Today's Mathematics

The Libyan devils we don’t know

2011-03-22T13:23:00.002-05:00

By Oliver Wright
Monday, 21 March 2011 at 4:22 pm

After Friday’s euphoria reality begins to set in.

MPs are getting their first chance to debate Britain’s involvement in Libya this afternoon and already there is concern being expressed about the strength of the coalition against Gaddafi and what the ‘end game’ of our involvement will be.

What is clear from listening to MPs in the debate is that while almost all broadly support idea of intervention – that support is shallow and could disappear quickly if events on the ground (or the air) start going wrong.

It is worth asking what the reaction of MPs and the public will be if an airstrike goes wrong and a significant number of civilians die at the hands of the coalition rather than Gaddafi.

Even within the Government there is private concern that while ministers and officials have “thought about” the consequences of military action in Libya they have not “thought it through”. Events of the ground have simply not allowed the time for such considered debate.

One organization illustrates this point neatly. The Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) is a group of radical Islamists aligned with al-Qaeda who are based in and around Bengazi and form part of the internal opposition to the Gaddafi regime. They tried to assassinate him in 2005 and their members have been involved in the eastern uprising.

LIFG is a proscribed terrorist group as in the UK – after it emerged that they were big suppliers of suicide bombers in Iraq.

Now we’re on the same side.

Cameron may say there is no decent future for Libya with Gaddafi still in power – but it is far from clear there is a decent future for Libya if he is removed. Or a future that the West would want.

Libya: the West and al-Qaeda on the same side

2011-03-22T08:53:00.005-05:00

Source: The Telegraph

Statements of support for Libya's revolution by al-Qaeda and leading Islamists have led to fears that military action by the West might be playing into the hands of its ideological enemies.

A Libyan rebel grimaces on the frontline near Sultan, south of Benghazi Photo: AP

By Richard Spencer, Tripoli 6:48PM GMT 18 Mar 2011

WikiLeaks cables, independent analysts and reporters have all identified supporters of Islamist causes among the opposition to Col Gaddafi's regime, particularly in the towns of Benghazi and Dernah.

An al-Qaeda leader of Libyan origin, Abu Yahya al-Libi, released a statement backing the insurrection a week ago, while Yusuf Qaradawi, the Qatar-based, Muslim Brotherhood-linked theologian issued a fatwa authorising Col Gaddafi's military entourage to assassinate him.

But they also agree that the leading roles in the revolution are played by a similar cross-section of society as that in Egypt next door – liberals, nationalists, those with personal experience of regime brutality and Islamists who subscribe to democratic principles.

The WikiLeaks cables, initially revealed by The Daily Telegraph and dating from 2008, identified Dernah in particular as a breeding ground for fighters in a number of causes, including Afghanistan and Iraq.

"The unemployed, disfranchised young men of eastern Libya have nothing to lose and are therefore willing to sacrifice themselves for something greater than themselves by engaging in extremism in the name of religion," the cables quoted a Dernah businessman as saying.

Col Gaddafi has pinpointed the rebels in Dernah as being led by an al-Qaeda cell that has declared the town an Islamic emirate. The regime also casts blame on hundreds of members of the Libyan Islamist Fighting Group released since the group renounced violence two years ago.

Although said by the regime to be affiliated to al-Qaeda, most LIFG members have focused only on promoting sharia law in Libya, rejecting a worldwide "jihad".

The man running Dernah's defences, Abdelkarim al-Hasadi, was arrested by US forces in Afghanistan in 2002, but says he does not support a Taliban-like state.

The rebels' political leadership there says it is secular.

The same goes for the wider leadership, whose membership claims to espouse largely liberal ideals.

In any future negotiations – should it come to dialogue or even victory – rebel spokesmen are likely to be politicians who were until recently senior figures in the regime itself.

The head of the opposition National Council, Mustafa Abdul Jalil was Col Gaddafi's justice minister until he defected at the start of the uprising.

That may not be as bad as it sounds – he was a law professor appointed to improve Libya's human rights record by Saif al-Islam Gaddafi when the colonel's son was leading Libya's westernisation drive, and had already clashed with longer-standing regime insiders.

The military chief, though, is Abdul Fattah Younis al-Obeidi, a former leader of Col Gaddafi's special forces who was his public security, or interior, minister until he went over to the rebels.

He has described Col Gaddafi as "not completely sane", and worked with the SAS during the now curtailed thaw in British-Libyan relations. But it is still ironic that the West is taking sides in a battle between the leader of a much hated regime and his former effective deputy.

Bernanke Says Federal Reserve Won't Reveal Details on Loans

2008-11-19T11:55:00.002-05:00

By Steve Matthews and Craig Torres

Nov. 18 (Bloomberg) -- Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said the central bank won't disclose details of the $2 trillion in emergency loans of taxpayer funds because doing so would stigmatize banks needing the money.

``Some have asked us to reveal the names of the banks that are borrowing, how much they are borrowing, what collateral they are posting,'' Bernanke said today to the House Financial Services Committee. ``We think that's counterproductive.''

Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said in September they would comply with congressional demands for transparency in a $700 billion bank rescue plan. Two months later, as the Fed lends far more than that in separate lending programs that don't require lawmakers' approval, Bernanke said too much disclosure would harm the borrowers.

Bloomberg News has requested details of the Fed lending under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act and filed a federal lawsuit Nov. 7 seeking to force disclosure.

The Fed made the loans under terms of 11 programs, eight of them created in the past 15 months, in the midst of the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression.

``First, the success of this depends on banks being willing to come and borrow when they need short-term cash,'' Bernanke said in response to questioning from Representative Spencer Bachus of Alabama, the committee's senior Republican.

``There is a concern that if the name is put in the newspaper that such-and-such bank came to the Fed to borrow overnight for a perfectly good reason, that others might begin to worry is this bank creditworthy and that might create a stigma, a problem, and might cause banks to be unwilling to borrow, and that would be counterproductive.''

`Very Safe' Loans

Bernanke said the central bank would not lose money on its lending, which is backed by assets.

``We take collateral, we haircut it, it is a short-term loan, it is very safe, we have never lost a penny in these various lending programs,'' he said.

Before Sept. 14, the Fed accepted mostly top-rated government and asset-backed securities as collateral. After that date, the central bank widened standards to accept other kinds of securities, some with lower ratings. The Fed collects interest on all its loans.

At a Sept. 23 Senate Banking Committee hearing in Washington, Paulson called for transparency in the purchase of distressed assets.

``We need oversight,'' Paulson told lawmakers. ``We need protection. We need transparency. I want it. We all want it.''

At a joint House-Senate hearing the next day, Bernanke also stressed the importance of openness in the program. ``Transparency is a big issue,'' he said.

The Bloomberg lawsuit argues that the collateral lists ``are central to understanding and assessing the government's response to the most cataclysmic financial crisis in America since the Great Depression.''

30 reasons for Great Depression 2 by 2011

2008-11-18T10:19:00.003-05:00

New-New Deal, bailouts, trillions in debt, antitax mindset spell disaster

By Paul B. Farrell , MarketWatch

Last update: 7:19 p.m. EST Nov. 17, 2008

ARROYO GRANDE, Calif. (MarketWatch) -- By 2011? No recovery? No new bull? "Hey Paul, why do you keep talking about a bigger crash coming by 2011?" Readers ask that often. So here's a sequel to my predictions of 2000 and 2004, with a look three years ahead:

First. Dot-com crash

We pinpointed the dot-com crash at its peak, in a March 20, 2000 column: "Next crash? Sorry, you won't see it coming." Bulls-eye: The dot-com bubble popped. The economy went into a 30-month recession. The stock market lost $8 trillion. And today, over eight years later, the market is still roughly 40% below its 2000 peak. See previous Paul B. Farrell.

Factor in inflation and the average stock has lost well over 50% of its value. Stocks have proven to be a very big loser, a bad investment for Americans, thanks to Wall Street's selfish greed, plus the complicity and naiveté of politicians, press and public.

Second. Subprime meltdown

We reported on warnings of another crash coming as early as 2004, wrote a sequel, also titled "Next crash? Sorry, you won't see it coming." Yes, we were early, but in good company. We wrote many more warning columns. Few listened.

Subsequent events, notably former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan's admission of his failures in congressional testimony, prove that if he and other Reaganomic ideologues weren't so myopic and intransigent about proving their free-market deregulation theories, they could have acted earlier and prevented today's colossal mess. Instead, their ideology kept the bubble blowing, delayed the pop, making matters worse.

So once again, as history proves over and over, ideology trumps common sense, reality and the facts. Greed drives ideologues to blow bubbles. They pop. Crashes happen. The public is collateral damage.

Third. Megabubble cycles

We also detailed the broader, accelerating macroeconomic sweep of cycles last summer in columns like "20 reasons new megabubble pops in 2011." We summarized a long list of major warnings from financial periodicals -- Forbes, Fortune, the Wall Street Journal, Economist -- and from the voices of Warren Buffett, Bill Gross, a sitting Fed governor and a former Commerce secretary. Multiple warnings "hiding in plain sight," beginning with a Fed governor warning Greenspan in 2000 about subprime risk.

But the big shocker came from the new Treasury secretary two years before the meltdown: Bloomberg News reports that shortly after leaving Wall Street as Goldman Sachs' CEO, Henry Paulson was at Camp David warning the president and his staff of "over-the-counter derivatives as an example of financial innovation that could, under certain circumstances, blow up in Wall Street's face and affect the whole economy."

Yes, they knew. And still both Paulson, a Wall Street insider, and Greenspan's successor, Ben Bernanke, a Princeton scholar of the Great Depression, stayed trapped in denial and kept happy-talking the public for months after the meltdown began in mid-2007. Get it? While they could have put the brakes on this meltdown years ago, our leaders were prisoners of their distorted, inflexible views of conservative Reaganomics ideology.

As a result, once again the "best and the brightest" failed America and now they and their buddies in Washington and Corporate America are setting up the Crash of 2011.

Now it's time for my 2008 update, a look into the future where things will get far worse during the next presidential term. And given human behavior, especially in the deep recesses of Wall Street's "greed is good" DNA, it seems inevitable that no matter how well-intentioned the new president may be Wall Street and Washington's 41,000 special-interest lobbyists will drive America into the Great Depression 2.

30 'leading edge' indicators of the coming Great Depression 2

Every day there is more breaking news, proof Wall Street's greed is already back to "business as usual" and in denial, grabbing more and more from the new "Bailouts-R-Us" bonanza of free taxpayer cash and credits, like two-year-olds in a toy store at Christmas -- anything to boost earnings, profits and stock prices, and keep those bonuses and salaries flowing, anything to blow a new bubble.

Scan these 30 "leading indicators." Each problem has one or more possible solutions, but lacks unified political support. Time's running out. We're already at the edge. Add up the trillions in debt: Any collective solution will only compound our problems, because the cumulative debt will overwhelm us, make matters worse:

America's credit rating may soon be downgraded below AAA
Fed refusal to disclose $2 trillion loans, now the new "shadow banking system"
Congress has no oversight of $700 billion, and Paulson's Wall Street Trojan Horse
King Henry Paulson flip-flops on plan to buy toxic bank assets, confusing markets
Goldman, Morgan lost tens of billions, but planning over $13 billion in bonuses this year
AIG bails big banks out of $150 billion in credit swaps, protects shareholders before taxpayers
American Express joins Goldman, Morgan as bank holding firms, looking for Fed money
Treasury sneaks corporate tax credits into bailout giveaway, shifts costs to states
State revenues down, taxes and debt up; hiring, spending, borrowing add even more debt
State, municipal, corporate pensions lost hundreds of billions on derivative swaps
Hedge funds: 610 in 1990, almost 10,000 now. Returns down 15%, liquidations up
Consumer debt way up, now at $2.5 trillion; next area for credit meltdowns
Fed also plans to provide billions to $3.6 trillion money-market fund industry
Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are bleeding cash, want to tap taxpayer dollars
Washington manipulating data: War not $600 billion but estimates actually $3 trillion
Hidden costs of $700 billion bailout are likely $5 trillion; plus $1 trillion Street write-offs
Commodities down, resource exporters and currencies dropping, triggering a global meltdown
Big three automakers near bankruptcy; unions, workers, retirees will suffer
Corporate bond market, both junk and top-rated, slumps more than 25%
Retailers bankrupt: Circuit City, Sharper Image, Mervyns; mall sales in free fall
Unemployment heading toward 8% plus; more 1930's photos of soup lines
Government policy is dictated by 42,000 myopic, highly paid, greedy lobbyists
China's sees GDP growth drop, crates $586 billion stimulus; deflation is now global, hitting even Dubai
Despite global recession, U.S. trade deficit continues, now at $650 billion
The 800-pound gorillas: Social Security, Medicare with $60 trillion in unfunded liabilities
Now 46 million uninsured as medical, drug costs explode
New-New Deal: U.S. planning billions for infrastructure, adding to unsustainable debt
Outgoing leaders handicapping new administration with huge liabilities
The "antitaxes" message is a new bubble, a new version of the American
dream offering a free lunch, no sacrifices, exposing us to more false promises

Will the next meltdown, the third of the 21st Century, trigger a second Great Depression? Or will the 2007-08 crisis simply morph into a painful extension of today's mess to 2011 and beyond, with no new bull market, no economic recovery as our new president hopes?

Perhaps some of the first 29 problems may be solved separately, but collectively, after building on a failed ideology, they spell disaster. So listen closely to "leading indicator" No. 30:

At a recent Reuters Global Finance Summit former Goldman Sachs chairman John Whitehead was interviewed. He was also Ronald Reagan's Deputy Secretary of State and a former chairman of the N.Y. Fed. He says America's problems will take years and will burn trillions.

He sees "nothing but large increases in the deficit ... I think it would be worse than the depression. ... Before I go to sleep at night, I wonder if tomorrow is the day Moody's and S&P will announce a downgrade of U.S. government bonds." It'll get worse because "the public is not prepared to increase taxes. Both parties were for reducing taxes, reducing income to government, and both parties favored a number of new programs, all very costly and all done by the government."

Reuters concludes: "Whitehead said he is speaking out on this topic because he is concerned no lawmakers are against these new spending programs and none will stand up and call for higher taxes. 'I just want to get people thinking about this, and to realize this is a road to disaster,' said Whitehead. 'I've always been a positive person and optimistic, but I don't see a solution here.'"

We see the Great Depression 2. Why? Wall Street's self-interested greed. They are their own worst enemy ... and America's too.

The first barons of banking

2008-11-12T19:05:00.000-05:00

Abu Dhabi Media Company FZLLC. http://www.thenational.ae/

Nobleman: Baron David de Rothschild, the head of the Rothschild bank. The Rothschilds have helped the British government since financing Wellington's army to fight the French in 1815. Galen Clarke / The National

Among the captains of industry, spin doctors and financial advisers accompanying British prime minister Gordon Brown on his fund-raising visit to the Gulf this week, one name was surprisingly absent. This may have had something to do with the fact that the tour kicked off in Saudi Arabia. But by the time the group reached Qatar, Baron David de Rothschild was there, too, and he was also in Dubai and Abu Dhabi.

Although his office denies that he was part of the official party, it is probably no coincidence that he happened to be in the same part of the world at the right time. That is how the Rothschilds have worked for centuries: quietly, without fuss, behind the scenes.

“We have had 250 years or so of family involvement in the finance business,” says Baron Rothschild. “We provide advice on both sides of the balance sheet, and we do it globally.”

The Rothschilds have been helping the British government – and many others – out of a financial hole ever since they financed Wellington’s army and thus victory against the French at Waterloo in 1815. According to a long-standing legend, the Rothschild family owed the first millions of their fortune to Nathan Rothschild’s successful speculation about the effect of the outcome of the battle on the price of British bonds. By the 19th century, they ran a financial institution with the power and influence of a combined Merrill Lynch, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley and perhaps even Goldman Sachs and the Bank of China today.

In the 1820s, the Rothschilds supplied enough money to the Bank of England to avert a liquidity crisis. There is not one institution that can save the system in the same way today; not even the US Federal Reserve. However, even though the Rothschilds may have lost some of that power – just as other financial institutions on that list have been emasculated in the last few months – the Rothschild dynasty has lost none of its lustre or influence. So it was no surprise to meet Baron Rothschild at the Dubai International Financial Centre. Rothschild’s opened in Dubai in 2006 with ambitious plans to build an advisory business to complement its European operations. What took so long?

The answer, as many things connected with Rothschilds, has a lot to do with history. When Baron Rothschild began his career, he joined his father’s firm in Paris. In 1982 President Francois Mitterrand nationalised all the banks, leaving him without a bank. With just US$1 million (Dh3.67m) in capital, and five employees, he built up the business, before merging the French operations with the rest of the family’s business in the 1990s.

Gradually the firm has started expanding throughout the world, including the Gulf. “There is no debate that Rothschild is a Jewish family, but we are proud to be in this region. However, it takes time to develop a global footprint,” he says.

An urbane man in his mid-60s, he says there is no single reason why the Rothschilds have been able to keep their financial business together, but offers a couple of suggestions for their longevity. “For a family business to survive, every generation needs a leader,” he says. “Then somebody has to keep the peace. Building a global firm before globalisation meant a mindset of sharing risk and responsibility. If you look at the DNA of our family, that is perhaps an element that runs through our history. Finally, don’t be complacent about giving the family jobs.”

He stresses that the Rothschild ascent has not been linear – at times, as he did in Paris, they have had to rebuild. While he was restarting their business in France, his cousin Sir Evelyn was building a British franchise. When Sir Evelyn retired, the decision was taken to merge the businesses. They are now strong in Europe, Asia especially China, India, as well as Brazil. They also get involved in bankruptcy restructurings in the US, a franchise that will no doubt see a lot more activity in the months ahead.

Does he expect governments to play a larger role in financial markets in future? “There is a huge difference in the Soviet-style mentality that occurred in Paris in 1982, and the extraordinary achievements that politicians, led by Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy, have made to save the global banking system from systemic collapse,” he says. “They moved to protect the world from billions of unemployment. In five to 10 years those banking stakes will be sold – and sold at a profit.”

Baron Rothschild shares most people’s view that there is a new world order. In his opinion, banks will deleverage and there will be a new form of global governance. “But you have to be careful of caricatures: we don’t want to go from ultra liberalism to protectionism.”

So how did the Rothschilds manage to emerge relatively unscathed from the financial meltdown? “You could say that we may have more insights than others, or you may look at the structure of our business,” he says. “As a family business, we want to limit risk. There is a natural pride in being a trusted adviser.”

It is that role as trusted adviser to both governments and companies that Rothschilds is hoping to build on in the region. “In today’s world we have a strong offering of debt and equity,” he says. “They are two arms of the same body looking for money.”

The firm has entrusted the growth of its financing advisory business in the Middle East to Paul Reynolds, a veteran of many complex corporate finance deals. “Our principal business franchise is large and mid-size companies,” says Mr Reynolds. “I have already been working in this region for two years and we offer a pretty unique proposition.

