United Nations Declaration (Articles 1 - 30):

Article 1: All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Article 2: Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.

Incoming UN chief names three women to top posts

Incoming UN chief names three women to top posts
Nigerian Minister of the Environment Amina Mohammed, seen in 2015, will be the UN's number two official (AFP Photo/Mireya ACIERTO)

Sustainable Development
"A Summary" – Apr 2, 2011 (Kryon channelled by Lee Carroll) (Subjects: Religion, Shift of Human Consciousness, 2012, Intelligent/Benevolent Design, EU, South America, 5 Currencies, Water Cycle (Heat up, Mini Ice Ace, Oceans, Fish, Earthquakes ..), Middle East, Internet, Israel, Dictators, Palestine, US, Japan (Quake/Tsunami Disasters , People, Society ...), Nuclear Power Revealed, Hydro Power, Geothermal Power, Moon, Financial Institutes (Recession, Realign integrity values ..) , China, North Korea, Global Unity,..... etc.) -
"The Timing of the Great Shift" – Mar 21, 2009 (Kryon channelled by Lee Carroll) - (Text version)

“ … Here is another one. A change in what Human nature will allow for government. "Careful, Kryon, don't talk about politics. You'll get in trouble." I won't get in trouble. I'm going to tell you to watch for leadership that cares about you. "You mean politics is going to change?" It already has. It's beginning. Watch for it. You're going to see a total phase-out of old energy dictatorships eventually. The potential is that you're going to see that before 2013. They're going to fall over, you know, because the energy of the population will not sustain an old energy leader ..."
"Update on Current Events" – Jul 23, 2011 (Kryon channelled by Lee Carroll) - (Subjects: The Humanization of God, Gaia, Shift of Human Consciousness, 2012, Benevolent Design, Financial Institutes (Recession, System to Change ...), Water Cycle (Heat up, Mini Ice Ace, Oceans, Fish, Earthquakes ..), Nuclear Power Revealed, Geothermal Power, Hydro Power, Drinking Water from Seawater, No need for Oil as Much, Middle East in Peace, Persia/Iran Uprising, Muhammad, Israel, DNA, Two Dictators to fall soon, Africa, China, (Old) Souls, Species to go, Whales to Humans, Global Unity,..... etc.)
(Subjects: Who/What is Kryon ?, Egypt Uprising, Iran/Persia Uprising, Peace in Middle East without Israel actively involved, Muhammad, "Conceptual" Youth Revolution, "Conceptual" Managed Business, Internet, Social Media, News Media, Google, Bankers, Global Unity,..... etc.)


The Declaration of Human Freedom

Archangel Michael (Via Steve Beckow), Feb. 19, 2011

Every being is a divine and eternal soul living in a temporal body. Every being was alive before birth and will live after death.

Every soul enters into physical life for the purpose of experience and education, that it may, in the course of many lifetimes, learn its true identity as a fragment of the Divine.

Life itself is a constant process of spiritual evolution and unfoldment, based on free choice, that continues until such time as we realize our true nature and return to the Divine from which we came.

No soul enters life to serve another, except by choice, but to serve its own purpose and that of the Divine from which it came.

All life is governed by natural and universal laws which precede and outweigh the laws of humanity. These laws, such as the law of karma, the law of attraction, and the law of free will, are decreed by God to order existence and assist each person to achieve life’s purpose.

No government can or should survive that derives its existence from the enforced submission of its people or that denies its people their basic rights and freedoms.

Life is a movement from one existence to another, in varied venues throughout the universe and in other universes and dimensions of existence. We are not alone in the universe but share it with other civilizations, most of them peace-loving, many of whom are more advanced than we are, some of whom can be seen with our eyes and some of whom cannot.

The evidence of our five senses is not the final arbiter of existence. Humans are spiritual as well as physical entities and the spiritual side of life transcends the physical. God is a Spirit and the final touchstone of God’s Truth is not physical but spiritual. The Truth is to be found within.

