up well of investment money), encouraging loan sharks and speculators in their profligate ways.

Where did the central banks find the $300 billion? Central banks are “lenders of last resort.” According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s Economic Review, “to function as a lender of last resort [a central bank] must have authority to create money, i.e., provide unlimited liquidity on demand.”1 In short, central banks can create money out of thin air. Increasing the money supply (”demand”) without increasing goods and services (”supply”) is highly inflationary; but this money-creating power is said to be necessary to correct the periodic market failures to which the banking system is inherently prone.2 “Busts” have followed “booms” so regularly and predictably in the last 300 years that the phenomenon has been dubbed the “business cycle,” as if it were an immutable trait of free markets like the weather. But in fact it is an immutable trait only of a banking system based on the sleight of hand known as “fractional-reserve” lending. The banks themselves routinely create money out of thin air, and they need a lender of last resort to bail them out whenever they get caught short in this sleight of hand.

Running through this whole drama is a larger theme, one that nobody is talking about and that can’t be cured by fiddling with interest rates or throwing liquidity at banks making too-risky loans. The reason the modern banking system is prone to periodic market failures is that it is a Ponzi scheme, one that is basically a fraud on the people. Like all Ponzi schemes, it can go on only so long before it reaches its mathematical limits; and there is good evidence that we are there now. If we are to avoid the greatest market crash in history, we must eliminate the underlying fraud; and to do that we need to understand what is really going on.

The 300 Year Ponzi Scheme Known as “Fractional-Reserve” Lending

A Ponzi scheme is a form of pyramid scheme in which earlier players are paid with the money of later players, until no more unwary investors are available to be sucked in at the bottom and the pyramid collapses, leaving the last investors holding the bag. Our economic Ponzi scheme dates back to Oliver Cromwell’s “Glorious Revolution” in seventeenth century England. Before that, the power to issue money was the sovereign right of the King, and for anyone else to do it was considered treason. But Cromwell did not have access to this money-creating power. He had to borrow from foreign moneylenders to fund his revolt; and they agreed to lend only on condition that they be allowed back into England, from which they had been banned centuries earlier. In 1694, the Bank of England was chartered to a group of private moneylenders, who were allowed to print banknotes and lend them to the government at interest; and these private banknotes became the national money supply. They were ostensibly backed by gold; but under the fractional-reserve lending scheme, the amount of gold kept in “reserve” was only a fraction of the value of the notes actually printed and lent. This practice grew out of the discovery of the goldsmiths, that customers who left their gold for safekeeping would come for it only about 10 percent of the time. Ten paper banknotes “backed” by a pound of gold could therefore safely be printed and lent for every pound of gold the goldsmiths held in reserve. Nine of the notes were essentially counterfeits.

The Bank of England became the pattern for the system known today as “central banking.” A single bank, usually privately owned, is given a monopoly over issuing the nation’s currency, which is then lent to the government, usurping the government’s sovereign power to create money itself. In the United States, formal adoption of this system dates to the Federal Reserve Act of 1913; but private banks have created the national money supply ever since the country was founded. Before 1913, multiple private banks issued banknotes with their own names on them; and as in England, the banks issued notes for much more gold than was in their vaults. The scheme worked until the customers got suspicious and all demanded their gold at once, when there would be a “run” on the banks and they would have to close their doors. The Federal Reserve (or “Fed”) was instituted to rescue the banks from these crises by creating and lending money on demand. The banks themselves were already creating money out of nothing, but the Fed served as a backup source, generating the customer confidence necessary to carry on the fractional-reserve lending scheme.

Today, coins are the only money issued by the U.S. government, and they compose only about one one-thousandth of the money supply. Federal Reserve Notes (dollar bills) are issued by the privately-owned Federal Reserve and lent to the government and to commercial banks. Coins and Federal Reserve Notes together, however, compose less than 3 percent of the money supply. The rest is created by commercial banks as loans. The notion that virtually all of our money has been created by private banks is so foreign to what we have been taught that it can be difficult to grasp, but many reputable authorities have attested to it. (See E. Brown, “Dollar Deception: How Banks Secretly Create Money,” www.webofdebt.com/articles, July 3, 2007.)

Among other problems with this system of money creation is that banks create the principal but not the interest necessary to pay back their loans; and that is where the Ponzi scheme comes in. Since loans from the Federal Reserve or commercial banks are the only source of new money in the economy, additional borrowers must continually be found to take out new loans to expand the money supply, in order to pay the interest creamed off by the bankers. New sources of debt are fanned into “bubbles” (rapidly rising asset prices), which expand until they “pop,” when new bubbles are devised until no more borrowers can be found, and the pyramid finally collapses.

Before 1933, when the dollar went off the gold standard, the tether of gold served to limit the expansion of the money supply; but since then, the Fed’s solution to collapsed bubbles has been to pump more newly-created money into the system. When the savings and loan associations collapsed, precipitating a recession in the 1980s, the Fed lowered interest rates and fanned the 1990s stock market bubble. When that bubble collapsed in 2000, the Fed dropped interest rates even further, creating the housing bubble of the current decade. When lenders ran out of “prime” borrowers, they turned to “subprime” borrowers - those who would not have qualified under the older, tougher standards. It was all part of the structural imperative of all Ponzi schemes, that the inflow of cash must continually expand to pay the people at the top. This expansion, however, has mathematical limits. In 2004, the Fed had to begin raising rates to tame inflation and to support the burgeoning federal debt by making government bonds more attractive to investors. The housing bubble was then punctured, and many subprime borrowers went into default.