“We work in a purely advisory capacity. We don’t lend or underwrite, because that creates conflicts. We are sensitive to banking relationships. But we look to ensure financial flexibility for our clients.”

He was unwilling to discuss specific deals or clients, but says that he offers them “trusted, impartial financing advice any time day or night”. Baron Rothschilds tends to do more deals than their competitors, mainly because they are prepared to take on smaller mandates. “It’s not transactions were are interested in, it’s relationships. We are looking for good businesses and good people,” says Mr Reynolds. “Our ambition is for every company here to have a debt adviser.”

Baron Rothschild is reluctant to comment on his nephew Nat Rothschild’s public outburst against George Osborne, the British shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer. Nat Rothschild castigated Mr Osborne for revealing certain confidences gleaned during a holiday in the summer in Corfu.

In what the British press are calling “Yachtgate”, the tale involved Russia’s richest man, Oleg Deripaska, Lord Mandelson, a controversial British politician who has just returned to government, Mr Osborne and a Rothschild. Classic tabloid fodder, but one senses that Baron Rothschild frowns on such publicity. “If you are an adviser, that imposes a certain style and culture,” he says. “You should never forget that clients want to hear more about themselves than their bankers. It demands an element of being sober.”

Even when not at work, Baron Rothschild’s tastes are sober. He lives between Paris and London, is a keen family man – he has one son who is joining the business next September and three daughters – an enthusiastic golfer, and enjoys the “odd concert”. He is also involved in various charity activities, including funding research into brain disease and bone marrow disorders.

It is part of Rothschild lore that its founder sent his sons throughout Europe to set up their own interlinked offices. So where would Baron Rothschild send his children today?

“I would send one to Asia, one to Europe and one to the United States,” he said. “And if I had more children, I would send one to the UAE.”

UK's Brown: Now is the time to build global society

2008-11-10T14:05:00.000-05:00

07:03 PM EST

LONDON (Reuters) - The international financial crisis has given world leaders a unique opportunity to create a truly global society, Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown will say in a keynote foreign policy speech on Monday.

In his annual speech at the Lord Mayor's Banquet, Brown -- who has spearheaded calls for the reform of international financial institutions -- will say Britain, the United States and Europe are key to forging a new world order.

"The alliance between Britain and the U.S. -- and more broadly between Europe and the U.S. -- can and must provide leadership, not in order to make the rules ourselves, but to lead the global effort to build a stronger and more just international order," an excerpt from the speech says.

Brown and other leaders meet in Washington next weekend to discuss longer term solutions for dealing with economic issues following a series of coordinated moves on interest rates and to recapitalize banks in the wake of the financial crisis.

"Uniquely in this global age, it is now in our power to come together so that 2008 is remembered not just for the failure of a financial crash that engulfed the world but for the resilience and optimism with which we faced the storm, endured it and prevailed," Brown will say in his speech on Monday evening.

"...And if we learn from our experience of turning unity of purpose into unity of action, we can together seize this moment of change in our world to create a truly global society."

According to a summary of the speech released by his office, Brown will set out five great challenges the world faces.

These are: terrorism and extremism and the need to reassert faith in democracy; the global economy; climate change; conflict and mechanisms for rebuilding states after conflict; and meeting goals on tackling poverty and disease.

Brown will also identify five stages for tackling the economy, starting with recapitalizing banks so they can resume lending to families and businesses, and better international co-ordination of fiscal and monetary policy.

He also wants immediate action to stop the spread of the financial crisis to middle-income countries, with a new facility for the International Monetary Fund, and agreement on a global trade deal, as well as reform of the global financial system.

"My message is that we must be: internationalist not protectionist; interventionist not neutral; progressive not reactive; and forward looking not frozen by events. We can seize the moment and in doing so build a truly global society."

(Reporting by Jodie Ginsberg; Editing by Janet Lawrence)

Russia welcomes Barack Obama with deployment of nuclear-capable missiles

2008-11-05T13:36:00.002-05:00

The Kremlin gave Barack Obama a glacial welcome to the world stage when Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president, ordered the deployment of nuclear-capable missiles on Nato's borders for the first time since the Cold War.

By Adrian Blomfield in Moscow telegraph.co.uk
Last Updated: 4:57PM GMT 05 Nov 2008

Mr Medvedev said he was ordering the deployment in retaliation to a missile defence shield that the United States wants to build in central Europe Photo: AP

In what appeared to be a deliberate attempt to rattle the president-elect, Mr Medvedev said that short-range Iskander surface-to-surface missiles would be stationed in Russia's baltic exclave of Kaliningrad, which borders EU states Poland and Lithuania.

Delivering his most aggressively anti-American speech yet, Mr Medvedev said he was ordering the deployment in retaliation to a missile defence shield that the United States wants to build in central Europe by 2011.

In comments likely to unnerve the Obama camp, the Russian leader even hinted that he was prepared to use the missiles to destroy the shield, which is to be erected in Poland and the Czech Republic.

"I have approved a new configuration for the military forces of our country," Mr Medvedev said in his first ever annual address to the two houses of the Russian parliament. "To neutralise – if necessary – the anti-missile system, an Iskander missile system will be deployed in the Kaliningrad region."

Although the Iskander is normally equipped with conventional warheads, it can be modified to carry a nuclear payload.

Russia has been threatening to move Iskander missiles to Kalinigrad since April last year, but until now no specific order had been given.

Mr Medvedev's speech had been postponed twice and commentators in Moscow say it is no accident that the Kremlin decided it should be delivered on the day the United States presidential election results were announced.

They suggested that Russia was deliberately attempting to test Mr Obama's mettle. Some analysts say that Kremlin hardliners are worried that the Democrat could seek to restore the notion of the United States as a "soft power" prepared to seek international consensus in its foreign policy.

For Kremlin hawks, such a policy could undermine their attempts to project the US as a threat to Russian sovereignty, thus undermining the justification for the authoritarian policies of Vladimir Putin, the country's powerful prime minister.

For much of his speech, President Medvedev, who was shoehorned into office by Mr Putin, sounded as abrasive as his predecessor at his most vituperative.

Seeking to cast Washington as the architect of the global financial crisis, he lashed out at the "erroneous, egotistical and sometimes even dangerous decisions of some members of the global community" – the traditional euphemism for the United States.

He also blamed the United States for August's war in the Caucasus, which saw Russia invade Georgia and destroy much of its infrastructure after the escalation of a conflict in a Moscow-backed breakaway region of the country.

The US, Mr Medvedev said, pursued a foreign policy that was "selfish, cannot stand criticism and prefers unilateral decisions." "The conflict in the Caucasus was used as a pretext for sending Nato warships to the Black Sea and then for foisting America's anti-missile systems on Europe," he told legislators.

The US sent naval vessels to the Black Sea after the August conflict ended to deliver humanitarian aid to Georgia. The ships have since left the area.

Breaking with tradition, Mr Medvedev failed to congratulate senator Obama on his victory. But he did urge the president-elect to take steps to improve US-Russia relations, which he said were badly damaged.

Ordinary Russians were sneering about the entire election, which was characterized in the frequently chauvinistic popular media as a contest between a senile grandfather and a black man of dubious credentials and intellect. American voters were portrayed as "popcorn and hamburger eating idiots" by one newspaper.

Several tabloids incorrectly reported that the main message of Mr Obama's final campaign speech was a call on young African Americans not to let their underpants show above the waistline of the jeans.

Many also questioned the US belief in democracy, claiming that it had plunged the world into turmoil.

"Russia does not need this Western operetta show," the Tvoi Dyen tabloid wrote. "We realised back in 1612, there is so much more important than difference of opinion."

Great expectations: Barack Obama and the world

2008-11-05T13:35:00.000-05:00

Last Updated: Wednesday, November 5, 2008 | 12:32 AM ET

By Jeremy Kinsman CBC News

Barack Obama in Germany in July 2008: 'The walls must come down' (Markus Schreiber/Associated Press)

Americans selected Barack Obama as their new president because 85 per cent of them told pollsters they didn't like the direction the country was heading. His first and vast challenge will be to try to change that direction.

Obama was also the world's choice by a wide margin. But my swing through several European capitals this autumn told me that, deep down, non-Americans didn't really believe he would in the end be America's choice.

The fact that he was — that America did, in the quiet of the polling booth, decisively select the candidate of colour — has offered the U.S. that rare second chance to redefine itself to the world.

It has been said that there are only two global superpowers today: the U.S. and world opinion. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the two became largely aligned in empathy until George W. Bush squandered that asset.

Today, they are aligned again, this time in admiration.

Many Europeans I spoke with didn't believe Obama would be elected because "it couldn't happen here," in the UK or France or Spain, they said. The Chinese public were said to be both fascinated and envious of his campaign, Geoff York reported in the Globe and Mail.

Well, today's election is going to give a huge adrenaline shot to repressed democrats and human rights defenders the world over in ways that the Bush "freedom agenda" couldn't, simply because of the force of the Obama example.

The new president inherits daunting domestic and foreign challenges but also an enormous fund of good will on almost every continent. For the short term, anyway, he is going to seem like the "world's president."

What is likely to change?

Obviously, the first to go will be George W. Bush and almost everything he stands for. Was this decent man as bad a president as people think? His Texan style didn't travel well, but the record? Darn near as bad.

I blame Vice-President Dick Cheney for much of this: the stealth and manipulation, the adversarial fixation on strengthening executive prerogative and stifling Congress as well as the laws of the land; the obsession to get Saddam Hussein and the blithe disregard of facts. But all that is past history now.

Turning the page, consider as gone the belief that military force alone can produce pleasing political outcomes. Or that U.S.-style unilateralism is a winning option.

Republican John McCain retained an "almost religious belief" in American exceptionalism and the merits of using military force to protect U.S. interests and values, Nicholas Lemann wrote in the New Yorker.

Obama won't have to declaim that America is exceptional. His very election shows that it is.

But gone will be the "with us or against us" bombast of the past so many years. Obama is more than a unifier. He is a cross-cultural figure.

Cultural anthropologists, whose stock is rising as U.S. agencies and military realize they don't really understand other peoples very well, should be thrilled.

An includer

Gone, too, should be that instinctive, pre-judging hostility to other countries such as Iran.

Obama's administration will undoubtedly support a community of democracies and of democrats but is unlikely to see these grouping as a made-in-America venture, one more coalition to line up against a growing list of adversaries, as McCain had seemed wont to do.

On the diplomatic circuit, every indication is that Obama is not a "great-power relationship" sort of leader either.

He is, by most accounts, a consensus seeker and while he will likely reach out to individual partners on a one-on-one, confidence-sharing basis, his preferred arenas will be multilateral — and large.

Forget about the G8. The preferred forums are likely to be the G15 or even the G20 because he is a big tent kind of guy.

Keeping a big stick

Economic recovery will be an uphill climb but with a more deeply Democratic Congress, an Obama administration can likely produce a quick stimulation package that, coupled this time with a sense of a fresh start, may have some real impact on a fretful American psychology.

Should that happen, it would only underpin Obama's leadership clout in the world.

But don't expect a president Obama to lighten up much on homeland security, or at least not until Americans tell him the cost of doing cross-border business is too high. (So, Canadians, grow up and renew your passports early. Service has improved at least.)

Also unlikely to change will be the core U.S. military budget, though some expensive programs like the provocative anti-missile defence system may get the chop.

As a liberal, Obama can't risk reducing U.S. military power or being seen to let America's guard down. Indeed, he has demonstrated a willingness to use force if necessary to go after the sanctuaries of really bad guys with or without local permission.

Would he have authorized last week's raid on a Syrian arms export depot? Probably. But he might actually have tried talking first to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The golden rule

North Korea won't change its spots overnight, nor will Iran knuckle under on the nuclear file. Nor will Iraq's Sunnis and Shias learn to love each other, or Israelis and Palestinians settle their scores, or the Taliban decide to celebrate Karzai-style democracy just because of Barack Obama.

So U.S. forces will likely be staying for a while in Iraq, though increasingly in the background.

In fact, there may well be spoiler-type pushback from upstaged brittle leaders like Russia's Vladimir Putin — unless Obama finds a way to get to them first, which he very well might.

Everybody who knows him passes the same message: that he reaches out to consult before he moves and follows the golden rule. He listens to and tries to understand others, which is why he is likely to drop the childish and dangerous practice of not talking with adversaries.

If one of Putin's main grievances is that Russia isn't taken seriously anymore by the U.S., then Obama ought to show that is not the case. Political leaders are human and attention counts.

That goes double for domestic politicians. I expect to see a return to the sort of attention former presidents like Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton lavished on members of Congress.

I expect to see the U.S. recommit to the goal of effective multilateralism in world affairs, where the rule is diplomacy first and military action only as a very last resort.

I expect to see the United Nations regain its rightful place in U.S. esteem. Obama has been explicit about the need to build an international consensus on the big challenges that individual governments cannot handle on their own, including counterterrorism, nuclear proliferation, and climate change and oil dependence.

I anticipate he will resubmit to Congress for ratification such multilateral initiatives as joining the International Criminal Court and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, despised by neo-conservative unilateralists. Indeed, I expect a major emphasis on negotiated nuclear disarmament, including that of America itself.

And Canada?

If you go to the Obama website and his campaign speeches, you won't find much about Canada — indeed, you won't find anything.

That may hurt those Canadians with the narrow soul of a deputy minister, but it's good news. We are not a U.S. problem!

But is Obama a problem for Canada? Wasn't he said to want to renegotiate NAFTA, the free trade agreement, to, implicitly, get a better deal for American workers?

That was probably campaign cover because some rust-belt Americans don't think NAFTA works for their country. But the recent global downturn turns the heat up on that file.

If there are issues to renegotiate, then let's be adults and think big about sharing a continent, and get down to it. That is the best way to get on the U.S. agenda.

With Obama in the White House, Stephen Harper's Conservative government may feel challenged by having, in Washington, a non-divisive social reformer and listener (hear that, 24 Sussex?) who believes in multilateralism, a once Canadian trait that we may have to relearn.

Will Obama press Canada to keep combat forces in Afghanistan past 2011? His first calls to add brigades there will likely be to others. Later, he'll listen to why we finally want to stand down and should probably respect the disproportionate contribution Canadians have made.

There will, however, be a problem on climate change, especially if there is no real effort to mitigate the environmental impact of developing the oilsands or to develop technologies that are not part of the carbon problem.

There may well be some sourpuss Canadian pundits who will disparage Obama's victory and put him down as a lightweight liberal floating on an ephemeral sea of rhetoric. Pay them no mind.

The rest of us should just celebrate the fact that our neighbour and closest friend has chosen the kind of leader that Canadians can instantly recognize because he operates in what used to be a very Canadian way of seeing and dealing with the world.

Lies and Audiotape: Morgan Chase Exec Brags Bailout Is for Takeovers, Restructuring, Not Lending

2008-11-03T14:28:00.002-05:00

Executive Intelligence Review

Oct. 26, 2008 (EIRNS)—In an internal bank conference call last week, a JP Morgan Chase executive, unaware that his conversation would be heard and published by a reporter, confirmed exactly what Lyndon LaRouche has said about the Hank Paulson bail-out: It has nothing remotely to do with extending lending to the U.S. economy, but is concerned with the Mussolini-like corporatist restructuring of the U.S. banking system, turning over the "smaller banks" to the totally bankrupt big banks, so that they can digest the smaller banks' assets, and survive perhaps a few more weeks.

New York Times reporter Joe Nocera obtained the call-in phone number on which the Oct. 17 Morgan Chase conference call took place, only 4 days after JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon had agreed to take $25 billion in a U.S. government capital injection. In an article in the Oct. 25 Times, entitled "So When Will Banks Give Loans?" Nocera quoted the unnamed JP Morgan Chase executive who gave the conference call, as follows:

"Twenty-five billion dollars is obviously going to help the folks who are struggling more than Chase," he began. "What we do think it will help us do, is perhaps be a little bit more active on the acquisition side, or opportunistic side, for some banks who are still struggling. And I would not assume that we are done on the acquisition side, just because of the Washington Mutual and Bear Stearns mergers. I think there are going to be some great opportunities for us to grow in this environment, and I think we have an opportunity to use that $25 billion in that way. And obviously depending on whether recession turns into depression or what happens in the future, you know, we have that as a backstop." [emphasis added]

Later during the call, the executive showed what a fig-leaf is Paulson's claim that the capital injection part of the bail-out plan would start up lending to the economy. The executive explained "loan dollars are down significantly." He added, "We would think that loan volume will continue to go down as we continue to tighten credit to fully reflect the high cost of pricing on the loan side."

Uses for $700 billion bailout money ever shifting

2008-10-30T07:14:00.000-05:00

JOHN DUNBAR
Associated Press
October 29, 2008

First, the $700 billion rescue for the economy was about buying devalued mortgage-backed securities from tottering banks to unclog frozen credit markets.

Then it was about using $250 billion of it to buy stakes in banks. The idea was that banks would use the money to start making loans again.

But reports surfaced that bankers might instead use the money to buy other banks, pay dividends, give employees a raise and executives a bonus, or just sit on it. Insurance companies now want a piece; maybe automakers, too, even though Congress has approved $25 billion in low-interest loans for them.

Three weeks after becoming law, and with the first dollar of the $700 billion yet to go out, officials are just beginning to talk about helping a few strapped homeowners keep the foreclosure wolf from the door.

As the crisis worsens, the government’s reaction keeps changing. Lawmakers in both parties are starting to gripe that the bailout is turning out to be far different from what the Bush administration sold to Congress.

In buying equity stakes in banks, the Treasury has “deviated significantly from its original course,” says Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby, the top Republican on the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee. “We need to examine closely the reason for this change,” said Shelby, who opposed the bailout.

The centerpiece of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act is the “troubled asset relief program,” or TARP for short. Critics note that tarps are used to cover things up. The money was to be devoted to buying “toxic” mortgage-backed securities whose value has fallen in lockstep with home prices.

Read article

Treasury Blacks Out Key Parts of Private Bailout Contracts

2008-10-22T12:49:00.001-05:00

David Sirota - The Huffington Post
Posted October 19, 2008 | 10:38 PM (EST)

Remember how Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson promised full transparency in spending the $700 billion bailout money? And remember how bailout opponents predicted that the failure to mandate such transparency would allow all sorts of Halliburton-style shenanigans? From the looks of the first private contracts issued by the Treasury Department, it looks like the bailout opponents were correct.

As flagged by BailoutSleuth.com, Paulson is blacking out the sections of government contracts that spell out how much private firms will be paid for their services in administering taxpayer money. Here's a page from the compensation part of a contract with Bank of New York, which has been hired to do some of the bookkeeping (because, of course, the Bush administration is happy to privatize that function):

And here's a page from the compensation part of a Treasury contract with law firm Simpson Thatcher Bartlett - a firm being hired to provide "legal advice" to the government:

Think these are doctored images? Check them out yourself on Treasury's website - the first contract is here (blacked out section on page 25 of the PDF) and the second contract is here (blacked out section on page 5 of the PDF).