God is one and, because of this, souls are one. They form a unity. They are meant to live in peace and harmony together in a “common unity” or community. The use of force to settle affairs runs contrary to natural law. Every person should have the right to conduct his or her own affairs without force, as long as his or her choices do not harm another.

No person shall be forced into marriage against his or her will. No woman shall be forced to bear or not bear children, against her will. No person shall be forced to hold or not hold views or worship in a manner contrary to his or her choice. Nothing vital to existence shall be withheld from another if it is within the community’s power to give.

Every person shall retain the ability to think, speak, and act as they choose, as long as they not harm another. Every person has the right to choose, study and practice the education and career of their choice without interference, provided they not harm another.

No one has the right to kill another. No one has the right to steal from another. No one has the right to force himself or herself upon another in any way.

Any government that harms its citizens, deprives them of their property or rights without their consent, or makes offensive war upon its neighbors, no matter how it misrepresents the situation, has lost its legitimacy. No government may govern without the consent of its people. All governments are tasked with seeing to the wellbeing of their citizens. Any government which forces its citizens to see to its own wellbeing without attending to theirs has lost its legitimacy.

Men and women are meant to live fulfilling lives, free of want, wherever they wish and under the conditions they desire, providing their choices do not harm another and are humanly attainable.

Children are meant to live lives under the beneficent protection of all, free of exploitation, with unhindered access to the necessities of life, education, and health care.

All forms of exploitation, oppression, and persecution run counter to universal and natural law. All disagreements are meant to be resolved amicably.

Any human law that runs counter to natural and universal law is invalid and should not survive. The enactment or enforcement of human law that runs counter to natural and universal law brings consequences that cannot be escaped, in this life or another. While one may escape temporal justice, one does not escape divine justice.

All outcomes are to the greater glory of God and to God do we look for the fulfillment of our needs and for love, peace, and wisdom. So let it be. Aum/Amen.


Pope Francis arrives for historic first US visit

Pope Francis arrives for historic first US visit
Pope Francis laughs alongside US President Barack Obama upon arrival at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, on September 22, 2015, on the start of a 3-day trip to Washington (AFP Photo/Saul Loeb)


Today's doodle in the U.S. celebrates Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I have a dream" speech on its 50th anniversary (28 Aug 2013)

'Love is love': Obama lauds gay marriage activists in hailing 'a victory for America'

'Love is love': Obama lauds gay marriage activists in hailing 'a victory for America'
The White House released this image, of the building colored like the rainbow flag, on Facebook following the supreme court’s ruling. Photograph: Facebook

Same-sex marriage around the world

"The Recalibration of Awareness – Apr 20/21, 2012 (Kryon channeled by Lee Carroll) (Subjects: Old Energy, Recalibration Lectures, God / Creator, Religions/Spiritual systems (Catholic Church, Priests/Nun’s, Worship, John Paul Pope, Women in the Church otherwise church will go, Current Pope won’t do it), Middle East, Jews, Governments will change (Internet, Media, Democracies, Dictators, North Korea, Nations voted at once), Integrity (Businesses, Tobacco Companies, Bankers/ Financial Institutes, Pharmaceutical company to collapse), Illuminati (Started in Greece, with Shipping, Financial markets, Stock markets, Pharmaceutical money (fund to build Africa, to develop)), Shift of Human Consciousness, (Old) Souls, Women, Masters to/already come back, Global Unity.... etc.) - (Text version)

… The Shift in Human Nature

You're starting to see integrity change. Awareness recalibrates integrity, and the Human Being who would sit there and take advantage of another Human Being in an old energy would never do it in a new energy. The reason? It will become intuitive, so this is a shift in Human Nature as well, for in the past you have assumed that people take advantage of people first and integrity comes later. That's just ordinary Human nature.

In the past, Human nature expressed within governments worked like this: If you were stronger than the other one, you simply conquered them. If you were strong, it was an invitation to conquer. If you were weak, it was an invitation to be conquered. No one even thought about it. It was the way of things. The bigger you could have your armies, the better they would do when you sent them out to conquer. That's not how you think today. Did you notice?

