No matter how you look at this development, it does not smell right. From JP Morgan’s website, hat tip Lisa Epstein:

JPMorgan Chase recently donated an unprecedented $4.6 million to the New York City Police Foundation. The gift was the largest in the history of the foundation and will enable the New York City Police Department to strengthen security in the Big Apple. The money will pay for 1,000 new patrol car laptops, as well as security monitoring software in the NYPD’s main data center.

New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly sent CEO and Chairman Jamie Dimon a note expressing “profound gratitude” for the company’s donation.

“These officers put their lives on the line every day to keep us safe,” Dimon said. “We’re incredibly proud to help them build this program and let them know how much we value their hard work.”

Now readers can point out that this gift is bupkis relative to the budget of the police department, which is close to $4 billion. But looking at it on a mathematical basis likely misses the incentives at work. Dimon is one of the most powerful and connected corporate leaders in Gotham City. If he thinks the police donation was worthwhile, he might encourage other bank and big company CEOs to make large donations.

And what sort of benefits might JPM get? The police might be extra protective of your interests. Today, OccupyWallStreet decided to march across the Brooklyn Bridge (a proud New York tradition) to Chase Manhattan Plaza in Brooklyn. Reports in the media indicate that the police at first seemed to be encouraging the protestors not only to cross the bridge, but were walking in front of the crowd, seemingly escorting them across. Over 700 of the marchers were arrested, and the media has a rather amusing “he said, she said” account, with OccupyWallStreet claiming entrapment and the cops batting their baby blues and trying to look innocent.

We simply don’t know whether the police would have behaved one iota differently in the absence of the JP Morgan donation. But it raises the troubling perspective that they might have.

It would be a “moral disaster” if the United States were to default on its debts and become unable to pay its obligations, JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon said at an appearance in Colorado Thursday evening.

The U.S. is the financial linchpin of the world, and the economic effects of the U.S. defaulting could be “potentially catastrophic,” he said at a dinner for the University of Colorado Denver Business School.

“It will dwarf Lehman,” Dimon said, referring to the 2008 collapse of the investment bank Lehman Brothers, which contributed to the beginning of a global financial crisis.

Dimon’s comments came in response to a question about the federal deficit from moderator Tom Petrie, a vice chairman of Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

Congress is debating raising the country’s $14.3 trillion borrowing limit. White House officials say the government will run out of cash to pay expenses Aug. 2, but lawmakers have said they want spending cuts before they agree to raise the debt ceiling.

Read More: AP/Huffington Post. Another retrofitted retread from Dystopia Diaries

Once again, the Xtranormal.com platform is being put to good use to elucidate exactly what’s happening:

Each segment has information that I found useful, especially the fact that there is actually no physical silver left in circulation — nice touch. Part II is here and part III available here.

Part IV is here, and after the creators accidentally deleting the original voices, the bear in the overalls is now sounding strangely like John Lennon.

Another source of information and a more detailed breakdown on basic market manipulation and arbitrage is available here. The site that appears to be the sponsor/creators of the Xtranormal videos silvergoldsilver.blogspot.com is less clear, but has information as well.

Lastly, the folks at Stand for Delivery have created a site dedicated to demanding delivery of their physical silver purchases, to in effect call the larger bluff of the market, if in fact there is a bluff occuring.

To my untrained financial brain, this is difficult to follow, but on the surface is seems like a likely scenario — it’s simply a different flavor of Ponzi scheme that is dovetailing with the desire for many to remove the “volatility” of the dollar (i.e. make it easier to manipulate) and move towards a a new federal or global currency, depending on who you are listening to.

Not such a wild scenario if you trace the de-evolution of the financial marketplace in a time where the new economy manufactures nothing, creates nothing and builds nothing — the new market only manipulates financials or other investors in order to generate revenue for long enough to avoid detection and then move on to the next area of vulnerability. “That’s called trading” you say — yes, but in the past even if you were burned by a more skilled trader, you would still have the physical performance of the company to rely on an even minimal performance or return — the change is that now we are rendering entire market segments into obsolescence by focusing only on 100% speculative market manipulations.

Remember the coming Biotech stock bubble? Turns out those were too complex to inflate and raid, which is why that cycle of hyperinflation never “caught on”.