So, just to review - within just a few weeks of the bailout passing, our government is blacking out the parts of public contracts that explain how much taxpayer cash private contractors are going to be paid. Perhaps this is what Paulson meant when he promised transparency - by posting these blacked out contracts on the Treasury website, the government is being transparent about exactly where it is being secretive. But I don't think that definition of transparency really flies, do you?

Of course, I wish I was surprised about this - but one of the major reasons I was opposed to this bailout from the beginning was because (as I and others repeatedly wrote) there is no real transparency at all. Now we know what "no transparency at all" really means.

Joe Biden: Promises / Guarantees "International crisis, a generated crisis"

2008-10-21T16:58:00.004-05:00

http://blogs.suntimes.com/sweet/2008/10/joe_biden_seattle_fund_raiser.html Chicago Suntimes

By
Lynn Sweet on October 21, 2008 2:59 PM Permalink Comments (0)

WASHINGTON--John McCain is going after Joe Biden on Tuesday for remarks Biden made Sunday at a Seattle fund-raiser about how Barack Obama, 47, will be tested by "the world" to see if he is tough enough. This off message message from Biden came during a long discussion about Obama. Click for the pool report with the entire transcript.

Lynn: here's that pool report -- notice that this comment is setting up his description of why Obama is the guy to deal with tough times:

Subject: Biden Seattle fundraiser pool report (#2 of 2) Pool report Seattle, WA fundraiser (#2 of 2) Sunday, October 19, 2008

For his second Seattle fundraiser of the evening, Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., spoke in a smaller ballroom at the downtown Sheraton Hotel, following the introduction of Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash..

The estimated total haul for Biden's fundraisers in the Emerald City this evening: a cool million bucks.

"I'm losing my voice, which would make everybody in the Senate very happy," said Biden at the outset of money-pitch part deux.

But despite his cold, the senator pressed on, speaking for about 15 minutes.
"You should have told me about your prowess," he told the Obama supporters about their fundraising skills.

"I just wasted a whole year hanging out waiting for something to happen," he joked about his own failed presidential bid.

Biden then implored the audience of organizers to help re-elect Gov. Chris Gregoire.
"It is almost as important that you re-elect the governor as it is that you elect the next president," he said.

But back to the Obama/Biden campaign...

"One of the things we're trying to do in this race is not just change the agenda, but we're trying to change the chessboard here. We're trying to change the way politicians have played, the divisive politics."

"Clinton was such an incredibly talented, incredibly talented president and politician, he was able to run upstream," Biden noted. "The truth of the matter was that if you noticed, even in those days, it was not a direct confrontation of the agenda. What we had to do was a little jujitsu."
"That was what drove the Republicans crazy - he took their playbook and he turned it on them."
As he has in the past, Biden described how the nation is at "an inflection point", one of "maybe five times in American history since the founding".

"The next four years are going to determine what it looks like 25 years from now because we either get this right internationally or we're in trouble," he said, citing the Korean peninsula and Pakistan as potential hot-spots.

He then talked about the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

"It's where al Qaeda lives. It's there. It's real. We focus so much on the bad policy on Iraq, we sometimes seem to think that somehow there isn't a real problem. Our CIA has pointed out that bin Laden is alive and well, Iraq, excuse me, in the mountains between Pakistan and Afghanistan. He's getting (inaudible) and support from those tribal areas. You have, folks, the Taliban is coming back. We're on the verge of finding ourselves in a position to see the regression occurring in Pakistan.

Biden emphasized the importance of injecting economic assistance to build hospitals, roads, and schools.

The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee warned that unless people there have "a reason to look to Islamabad instead of looking to the tribally-controlled areas, then in fact we got no hope, folks."

"Bin Laden is alive and well," he cautioned. "Our own agencies have pointed out that we have created more terrorists than we have dissuaded and destroyed as a consequence of shredding the constitution, keeping Guantanamo open."

"We talk about Iran getting a nuclear weapon and threatening Israel and us. Let me tell ya something, Pakistan already is bristling with nuclear weapons, all of which can hit Israel right now, all of which can strike the Mediterranean and well into the Indian Ocean."

Biden recalled when his helicopter came down in a snowstorm at 10,500 feet in the middle of the mountains along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

"You literally can see what these kids are up against, our kids in that region. The place is crawling with al Qaeda. And it's real."

"My generic point is you can't win it militarily," he said. "You gotta go beyond that."
He showered praise on Cantwell for her work in foreign affairs before referencing an article by the "most enlightened conservative columnist in America", David Brooks.

"David Brooks wrote a piece basically endorsing Barack Obama last week in the New York Times. You should get it. And I think it best summarizes why Barack is the right guy at the right moment for this job, that he understands, like Maria does, he looks at this from a very different perspective. This is the 21st century. We do not have the military capacity, nor have we ever, quite frankly, in the last 20 years, to dictate outcomes. It's so much more important than that. It's so much more complicated than that. And Barack gets it."

So why was Biden saying this to the crowd of supporters? He'll tell ya why...

"We're gonna find ourselves in real trouble when we get elected. This is gonna be really hard. This is gonna be really, really, really hard. We're gonna have the largest systemic deficit in modern - not modern - in the history of the world. Literally. Literally. We're gonna find ourselves inheriting a debt, yearly debt this year, that may approach three-quarters of a trillion dollars. You hear me? We left this guy with a $232 billion surplus. At a minimum when we take office - God willing - we're gonna have a $450 billion deficit. And the way the economy is tanking the way it is now it may be as high as $750 billion."

"28 states are in serious trouble and they're about to contribute to the economic downward spiral because what are they doing? Cutting services, laying people off as they lose their tax base. So there are going to be a lot of tough decisions Barack's gonna have to make, a lot of tough decisions, including on foreign policy."

"And here's the point I want to make. Mark my words. Mark my words. It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We're about to elect a brilliant 47-year old senator president of the United States of America.
Remember I said it standing here if you don't remember anything else I said. Watch, we're gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy. And he's gonna have to make some really tough - I don't know what the decision's gonna be, but I promise you it will occur. As a student of history and having served with seven presidents, I guarantee you it's gonna happen. I can give you at least four or five scenarios from where it might originate. And he's gonna need help. And the kind of help he's gonna need is, he's gonna need you, not financially to help him, we're gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it's not gonna be apparent initially, it's not gonna be apparent that we're right. Because all these decisions, all these decisions, once they're made if they work, then they weren't viewed as a crisis. If they don't work, it's viewed as you didn't make the right decision, a little bit like how we hesitated so long dealing with Bosnia and dealing with Kosovo, and consequently 200,000 people lost their lives that maybe didn't have to lose lives. It's how we made a mistake in Iraq. We made a mistake in Somalia. So there's gonna be some tough decisions. They may emanate from the Middle East. They may emanate from the sub-continent. They may emanate from Russia's newly-emboldened position because they're floating in a sea of oil."

After again touting Cantwell's judgment, Biden told the crowd to "gird your loins."

"Only thing I'm asking you is, you know, gird your loins. We're gonna win with your help, God willing, we're gonna win, but this is not gonna be an easy ride. This president, the next president, is gonna be left with the most significant task. It's like cleaning the Aegean stables, man. This is more than just, this is more than - think about it, literally, think about it - this is more than just a capital crisis, this is more than just markets, this is a systemic problem we have with this economy."

As he did last week in Missouri, Biden then touted Obama's team of economic advisers.
"I have great respect and have had great respect for a long time for Barack Obama, but I've never, I never thought that I'd have the kind of respect I have after watching him assemble probably the finest economic team that's been put together in the history of this country, Democrats and Republicans. You should see him orchestrate these meetings we have with 18 of the best minds in the world, from both parties. There's no doubt about who's charge, Gov. There's no doubt. There's no doubt about how incisive his questions are. What he asks of this group is stunning in terms of there responses. They kind of go, 'whoa, whoa!' This guy has an ability to move to the quick of things like anybody I've ever served with, at least this up close. So I think we're gonna put our hands, take this ship (inaudible) in the right hands. I think we got this ticket right. I think we got it in the right balance here."

After a round of applause, Biden continued.

"I've forgotten more about foreign policy than most of my colleagues know, so I'm not being falsely humble with you. I think I can be value added, but this guy has it. This guy has it. But he's gonna need your help. Because I promise you, you all are gonna be sitting here a year from now going 'oh my God, why are they there in the polls, why is the polling so down, why is this thing so tough? We're gonna have to make some incredibly tough decisions in the first two years. So I'm asking you now, I'm asking you now, be prepared to stick with us. Remember the faith you had at this point because you're going to have to reinforce us."

Noting that he's a practicing Irish-Catholic, the Delaware lawmaker said, "Let's not be, for those of a different faith remember St. Peter denied Christ thrice, you know? We don't need anybody denying us, this is gonna be tough. There are gonna be a lot of you who want to go 'whoa, wait a minute, yo, whoa, whoa, I don't know about that decision.' Because if you think the decision is sound when they're made, which I believe you will when they're made, they're not likely to be as popular as they are sound. Because if they're popular, they're probably not sound."

While the crowd laughed, Biden noticed your pooler in the back of the room pounding away at his keyboard.

"I probably shouldn't have said all this because it dawned on me that the press is here," the senator said.

"All kidding aside, these guys have left us in a God-awful place. We have the ability to straighten it out. It's gonna take a little bit of time, so I ask you to stay with us. Stay with us."
And with that, he handed the mic back to Cantwell.

Matthew Jaffe
ABC News
Washington, DC

U.S. suicide rate is up

2008-10-21T10:12:00.000-05:00

It's climbed steadily since 1999. The most alarming increase is among middle-age adults: nearly 16%.

By Denise Gellene

October 21, 2008
LA Times

After falling for more than a decade, the U.S. suicide rate has climbed steadily since 1999, driven by an alarming increase among middle-age adults, researchers said Monday.

A new six-year analysis in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine found that the U.S. suicide rate rose to 11 per 100,000 people in 2005, from 10.5 per 100,000 in 1999, an increase of just under 5%.

The report found that virtually all of the increase was attributable to a nearly 16% jump in suicides among people ages 40 to 64, a group not commonly seen as high-risk. The rate for that age group rose to 15.6 per 100,000 in 2005, from 13.5 per 100,000 in 1999.

Susan P. Baker, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health and an author of the study, said she was baffled by the findings. Sociological studies have found that middle age is generally a time of relative security and emotional well-being, she said.

"We really don't know what is causing this," said Dr. Paula Clayton, research director of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, who was not involved in the study. "All we have is speculation."

One possibility, she said, is that the increase in suicides might be tied to a concurrent increase in abuse of prescription pain pills, such as OxyContin. Studies have shown that people who abuse drugs are at greater risk for suicide, she noted.

Another possible explanation, she said, was the drop in hormone replacement therapy after it was linked to health risks in 2002. Women who gave up the drugs or decided not to take them might have been more susceptible to depression and potentially suicide, she said.

Dr. Ian Cook, an associate professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine, who was not involved in the study, said stresses of modern life, particularly worries in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, might have a role.

Untreated depression is the leading cause of suicide, he said.

"The bottom line is while we can't infer a lot of things about what is causing the trend, I think it cries out for better depression screening and treatment," he said.

Suicide rates declined 18% from 1986 to 1999, helped in part by a focus on prevention among teenagers and the elderly.

In the current study, researchers found little or no change in the suicide rates for three other age groups: 10 to 19, 20 to 29, and over 65.

Suicides for whites ages 40 to 64 rose 17% from 1999 to 2005, researchers said. For middle-age white men, the rate rose 16% to 26.9 per 100,000 in 2005, from 23.1 per 100,000 in 1999. For white women in that age group, the rate rose 19% to 8.2 per 100,000 from 6.9 per 100,000.

The suicide rate among middle-age African Americans rose 7% from 1999 to 2005, but it was not enough to drive up the overall suicide rate among blacks.

For black men ages 40 to 64, the rate rose 5% to 10.4 per 100,000 from 9.9 per 100,000, and for black women in that age group, the rate rose 14% to 2.5 per 100,000 from 2.2 per 100,000.

Baker said she had no idea why the increases among whites were higher.

Gellene is a Times staff writer.

denise.gellene@latimes.com

Suicide Predominant in White, Middle-Aged Americans

2008-10-21T10:10:00.001-05:00

By Anna Boyd
15:36, October 21st 2008 eFluxMedia

While anti-suicide campaigns have focused on teens and young adults because they are thought to be at high risk, a study in the online edition of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine concludes that middle-aged white men and women register the highest rate of suicide in the United States. Whites age 40 to 64 have “recently emerged as a new high-risk group for suicide,” the study says.

The study by Susan Baker, MPH, of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, and her colleagues, was based on data from 1999 to 2005. Suicide claimed 32,637 lives in 2005, a rate of 11 per 100,000 people. Overall, the suicide rate increased by 0.7 percent per year during that period, but it rose 2.7 percent annually among middle-aged white men and 3.9 percent among middle-aged white women.

"The results underscore a change in the epidemiology of suicide, with middle-aged whites emerging as a new high-risk group. Historically, suicide-prevention programs have focused on groups considered to be at highest risk -- teens and young adults of both genders as well as elderly white men. This research tells us we need to refocus our resources to develop prevention programs for men and women in their middle years,” Baker said in a statement.

On the other hand, suicide in blacks decreased significantly and remained stable among Asian and Native Americans.

The study also shows that rates of suicide by hanging or suffocation increased by 6.3 percent among men and 2.3 percent among women. Overall, the study found that hanging/suffocation accounted for 22 percent of all suicides by 2005, surpassing poisoning at 18 percent. Previous studies have showed that guns were the most common method of suicide. Other methods included prescription drugs, poisons, and firearms.

The researchers could not find a specific reason behind this increase in suicidal rates. Dr. Paula Clayton, research director of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention said it might be associated with an increase in abuse of prescription pain pills, known to cause depression and expose people to suicidal thoughts. Another possible explanation was the drop in hormone replacement therapy after it was linked to health risks in 2002. Women who interrupted the drugs were more susceptible to depression and potentially suicide. However more study needs to be done in order to fully understand reasons behind this situation, Dr. Clayton, who was not involved in the study, said.

The bad news is that the suicidal rate could increase even more given the current economic situation in the US, the researchers warned.

EU Leaders Call for Global Currency

2008-10-20T09:31:00.002-05:00

By Kurt Nimmo
Oct 18, 2008, 08:27 Axis of Logic

Editor's Note: In September, 1990, as George Herbert Walker Bush spoke to a joint session of Congress about his plans for the first illegal US invasion of Iraq. It was during this speech that he made public the "fifth objective" of the illuminati during that period in his speech entitled, "Toward a New World Order". Their planned demolition of the economy this year has laid the groundwork for the empire's new global currency.

- Les Blough, Editor

"Certainly, the elite cooked up an appropriate global crisis, now they will engage in a full court press to establish a global currency and eventually a global government."

Saturday, Oct 18, 2008 - If we are to believe the Washington Post, French president and current EU leader Nicolas Sarkozy has pledged to save us from nameless “freewheeling bankers and traders” who get the blame for the current economic crisis.

Sarkozy, Gordon Brown, and EU honcho José Manuel Barroso are talking up an international summit to discuss an “urgent overhaul of the world’s financial architecture,” that is to say a new Bretton Woods to establish a brand spanking new international economic order. Sarkozy has managed to grab George Bush’s ear and he will travel to Washington on Saturday to lay the groundwork for a conference.

In 1944, 44 allied nations met at a resort in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to fiddle with monetary standards, fix exchange rates, and create the IMF and World Bank. “Launching a remake of this old model — particularly in such a short time, with so many new participants — would represent a daunting challenge at any time, but particularly during the twilight of the Bush presidency and the crisis that is still jolting banks and stock markets around the world,” reports the Post.

Sarkozy and the EU leaders would have us believe this new Bretton Woods will call for “globally coordinated regulation of the financial industry, elimination of tax havens and a compensation system in which traders are not rewarded for dangerous risk-taking,” among other things.

It was the demise of Bretton Woods in 1971, insists European Central Bank president Jean- Claude Trichet, that led to the abandonment of regulation and subsequent market turmoil. “The explosion of the first Bretton Woods in a way could be interpreted as a rejection of discipline,” said Trichet, reports Bloomberg.

Gordon Brown, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, wants to fix that turmoil with a new spate of regulations aimed at international finance. On October 13 in London, Brown said “we must devise new rules for a world of global capital flows” just as the founders of Bretton Woods “devised rules for a world of limited capital flows.”

“We now have global financial markets but what we do not have is anything other than national and regional regulation and supervision,” Brown lamented from Brussels.

All of this is nonsense. It should be obvious by now the bankers engineered the current crisis in order to consolidate their hold on the global economy and all the talk about rogue traders, tax havens, and over-compensated executives is merely that — talk, or more specifically a sales pitch, a slick parlor trick devised to fool the commoners.

Glossed over in all the corporate media coverage is the global elite demand that a global currency be established. “Europe wants to present a blueprint for a new worldwide currency system,” reports the AFP in the video here.

“Another subject in tomorrow’s world is that of the great currencies,” Reuters reported Sarkozy musing on October 16. “How many should there be? What should the agreement between these great currencies be? Should we organize a discussion?”

Any discussion would be purely academic, as the ruling elite long ago decided to force a global currency down our throats. In fact, a global currency is at the very core of their plan to dominate the world. Control money and you control the destiny of states, you eliminate national sovereignty. “The control of money and credit strikes at the very heart of national sovereignty,” A.W. Clausen, president of Bank of America once observed.

As Georgetown professor and CFR historian Carroll Quigley noted, the goal of the banking families and their minions consists of “nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole… controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences.”

It remains to be seen if the EU will realize its “solution” to the world economic crisis. In 2007, Robert Mundell, “the father of the euro,” noted that “international monetary reform usually becomes possible only in response to a felt need and the threat of a global crisis.”

Certainly, the elite cooked up an appropriate global crisis, now they will engage in a full court press to establish a global currency and eventually a global government.

http://www.infowars.com/?p=5387

Bretton Woods II: Will a New Financial-World Order Solve the Economic Crisis?

2008-10-20T09:28:00.001-05:00

Posted on date: Oct 20, 2008

By J.D. Seagraves
Citizen Economists

On October 13, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown called for a new-world financial order. “We must create a new international financial architecture for the global age,” Brown said. “We must have a new Bretton Woods.”

Brown’s statement echoed the sentiments of French and EU president Nicolas Sarkozy, who on September 26 said, “We must rethink the financial system from scratch, as at Bretton Woods.”

So is a new “Bretton Woods” a good idea? Before we can answer that question, we need to take a look at the original Bretton Woods System, which was the world’s first fully negotiated international monetary order. What inspired global leaders to create it, and what ultimately led to its demise?

The Monetary Role of Gold

By 1900, most Western European nations had evolved from centrally planned monarchies to pseudo-capitalist republics. This resulted in the heyday of the International Gold Standard, in which market economies of the West engaged in relatively free trade, facilitated by the ultimate global currency of gold.

