Official Statement from Governor Abbott:

Governor Greg Abbott today signed House Bill 483 (Capriglione, R-Southlake; Kolkhorst, R-Brenham) to establish a state gold bullion depository administered by the Office of the Comptroller. The law will repatriate $1 billion of gold bullion from the Federal Reserve in New York to Texas. The bullion depository will serve as the custodian, guardian and administrator of bullion that may be transferred to or otherwise acquired by the State of Texas. Governor Abbott issued the following statement:

“Today I signed HB 483 to provide a secure facility for the State of Texas, state agencies and Texas citizens to store gold bullion and other precious metals. With the passage of this bill, the Texas Bullion Depository will become the first state-level facility of its kind in the nation, increasing the security and stability of our gold reserves and keeping taxpayer funds from leaving Texas to pay for fees to store gold in facilities outside our state.”

* * *

Is this the first step down a road to secession? Notably, they’ll need that gold to establish their own country once they win the potentially imminent war with the US military which starts on Monday (Jade Helm).

* * *

This implicit subordination of The Fed’s gold sends a more ominous signal of rising fears of confiscation and leaves us wondering just how long before every state (and/or country) decides to follow Texas’ lead?

Submitted by Bill Bonner via Bonner & Partners,

Bullies, Chiselers, and Zombies

Let us finish our series, “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” We’ve been looking at how, when everybody’s a lawbreaker, it’s hard to spot the real criminals. (To catch up, here’s Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV.)

You’ll recall that we imagined a conversation between two German soldiers on the Eastern Front in 1943.

“Klaus, are we the bad guys here?” one might have asked the other.

Yesterday, we mentioned a few “bad guys.” It was no trouble to find them. Just check the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, D.C.

But today we move on – beyond the two-bit bullies, chiselers, and zombies – to the really ugly guys.

Who are the evil ones?

It’s easy to see evil in dead people. Stalin... Hitler... Pol Pot... people who tortured and killed just to feel good. The jaws of Hell must open especially wide to let them in.

But who should go to the devil today?

Counting the Bodies

It is not for us to say. But we can make some recommendations:

Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Lindsey Graham come to mind, along with John McCain, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, and all the other clownish warmongers.

Of course, we want to be fair and respectful. Each should definitely get an impartial hearing… and then his own lamppost.

But everybody has his own idea about who should swing. So, let’s try to look at it objectively.

Things governments do are quantifiable. We can follow the money. We can count the bodies.

We’re going to make it easy to tell the good from the bad and the ugly with our new Index of Evil.

Which are good? Which countries really are evil?

Russia? Iran? North Korea? The Islamic State? How do we know?

We put our trusty researcher, Kelly Green, on the case.

“Kelly,” we asked, “can you quantify ugliness? Can you help our readers figure out who is good and who is bad? Can you identify who really should be included in the Index of Evil?”

Kelly was not put off by the magnitude and gravity of the job. She went to work on it. What are the marks of evil in a nation? Murder. Assassination. Wars. Torture. False imprisonment.

We’ll forgive theft. All governments steal. (Some more than others.) But we’re talking about “ugly” not just “bad.” So let’s stick to capital crimes and mortal sins, not just venial sins and misdemeanors.

Who kills? Who puts people behind bars? Who tortures?

Kelly added it up, creating the world’s first objective standard.

Who’s the Bad Guy Now?

Three decades after the U.N. Convention Against Torture, torture still happens in 141 countries.

Alas, torture, says Kelly, is not reliably quantifiable. The CIA, for example, calls it “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

To his credit, Senator John McCain – a prisoner of war in Vietnam – has consistently opposed torture and introduced new legislation to ban it just this month.

We also had to take out countries for which data was unavailable. North Korea, for example, is a mystery. ISIS, too, is such a special case that the numbers won’t mean much.

You’ll notice that we included many numbers that were not clearly evil. Military spending, for example, is not necessarily a bad thing. And the homicide rate is not always the fault of an evil government.

Nevertheless, the numbers are there; make of them what you will.

And we included the U.S. for comparison:

So, Klaus, who’s the bad guy?

People make their way past a stencil by street artist Flip in Athens June 4, 2015. REUTERS/Alkis Konstantinidis

By Jan Strupczewski and Renee Maltezou

BRUSSELS/ATHENS (Reuters) - Talks on ending a deadlock between Greece and its international creditors broke up in failure on Sunday, with European leaders venting their frustration as Athens stumbled closer toward a debt default that threatens its future in the euro.

European Union officials blamed the collapse on Athens, saying it had failed to offer anything new to secure the funding it needs to repay 1.6 billion euros ($1.8 billion) to the International Monetary Fund by the end of this month.

Greece retorted it was still ready to talk, but that EU and IMF officials had said they were not authorized to negotiate further. Athens insists it will never give in to demands for more pension and wage cuts.

"This is very disappointing and sad. It was a last attempt to bridge our differences but the gap is too large. One can discuss a gap, but this is an ocean," said a person who was close to the talks.

Both sides acknowledged the talks had lasted less than an hour, although even here accounts differed: Greece put the length at 45 minutes, EU officials at half an hour.

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German Chancellor Angela Merkel (L) shakes hands with Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras (R) at the …

Following what it called this "last attempt" at a solution, the EU's executive Commission said euro zone finance ministers would now tackle the issue when they meet on Thursday.

With no technical deal apparently possible, the ministers are likely to have to make difficult political decisions on Greece's membership of the currency bloc.

Failure to keep Greece in the euro, after years of arduous negotiations and two emergency bailouts totaling 240 billion euros, would send it lurching into the unknown and mark a historic blow to the EU's most ambitious project.

Last Friday, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras had indicated he would accept painful compromises on demands for austerity and reform in return for debt relief.