If you have more knowledge of this topic, please sound off in the comments, everyone could benefit from as much trained knowledge as possible on this one.

According to Keiser, the goal of the “Crash JP Morgan – Buy Silver!” campaign is to force JP Morgan to cover its negative bets. He claims “There’s no way they can cover their liabilities if we all buy 1 silver coin and demand physical delivery.”

The charges that JP Morgan has been manipulating the silver market are not new. Back in May the New York Post reported on a federal investigation and just this month a class action law suit was commenced alleging that around June 2008, when JP Morgan acquired Bear Stearns and its short positions in silver futures, JP Morgan and another bank, HSBC, conspired to manipulate the market for silver futures and options contracts for their own benefit. Read more about that in the Telegraph.

Rev. Billy & the Mountaintop Gospel Choir bring the mountains back to a Chase bank in the East Village, NYC.

Adam Klasfeld writes on the Courthouse News Service:

The self-ordained Rev. Billy Talen was arrested on Easter Sunday after putting a “holy hex” on JPMorgan Chase bank, which he calls the nation’s largest financier of coal-mining mountaintop removal.

The former New York City mayoral candidate and his green-robed chorus put the hex on two bank branches, saying Morgan Chase has helped destroy more than 450 Appalachian mountains, deforested 800 square miles and polluted more than 1,200 miles of streams.

Rev. Billy led his Life After Shopping Gospel Choir to two East Village Chase branches, where the singers “deposited” mounds of “sacred dirt from Coal River Mountain, West Virginia” on the floors of ATM lobbies.

At the branch on St. Marks Place and 2nd Avenue, the choir performed a “mystery channeling of money” as bank customers withdrew money, and the reverend/performance artist preached to a crowd through a white megaphone.

“There’s cancer in the mud in the promised land,” the Rev. Billy intoned.

See more the photos on Rev. Billy’s Flickr photo stream.

For more on Rev. Billy go to www.revbilly.com.

Read more about Rev. Billy’s arrest on Courthouse News Service.

via the NY Times

JPMorgan Chase & Company is coming under fire for the way it conducted an online contest to award millions of dollars to 100 charities.

At least three nonprofit groups — Students for Sensible Drug Policy, the Marijuana Policy Project and an anti-abortion group, Justice for All— say they believe that Chase disqualified them over concerns about associating its name with their missions.

The groups say that until Chase made changes to the contest, they appeared to be among the top 100 vote-getters.

“They never gave us any indication that there was any problem with our organization qualifying,” said Micah Daigle, executive director of Students for Sensible Drug Policy. “Now they’re completely stonewalling me.”

Three days before the contest ended, Chase stopped giving participants access to voting information, and it has not made public the vote tallies of the winners.

“This is a problem of accountability,” said David Lee, executive director of Justice for All. “Simply publish the votes and let us see that the 100 organizations named as winners won.”

The end of our consumer society is on the horizon, which should be no surprise to anyone who took Economics 101. Do we really expect to spend our way out of this mess by buying and selling each other useless cheap stuff from China?

As the financial collapse gathers steam, gold and silver oracles like Butler, Friedman, Morgan and Turk who have been predicting for years the launch of the price of silver to the moon will see their prophecy fulfilled, but a celebration is not in order.

Being wealthy during the last 60 years of unprecedented prosperity at the expense of the Third World and the environment is one thing, but profiting from a bull market in silver when millions of hungry Americans are living in tent-cities next door is quite another.

A default at the Comex that will ignite the explosion in the price of silver and gold is in progress. Investors turned away from the bullion and coin dealers who refuse to sell silver at the $9 paper price opened commodity futures brokerage accounts.  They hope to take delivery of the real thing–silver bars with serial numbers–at the manipulated price of $9 an ounce before the Comex has to shut down and admit they never had enough real silver.

Silver delivery at $9 per ounce is courtesy of The Shorts, the largest concentrated short position by four or less dealers in financial history.

Ted Butler, a brilliant researcher, has been writing about the concentrated short position in silver for years and initially thought the default at Comex would come when the dealers ran out of liquidity, but his research suggested otherwise: “Even when holding extremely large short positions and incurring massive unrealized paper losses, measuring in the many hundreds of millions of dollars, the dealers have never collectively turned tail and bought back their short positions to the upside.”