Gold, according to Austrian economist Carl Menger, emerged as money millennia ago. In fact, gold’s monetary nature predates the existence of the nation-state. It is “real money” in the sense that no one has to be forced to accept it: they do so willingly. And thus, gold presents a problem for nation-state governments—they can’t manipulate it as easily as paper money.

True, nation-states dating back to the Roman Empire and before have attempted to make money a state institution through the implementation of “monetary policy.” The chief tactics of these ancient states were coin clipping and debasement (mixing cheap alloys in with gold) and forcing people under “legal tender” laws to accept devalued coins at full face value. These monetary tricks ultimately led to the ruination of numerous empires throughout history, with the Romans being neither the first nor the last.

The End of the International Gold Standard

Fast-forwarding 150 decades or so, the nation-states of the early 20th century were in a similar bind: they couldn’t finance the wars they wanted to fight under the strictness of a gold standard. “War,” after all, as Randolph Bourne said, “is the health of the state,” as it lends itself to an intense concentration of government power. But early twentieth-century bureaucrats found it difficult or impossible to fund wars through taxation without inspiring domestic revolts. The other option—printing money—wasn’t feasible under a gold standard, since each paper note had to be backed by real gold. So what were war-makers to do?

What aggressive governments did do, time and time again, was temporarily suspend the convertibility of notes. Typically under a gold standard, individuals could trade in a fixed number of dollars (or pounds or francs, etc.) for an ounce of gold. To make war, governments would simply print up extra notes and all money unconvertible for the duration of the conflict—and then devalue their currencies after the war. European nations did this countless times, and the U.S. suspended convertibility during the Civil War, World War I and World War II. But then the Allied nations of that final conflict had a better idea: why not do away with the International Gold Standard once and for all and inflate without limit?

The Creature from Bretton Woods, NH

Unfortunately for them, nation-states had not yet developed the means of social control necessary to impose fiat currencies on the world. So instead, global leaders did the next best thing—they abandoned the too-restrictive International Gold Standard in favor of a new monetary order: the Bretton Woods System.

For three weeks in July of 1944, 730 delegates from all 44 World War II Allies met in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, as part of the UN’s Monetary and Financial Conference. By the time they were done, they had created the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD). These entities—created by “democratic nations” with no democratic approval—would be the enforcers of the new world-financial order.

Ostensibly, the IMF and IBRD were supposed to facilitate “free trade.” In truth, just like modern “free trade” agreements, the IMF and IBRD inhibited and indeed prohibited truly free trade and, instead, created rules to promote government-managed and controlled trade.

Regardless, if we can believe the architects of the post-war order, Bretton Woods was intended to end the protectionist currency manipulation that occurred under the International Gold Standard. Under the gold standard, a country with a trade deficit could simply revalue its currency relative to gold, thereby encouraging exports and discouraging imports. But under Bretton Woods, all member nations had to “peg” their currencies to a weight of gold, plus or minus 1 percent.

The Death of Bretton Woods I

The U.S. dollar, however, had a different role under Bretton Woods: it would take the place of gold and serve as the world’s reserve currency. Only the U.S. dollar could be converted to gold (at $35 an ounce), and only foreign central banks could do the converting. Following Frank D. Roosevelt’s draconian Gold Confiscation Act of 1933, private ownership of gold was banned in the U.S. and remained illegal into the 1970s.

When Bretton Woods was set up, the U.S. held about 60% of world gold reserves. However, beginning with the New Deal, the ever-expanding federal government had quite an appetite and, like empires of old, preferred to fund its growth via monetary trickery instead of taxation. Thus, the government’s central bank—the always eager-to-inflate Federal Reserve—created far more dollars than there were ounces of gold backing them.

This led to an old-fashioned bank run. Foreign governments were smart enough to know there wasn’t enough gold to back all of the dollars in circulation, so they raced to redeem their dollars while they still could. By 1970, the U.S. held just 16% of world gold reserves.

Clearly, the system was unsustainable, so on August 15, 1971, President Nixon “closed the gold window” and reneged on America’s promise to redeem paper dollars in gold, severing the U.S. dollar’s 179-year tie to gold and converting the greenback into a full-fledged fiat currency.

The Birth of Bretton Woods II?

It’s said that the nations that came together for Bretton Woods I all shared a belief in “capitalism.” Austrian economists would scoff at this notion. One of the primary architects of the Bretton Woods System and the notorious IMF was John Maynard Keynes, a Fabian socialist and advocate for central planning in a “mixed economy.” Keynes attended Bretton Woods on behalf of the UK and argued for a world central bank issuing fiat notes known as “bancos.” The U.S., then a creditor nation, resisted. Now, of course, the United States—the world’s biggest and most broke debtor—would have no such leverage.

World leaders are meeting next month to talk about the possibility of setting up a new Bretton Woods System. If these leaders share a common belief, you can be sure it isn’t in capitalism, and you can bet all the fiat money in the world that gold will not play a role in Bretton Woods II. A much more likely scenario is that John Maynard Keynes will finally get his wish, 64 years later, and we’ll have a world central bank and the beginnings of true global government. Everything else Keynes advocated has failed so miraculously and led to so much misery, one can only imagine how bad life under the “banco” might be.

What's Next?

Solving the Financial Crisis: An Academic Viewpoint

Central Banks: The Neurosurgeons of the Global Economy

The Libertarian Battle over Monetary Policy

Financial Bailout Plan: What Does It Mean for Capitalism and Democracy?

ECB's Nowotny Sees Global `Tri-Polar' Currency System Evolving

2008-10-20T09:18:00.000-05:00

By Jonathan Tirone

Oct. 19 (Bloomberg) -- European Central Bank council member Ewald Nowotny said a ``tri-polar'' global currency system is developing between Asia, Europe and the U.S. and that he's skeptical the U.S. dollar's centrality can be revived.

``What I see is a system where we have more centers of gravity'' Nowotny said today in an interview with Austrian state broadcaster ORF-TV. ``I see for the future a tri-polar development, and I don't think that there will be fixed exchange rates between these poles.''

The leaders of the U.S., France and the European Commission will ask other world leaders to join in a series of summits on the global financial crisis beginning in the U.S. soon after the Nov. 4 presidential election, President George W. Bush, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and European Commission President Jose Barroso said in a joint statement yesterday.

Nowotny said he was ``skeptical'' when asked whether the Bretton Woods System of monetary policy, set up after World War II and revised in 1971, could be revived to aid global currency stability. The U.S. meeting should aim to strengthen financial regulation, define bank capital ratios and review the role of debt-rating agencies.

European leaders have pressed to convene an emergency meeting of the world's richest nations, known as the Group of Eight, joined by others such as India and China, to overhaul the world's financial regulatory systems. The meetings are to include developed economies as well as developing nations.

`Real Economy'

Bush, 62, has cautioned that any revamping must not restrict the flow of trade and investment or set a path toward protectionism. The G8 nations are Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States. The U.S. hasn't committed itself to the sweeping terms of Europe's agenda, White House press secretary Dana Perino said yesterday.

Sarkozy wants the G8 to consider re-anchoring their currencies, the hallmark of the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement that also gave birth to the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.

The current financial crisis, in which European governments have pledged at least 1.3 trillion euros ($1.7 trillion) to guarantee loans and take stakes in lenders, should be ``under control'' by mid-2009, Nowotny said. The economy will suffer longer.

``What comes then, unfortunately in parallel, will be the problems for the real economy,'' Nowotny said. ``The growth rate in 2009 will be significantly below what we have in 2008.''

He predicted gross domestic product growth around 1 percent in Austria next year.

To contact the reporters on this story: Jonathan Tirone in Vienna at jtirone@bloomberg.net

Banks Admit Bailout Won't Work

2008-10-17T21:34:00.002-05:00

Posted Oct 17, 2008 09:48am EDT by Henry Blodget in Investing, Recession, Banking

Banks borrow record $437.5 billion per day from Fed

2008-10-17T21:33:00.000-05:00

Reuters
Friday, Oct 17, 2008

Financial institutions ran to their lender of last resort for record amounts of cash in the latest week, under extreme pressure from the worst global financial crisis in a generation, Federal Reserve data showed on Thursday.

Banks and dealers’ overall direct borrowings from the Fed averaged a record $437.53 billion per day in the week ended October 15, topping the previous week’s $420.16 billion per day.

Some analysts are concerned that banks’ dependence on Fed lending might become long term and difficult to change.

“The banking system is going to become addicted to this very cheap money. Unwinding it will be very difficult,” said Howard Simons, strategist with Bianco Research in Chicago.

“We have effectively allowed the central banks to disintermediate the banking system. Why would I want to borrow from you if I could do it with the central bank, because they can always print it up and say ‘here’…and they are in the business now of making sure I stay in business,” Simons said.

Primary credit discount window borrowings averaged a record $99.66 billion per day in the latest week, up from $75.0 billion per day the previous week.

Primary dealer and other broker dealer borrowings were $133.87 billion as of October 15, versus $122.94 billion on October 8.

“Other credit extensions”, mostly reflecting loans to insurer AIG, were $82.86 billion as of October 15, versus $70.30 billion as of October 8.

The Fed’s lending to banks to enable them to purchase asset-backed commercial paper from money market mutual funds was $122.76 billion as of October 15, versus $139.48 billion on October 8.

Full article here

G-7 unsuited to global crisis - World Bank

2008-10-07T07:54:00.001-05:00

http://cnnmoney.mobi/money/business/economy/detail/97289
October 06 2008: 02:43 PM EDT

The Group of Seven industrialized countries is outmoded and should be replaced with a new entity that would include growing economies in Asia and Latin America, World Bank President Robert Zoellick said Monday.

He said the financial crises roiling markets in the United States and Europe are an alarm for the world and demonstrate the need for a broader-based system to handle them.

"The G-7 is not working," he said. "We need a better group for a different time. For financial and economic cooperation, we should consider a new steering group including Brazil, China, India, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia and South Africa and the current G-7."

Russia set to join

The G-7 brings together the United States, Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Japan. When Russia joins the group for political discussions, it becomes the G-8.

Speaking before weekend meetings of the bank and its sister institution, the International Monetary Fund, Zoellick said the new group would not be a G-14.

"We will not create a new world simply by remaking the old," he said. "It should be numberless, flexible, and over time, it could evolve" to fit changing circumstances, including new emerging powers, while serving as a network for frequent interaction.

"We need a Facebook for multilateral economic diplomacy," Zoellick said in a speech to the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, referring to the social networking site.

"These rising powers need to be heard," he said. "They want to know what their role will be in making the new rules for the global economy. Having demonstrated their competitive success, these rising powers are suspicious that the more established stakeholders will hold them back, whether through old rules of trade and finance or new rules for climate change and the environment."

Economics on global agenda

The G-7 was formed in 1976 to bring together finance ministers from member countries who meet several times a year to discuss economic matters. Besides Zoellick, other officials in developed and developing countries have called for the G-7 to become more representative of the global economy.

Zoellick said the IMF, the World Bank and perhaps the World Trade Organization could help support the new group by identifying emerging problems, supplying analyses, suggesting solutions and drawing on "our own broader membership to propose coalitions to address issues."

The World Bank and the IMF were established in the World War II's last days to stabilize the international economy. They now have 185 member nations.

Zoellick, a former U.S. diplomat, trade negotiator and business executive, said economic multilateralism needs to be redefined beyond its traditional focus on trade and finance. He said energy, climate change and stabilizing fragile and post-conflict states are economic issues and not just part of the global dialogue on security and development.

Developing countries

Turning to developing countries, Zoellick warned that the financial crisis could be a tipping point for many of them.

"Deceleration of growth and deteriorating financing conditions will trigger business failures and possibly banking emergencies," he said. "As is always the case, the most poor are the most defenseless."

House to Wall Street: Drop dead

2008-09-29T15:26:00.000-05:00

Commentary: Uneasy Republicans couldn't stomach massive bailout

marketwatch.com

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) - With a firm rejection of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, the House Republicans have told the financial markets that they'll have to solve their problems on their own, without $700 billion of taxpayer money.

In a stunning vote on Monday, the House rejected the financial rescue package on a vote of 205 to 228. Republicans voted against the bill by a two-to-one ratio, and in the process rejected their own leadership, who had worked for nearly a week to craft a bill that could gain a majority. Nearly 100 Democrats also voted against the bill, spurning their leadership.

Many Republicans in the House were never persuaded that the credit crunch in the financial system is an impending disaster deserving of taxpayer aid. Politicians who had cut their teeth on free-market principles couldn't accept the idea that the federal government should back up the banks who had foolishly bet everything on the housing bubble.

Or they didn't want to face the voters in six weeks and explain why a Republican would vote for the biggest government bailout ever.

Now we shall see if Paulson and Bernanke were right when they said the credit crisis could worsen and inflict dire consequences on the global economy. Or perhaps the plan's many critics were right in saying that credit markets and home prices can adjust on their own, once the promise of free money is withdrawn.

The leaders in Congress and in the administration will undoubtedly try again, hoping to write a compromise bill that can attract a majority. But that won't be easy, because the Paulson plan had significant opposition from backbenchers on both the Republican right and the Democratic left.

Rejection of the plan means there's no political solution to this financial crisis on the horizon. As it now stands, the markets are on their own.

The next six weeks will tell whether the coup d'etat in the House on Monday has created a political crisis to match the financial one.

Dirty Secret Of The Bailout: Thirty-Two Words That None Dare Utter

2008-09-23T14:12:00.001-05:00

September 22, 2008 02:06 PM Huffington Post

Read More: Bailout, Financial Crisis, Henry Paulson Wall Street, Paulson Bailout Package, Section 8, Politics News

A critical - and radical - component of the bailout package proposed by the Bush administration has thus far failed to garner the serious attention of anyone in the press. Section 8 (which ironically reminds one of the popular name of the portion of the 1937 Housing Act that paved the way for subsidized affordable housing ) of this legislation is just a single sentence of thirty-two words, but it represents a significant consolidation of power and an abdication of oversight authority that's so flat-out astounding that it ought to set one's hair on fire. It reads, in its entirety:

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

In short, the so-called "mother of all bailouts," which will transfer $700 billion taxpayer dollars to purchase the distressed assets of several failed financial institutions, will be conducted in a manner unchallengeable by courts and ungovernable by the People's duly sworn representatives. All decision-making power will be consolidated into the Executive Branch - who, we remind you, will have the incentive to act upon this privilege as quickly as possible, before they leave office. The measure will run up the budget deficit by a significant amount, with no guarantee of recouping the outlay, and no fundamental means of holding those who fail to do so accountable.

Is this starting to sound familiar? Robert Kuttner cuts through much of the gloss in an article in today's American Prospect:

The deal proposed by Paulson is nothing short of outrageous. It includes no oversight of his own closed-door operations. It merely gives congressional blessing and funding to what he has already been doing, ad hoc. He plans to retain Wall Street firms as advisors to decide just how to cut deals to value and mop up Wall Street's dubious paper. There are to be no limits on executive compensation for the firms that get relief, and no equity share for the government in exchange for this massive infusion of capital. Both Obama and McCain have opposed the provision denying any judicial review of decisions made by Paulson -- a provision that evokes the Bush administration's suspension of normal constitutional safeguards in its conduct of foreign policy and national security. [...]

The differences between this proposed bailout and the three closest historical equivalents are immense. When the Reconstruction Finance Corporation of the 1930s pumped a total of $35 billion into U.S. corporations and financial institutions, there was close government supervision and quid pro quos at every step of the way. Much of the time, the RFC became a preferred shareholder, and often appointed board members. The Home Owners Loan Corporation, which eventually refinanced one in five mortgage loans, did not operate to bail out banks but to save homeowners. And the Resolution Trust Corporation of the 1980s, created to mop up the damage of the first speculative mortgage meltdown, the S&L collapse, did not pump in money to rescue bad investments; it sorted out good assets from bad after the fact, and made sure to purge bad executives as well as bad loans. And all three of these historic cases of public recapitalization were done without suspending judicial review.

Kuttner's opposition here is perhaps the strongest language I've seen used, pushing back on this piece of legislation, in any publication of repute, and even here, Section 8 is not cited by name or by content. McClatchy Newspapers also alludes to Section 8 with concern, citing the "unfettered authority" that Paulson would be granted, and noting that the "law also would preclude court review of steps Paulson might take, something Joshua Rosner, managing director of economic researcher Graham Fisher & Co. in New York, said could be used to mask previous illegal activity." Jack Balkin also gives the matter the sort of attention it deserves on his blog, Balkinization.

But elsewhere, the conversation is muted. The debate over whether Congress is going to pass the Paulson bailout package, or pass the Paulson bailout package really hard seems to have boiled down to a discussion of time and concessions. The White House has made it clear that they want this package passed yesterday. Congressional Democrats seem to be of different minds on the matter, with some pushing back hard, and others content to demand a small dollop of turd polish to make the package seem more aesthetically pleasing, at which point, they'll likely roll over and pass the bill. Neither candidate, John McCain or Barack Obama, seem all that amenable toward the bailout, but neither have either demonstrated that they are willing to risk their candidacies to do much more than exploit the issue for electoral purposes.

Sunday morning came and went, with Paulson traipsing dutifully from studio to studio, facing nary a question on Section 8. Front page articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal detail the wranglings, but make no mention of this section of the legislation. On TV, cable news networks are stuck in the fog of the ongoing presidential campaign.

Throughout the coverage, one catches a whiff of what seems like substantive pushback on this power grab, but it largely amounts to a facsimile of journalistic diligence. Most note, in general terms, that the bailout represents a set of "broad powers" that will be granted to the Department of the Treasury. Yet the coverage offsets these concerns through the constant hyping of the White House's overall message of "urgency."

But one cannot overstate this: Section 8 is a singularly transformative sentence of economic policy. It transfers a significant amount of power to the Executive Branch, while walling off any avenue for oversight, and offering no guarantees in return. And if the Democrats end up content with winning a few slight concessions, they risk not putting a stop-payment on the real "blank check" - the one in which they allow the erosion of their own powers.

Over in the Senate, Christopher Dodd has proposed a bailout legislation of his own, which critically calls for "an oversight board that not only includes the chairman of the Federal Reserve and the SEC, but congressionally appointed, non-governmental officials" and would require the President to appoint an "independent inspector general to investigate the Treasury asset program." In Dodd's legislation, Section 8 is effectively stripped from the bill.

Nevertheless, the fact that Section 8 of the Paulson plan seems to strike few as a de facto dealbreaker can and should astound. The failure of Congress to hold the line on this point would be truly embarrassing. But if we make it through this week with nobody in the press specifically informing the public about the implications of this single sentence - in the middle of a complicated bill, in the middle of a complicated time - then right there, you have the single largest media failure of this year.