But the Commission said after the talks, which also involved the European Central Bank, that "the Greek proposals remain incomplete".

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Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras welcomes Egyptian Defense Minister General Sedki Sobhi (not pict …

"While some progress was made, the talks did not succeed as there remains a significant gap between the plans of the Greek authorities and the joint requirements of Commission, ECB and IMF," it said. These amounted to up to 2 billion euros a year in permanent budget savings.

EU officials said Athens had moved closer to the lenders on the size of Greece's primary surplus - the budget balance before its debt repayments - but had not said how it intended to achieve this. Otherwise the Greek delegation, led by Deputy Prime Minister Yannis Dragasakis, had offered nothing new, they added.

Dragasakis said the Greek delegation remained ready to resume talks but blamed European lenders for insisting on pension cuts and value-added tax hikes to close the projected budget gap.

CONFRONTATIONAL LINE

European leaders have piled pressure on Tsipras to offer major concessions in the search for a deal with the EU and IMF as the country faces a debt default in just over two weeks.

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A Greek national flag flutters next to statues of ancient Goddess Athena (L) and God Apollo atop the …

The talks' failure followed signs of an increasingly confrontational line by Greece's European Union partners. The toughest language came not from Greece's long-standing conservative critics but from German Social Democrat chief Sigmar Gabriel, who until recently had been regarded as sympathetic, at least by Berlin standards.

He wrote in Bild newspaper that he wanted to keep Greece in the euro. "But not only is time running out but so too is patience across Europe. Everywhere in Europe, the sentiment is growing that enough is enough," said Gabriel, who is vice-chancellor in Angela Merkel's grand coalition government.

"The shadow of an exit of Greece from the euro zone takes on ever clearer shape," he said. "Repeated apparently final attempts to reach a deal are starting to make the whole process look ridiculous. There is an ever greater number of people who feel as if the Greek government is giving them the run-around."

Germany's Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung reported European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, also reputed to have been more sympathetic to Greek views, warned Tsipras about the risk of "Grexit" - a Greek exit from the euro - when they met last week.

Tsipras says imposing yet more austerity on a country whose economy has shrunk by a quarter in recent years is futile, and will only deepen the suffering of Greeks whose living standards have already dived while unemployment soared.

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Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras poses with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker (R) …

"REGIME CHANGE"

U.S.-based economic analyst Jacob Funk Kirkegaard cast doubt on the Athens government's longevity. He said Europe seemed to be giving up on trying to coax Tsipras toward the political center, opting for confrontation that might lead to "a new more realistic government".

"It is increasingly obvious he is not even a closet centrist but largely seems to agree with the left wing of his party. The euro area thus has no real choice but to seek regime change in Athens," he said on the website of the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

Tsipras still seems to have some support in his quest for debt relief. A person familiar with the negotiations told Reuters that discussions were under way on the issue.

Athens faces immediate problems in repaying debts as the EU and IMF have not paid any money from Greece's bailout programs since the middle of last year. On top of the IMF loan, it must also repay 6.7 billion euros when Greek bonds held by the ECB fall due in July and August.

Even if this short-term hump can be overcome, Greece still faces the daunting prospect of eventually repaying the bailout loans, something that will hang over its enfeebled economy for decades unless a relief deal is achieved.

(Additional reporting by Paul Taylor and John O'Donnell; Writing by David Stamp; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)

Tel Aviv (AFP) - Israeli artists and leading cultural figures gathered Sunday to try and consolidate an approach against Culture Minister Miri Regev's declared intent to withdraw support from institutes that "delegitimize" Israel, a move critics say would amount to censorship.

Hundreds of cultural icons crammed into a performance venue in Jaffa, south of Tel Aviv, to discuss a joint response after Regev sparked a furore last week when she threatened to defund a theatre managed by an Arab Israeli if he refused to perform in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

The debate was also fired up by Education Minister Naftali Bennett's recent decision to overrule a professional committee and pull an Arab play from a state-funded educational programme.

But Regev was the main focus of the ire of many speakers at the event, including stage actor Oded Kottler who compared the people who had voted for her ruling Likud party to "cattle" who risked being led meekly into a world where culture was silenced.

Michael Gurevitch, artistic director of the prestigious Khan theatre in Jerusalem, was greeted with thundering applause when he proposed a "strike of all cultural institutions" in case of any censorship, which he said would cause "international damage" to Israel's image.

Others, such as prominent lawyer Eli Zohar, chairman of the Gesher theatre, called for dialogue with Regev.

"We need to make brave decisions, either we want to eat the grapes or fight with the guard," he said to boos.

Regev on Saturday reiterated on her Facebook page that alongside her intention to encourage cultural activities across Israeli society, "the border should be clear -- I won't support cultural institutions that delegitimize and advance boycotts on Israel."

Gurevitch said there could be no dialogue with Regev so long as she sought to influence the content of artworks.

"I don't think we need to talk with her about the content," he told AFP.

"The first thing she said when taking the position was that 'if I see an artistic work that harms or delegitimizes the state, I will censor it'."

"She can't determine what harms the state's security," he said.

Gurevitch noted that the current law determining the criteria for funding artists and creative institutions did not include the question of content.

An online petition of "creators and people of culture from all fields of artistic activity" has meanwhile garnered nearly 3,000 signatures.

"We protest the anti-democratic measures taken in recent weeks by government ministries against creators and people of culture whose works or stances do not conform with those of the ministries," it read.

Regev responded by saying she would not conduct a dialogue through petitions.

"The signatories don't know me, haven't heard me and know nothing of my plans," she said in a statement. "It's somewhat uncultured to make hysterical declarations of potential McCarthyism, which have no real foundation."

Itamar Gourvitch, who as head of the forum of cultural institutions organised Sunday's meeting, told AFP it had ended without a resolution.