Shorts to Comex and the regulators: The dramatic price decline in August from $21 to $9 is our parting gift to you for looking the other way during our obvious manipulation of prices in the War on Precious Metals. We had to prevent gold and silver from gaining legitimacy as stores of value or consumerism would not have become hyper-consumerism. Mopping up our mess will be easier at $9 instead of $21.

The Comex maintains a guarantee fund and insurance policy to meet a clearing member default, but it has only about $250 million, which is insufficient to cover the losses, but imagine a default at $50 or more per ounce.

Why has the price of silver historically been suppressed, stuck for years in the $4 to $5 trading range?

The downward price manipulation of silver caused by the excessive and uneconomic short position on the Comex has been the subject of most of Butler’s research. His explanation for market fluctuations are often greed-and-profit but he just as often contradicts himself and writes:  “It is my contention that this uniquely large and concentrated short position in silver explains why the price is still cheap. Therefore, in spite of the open losses the shorts are experiencing and the great profits accruing to silver investors, the price manipulation is still in place.” James R. Cook, president of Investment Rarities, credits Ted Butler for the vast majority of investment silver purchased in the past seven years, but when Cook asks the obvious question, “Isn’t the manipulated downward price consistent with a strategy to encourage the purchase of silver?”, Ted is unable to provide a greed-and-profit motive and repeats what has become his mantra,  “My main motive has been and still remains doing what I can to end this manipulative crime in progress.”

It is manipulative and it is a crime, but Ted Butler is unable to consistently support a profit motive because there isn’t one. The Puppet Masters manipulate the paper price of the precious metals downward to prevent gold and silver from gaining legitimacy as stores of value instead of the fiat currencies we call money.

Behind every consumer society is the reality of a credit-based monetary system and a fiat currency.  There is not enough gold and silver in the world to back the trillions of dollars required for the industrial revolution and the global consumer economy. Behind every fiat currency is a Federal Reserve or a Central Bank controlled by the same men: Rothschild, Rockefeller, Kuhn, Loeb, and Ted Butler’s prime suspect in the “ongoing intentional not accidental” great crime of keeping the price of silver low so investors can “buy a lot more metal”: JP Morgan Chase. “The paper margin calls and technical selling in silver was intentionally planned and forced on us by those who held big short positions.”

One of the more absurd notions that found its way into the history books and the writings of economic experts is that somehow these men were made wealthier from the Monopoly money they printed, the same money that enabled consumers to buy houses, cars, furniture and electronics, i.e. the cheap “stuff” we use on a daily basis. Recall that in 1910 these men already controlled one-sixth of the entire world’s wealth, and it was real wealth: gold, silver and raw materials in a world before we had a “throw away” mentality and the planet’s ecological structures were still in balance.

The Federal Reserve puppet masters orchestrated the Industrial Revolution, the Great Depression, the stagflation of the 1970’s and the dot-com and the housing market bubbles, all of which resulted in unprecedented prosperity.

Consumers can thank the puppet masters for all that “stuff” they have because as Ron (sound money) Paul puts it,  “Our current system gives us a free ride, our paper (fiat) buys cheap goods from overseas, and foreigners risk all by financing our extravagance.”

Thank them also for the unprecedented environmental damage and pollution caused by our hyper-consumer society.

We have consumed the resources of our planet; and it’s time for a change to a sustainable, non-consumer society. When people still had jobs and weren’t scared to go shopping, I recommended The Story of Stuff but, thanks to the financial meltdown, consumerism is on the way out, so now the video to watch is the sequel:  The Power of Community – How Cuba Survived Peak Oil.

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Robert Singer is an Entrepreneur and the author of a forthcoming book on the Federal Reserve. His articles cover politics and the financial and environmental implications of our consumer society.  The articles have been main headlined and can be found on numerous popular websites: Marketoracle, Silverseek, Goldseek, disinformation.com, Daylife, LAprogressive, Canadafreepress, Opednews, Daily.pk and many of the Wordpress sites. Richard Daughty, The Mogambo Guru, proclaimed him a Junior Mogambo Ranger (JMR).