Fed's Fisher says not certain inflation will ease

2008-09-05T08:05:00.000-05:00

By Alister Bull

HOUSTON (Reuters) - U.S. economic growth is softening amid still fragile financial markets but it is not clear that this will curb inflation as hoped, a top Federal Reserve official said on Thursday.

"While it seems pretty clear that economic momentum is slowing, the jury is out on whether lesser momentum will be sufficient to translate into relief on the price front over the intermediate to longer term," Dallas Federal Reserve Bank President Richard Fisher told a business luncheon.

"It is pretty clear that trend consumer price inflation has accelerated over the past few months," said Fisher, who has voted against interest rate cuts or in favor of monetary policy tightening at every Fed rate-setting meeting this year.

A stronger dollar and lower oil prices would appear to be taking some of the pressure off of import and energy costs, but Fisher said that it was too early to tell if this would help to bring down inflation.

"First of all, you don't know how long it will last," he told reporters after the speech.

"I do think it is 50/50 odds that the kind of pressures that we saw coming on the price front from these high commodity prices ... might well pass through the economy and not leave the stain of intermediate and long-term inflation. On the other hand, it might," Fisher said.

Despite Fisher's concern over inflation, the U.S. central bank is expected to hold benchmark overnight rates steady at 2 percent at its next policy meeting on Sept. 16.

The Fed halted an aggressive rate-cutting campaign this year after slashing borrowing costs by 3.25 percentage points to shield the economy from a collapsing housing market.

It has signaled it will be patient despite high inflation in waiting for growth to rebuild, based on an assessment that the weakened economy will cap price pressures.

Fisher made plain this outcome, or a less favorable situation where higher prices get embedded into expectations for inflation in the future, were far from certain.

"The jury is still very much out as to which scenario will obtain. The most recent inflation reports are not particularly encouraging," he said.

On the other hand, he was pretty downbeat on the economic outlook in his speech.

"Consumption expenditures, real capital expenditures and construction show the third quarter off to a weak start, although yesterday's manufacturing numbers were a nice surprise on the upside," he said. July factory orders rose a stronger than expected 1.3 percent, data released on Wednesday showed.

"I think it is very likely we will suffer anemic growth for the current and perhaps the next couple of quarters," he said.

He also said credit markets still had not recovered from their shock over massive subprime mortgage losses.

"I think substantial progress is being made. Without getting into specifics, I think still more has to be made, but we're in the process of healing. It is just, I think, going to take some time," he told reporters.

At the outset of his remarks, Fisher warned the audience that he would not comment on the presidential election. But he did have a warning for both Democratic hopeful Sen. Barack Obama and his Republican rival Sen. John McCain.

"If we want to keep growing the United States' share of the global market for services, we must resist the siren call of protectionism ... I hope both presidential candidates and both political parties will bear this in mind," he said.

Putin Suggests U.S. Provocation in Georgia Clash

2008-08-29T11:43:00.001-05:00

By CLIFFORD J. LEVY
NEW YORK TIMES

Published: August 28, 2008

MOSCOW — As Russia struggled to rally international support for its military action in Georgia, Vladimir V. Putin, the country’s paramount leader, lashed out at the United States on Thursday, contending that the White House may have orchestrated the conflict to benefit one of the candidates in the American presidential election.

Mr. Putin’s comments in a television interview, his most extensive to date on Russia’s decision to send troops into Georgia earlier this month, sought to present the military operation as a response to brazen, cold war-style provocations by the United States. In tones that seemed alternately angry and mischievous, he suggested that the Bush administration may have tried to create a crisis that would influence American voters in the choice of a successor to President Bush.

“The suspicion would arise that someone in the United States created this conflict on purpose to stir up the situation and to create an advantage for one of the candidates in the competitive race for the presidency in the United States,” Mr. Putin said in an interview with CNN.

He added, “They needed a small victorious war.”

Mr. Putin did not specify which candidate he had in mind, but there was no doubt that he was referring to Senator John McCain, the Republican. Mr. McCain is loathed in the Kremlin because he has a close relationship with Georgia’s president, Mikheil Saakashvili, and has called for imposing stiff penalties on Russia, including throwing it out of the Group of 8 industrialized nations.

Mr. Putin offered scant evidence to support his assertion, and the White House called his comments absurd. But they underscored the depth of the rift between Moscow and Washington over the Georgia crisis, which flared three weeks ago when the Georgian military tried to reclaim a breakaway enclave allied with Russia. They also suggested that the Russian leader was deeply concerned about the possibility that Mr. McCain, widely viewed here as having a strong bias against Russia, could become president.

Only last spring, Mr. Putin, the president at the time, held a summit meeting with Mr. Bush in which the two expressed personal affection for each other and sought to smooth over tensions in the bilateral relationship.

Russia has been struggling to persuade the outside world to back its action in Georgia. On Thursday, China and four other countries meeting with Russia for the annual summit meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a security alliance, declined to back Russia’s military action in a joint communiqué.

Mr. Putin’s interview came after his protégé, President Dmitri A. Medvedev, spoke to several foreign news outlets this week as part of a concerted move by the Kremlin to counter Georgia’s public relations offensive in the international media. Mr. Medvedev’s tone was less harsh, though he also criticized the West.

On Thursday, Mr. Putin, now prime minister, also said Russian defense officials believed that United States citizens were in the conflict area supporting the Georgian military when it attacked the separatist region of South Ossetia.

“Even during the cold war, during the time of tough confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States, we have always avoided direct clashes between our civilians, let alone our servicemen,” Mr. Putin said. “We have serious reasons to believe that directly, in the combat zone, citizens of the United States were present.”

“If the facts are confirmed,” he added, “that United States citizens were present in the combat zone, that means only one thing — that they could be there only on the direct instruction of their leadership. And if this is so, then it means that American citizens are in the combat zone, performing their duties, and they can only do that following a direct order from their leader, and not on their own initiative.”

In Washington, the White House spokeswoman, Dana M. Perino, dismissed Mr. Putin’s remarks. “To suggest that the United States orchestrated this on behalf of a political candidate just sounds not rational,” she said.

She added, “It also sounds like his defense officials who said they believe this to be true are giving him really bad advice.”

A senior Russian defense official, Col. Gen. Anatoly Nogovitsyn, said at a news conference in Moscow on Thursday that Russian forces had found a United States passport in a ruined building near Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia. The position, he said, had been occupied by Georgian Interior Ministry forces.

“What was the gentleman’s purpose of being among the special forces and what he is doing today, I so far cannot answer,” General Nogovitsyn said, holding up what he said was a color copy of the passport. He said members of the Georgian unit had been killed, and the building destroyed.

When the war broke out, the United States had about 130 military trainers in Georgia preparing Georgian troops for service in Iraq. The American Embassy in Tbilisi said these trainers were not involved in the fighting; about 100 remain and are assisting with the delivery of aid to Georgia that is arriving on military planes and ships.

General Nogovitsyn said the passport was in the name of Michael Lee White of Texas, but gave no information on whether Russians believed that he was a member of the United States military. The United States Embassy in Georgia told The Associated Press that it had no information on the matter.

Mr. Putin said in the CNN interview that Russia had thought that the United States would prevent Georgia from attacking South Ossetia, but suggested that he now believed that the Bush administration encouraged Mr. Saakashvili to send in his military.

“The American side in fact armed and trained the Georgian Army,” Mr. Putin said. “Why hold years of difficult talks and seek complex compromise solutions in interethnic conflicts? It’s easier to arm one of the sides and push it into the murder of the other side, and it’s over. It seemed like an easy solution. The thing is, it turns out that it’s not always so.”

The Georgia conflict has become a flash point in the United States presidential campaign, with Senator McCain assailing what he refers to as “revanchist Russia” and asserting that he is far more qualified to handle such a crisis than the Democratic candidate, Senator Barack Obama.

Mr. McCain has long been friendly with Mr. Saakashvili, who has said he talks to Mr. McCain regularly. Mr. McCain’s top foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, has worked as a lobbyist on behalf of the Georgian government, and Mr. McCain’s wife, Cindy, traveled to the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, this week on a humanitarian aid mission.

All these ties, combined with Mr. McCain’s criticism of Russia, have earned him a kind of notoriety in Moscow. When Parliament passed a resolution this week urging that Russia recognize the independence of the two breakaway enclaves, some lawmakers not only praised the courage of the South Ossetians, but also threw a few barbs at Mr. McCain.

U.S. Economy: Consumer Spending Slows, Inflation Accelerates

2008-08-29T11:28:00.000-05:00

By Shobhana Chandra

Aug. 29 (Bloomberg) -- Spending by U.S. consumers slowed in July as the impact of the tax rebates faded and a pickup in inflation eroded Americans' buying power.

Purchases rose 0.2 percent, one-third the pace in June, the Commerce Department said today in Washington, while prices surged the most in 17 years. The Reuters/University of Michigan final index of consumer sentiment was at 63 this month, from 61.2 in July.

The figures on spending, which accounts for more than two- thirds of the economy, underscore projections for growth to slow from the 3.3 percent pace last quarter that the government reported yesterday. With unemployment rising and home values dropping, Americans are cutting back on big-ticket items like automobiles and furniture, today's report showed. Stocks fell.

``We are looking for a clear slowdown in the economy,'' said Nigel Gault, chief U.S. economist at Global Insight Inc. in Lexington, Massachusetts, who accurately forecast the gain in spending. ``Inflation has been eating into spending power.''

The Standard & Poor's 500 Stock Index dropped 1 percent to 1,287.57 at 11:00 a.m. in New York. Treasuries also slipped, with yields on benchmark 10-year notes at 3.80 percent, compared with yesterday's close of 3.78 percent.

A separate private report indicated business activity advanced in August as commodity prices retreated from record levels. The National Association of Purchasing Management-Chicago said its business index increased to 57.9 from 50.8. Fifty is the dividing line between expansion and contraction.

Economists' Forecasts

The increase in spending matched the median forecast of 75 economists in a Bloomberg News survey.

Incomes dropped 0.7 percent, the first decrease since August 2005, reflecting the end of the rebates, after a 0.1 percent gain the prior month. The median projection was a decline of 0.2 percent.

As domestic demand wanes, the U.S. may also be hit by a slowdown in economies abroad that would erode export gains. Europeans' confidence fell more than forecast this month as the economy teetered on the brink of a recession, a report showed today. The European Commission's index of executive and consumer sentiment dropped to 88.8 from 89.5 in July.

The Commerce Department report's price gauge tied to spending patterns jumped 4.5 percent from July 2007, the biggest 12-month gain since 1991.

Fed Forecast

The Federal Reserve's preferred gauge of prices, which excludes food and fuel, climbed 0.3 percent for a second month. The so-called core price measure was up 2.4 percent from a year before, the most since February 2007. That compares with the 1.8 percent to 2 percent median forecast of Fed officials for 2010, which is an indication of their target for the measure.

Adjusted for inflation, spending plunged 0.4 percent, the biggest drop in four years. Price-adjusted purchases of durable goods, such as autos, furniture, and other long-lasting items, dropped 1.6 percent. Spending on non-durable goods decreased 0.9 percent, and services, which account for almost 60 percent of all outlays, were unchanged.

Concern over both slower growth and rising prices led Fed policy makers to hold the benchmark interest rate at 2 percent this month.

Rising unemployment, falling stock and house prices and stricter lending rules ``were viewed as pointing towards weak growth in personal consumption expenditures during the second half of 2008,'' minutes of the Fed's Aug. 5 meeting released this week showed.

Savings Rate

The drop in incomes pushed the savings rate down to 1.2 percent from 2.5 percent the prior month.

Disposable income, or the money left over after taxes, decreased 1.1 percent. Adjusted for inflation, it fell 1.7 percent after declining 2.6 percent in June.

Other reports indicate purchases of big-ticket items are weakening. Sales of autos and light trucks plunged in July to a 12.5 million annual pace, the lowest since 1993, according to Bloomberg calculations based on industry data.

The real-estate slump in also hurting purchases of household goods. Williams-Sonoma Inc., the biggest U.S. gourmet-cookware chain, said yesterday that second-quarter earnings dropped 29 percent and reduced its annual sales forecast.

Weakening trends continued through August and are worst in cities most affected by the housing slump, Chief Executive Officer Howard Lester said on a conference call. At Pottery Barn and West Elm, for example, purchases have suffered in Southern California, Nevada and south Florida, he said.

``It is extremely difficult to know how the consumer will respond in the back half of the year,'' Lester said in a statement. ``We are also looking forward to 2009 with a very cautious outlook.''

The longest expansion in consumer spending on record will probably end this year, according to economists surveyed by Bloomberg earlier this month. Retail sales fell in July for the first time in five months, led by a slump in auto purchases, according to Commerce data.

Medvedev: We're not afraid of Cold War

2008-08-27T17:16:00.000-05:00

Youtube
With the Russian parliament backing the independence of the breakaway republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, President Dmitry Medvedev gives his views on the issue in an exclusive interview with RT.

Full text of this interview is here: http://www.russiatoday.com/news/news/...

U.S., Russian Ships Square Off in Black Sea

2008-08-27T17:07:00.001-05:00

Ian Traynor
The Guardian
August 27, 2008

US and Russian warships took up positions in the Black Sea today in a risky war of nerves on opposing sides of the Georgia conflict.

With the Russians effectively controlling Georgia's main naval base of Poti, Moscow also dispatched the Moskva missile cruiser and two smaller craft on "peacekeeping" duties at the port of Sukhumi on the coast of Abkhazia, the breakaway region that the Kremlin recognised as independent yesterday.

The Americans, wary of escalating an already fraught situation, cancelled the scheduled docking in Poti of the US Coast Guard vessel, the Dallas, and instead sent it to the southern Georgian-controlled port of Batumi, 200km (124 miles) from the Russian ships, where it delivered humanitarian aid.

"Let's hope we don't see any direct confrontation," said Dmitri Peskov, the spokesman for the Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin, as the Russians challenged the US policy of using military aircraft and ships to deliver relief supplies.

"The decision to deliver aid using Nato battleships is something that hardly can be explained," said Peskov. "It's not a common practice."

He said Russian naval forces were taking "some measures of precaution" around the Black Sea as the worsening dispute caused by Russia's recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia independence brought strong criticism from the key European countries most reluctant to sever relations with Russia.

The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, spoke to President Dmitri Medvedev today, the first western leader to talk to the Kremlin since Medvedev announced the recognition of the two secessionist regions of Georgia. She made it plain she had voiced her strong disapproval to the Russian leader.

"I made clear above all that I would have expected that we would talk about these questions in [international] organisations before unilateral recognition happened," she said. "There are several UN Security Council resolutions in which the territorial integrity of Georgia was stressed, which Russia also worked on."

The French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, said Russia had broken international law and, along with other senior European officials, worried that Russia's decision to redraw Georgia's borders would encourage Moscow to act similarly with other former parts of the Soviet Union such as Ukraine.

"We cannot accept these violations of international law ... of a territory by the army of a neighboring country," he said.

Germany and France, who opposed the US and Britain in April in blocking Georgian negotiations to join Nato, have been the most reluctant to punish Russia for the Georgian conflict of the past three weeks and are desperate to try to revive the Russia-Georgia peace plan mediated by the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, a fortnight ago.

Paris and Berlin agree the unilateral recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia by Russia left the peace plan ineffectual. A summit of EU leaders in Brussels on Monday is to ponder Europe's options.

With mounting warnings of western economic or trade sanctions against Russia, an EU official admitted that threats to block Russian membership of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) were meaningless. The push for Russian admission being driven not by Moscow but by western business interests keen to tap the large Russian market, he said.

Peskov warned that trade sanctions against Moscow would hurt the west as much as Russia.

He admitted that South Ossetia, a mountainous region of 70,000 people, would struggle to establish itself as an independent state, but stressed that Russia's constitution made it possible for Russia to expand.

"My country will extend the arm of cooperation and friendship to ease the transition period [for South Ossetia]," he said.

EU officials complained that Moscow was seeking to control the distribution of international relief. EU aid officials were demanding entry to the Russian controlled regions, but were being barred unless they handed over the aid to the Russian authorities for distribution.

FDIC may borrow money from Treasury: report

2008-08-27T17:05:00.000-05:00

(Reuters) - Federal Deposit Insurance Corp (FDIC) might have to borrow money from the Treasury Department to see it through an expected wave of bank failures, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The borrowing could be needed to cover short-term cash-flow pressures caused by reimbursing depositors immediately after the failure of a bank, the paper said.

The borrowed money would be repaid once the assets of that failed bank are sold.

"I would not rule out the possibility that at some point we may need to tap into (short-term) lines of credit with the Treasury for working capital, not to cover our losses," Chairman Sheila Bair said in an interview with the paper.

Bair said such a scenario was unlikely in the "near term." With a rise in the number of troubled banks, the FDIC's Deposit Insurance Fund used to repay insured deposits at failed banks has been drained.

In a bid to replenish the $45.2 billion fund, Bair had said on Tuesday that the FDIC will consider a plan in October to raise the premium rates banks pay into the fund, a move that will further squeeze the industry.

The agency also plans to charge banks that engage in risky lending practices significantly higher premiums than other U.S. banks, Bair said.

The last time the FDIC had borrowed funds from the Treasury was at nearly the tail end of the savings-and-loan crisis in the early 1990s after thousands of banks were shuttered.

The fact that the agency is considering the option again, after the collapse of just nine banks this year, illustrates the concern among Washington regulators about the weakness of the U.S. banking system in the wake of the credit crisis, the Journal said.

(Reporting by Sweta Singh in Bangalore; Editing by Erica Billingham)

'NATO whitewash and rearm criminal regime of Georgia'

2008-08-19T10:45:00.001-05:00

YOUTUBE _ RUSSIA TODAY
Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has commented on the result of Tuesday's NATO Foreign Ministers meeting in Brussels.

Russian General Says Georgia May Commit False Flag Terror Attacks

2008-08-19T10:44:00.000-05:00

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Monday, August 18, 2008

Deputy Chief of the Russian General Staff Anatoly Nogovitsyn warns that Georgia may be planning to commit false flag terror attacks by using mercenaries dressed in Russian uniforms, as Russia moved to guard sensitive infrastructure against terrorist attacks.

In a news briefing on Monday, he said: “I cannot rule out that they might use mercenaries with Slavic appearance for a provocation, clad in the uniform of Russian servicemen, in order to commit subversive acts both on Ossetian and Russian territory.”

In response to the threat, Russia has stationed troops around the Inguri Hydroelectric Plant, viewed as a potential target.

Nogovitsyn’s warning that Georgia may resort to subversion in order to enhance its well-groomed image of being the victim of a war that it started with the horrific bombardment of civilian targets in South Ossetia on August 8th, arrives amidst more examples of pro-Georgian western media bias.

Following in the footsteps of the BBC, Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News used footage of the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali in ruins after the Georgian assault and claimed it was the Georgian town of Gori after it was attacked by the Russians.

In reality, 70% of Tskhinvali was destroyed, whereas Gori suffered relatively little damage according to a United Nations aid convoy.