Any country that thinks this way today will not survive, for humanity has discovered that the world goes far better by putting things together instead of tearing them apart. The new energy puts the weak and strong together in ways that make sense and that have integrity. Take a look at what happened to some of the businesses in this great land (USA). Up to 30 years ago, when you started realizing some of them didn't have integrity, you eliminated them. What happened to the tobacco companies when you realized they were knowingly addicting your children? Today, they still sell their products to less-aware countries, but that will also change.

What did you do a few years ago when you realized that your bankers were actually selling you homes that they knew you couldn't pay for later? They were walking away, smiling greedily, not thinking about the heartbreak that was to follow when a life's dream would be lost. Dear American, you are in a recession. However, this is like when you prune a tree and cut back the branches. When the tree grows back, you've got control and the branches will grow bigger and stronger than they were before, without the greed factor. Then, if you don't like the way it grows back, you'll prune it again! I tell you this because awareness is now in control of big money. It's right before your eyes, what you're doing. But fear often rules. …

Merkel says Turkey media crackdown 'highly alarming'

Merkel says Turkey media crackdown 'highly alarming'
Reporters Without Borders labels Erdogan as 'enemy of press freedom'

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Friday, February 17, 2012

How credit ratings agencies rule the world

Britain's credit rating took a knock this week, when Moody's expressed a 'negative outlook' for the national economy. But who are the mysterious agencies who take it upon themselves to grade everything from countries to corporations – and how much power do they really wield?

guardian.co.ukPatrick KingsleyWednesday 15 February 2012 


Traders in New York. A downgrade from one of the Big Three credit
ratings agencies can send markets into a panic. Photograph: Mary Altaffer/AP

"Thank you for calling Moody's," says the automated voice. "Your call may be recorded for quality purposes. If you would like a rating, press one." I press one. There is a brief musical interlude. "Hello, Moody's," says another voice, eventually. "What rating would you like?"

As you may have deduced, I am on the phone to Moody's Investors Service. Along with Fitch, and Standard & Poor's (S&P), Moody's are one of the Big Three credit ratings agencies. They sound like a trio of preppy clothing companies, but in fact they are some of the most powerful players in world finance. Specifically, they rate the "creditworthiness" of companies and currencies. In the process, it is hoped that they give investors an idea which investments are safest to make.

"Hello, Moody's!" I say. "I would like to know the rating for UK sovereign debt." It's a topical question. The eurozone crisis has seen countries' ratings fall across the continent. Chancellor George Osborne has staked his reputation on helping the UK avoid the same fate. My adviser will ideally come back to me with three particular letters: AAA. This is the highest rating Moody's offers. Then comes AA1, and the scale goes down to C. Anything at or below BBB is known as "junk".

"The UK has a rating of AAA," says Ms Moody. But then comes the hammer-blow: "We also have a negative outlook for the UK." This negative outlook – which Moody's announced on Monday – isn't quite AA1, but it's the preamble to it. The lower their outlook, the more likely Moody's thinks the UK government is to default on its debts – and the less likely it is that people such as me will want to lend it money. The lenders that do remain will be more nervous about the prospects of getting their money back – and so they'll charge higher interest rates. And the higher the interest rates, the steeper the government's debt repayments, and the more likely it is to default. And so it goes on.

It is an Escherian cycle, and one in which the credit ratings agencies – many argue – play too powerful a role. "I am no fan of conspiracy theories," said Rainer Bruederle, a former German economic minister, after S&P threatened to downgrade 15 EU countries in December, "but sometimes it is hard to dismiss the impression that some American ratings agencies and fund managers are working against the eurozone." But Europeans aren't the only ones up in arms. "S&P has shown really terrible judgment and they've handled themselves very poorly," said US treasury secretary Timothy Geithner after S&P downgraded America's AAA credit rating in August. "They've shown a stunning lack of knowledge about basic US fiscal maths."