The Subprime Mess and the Derivatives Scam

In the ever-growing need to find new borrowers, lending standards were relaxed. Adjustable rate mortgages, interest-only loans, no- or low-down-payment loans, and no-documentation loans made “home ownership” available to nearly anyone willing to take the bait. The risks of these loans were minimized by off-loading them onto unsuspecting investors. The loans were sliced up, bundled with less risky mortgages, and sold as mortgage-backed securities called “collateralized debt obligations” (CDOs). To induce rating agencies to give CDOs triple-A ratings, “derivatives” were thrown into the mix, ostensibly protecting investors from loss.

Derivatives are basically side bets that some investment (a stock, commodity, etc.) will go up or down in value. The simplest form is a “put” that pays the investor if an asset he owns goes down, neutralizing his risk. But most derivatives today are far more difficult to understand than that. Some critics say they are impossible to understand, because they were intentionally designed to mislead investors. By December 2006, according to the Bank for International Settlements, the derivatives trade had grown to $415 trillion. This is a Ponzi scheme on its face, since the sum is nearly nine times the size of the entire world economy. A thing is worth only what it will fetch in the market, and there is no market anywhere on the planet that can afford to pay up on these speculative bets.

The current market implosion began when investment bank Bear Stearns, which had been buying CDOs through its hedge funds, closed two of those funds in June 2007. When the creditors tried to get their money back, the CDOs were put up for sale, and there were no takers at anywhere near their stated valuations. Panic spread, as increasing numbers of investment banks had to prevent “runs” on their hedge funds by refusing withdrawals by investors concerned about fraudulent CDO valuations. When the problem became too big for the investment banks to handle, the central banks stepped in with their $300 billion lifeline.

Among those institutions rescued was Countrywide Financial, the largest U.S. mortgage lender. Countrywide has been called the next Enron, not only because it was facing bankruptcy but because it was guilty of some quite shady practices. It underwrote and sold hundreds of thousands of mortgages containing false and misleading information, which were then sold in the market as “securities.” The lack of “liquidity” was blamed directly on these corrupt practices, which had frightened investors away from the markets. But that did not deter the Fed from sending in a lifeboat. Countrywide was saved when Bank of America bought $2 billion of its stock with a loan made available by the Fed at newly-reduced interest rates. Bank of America also got a nice windfall, since when investors learned that Countrywide was being rescued, the stock it just purchased shot up.

Where did the Fed itself get the money? Chris Powell of GATA (the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee) commented, “[I]n central banking, if you need money for anything, you just sit down and type some up and click it over to someone who is ready to do as you ask with it.” He added:

If it works for the Federal Reserve, Bank of America, and Countrywide, it can work for everyone else. For it is no more difficult for the Fed to conjure $2 billion for Bank of America and its friends to “invest” in Countrywide than it would be for the Fed to wire a few thousand dollars into your checking account, calling it, say, an advance on your next tax cut or a mortgage interest rebate awarded to you because some big, bad lender encouraged you to buy a McMansion with no money down in the expectation that you could flip it in a few months for enough profit to buy a regular house.3

Which brings us to the point here: if somebody is going to be “reflating” the economy by typing up money on a computer screen, it should be Congress itself, the publicly accountable entity that alone is authorized to create money under the Constitution.

The Way Out

Economic collapse has been the predictable end of all Ponzi schemes ever since the Mississippi bubble of the eighteenth century. The only way out of this fix is to reverse the sleight of hand that got us into it. If new money must be pumped into the economy, it should be done, not by private banks for private profit, but by the people collectively through their representative government; and the money should be spent, not on bailing out banks and hedge funds that have lost speculative market gambles, but on socially productive services such as rebuilding infrastructure.

When deflation is tackled by creating new money in the form of debt to private banks, the result is a spiraling vortex of debt and price inflation. The better solution is to put debt-free money into consumers’ pockets in the form of wages earned. Workers are increasingly losing their jobs to “outsourcing.” A government exercising its sovereign right to issue money could pay those workers to build power plants using “clean” energy, high-speed trains, and other needed infrastructure. The government could then charge users a fee for these services, recycling the money from the government to the economy and back again, avoiding inflation.

Other considerations aside, we simply cannot afford the bank bailouts coming down the pike. If it takes $300 billion to avert a market collapse precipitated by a few failing hedge funds, what will the price tag be when the $400-plus trillion derivatives bubble collapses? Rather than bailing out banks that have usurped our sovereign right to create money, we the people should skip the middlemen and create our own money, debt- and interest-free. As William Jennings Bryan said in a historic speech a century ago:

[The bankers] tell us that the issue of paper money is a function of the bank and that the government ought to go out of the banking business. I stand with Jefferson . . . and tell them, as he did, that the issue of money is a function of the government and that the banks should go out of the governing business. . . . [W]hen we have restored the money of the Constitution, all other necessary reforms will be possible, and . . . until that is done there is no reform that can be accomplished.