“Russia ’s TV channel Zvezda, which has five camera crews working in Tskhinvali, aired the same footage two days before, on Monday,” reports Pravda. “Sky News showed its report with no sound, whereas the people showed in the Russian report could be heard speaking Russian and Ossetian languages. The crying people shown in the report were heard cursing Georgian President Saakashvili for destructions and manslaughter.”

After the controversy came to light yesterday, the Sky News clip was quickly pulled from You Tube.

In addition, CNN last week showed Georgian forces attacking Russian civilians in Tskhinvali, the provincial capital of South Ossetia, but then claimed it showed Russians attacking Georgians in the Georgian town of Gori.

A 12-year-old American girl who was caught up in the brutal assault by Georgia on South Ossetia attempted to tell the truth about who the real aggressors were during a live Fox News interview, but she was quickly silenced by the host.

Western media coverage of the conflict has reflected a virulently pro-Georgia bias since the very start, once again proving that the press is not independent, but simply a mouthpiece for the same Anglo-American power structure for whom Georgia is merely another client state.

Georgia is a U.S. Project - Russian FM

2008-08-15T14:23:00.000-05:00

Russia Today
Friday, Aug 15, 2008

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has criticised Georgia’s relationship with the U.S. in the aftermath of the trouble in South Ossetia. In a news conference he addressed a wide range of issues surrounding the future of the Caucasus region including Abkhazia, the role of the U.S. and media coverage of the conflict.

“The repercussions of blood spilled in the Caucasus will last for centuries, not decades. We can now start counting centuries from August 8, 2008,” he said.

“It’s an open secret – Western analysts have been writing about it, that the current Georgian leadership is a special project of the United States. And of course it must be hurtful to see a protégé making such a sleazy performance.”

Saakashvili Defends the “New World Order” On Glenn Beck

2008-08-15T10:08:00.000-05:00

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars
August 12, 2008

At one minute, five seconds into the clip here from Glenn Beck’s neocon propaganda hour, we hear the sock puppet Saakashvili make reference to the New World Order. According to Saakashvili, he is not concerned so much for his own personal safety, he is more worried about the “region,” in other words the little globalist and NATO fiefdoms carved out of the corpse of the former Soviet Union, only the latest additions to the New World Order.

Saakashvili actually uses this phrase, same as George Bush Senior, Bill Clinton, Gary Hart, and other minions of the globalist elite. Of course, Saakashvili is no Bush or Clinton, in fact he is little more than a rag doll that will be thrown on the growing pyre after he outlives his usefulness. He is but another disposable Mafia don and one low on the criminal syndicate’s totem pole. One day he is on Glenn Back telling brazen lies, the next he may share the fate Ngo Dinh Diem, assassinated in the back of an APC because he was no longer of any use to the United States in Vietnam. Misha the useful tool will undoubtedly become a footnote in short order. In the meantime, he takes his marching orders from the neocons and their musical chair fellows, the neolibs.

As Paul Craig Roberts notes, Saakashvili is a product of NED and the neocons. “Back in the Reagan years the National Endowment for Democracy was created as a cold war tool. Today the NED is a neocon-controlled agent for US world hegemony. Its main function is to pour US money and election-rigging into former constituent parts of the Soviet Union in order to ring Russia with American puppet states,” writes Roberts, who should know as a former member of the Reagan administration. “The neoconservative Bush Regime used the NED to intervene in Ukrainian and Georgian internal affairs in keeping with the neoconservative plan to establish US-friendly and Russia-hostile political regimes in these two former constituent parts of Russia and the Soviet Union.”

Roberts tells us the neocons are criminally insane and along with “the Israeli-occupied American media” are pushing “the innocent world toward nuclear war.” Glenn Beck, always an eager little servant, helps this lunatic effort by providing Saakashvili with a corporate media platform to spew his nonsense and lies. Beck, of course, simply does what he is told.

Saakashvili’s usage of the term “New World Order” provides us with more evidence of who is actually calling the shots in Georgia — not the Georgians, but the ruling elite. Saakashvili owes his ascendancy to NED and USAID and the “entire panoply of ‘democracy promoting’ devices” plied by the globalists as an alternate way to overthrow governments.

“During the late 1970s there was new thinking at the highest levels of the U.S. foreign policymakers, and they reconsidered whether these ugly murderous military dictatorships of the 1970s were really the best way to preserve U.S. interests in these countries,” writes former CIA officer Philip Agee. “This new thinking led to the establishment in 1983 of the National Endowment for Democracy. They had chosen the German pattern in which the major political parties in Germany have foundations financed by the federal government. They did more or less the same thing with the establishment of the NED as a private foundation – there is really nothing private about it, and all its money comes from the Congress.”

“A lot of what we [NED] do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA,” boasts Allen Weinstein, a UNESCO globalist. Mr. Weinstein should know, as he was chosen to serve as acting president of NED in 1983 when it was taking over CIA duties of subversion and subterfuge.

It make sense that Capo Bastone Saakashvili, the throughly disposable underling to the international banking crime syndicate, would appear on Beck. After all, the Operation Mockingbird corporate media is a wholly owned subsidiary of the CIA, an effort launched out of the psychological warfare labs of the Office of Policy Coordination and the Office of Special Operations with gobs of money diverted from the Marshall Plan back in the day. Beck is simply the latest manifestation of this ongoing disinformation and propaganda campaign, never mind the complete if not absurd transparency of the effort to portray the grubby little Saakashvili as a democrat.

US hampering Russian peace efforts – Putin

2008-08-11T21:46:00.000-05:00

August 11, 2008, 15:11
RussiaToday

The Prime Minister has accused Washington of undermining Russia’s attempts to restore peace in the South Ossetian conflict zone. Vladimir Putin said a decision by the US military to fly 800 Georgian soldiers from Iraq to Georgia showed America was ‘trying to get in the way’. In a stinging attack on the US, Putin told government ministers: "It's a pity that some of our partners, instead of helping, are trying to get in the way”.

He said the US was using “its military transport aircraft to relocate Georgia's military contingent from Iraq virtually into the conflict zone”.

He also voiced his frustration at the inability of Russia's western partners to adequately assess the situation in South Ossetia.

“I’m amazed by their skills at seeing black as white, of portraying aggressors as victims and of blamimg the real victims for the consequences of the conflict.

Putin also accused the West of double standards when it comes to judging war crimes.

“As we all know, Saddam Hussein was hanged for burning down several Shiite villages. But now suddenly the situation is different. The Georgian leaders who in a matter of hours wiped out ten Ossetian villages, who ran over children and the elderly with tanks, who burned civilians alive, those people have to be protected,” he said.

Meanwhile, American Joe Mestas, who witnessed days of shelling, has said U.S. and Georgian leaders are responsible for the violence that has killed 2,000 people in the region. He told RT that Washington will have to answer for the violence.

“I thought that since U.S. is supporting Georgia there would be some control over the situation in South Ossetia and that there would be a peaceful solution to the conflict. But what is happening there now it’s not just war, but war crimes. George Bush and [Georgian president] Mikhail Saakashvili should answer to the crimes that are being committed – the killing of innocent people, running over by tanks of children and women, throwing grenades into cellars where people are hiding,” Mestas said.

“The war is when military fight against military. But the Georgian army is killing innocent civilians. This is genocide,” he added.

Nancy Pelosi talks about the New World Order Plan

2008-08-08T07:26:00.000-05:00

You Tube | August 7, 2008

This was on Pelosi’s book tour stop in Coral Gables, Florida on August 8th, 2008. Pelosi speaks about the New World Order and explains how it’s written on the One dollar bill.

WeAreChangeFL.org
FederalJack.com

Vision 2015: a Globally Networked and Integrated Intelligence Enterprise

2008-08-07T12:14:00.000-05:00

Published July 2008

The Director of National Intelligence produced this report; it states, "the purpose of this Vision document is to chart a new path forward for a globally networked and integrated Intelligence Enterprise for the 21st century based on the principles of integration, collaboration, and innovation."

Essential Documents are vital primary sources underpinning the foreign policy debate.

Report

Vision 2015: a Globally Networked and Integrated Intelligence Enterprise

Sy Hersh at Campus Progress journalism conference

2008-08-04T14:47:00.001-05:00

Sy Hersh and Faiz Shakir. First reported here:
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/07/31/c...

Proposed False Flag event for an excuse to attack Iran.

Vaccine: Secret Shots given to soldiers, covered by Military

2008-08-04T13:59:00.000-05:00

Vaccines - Secret Shots given to soldiers & covered up by Military
Youtube

IMF predicts no end in sight to credit crisis

2008-07-30T08:03:00.001-05:00

Radio Australia
July 29, 2008

The International Monetary Fund says there’s no end in sight to the credit crisis gripping world financial markets.

As Australia’s NAB and ANZ have already discovered, the IMF believes banks are in for more pain as mortgage defaults soar and economies slow. The IMF has a particularly gloomy assessment of the US economy, and it came on the same day as the Bush administration revealed America’s budget deficit will climb to a record high of more than half-a-TRILLION dollars.

Trade failure clouds climate talks and beyond

2008-07-30T07:58:00.000-05:00

GENEVA, July 30 (Reuters) - The collapse of world trade talks deals such a blow to international negotiations that the prospect of agreeing effective solutions to global warming or the spread of nuclear weapons seems more remote than ever.

"If we cannot even manage trade, how should we then find ourselves in a position to manage new challenges like climate change?" said European agriculture chief Mariann Fischer Boel after talks at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in Geneva fell apart on Tuesday. "It is a failure with wider consequences than we have ever seen before."

Countries aim to agree a successor by the end of next year to the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, a 1997 treaty which commits developed countries to limit greenhouse gas emissions and which expires in 2012.

Like trade pacts, climate agreements have to be reached by consensus -- something that has proven impossible among the 153 WTO members.

The Geneva failure augurs badly for United Nations climate negotiations in Copenhagen in late 2009, and for faltering global efforts to halt nuclear proliferation, highlighted by the dispute over Iran's atomic programme, analysts said.

"It will greatly undermine trust in multilateral goodwill," said Mark Halle of the International Institute for Sustainable Development. "Nobody thinks we can get a climate deal without overcoming the deep mistrust in the developing world."

The fact that the WTO's "Doha development round", touted as a way to help poorer countries get more from world trade, foundered on a dispute between the United States and and big emerging economies has hit hopes for a post-Kyoto deal.

"It will be extremely difficult (for developing countries) to rebuild their confidence in the multilateral system about the desire of the rich to do anything," Halle said.

BALANCE OF POWER

The rise of the big developing economies, Brazil, China and India, since the Doha round began in 2001, will also change the dynamic in climate talks, said Bruce Stokes, a fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

"Certainly India in particular will be a key player in Copenhagen," he said.

"China's last minute objections to a Doha deal underscore their leverage, that will of course be even greater," he added.

Under Kyoto, only developed countries have greenhouse gas limits, but at Copenhagen, developing nations with the fastest growing output of carbon dioxide blamed for global warming are under pressure to brake their own emissions.

India in particular is resisting any negotiated binding curb, and its firm line in Geneva -- where a dispute with the United States on protecting its farmers felled the trade talks -- suggests it may show little flexibility on climate change.

Persuading developing countries to accept emissions curbs is seen as vital to bringing Washington, which turned its back on Kyoto under President George W. Bush, back into a rules-based global climate pact.

Coincidentally, India is one of the emerging world's nuclear powers, which built an atomic arsenal in defiance of U.S.-led efforts to halt the spread of weapons of mass destruction.

For some policymakers, failure in Geneva was a symptom of a major change in the global order, which is likely to be just as evident in climate talks.

"The collapse of the WTO talks is another sign of the decline of Western power," said a European Union official involved in policy planning. "It's no longer enough for the United States and the Europeans to agree on the objective in order to achieve the desired outcome."

The reluctance of emerging countries to accept curbs on greenhouse gases is another sign of the changing world order, which the EU official put down in part to opposition to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and a perception that Washington remains bogged down and unable to prevail in either Iraq or Afghanistan.

He pointed to this month's veto by Russia and China of a U.N. resolution to impose sanctions on Zimbabwe, and to persistent difficulty in persuading them to back tougher measures against Iran and Sudan, as signs of this power shift.

For the EU's trade negotiator, haggard and bitterly disappointed after nine days of ultimately fruitless talks, the failure in Geneva was a blow for those who hope the world can find consensus to solve global problems that affect everyone.

"We have missed a chance to seal the first global pact of a reshaped world order," said Peter Mandelson. "We would all have been winners from a Doha deal. Without one we all lose." (Additional reporting by Paul Taylor in Brussels) (Editing by Paul Taylor and Catherine Evans)

CIA accuses Pakistan of 'backing militants'

2008-07-30T07:57:00.000-05:00

WASHINGTON (AFP) — A senior CIA official this month confronted Pakistani officials over ties between the country's intelligence service and militants in the tribal areas, The New York Times reported Wednesday.

Citing defense and intelligence sources, the Times said that the trip by agency deputy director Stephen Kappes demonstrated a harder line being taken against Pakistani ties to those responsible for the surge of violence in Afghanistan, including militant Maulavi Jalauddin Haqqani.

Earlier this year, the US military pressed for Pakistani troops to hit the Haqqani network in the tribal areas.

"It was a very pointed message saying, 'Look, we know there's a connection, not just with Haqqani but also with the other bad guys and ISI, and we think you could do more and we want you to do more about it," a senior US officials told the Times, referring to Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence agency.

The daily said the meeting could be a sign that the relationship between the Central Intelligence Agency and Pakistan's ISI "may be deteriorating".

A US official said there was no evidence of official Pakistani support of Al-Qaeda, but there was "genuine and longstanding concerns about Pakistan's ties to the Haqqani network, which of course has ties to Al-Qaeda."

The report comes after premier Yousuf Raza Gilani met with US President George W. Bush in Washington and urged him not to act "unilaterally" against militants in Pakistan's lawless tribal zones.

Gilani insisted Monday that Pakistan was committed to fighting extremists.

Pakistan's fledgling government caused concern in Washington by launching talks with militants soon after beating allies of US-backed President Pervez Musharraf in elections in February.

Militants kidnapped 30 troops and police in northwestern Pakistan's Swat Valley on Tuesday, a day after killing three intelligence officials, threatening a shaky truce in the region.

Press TV Ron Paul Revolution March Coverage

2008-07-16T11:21:00.003-05:00

http://217.218.67.244/presstv/20080713/OUTPUT_05-31-00-SNG-JIHAN-WASHINGTON.wmv

Is White House Blocking Search for Bin Laden?

2008-06-30T13:02:00.001-05:00

Pentagon Would Use Special Forces to Nab Bin Laden in Pakistan, New York Times Says

By MARTHA RADDATZ
June 30, 2008 ABC News

The Pentagon has drafted a secret plan that would send U.S. special forces into the wild tribal regions of Pakistan to capture or kill Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants, but the White House has balked at giving the mission a green light, The New York Times reported today.

New leaked reports have exposed U.S. covert operations in the Middle East.

The Bush administration, which has seven months left in its term, gave the go-ahead for the military to draw up the plan to take the war on terror across the Afghan border and into the mountains of Pakistan where bin Laden is believed to be hiding, according to the newspaper.

Intelligence reports have concluded that bin Laden has re-established a network of new training camps, and the number of recruits in those camps has risen to as many as 2,000 in recent months from 200 earlier this year.

Although the special forces attack plan was devised six months ago, infighting among U.S. intelligence agencies and among White House offices have blocked it from being implemented, the Times reported.

The Bush team would like to leave office next January having put bin Laden, the man behind the Sept. 11 attacks, behind bars or in his grave.

But sending U.S. forces into Pakistan would be controversial and risky. The rugged mountain area is populated by bin Laden sympathizers, hurting the chances that such a raid could succeed. It would also trigger a diplomatic outcry from the Pakistani government.

The United States has conducted a series of aerial drone attacks on Taliban and al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan, killing several key Qaeda figures and narrowly missing bin Laden's deputy, Ayman Zawahiri, in one strike. But an attack earlier this month killed several Pakistani border guards instead and has made Pakistan less willing to allow U.S. strikes on its territory.

The Taliban of Pakistan, who are close al Qaeda allies, have grown alarmingly stronger in Pakistan's lawless border areas and threatened the regional capital of Peshawar last week.

Pakistan's new coalition government, which has made a series of truces with the militants in recent months, was forced over the weekend to launch an offensive to push the militants back from the outskirts of Peshawar.

Pakistan called the operation a success, even though none of the heavily armed militants in the area were reported killed.

Pakistan announced Sunday that Bush had invited Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani to Washington next month. High on that visit's agenda is the question of whether Pakistan can restrain the Taliban by itself or whether the United States could decide to take action in the tribal areas.

A separate report said the Bush administration has also begun a "major escalation of covert operations against Iran ... to destabilize the country's religious leadership."

The charge was made by veteran journalist Seymour Hersh in the current issue of The New Yorker magazine.

World needs tough monetary policy to tackle inflation

2008-06-30T06:41:00.001-05:00

By David Milliken Reuters

BASEL (Reuters) - The world needs higher interest rates to tackle a clear inflation threat, even though economic growth is likely to be hit harder than most observers expect, the Bank for International Settlements said on Monday.

The Swiss-based BIS -- a meeting place and think tank for the world's central banks -- gave a gloomy outlook for both inflation and growth in its annual report, published after a three-day meeting of central bankers from over 100 countries.

BIS General Manager Malcolm Knight said central banks faced their greatest challenge in years, with growth slowing even as inflation pressures intensified.

"Clearly, the downside risks for future growth complicate the task of monetary policy," he said in a speech to the BIS annual meeting. "But there must in the end be a forceful response to confront the danger that inflation expectations could rise appreciably, with all the attendant problems that would bring."

The tone of the annual report was darker than last year after what the BIS described as the worst financial market turmoil since World War Two, and the bank saw a "significant risk" of recession in the United States, the world's biggest economy.

But this did not mean central banks should abandon their focus on fighting inflation, even if the BIS was concerned to point out that there was no single solution for all banks.

"With inflation a clear and present threat, and with real policy rates in most countries low by historical standards, a global bias towards monetary tightening would seem appropriate. That said, the circumstances of different countries, both actual and prospective, currently rule out a 'one-size-fits-all' approach," the BIS said.

"Moreover, should the global economy slow sharply and inflationary pressures recede, the bias to tightening would evidently also be reduced," it added.

The BIS said the financial market turmoil which spread from the U.S. subprime mortgage market in the middle of last year was the consequence of a classic unsustainable credit boom, and that disruption to the banking system limited the potential of interest rate cuts to boost demand.

Tax cuts and more government spending might have some merit, but the countries whose government finances were solid enough to afford that tended to be those less affected by the turmoil, the BIS added.

"In the aftermath of a long credit-driven boom, it would not be surprising to see turmoil in financial markets, slowing real growth and temporarily rising inflation," it said.

"Their interaction does appear to point to a deeper and more protracted global downturn than the consensus view seems to expect. At the same time, inflationary forces, particularly in emerging market economies, could also prove unexpectedly strong and persistent."