The agencies say they're simply telling it like it is. After all, the US congress spent most of last summer dithering about how to rescue the American economy. All winter, European leaders have flip-flopped about how to save the euro. Both quagmires, S&P argues, logically make it likelier that the governments concerned will renege on their debts.

More people would trust the agencies if they hadn't got so much so wrong so recently. In 2009 Moody's issued a report titled "Investor fears over Greek government liquidity misplaced"; within six months, the country was seeking a bailout. Meanwhile, S&P's sovereign debt team miscalculated US debt by as much as $2tn when it downgraded America's credit rating last August. Small wonder the Independent called the team's then head – the mustachioed, chain-smoking David Beers – "the most powerful man in the world that you've never heard of".


Sub-prime mortage lending led to record numbers of foreclosures
in the US. Photograph: David Mcnew/Getty Images

As for their recent decisions, few believe that the agencies are wrong – but some think they're wrong for speaking up. By highlighting the seriousness of the situation, finance ministers argue the agencies are making things worse, because of the cooling effect their downgrades have on investment. "The rating agencies fuelled the crisis in 2008," raged Christian Noyer, the governor of the Bank of France, in December, "and we can question whether they are not doing the same thing in the current crisis."

Noyer's view highlights the paradoxical position ratings agencies find themselves in. Today, they are said to be too quick to downgrade government bonds. Five years ago, by contrast, they were too slow to downgrade the toxic debt that caused the financial crisis. "During the sub-prime mortgage crisis," says Larry Elliott, the Guardian's economics editor, "the ratings agencies were very, very lax."

In layman's terms, the 2008 crisis started when thousands of US homeowners stopped paying interest on their mortgage. The crisis spread because thousands of bankers and fund-managers had foolishly backed those mortgages, and so lost a lot of money themselves. They did this partly through their own lack of foresight, but also because of the ratings agencies' failure to warn them of the risks involved. In the run-up to 2008, a staggering proportion of mortgage-based debts were rated AAA, when in fact they were junk. The same goes for groups such as Enron, Lehman Brothers and AIG. Days before they went bust, Moody's, S&P, and Fitch all still rated these failing companies as safe investments. Shockingly, more than half of all corporate debt ever rated AAA by S&P has been downgraded within seven years, according to research by economist Sukhdev Johal.

Part of the problem is that ratings agencies are funded by the very companies they rate. If you want to be rated, you must pay an agency between $1,500 and $2,500,000 for the privilege, depending on the size of your company. In theory, this creates a conflict of interest, because it gives the agency an incentive to give the companies the rating they want. It could explain why, for much of the past decade, agencies seemed happy not to question either the risks banks were taking, or the accuracy of their accounts. "We rely on audited statements," one senior analyst told Alexandra Ouroussoff, an anthropologist who spent six years interviewing people involved with credit ratings agencies. "We are hamstrung by audited statements. If lying accountants sign off on a fiction ..." The analyst – known as Jane – left the sentence unfinished, but her inference was clear: the agencies are only as effective as their clients are honest.

There is a flipside. On the one hand, it is claimed the agencies do not deal robustly enough with the companies who pay them. On the other, it is said they are too aggressive with the companies who don't. In 1998, Moody's wrote to a German insurance giant called Hannover Re, according to research by the Washington Post's Alec Klein. Though Hannover was not a client of Moody's, the agency said that it had nevertheless decided to rate them free of charge. Ominously, the agency hoped that in the future Hannover would be interested in paying for the service itself. "We need to act," said Hannover's chairman, Wilhelm Zeller.

Unfortunately, Hannover did not act soon enough. Moody's began rating Hannover's debt status, but the insurance company had already enlisted the services of S&P and AM Best (another, smaller agency). In 2003, Moody's downgraded its debt to junk status, and because of the respect paid to Moody's valuations, shareholders panicked, sold their stock, and Hannover Re lost $175m (£111m) in an afternoon. Moody's declined to comment for the Washington Post piece.