Knight, who leaves the BIS in September, said forecasts that current high inflation in industrialized countries was a temporary blip could not be fully trusted because of a significant rise in consumers' inflation expectations and past failures in accurately predicting rising commodity prices.

"It would seem imprudent from an inflationary perspective to rely heavily at this stage on such an outcome," he said.

U.S., EURO ZONE, JAPAN

The BIS was most pessimistic about the U.S. economy, saying that as well as the housing downturn there was a danger that consumption would take a further hit from people trying to rebuild savings depleted by past over-borrowing.

A bright spot for the United States was exports, helped by a weak dollar and the fact that other economies seemed to be less affected by its slowdown than in previous downturns -- though Britain appeared to be suffering a similar property-led malaise.

Strong business investment and falling unemployment meant prospects for domestic demand were good in the euro zone, especially Germany, though France, Spain and Ireland would have to cope with the end of house price booms.

Prospects were not so good in Japan, where weak wage growth and narrow profit margins in small firms meant demand from consumers and many businesses was vulnerable to rising prices.

Then there was the general fallout from the credit squeeze and rising oil and commodity prices, the BIS added.

"Fears are building that the global economy might be at some kind of tipping point. These fears are not groundless," the BIS said.

CENTRAL BANK REACTION

Analyzing how central banks had reacted to the crisis, the BIS said that most -- including the European Central Bank, Bank of Japan and Bank of England -- appeared to have set rates on the same criteria as before the crisis.

But the U.S. Fed had cut rates more rapidly, and the Reserve Bank of Australia raised rates faster than past behavior would have suggested.

"For these central banks, it appears that something not present in the equations, perhaps a shift in the economic outlook not present or reflected in the contemporaneous output gaps and rates of inflation, must have influenced policy in a decisive way," the BIS said.

The BIS repeated its call that central banks and regulators should do more to curtail future credit booms.

"It would have been better to avoid the build-up of credit excesses in the first place. In future, this could be done through the establishment of a new macrofinancial stability framework which would call for both monetary and macroprudential policies to 'lean against the wind' of the credit cycle."

* For a copy of the report and Knight's speech, go to www.bis.org

This Recession, It's Just Beginning

2008-06-27T07:38:00.001-05:00

By Steven Pearlstein

Friday, June 27, 2008; Page D01

So much for that second-half rebound.

Truth be told, that was always more of a wish than a serious forecast, happy talk from the Fed and Wall Street desperate to get things back to normal.

It ain't gonna happen. Not this summer. Not this fall. Not even next winter.

This thing's going down, fast and hard. Corporate bankruptcies, bond defaults, bank failures, hedge fund meltdowns and 6 percent unemployment. We're caught in one of those vicious, downward spirals that, once it gets going, is very hard to pull out of.

Only this will be a different kind of recession -- a recession with an overlay of inflation. That combo puts the Federal Reserve in a Catch-22 -- whatever it does to solve one problem only makes the other worse. Emerging from a two-day meeting this week, Fed officials signaled that further recession-fighting rate cuts are unlikely and that their next move will be to raise rates to contain inflationary expectations.

Since last June, we've seen a fairly consistent pattern to the economic mood swings. Every three months or so, there's a round of bad news about housing, followed by warnings of more bank write-offs and then a string of disappointing corporate earnings reports. Eventually, things stabilize and there are hints that the worst may be behind us. Stocks regain some of their lost ground, bonds fall and then -- bam -- the whole cycle starts again.

It was only in November that the Dow had recovered from the panicked summer sell-off and hit a record, just above 14,000. By March, it had fallen below 12,000. By May, it climbed above 13,000. Now it's heading for a new floor at 11,000. Officially, that's bear market territory. We'll be lucky if that's the floor.

In explaining why that second-half rebound never occurred, the Fed and the Treasury and the Wall Street machers will say that nobody could have foreseen $140 a barrel oil. As excuses go, blaming it on an oil shock is a hardy perennial. That's what Jimmy Carter and Fed Chairman Arthur Burns did in the late '70s, and what George H.W. Bush and Alan Greenspan did in the early '90s. Don't believe it.

Truth is, there are always price or supply shocks of one sort or another. The real problem is that the underlying fundamentals had gotten badly out of whack, making the economy susceptible to a shock. The only way to make things better is to get those fundamentals back in balance. In this case, that means bringing what we consume in line with what we produce, letting the dollar fall to its natural level, wringing the excess capacity out of industries that overexpanded during the credit bubble and allowing real estate prices to fall in line with incomes.

The last hope for a second-half rebound began to fade earlier this month when Lehman Brothers reported that it wasn't as immune to the credit-market downturn as it had led everyone to believe. Lehman scrambled to restore confidence by firing two top executives and raising billions in additional capital, but even that wasn't enough to quiet speculation that it could be the next Bear Stearns.

Since then, there has been a steady drumbeat of worrisome news from nearly every sector of the economy.

American Express and Discover warn that customers are falling further behind on their debts. UPS and Federal Express report a noticeable slowdown in shipments, while fuel costs are soaring. According to the Case-Shiller index, home prices in the top 20 markets fell 15 percent in April from the year before, and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac report that mortgage delinquency rates doubled over the same period -- and that's for conventional home loans, not subprime. United Airlines accelerates the race to cut costs and capacity by laying off 950 pilots -- 15 percent of its total -- as a number of airlines retire planes and hint that they may delay delivery or cancel orders of new jets from Boeing and Airbus. Goldman Sachs, which has already had to withdraw its rosy forecast for stocks, now admits it was also too optimistic about junk bond defaults, and analysts warn that Citigroup and Merrill Lynch will also be forced to take additional big write-downs on their mortgage portfolios.

Meanwhile, General Motors, already reeling from a 28 percent plunge in the pace of auto and truck sales, now confronts the fact that it won't get any help this time from GMAC, its once highly profitable finance arm, which is reeling from an increase in delinquencies on home and auto loans. With the carmaker hemorrhaging cash, whispers of a possible default sent the price of insuring GM bonds soaring on the credit default market.

You know things are bad when middle-class Americans have to give up their boats and Brunswick, the nation's biggest maker of powerboats, is forced to close 10 plants and lay off 2,700 workers.

For much of the year, optimists took comfort in the continuing strength of the technology sector and exports to fast-growing countries around the world. But even those bright spots have dimmed.

Tech stocks got hammered yesterday after software maker Oracle and BlackBerry maker Research in Motion warned that the pace of corporate orders had slowed.

And both India and China raised interest rates and bank reserves sharply in an effort to tame inflation and slow their overheated economies, even as the air continued to rush out of their real estate and stock market bubbles.

Like the rain-swollen waters of the Mississippi River, this sudden surge of downbeat news has now overflowed the banks of economic policy and broken through the levees of consumer and investor confidence. At this point, there's not much to do but flee to safety, rescue those in trouble and let nature take its course. And don't let anyone fool you: It will be a while before things return to normal.

Malkin’s Conspiracy Theories Proven Wrong

2008-06-13T07:32:00.003-05:00

Lee Rogers
Rogue Government
June 12, 2008
The terror war is a complete fraud and we are not over in Iraq fighting for freedom. It is time for propagandists like Malkin to face the facts. Ask yourself how much credibility Malkin and her followers have when they resort to baseless conspiracy theories with no factual evidence to spin the truth of what was an obviously authentic video of a U.S. Marine engaging in some incredibly disgusting behavior.

The conspiracy theorists over at Michelle Malkin’s web site Hot Air, have now been forced to admit that the conspiracy theories they endorsed surrounding the infamous puppy toss video were completely false. Several months ago, Hot Air went into damage control mode when a video showing a U.S. Marine tossing an innocent and defenseless puppy over a cliff while on patrol in Iraq surfaced on the Internet. Malkin and others immediately claimed that the video was a fake. With no conclusive evidence, they endorsed theories including ones that claimed the puppy was actually a stuffed toy and that the audio in the video was edited to recreate the puppy’s cries for help as it was tossed over the cliff. Lance Cpl. David Motari who was identified as the Marine tossing the puppy over the cliff has now been kicked out of the Marines. The puppy toss video was cited as the reason for his separation. The bottom line is that Malkin and all of her brainwashed followers will simply do anything to defend what the U.S. military does even if it flies in the face of factual information and common sense. Simply put, the U.S. military is not fighting for freedom over in Iraq when George W. Bush and the criminals in Washington DC are implementing a police state in the U.S. and shredding the Constitution. Since this is the case, there should be no reason for Malkin and others to run cover for military personnel based upon the premise that they are fighting for freedom. There is very little freedom left in this country, so its time to ask what the U.S. military is really doing in Iraq and in over 100 countries around the world.

From the AP:

The Marine Corps on Wednesday said it was expelling one Marine and disciplining another for their roles in a video showing a Marine throwing a puppy off a cliff while on patrol in Iraq.

The 17-second video posted on YouTube drew sharp condemnation from animal rights groups when it came to light in March.

The clip shows two Marines joking before one hurls the puppy into a rocky gully. A yelping sound is heard as it flips through the air.

"That’s mean. That’s mean, Motari," an off-camera Marine is heard telling the Marine who tossed the black and white dog. The off-camera Marine snickered slightly afterward.

Lance Cpl. David Motari, assigned to the 1st Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment at Kaneohe Bay, is "being processed for separation" from the Marine Corps, the Marine Corps said in a news release. He also received unspecified "non-judicial punishment."

The Marine Corps didn’t say what role Motari played in the clip.

The video was viewed tens of thousands of times before YouTube took it down due to a violation of the site’s terms of use.

"The actions seen in the Internet video are contrary to the high standards we expect of every Marine and will not be tolerated," Marine Corps Base Hawaii said in a news release. "The vast majority of Marines conduct their duties with honor and compassion that makes American people proud."

The second Marine, Sgt. Crismarvin Banez Encarnacion also received unspecified "non-judicial" punishment.

Kurt Nimmo writing for InfoWars has called on Michelle Malkin to apologize for using ridiculous conspiracy theories to defend this incredibly cruel act. Kurt sums up the absurdity of the situation below.

Michelle Malkin, the neocon going by the handle Allahpundit, and all the other neocon camp followers, will support the troops no matter what they do, no matter how many dogs, farm animals, children, mothers and fathers, grandmothers and toddlers they torture, kill, and dismember. After all, most neocons hate all things Muslim, they viscerally loathe all “pinkos” and people who exercise the First Amendment.

The terror war is a complete fraud and we are not over in Iraq fighting for freedom. It is time for propagandists like Malkin to face the facts. Ask yourself how much credibility Malkin and her followers have when they resort to baseless conspiracy theories with no factual evidence to spin the truth of what was an obviously authentic video of a U.S. Marine engaging in some incredibly disgusting behavior. This puppy toss video is just the tip of the iceberg. Look at the torture, the killing of innocent civilians, the depleted uranium scandal, countless cases of corruption and waste. With all of this in mind, it becomes impossible to justify the continued occupation of Iraq regardless of how Malkin and others try to spin it.

Israeli official says attack on Iran 'unavoidable'

2008-06-06T10:04:00.000-05:00

Olmert deputy tells newspaper sanctions not slowing Iran's nuclear work

Reuters

updated 9:44 a.m. ET June 6, 2008

JERUSALEM - An Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear sites looks “unavoidable” given the apparent failure of sanctions to deny Tehran technology with bomb-making potential, one of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s deputies said Friday.

“If Iran continues with its program for developing nuclear weapons, we will attack it. The sanctions are ineffective,” Transport Minister Shaul Mofaz told the mass-circulation Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper.

“Attacking Iran, in order to stop its nuclear plans, will be unavoidable,” said the former army chief who has also been defense minister.

It was the most explicit threat yet against Iran from a member of Olmert’s government, which, like the Bush administration, has preferred to hint at force as a last resort should U.N. Security Council sanctions be deemed a dead end.

Defiance
Iran has defied Western pressure to abandon its uranium enrichment projects, which it says are for peaceful electricity generation rather than bomb-building. The leadership in Tehran has also threatened to retaliate against Israel — believed to have the Middle East’s only atomic arsenal — and U.S. targets in the Gulf for any attack on Iran.

Mofaz also said in the interview that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has called for Israel to be wiped off the map, “would disappear before Israel does.”

A spokesman for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert did not address Mofaz’s comments directly but said that “all options must remain on the table” and said more could be done to put financial pressure on Tehran.

“Israel believes strongly that while the U.N. sanctions are positive, much more needs to be done to pressure the regime in Tehran to cease its aggressive nuclear program,” spokesman Mark Regev said.

“We believe the international community should be considering further tangible steps such as embargoing refined petroleum headed for Iran, sanctions against Iranian businessmen traveling abroad, tightening the pressure on Iranian financial institutions and other such steps,” he added.

Mofaz’s remarks came as he and several other senior members of Olmert’s Kadima Party prepare for a possible run for top office should a corruption scandal force the Israeli prime minister to step down.

Party rival
Iranian-born Mofaz has been a main party rival of the Israeli prime minister, particularly following the 2006 elections when Olmert was forced to hand the defense portfolio to Labor, his main coalition partner, at Mofaz’s expense.

Mofaz, who is also designated as a deputy prime minister, has remained privy to Israel’s defense planning. He is a member of Olmert’s security cabinet and leads regular strategic coordination talks with the U.S. State Department.

Israeli planes destroyed Iraq’s nuclear reactor in 1981.

A similar Israeli sortie over Syria last September razed what the U.S. administration said was a nascent nuclear reactor built with North Korean help. Syria denied having any such facility.

Independent analysts have questioned, however, whether Israel’s armed forces can take on Iran alone, as its nuclear sites are numerous, distant and well-fortified.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24998146/

Unemployment Makes Dramatic Leap

2008-06-06T09:42:00.000-05:00

WASHINGTON, June 6, 2008

(CBS/ AP) The nation's unemployment rate jumped to 5.5 percent in May - the biggest monthly rise since 1986 - as nervous employers cut 49,000 jobs.

The latest snapshot of business conditions showed a deeply troubled economy, with dwindling job opportunities in a time of continuing hardship in the housing, credit and financial sectors.

With employers worried about a sharp slowdown and their own prospects, they clamped down on hiring in May, said Friday's report from the Labor Department. The unemployment rate soared from 5 percent in April to 5.5 percent in May. That was the biggest one-month jump in the rate since February 1986. The increase left the jobless rate at its highest since October 2004.

The big jump in the unemployment rate surprised economists who were forecasting a tick-up to 5.1 percent. Payroll losses, however, weren't as deep as the 60,000 that analysts were bracing for. Still, job losses in both March and April turned out to be larger than the government previously reported. Employers now have cut payrolls for five straight months.

The 5.5 percent rate is relatively moderate judged by historical standards. Yet, there was no question that employers last month sharply cut jobs in manufacturing, construction, retailing and professional and businesses services. Those losses swamped gains elsewhere, including in the education and health fields, government and leisure and hospitality.

The government said the number of unemployed people grew by 861,000 in May - rising to 8.5 million. The over-the-month jump in unemployment reflected more workers losing their jobs as well as an increase in those coming into the job market to look for work, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said.

A year ago, the number of unemployed stood at 6.9 million and the jobless rate was 4.5 percent.

The startling news followed Thursday's Labor Department report that showed applications for unemployment benefits totaled 357,000 last week, some 18,000 fewer than the previous week. That pushed applications for benefits to their lowest level since mid-April.

However, the four-week average for people receiving benefits edged up to 3.086 million, the highest level since March 6, 2004, when the country was still struggling to recover from a prolonged period of rising unemployment.

A trio of crises - housing, credit and financial - have rocked the economy. That's caused economic growth to slow to a crawl as businesses and consumers have tightened their belts. Spiraling energy costs are another negative force.

The country's economic problems are a top concern for voters - and thus for President Bush, lawmakers on Capitol Hill and those vying to win the White House this fall.

So far this year, the government said, job losses have totaled 324,000.

Workers with jobs, however, saw modest gains.

Average hourly earnings for jobholders rose to $17.94 in May, up 0.3 percent from the previous month. Economists were forecasting a 0.2 percent gain. Over the last 12 months, wages have grown by 3.5 percent.

With food and energy prices marching upward, paychecks aren't stretching as far. Although tax rebates helped to energize shoppers and give major retailers better sales in May, analysts still believe that anxious consumers will be keeping a close watch on their purchases and their budgets in the months ahead.

Worried about inflation, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has signaled that the central bank's rate-cutting campaign, which commenced last September to help bolster the economy, is probably over for now.

Fed officials and the Bush administration are hoping that the Fed's powerful doses of rate reductions and the government's $168 billion stimulus package, including tax rebates for people and tax breaks for businesses, will pull the economy out of its deep funk in the second half of this year.

Even if that happens, the unemployment rate is expected to climb to 6 percent or higher early next year. Employers won't want to ramp up hiring until they feel more sure that an economic recovery has strong legs.

This prolonged stretch of job cuts has many economists believing the country has fallen into a recession.

However, the overall economy as measured by the gross domestic product has managed to remain in positive territory with the GDP growing at an annual rate of 0.9 percent in the first three months of the year.

Obama-Clinton ticket: a dream or nightmare?

2008-06-04T21:13:00.000-05:00

By CALVIN WOODWARD – 5 hours ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — Picture a cozy weekend at Camp David for President Obama, Vice President Hillary Rodham Clinton and their lively spouses.

They'd talk policy and politics in the confines of the rustic retreat. After the long campaign and all the bruised feelings, Michelle Obama could finally reach out to Bill Clinton, as she recently said she's been wanting to do.

To be exact, she said: "I want to rip his eyes out."

Then added: "Kidding."

They could bring along Obama's national security adviser, let's say Samantha Power. She's the foreign policy specialist who had to leave the Obama campaign after calling Hillary Clinton a "monster."

Now that Clinton is angling to become Obama's running mate, the question arises how two frosty rivals and their seething camps might come together without sticking flag pins into each other.

It's all pretty awkward right now.

Clinton's aides and surrogates are boldly pitching her for the No. 2 spot even as many of them, like her, refuse to acknowledge she's failed in her quest for No. 1. Instead, she said she's open to being Obama's running mate.

For months, she's cast her rival as wet behind the ears and herself as the one to be trusted to deal with crises in the middle of the night.

In an Obama-Clinton White House, he'd take the 3 a.m. call. She might or might not be awakened.

For his part, Obama has painted Clinton as a figure of another time and himself as a clean break from all that's past and passe about Washington. He'd be eager to bring in his own team, to bring "change," the coin of his realm.

Then there's Bill, a man of deep experience, in-your-face opinions and more baggage than a boxcar.

Even so, some Democratic strategists are salivating at the prospect of Obama and Hillary Clinton joining forces.

They are fixated on her electoral strengths and not at all on Oval Office atmospherics or what might be done about her husband.

Obama's side is trying to tamp down the veep speculation that threatens to overshadow his historic achievement as the first black presidential nominee, but in a way that does not seem dismissive of her and does not rule out the chance of offering her the position.