It's an example that highlights the power of the Big Three, who collectively rate around 95% of debt. "They have built up such a franchise," Zeller told the newspaper, "it's difficult, if not impossible, to do anything against it." There are more than 150 ratings agencies worldwide, but in order to have any credibility, companies really need at least one of Moody's, S&P and Fitch on their side, and preferably all three. The first two firms each control around 40% of the market. Fitch has about 15%, and is usually engaged when S&P and Moody's disagree significantly about the creditworthiness of a debt. This generally happens because S&P measures how likely a debtor is to default, whereas Moody's rates how long the default is likely to last.

A former Lehman Brothers employee leaves the office after the
bank filed for bankruptcy in 2008. Photograph: Rex Features

It wasn't always like this. At the beginning of the 20th century, there were no ratings agencies, and very few ways of telling which of the many emerging securities were worth investing in. There was a gap in the market, and the first person to fill it was a Wall St errand boy called John Moody. In 1900, aged 32, he published Moody's Manual of Industrial and Miscellaneous Securities, a compendium of information on thousands of financial institutions. The book sold out in months, and an industry was born. Poor's Publishing Company (the predecessor to S&P) emerged in 1916, Fitch in 1924.

Until the 1980s, the Big Three were still primarily North America-based, and demand for their services was not high. This was because they rated the debt markets, whereas at that time companies still did half their borrowing from banks, and invested in things in which they had personal knowledge. "In the old days, few bothered to engage a credit ratings agency because they dealt with what they knew," writes Ha-Joon Chang, a heterodox (or leftwing) economist and author of 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism. "Banks lent to companies that they knew or to local households, whose behaviours they could easily understand, even if they did not know them individually. Most people bought financial products from companies and governments of their own countries in their own currencies." But from the 80s onwards, as the financial system became more deregulated, companies started borrowing more and more from the globalised debt markets, and so the opinion of the credit ratings agencies became more and more relevant. All three agencies are still headquartered in America, but they now have offices in hundreds of countries, thanks to the rapid expansionist tactics Hannover Re experienced at first hand.

For countries such as Britain, the USA and France, the threat of a downgrade is not as serious as it has been for other European countries. Moody's negative outlook did not hit the pound or government bond prices hard, and the FTSE 100 was affected only slightly. Even if Britain's rating fell to AA1, the state is unlikely to be seriously affected because most other countries are in the same boat, and investors have to put their money somewhere. "In this respect, AAB is like the new triple-A," says Heather Stewart, economics editor for the Observer.

But in many other areas of the financial system, the agencies still wield tremendous power – power that many believe needs more regulation. "The obvious solution would be to take this public service into public hands," Aditya Chakrabortty has argued in these pages. "Let's have a ratings agency run by the UN, funded by pooled contributions from both lenders and borrowers ... Let's make the ratings business a utility, rather than a semi-cartel that intimidates elected politicians and rakes in excess profits. It's time to break up the bullying double-act."

Others are more pessimistic about the effect regulation could realistically have. "Whether [or not] an intentional masking of risk by analysts was a significant factor in precipitating the banking crisis ... the focus on irresponsibility serves to deflect attention from the more important question: the question of the accuracy of the risk-modelling techniques," writes Ouroussoff, who is also the author of Wall Street at War. In other words, the problem posed by credit ratings agencies lies not so much in their alleged malpractice or negligence, but in the sheer impossibility of rating creditworthiness in the first place. It's a problem that derives from the difference between quantifying risk and predicting uncertainty. Credit ratings agencies aren't bad at doing the former; at calculating, through mathematical formulas, the statistical likelihood of, say, more than 5% of homeowners defaulting on their mortgage. But they're arguably bad at doing the latter; at predicting the unpredictable, or anything that can't be included within a statistic: the possibility, for example, that vast swaths of the banking industry might, through sheer stupidity, have handed out mortgages to people who couldn't possibly pay them back.


Are Rating Firms Getting a Free Pass?
 (Illustration by Topos Graphics)

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