They can't afford to dismiss her, or, more precisely, the more than 17 million voters who turned out for her, including masses of blue-collar voters in swing states, Hispanics and older voters, especially women.

Obama picked his words with exquisite care when he talked about Clinton with supporters, directly addressing his but really speaking to hers.

"You can rest assured that when we finally win the battle for universal health care in this country — and we will win that fight — she will be central to that victory," he said.

Clinton, of course, has already fought that fight for another president, her husband, and lost. She's also assailed Obama's health care plan, which does not mandate universal coverage, as seriously deficient.

Obama purposely did not address in what capacity she might take another run at health care. It's unlikely he knows. He and Clinton have yet to talk in a serious way.

The Illinois senator is famously willing to meet with difficult people, even Iran's hard-line, terrorist-underwriting, nuclear-developing, anti-American president.

But a sit-down with Clinton isn't coming together too quickly, days after he proposed that it happen once the dust settled.

After he secured the Democratic presidential nomination Tuesday, he called her in the evening, missed her and left a message.

She got back to him.

Then they ran into each other backstage Wednesday between delivering speeches at a Washington conference. Obama said they'd have a conversation in "coming weeks."

It's an awkward time.

And then there's Bill.

Ray Is Latest Celeb Accused of Ara-fashion

2008-05-29T21:21:00.000-05:00

BY LUCHINA FISHER

May 29, 2008—

Is Rachael Ray, the talk-show host, cookbook author and magazine editor, a terrorist sympathizer?

Dunkin' Donuts, worried that its customers might think so, abruptly yanked an ad in which Ray wears a scarf that resembles a keffiyeh -- a traditional headdress worn by Arab men -- after conservative commentators became enraged by the ad and even threatened to boycott the company.

Ray, who signed on as the company's pitchwoman last March, will continue to appear in other ads and commercials.

The controversial ad, which appeared earlier this month on the doughnut chain's Web site to promote its iced coffee, came under fire nearly two weeks ago when pro-Jewish blogger Pam Geller posted it under the headline "Rachel [sic] Ray: Dunkin Donuts Jihad Tool."

"Have you seen Rachel [sic] Ray wearing the icon of Yasser Arafatbastard and the bloody Islamic jihad," Geller wrote. "This is part of the cultural jihad."

Fox News commentator Michelle Malkin took up the cause last week, when she wrote on her Web site michellemalkin.com: "The keffiyeh, for the clueless, is the traditional scarf of Arab men that has come to symbolize murderous Palestinian jihad. Popularized by Yasser Arafat and a regular adornment of Muslim terrorists appearing in beheading and hostage-taking videos, the apparel has been mainstreamed by both ignorant (and not so ignorant) fashion designers, celebrities and left-wing icons."

After pulling the ad May 24, Dunkin' Donuts issued a statement from Margie Myers, senior vice president of communications for Dunkin' Brands: "In a recent online ad, Rachael Ray is wearing a black-and-white silk scarf with a paisley design. It was selected by the stylist for the advertising shoot. Absolutely no symbolism was intended. However, as of this past weekend, we are no longer using the online ad because the possibility of misperception detracted from its original intention to promote our iced coffee."

Ray's publicist Charlie Dougiello wrote in a e-mail, "This is a nonstory."

He confirmed that Ray was wearing a black and white scarf with a paisley floral design that was chosen by the stylist for the shoot and echoed Dunkin's statement. "Absolutely no symbolism was intended," he said. "However, given the possibility of misperception, Dunkin is no longer using the commercial."

Debbie Schlussel, a Detroit attorney who writes a daily column for her conservative Web site debbieschlussel.com., said, "I think they [Dunkin' Donuts] ought to be applauded for that."

But Laila Al-Qatami, spokeswoman for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination League, a Washington-based civil rights and cultural organization, believes that this is all much ado about nothing. "I think Dunkin' Donuts jumped the gun," she said, adding that the scarf's mere resemblance to a keffiyeh makes the company's action seem "unreasonable."

Al-Qatami says the real keffiyeh has been worn for decades by Arab men to protect their heads from the heat. More recently, the black keffiyeh has become associated with the Palestinian people because of Arafat's frequent use of it.

Favored in the 1980s by supporters of the Palestinian cause, these days the keffiyeh is just as likely to make a fashion statement as a political one. Trendy clothing store Urban Outfitters initially sold keffiyeh-like scarves until Jewish customers protested, according to commentator Malkin, but reintroduced them with different colors in several global markets. Fashion house Balenciaga glamorized them on the runway.

When celebrities and public figures don them, however, they are likely to draw heat. Before Ray's recent keffiyeh kerfuffle, there was the racket over Ricky Martin. Three years ago, the pop singer wore a red keffiyeh to show support for Palestinian human rights, Al-Qatami said.

When he learned that it had been inscribed with the phrase "Jerusalem is ours" in Arabic, he apologized, saying, "I had no idea that the keffiyeh scarf presented to me contained language referring to Jerusalem, and I apologize to anyone who might think I was endorsing its message."

Other celebrities, such as Collin Farrell, Mary Kate Olsen and Kanye West, have been singled out by Malkin for wearing "hate couture."

Al-Qatami believes people like Malkin and Schlussel are overreacting. "It's just an article of clothing," she said. "It only carries that kind of symbolism for people like Debbie Schlussel, who are promoting fear of Arabs."

Schlussel, the Detroit attorney and blogger, disagrees. She compares the keffiyeh to the Ku Klux Klan's white hoods. "People need to realize it's not just clothing," she said. "It's come to symbolize the garb of terrorism."

Schlussel said it's no accident that in some pictures and videos of Islamic terrorists who have kidnapped and killed Americans, their faces are covered with a keffiyeh.

In February, she took John McCain's daughter Meghan to task when several pictures surfaced of her wearing keffiyehs. In one, her mother, Cindy, sits beside Meghan, who has the headscarf wrapped around her neck. "It didn't occur to her that her daughter shouldn't be wearing that," Schlussel said. "The possible future first lady doesn't see that?

"People need to be educated," she added. "I think they can't have an excuse these days when wearing that."

U.S. Bank Failures Loom

2008-05-29T13:20:00.001-05:00

Alistair Barr
Daily Times
May 29, 2008

SAN FRANCISCO: By April, Gary Holloway was almost three years into retirement. He’d built a new home by a lake in Texas, bought a boat and was working on his golf game. While taking on some part-time work, Holloway also travelled for months across the US with his wife, from Seattle to Washington DC, catching up with old friends and family.

That life of leisure abruptly changed about six weeks ago when Holloway got a phone call from his former employer, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp, or FDIC, which regulates US banks and insures deposits.

Earlier this year, the FDIC began trying to lure roughly 25 retirees like Holloway back to prepare for an increase in bank failures. It’s also hiring about 75 new staff. Holloway quickly went back to work. ANB Financial NA, a bank in Bentonville, Ark with $2.1 billion in assets and $1.8 billion in customer deposits, was failing and an expert like Holloway was needed to value the assets and find a stronger institution to take them on.

On May 9, life for ANB ended when the FDIC and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, another bank regulator, announced that the lender was closing. Only three banks have failed so far in 2008. But that number is set to surge as the credit crunch slows economic growth and hammers some lenders that grew too fast during the recent real-estate boom, experts say.

Things may get worse before they get better: At least 150 banks will fail in the US during the next two to three years, according to a projection by Gerard Cassidy and his colleagues at RBC Capital Markets.

If the current economic slowdown deteriorates into a recession on the scale of those from the 1980s and early 1990’s, the number of failures will be much higher this time around — probably as high as 300 of them, by RBC’s reckoning. That’s a massive surge compared to the recent boom years of the credit and real estate markets. From the second half of 2004 through end of 2006 there were 10 consecutive quarters without a bank failure in the US — a record length of time, Cassidy notes.

Texas Ratio: Cassidy and his colleagues have developed an early-warning system for spotting future trouble at banks called the Texas Ratio. The ratio is calculated by dividing a bank’s non-performing loans, including those 90 days delinquent, by the company’s tangible equity capital plus money set aside for future loan losses. The number basically measures credit problems as a percentage of the capital a lender has available to deal with them.

Cassidy came up with the idea after covering Texas banks in the 1980s. Until the recession hit that decade, many banks in the state were considered some of the best in the country. But as problem assets climbed, that view was cruelly challenged, Cassidy recalls. Along with his colleagues, Cassidy applied the same ratio to commercial banks at the end of this year’s first quarter and found some disturbing trends.

UCBH Holdings Inc, a San Francisco-based bank, saw its Texas Ratio jump to 31% at the end of the first quarter from 4.7% in 2006, according to RBC. The Texas Ratio of Colonial BancGroup, based in Montgomery, Ala., jumped from 1.5% in 2006 to 25% at the end of March.Sterling Financial Corp., headquartered in Spokane, Wash., had a Texas ratio of 1.9% in 2006. It was nearly 24% at the end of the first quarter, RBC data show.

These banks are nowhere near RBC’s 100% critical threshold, and several lenders have raised new capital since the first quarter. For instance, National City Corp. topped RBC’s list with a Texas Ratio of 40% at the end of March, though the bank did raise $7 billion in new capital in April.

CD signs of stress: Other lenders are already in more dire straits. IndyMac Bancorp a large savings and loan institution and a leading mortgage lender, is one of Cassidy’s biggest concerns, with a whopping Texas Ratio around 140%.

IndyMac is currently offering the highest rates on one-year CDs, according to Bankrate.com. Others in the top 10 include Corus Bankshares, Imperial Capital Bancorp and GMAC bank.

When Countrywide Financial was struggling last year, its federal savings bank unit began offering some of the highest CD rates in the US to build deposits. Bank of America has since agreed to acquire Countrywide and it didn’t make it onto Bankrate.com’s list of top 10 CD rates this week.

Construction loan destruction: Construction and development, or C&D, loans made up 83% of the Chicago-based bank’s total loans at the end of 2007, according to RiskMetrics Group. This type of loans helps to pay for things like the building of real-estate development projects and the construction of office buildings.

Small and medium-sized banks found it difficult to compete with large lenders in the national markets for mortgages and other consumer loans. So many focused on C&D loans because this type of financing relies more on local, personal connections, said Zach Gast, financial sector analyst at RiskMetrics. As the real estate market boomed, C&D loans did too. A decade ago, bank holding companies had $60 billion of these loans. That number is now $480 billion, according to Gast, who also notes that C&D loans are almost never securitized, so they’re held on banks’ balance sheets.

Such rapid loan growth usually creates trouble later. Indeed, delinquencies represented 7.1% of total C&D loans at the end of the first quarter, up from 0.9% at the end of 2005, Gast said. Colonial BancGroup had 37% of its loans in C&D loans at the end of last year, while Sterling Financial had 33% and UCBH had 20%. East West Bancorp a rival to UCBH, is also exposed, with 25% of total loans in C&D assets at the end of 2007, RiskMetrics data show.

Regulators: Where were regulators when these banks built up such large exposures? That’s a question RBC’s Cassidy has been asking himself, noting that “they dropped the ball in a big way.” Officials at the FDIC declined to comment.

Efforts by the Securities and Exchange Commission to make sure banks report accurate earnings may have made the situation worse, Cassidy says. Bank regulators try to encourage institutions to build reserves in good times, so they’re ready for downturns. But the SEC has been worried that banks might use reserves to smooth reported earnings, so it advised some lenders that they couldn’t set aside reserves if they weren’t experiencing commensurate credit losses, Cassidy explained.

Crisis redux? The FDIC had highlighted 76 banks that it considered troubled at the end of 2007. That’s up from 50 at the end of 2006, which was the lowest level for at least 25 years. Once identified by regulators, troubled banks are often required to limit or halt loan growth and shrink their balance sheets by selling some assets, Cassidy said. Resolution and receivership specialists at the FDIC, like Gary Holloway, value troubled banks’ assets as quickly as possible and try to find a stronger bank to absorb the weaker entity through an acquisition.

The current crisis hasn’t reached the scale of the savings and loan crisis. In 1990, more than 1,500 banks were on the FDIC’s troubled watch list, out of a total of roughly 15,000. More than 1,000 banks failed in 1988 and 1989, FDIC data show. But it’s possible for such comparisons to understate the scope of the coming wave of insolvencies.

Cops & Customs Agents Caught Drug Smuggling

2008-05-29T13:17:00.001-05:00

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Thursday, May 29, 2008

Following last September’s crash of a Gulfstream jet used by the CIA for torture flights that contained 4 tonnes of cocaine, more customs officials and cops have been caught in drug smuggling and drug dealing rackets.

Customs supervisor Walter Golembiowski and officer John Ajello face narcotics, bribery and conspiracy charges after they were arrested for helping smuggle drugs and contraband through New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport.

"The investigation has led to the indictment and prosecution of more than 20 people — “from distributors to overseas sources of supply” — and the seizure of more than 600 pounds of imported hashish and other drugs from the United States and France," according to a CNN report.

Meanwhile in Texas, Cameron County Constable Saul Ochoa was arrested by the FBI yesterday morning for possession and distribution of marijuana.

Ochoa’s brother is Justice of the Peace Benny Ochoa III of Port Isabel and his cousin is Port Isabel Police Chief Joel Ochoa.

"The grand jury charged Ochoa with possessing five to 10 pounds of marijuana on four different days in May with the intent to distribute. Each of the four counts carries a maximum five years in prison and $250,000 fine," according to a Brownsville Herald report.

While reports of customs agents and cops dealing drugs are almost routine, the real head of the hydra has always been CIA involvement in smuggling drugs that end up on America’s streets, a symbiotic process that also helps finance wars and terrorist groups to do the bidding of the U.S. government around the world.

The corporate media will report on lesser drug smuggling scandals involving cops and customs agents, but when it comes to the gargantuan sprawling CIA drug smuggling racket, the silence is deafening.

In September 2007, a Florida based Gulfstream II jet aircraft # N987SA was forced to crash land in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula after it ran out of fuel.

After accident investigators arrived on the scene they discovered a cargo of nearly 4 tonnes of cocaine.

Journalists discovered that the same Gulstream jet had been used in at least three CIA "rendition" trips to Guantanamo Bay between 2003 and 2005.

Kevin Booth’s underground hit documentary American Drug War features footage of former DEA head Robert Bonner admitting that the CIA was involved in cocaine smuggling operations.

Former DEA agent Cele Castillo, who has appeared on The Alex Jones Show many times, personally witnessed CIA drug smuggling operations funneled through terrorists that were also involved in kidnappings and the training of death squads on behalf of the U.S. government.

Investigative reporter Gary Webb was instrumental in exposing CIA cocaine trafficking operations before his alleged suicide in 2004. In the You Tube clip below, Webb traces the history of Agency involvement in drug smuggling and its links to financing wars in central America.

S&P: US home prices tumble a record 14.1 pct in 1Q

2008-05-28T17:23:00.000-05:00

AP

NEW YORK - U.S. home prices dropped at the sharpest rate in two decades during the first quarter, a closely watched index showed Tuesday, a somber indication that the housing slump continues to deepen.

Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller said its national home price index fell 14.1 percent in the first quarter compared with a year earlier, the lowest since its inception in 1988. The quarterly index covers all nine U.S. Census divisions.

Prices nationwide are at levels not seen since the third quarter of 2004, according to Maureen Maitland, a S&P vice president. However, the index is still up 60 percent versus 2000.

Two narrower indices set record declines in March versus the previous year. The 20-city index tumbled 14.4 percent, the lowest since that index was started in 2001. The 10-city index plunged 15.3 percent, a record in its 20-year history.

"There are very few silver linings that one can see in the data. Most of the nation appears to remain on a downward path," said David Blitzer, chairman of S&P's index committee.

Nineteen of the 20 metro areas reported annual declines, with 15 of them posting record lows. Six metro areas lost more than 20 percent.

Las Vegas had the worst performance in March, falling 25.9 percent from a year earlier, followed by Miami and Phoenix. Only Charlotte, N.C., stayed above water, gaining less than 1 percent over the previous year.

Last week, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight said home prices fell 3.1 percent in the first quarter, the largest drop in its 17-year history and only the second quarter of price declines recorded.

The OFHEO index is narrower in scope and is calculated using mortgages of $417,000 or less that are bought or backed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. That excludes properties bought with some of the riskier types of home loans.

(This version CORRECTS that 20-city and 10-city metro area figures are for March sted 1st quarter) )

San Antonio Cops Force Blood Tests on Drivers

2008-05-28T17:18:00.001-05:00

Trueveo
May 27, 2008

U.S. Economy: The Worst is Yet to Come

2008-05-28T16:47:00.000-05:00

Mark Weisbrot
The Huffington Post
May 28, 2008

Since the U.S. economy showed positive growth for the last quarter, some commentators in the business press are saying that we are not necessarily going to have a recession, or that if there is one it will be mild. This is a bit like the proverbial story of the man who jumped out of a window 60 floors up, and then said “so far, so good,” as he passed the 30th floor.

The United States accumulated a massive, $8 trillion housing bubble during the decade from 1996-2006. Only about 40 percent of that bubble has now deflated. House prices are still falling at a 20 percent annual rate (over the last quarter). This means that the worst is yet to come, including another wave of mortgage defaults and write-downs. Even homeowners who are not in trouble will borrow increasingly less against their homes, reducing their spending.

President Bush says we are not in a recession. One commonly-used definition of a recession is two consecutive quarters of declining output (GDP). The first quarter of 2008 came in at 0.6 percent, although it would have been negative if not for inventory accumulation. So by this definition we cannot say with certainty that the recession has started, although it could well have started this quarter. Of course, for most Americans it has felt like a recession hit some time ago, with real wages flat since the end of 2002, and household income not growing for most of the six-and-a-half year economic expansion.

The National Bureau of Economic Research will eventually decide on the official onset of the recession, but even its definition is arbitrary. All the indicators of a serious recession are swirling around us. The economy has lost jobs for four months in a row, which has never happened without a recession. Consumer confidence has dropped to a 28 year low - a level not seen since Jimmy Carter was president. Home foreclosure filings are up 65 percent over last year. And now commercial real estate prices are heading south, dropping 6.2 percent in the first quarter.

With oil prices hitting record highs, and the Fed beginning to worry more about inflation, more restrictive lending practices and other fallout from the credit crunch, the near-term economic future looks even dimmer.

Some look to exports to lead the recovery, but these are only 11 percent of GDP, and consumption is about 70 percent. Still, the fall in the dollar over the last six years is helping - making our exports more competitive and reducing the subsidy that we have been giving to imports for many years. In a sign of how economic illiteracy prevails in the United States, most people (thanks largely to what they hear and read in the media) see the dollar’s decline as bad economic news.

We are facing the prospect of millions losing their homes, their jobs, their retirement savings, their health insurance, and their livelihoods.

This serious economic situation greatly raises the stakes of the 2008 election. What will the government do to help the victims of economic mismanagement, to provide health insurance, and to restart the economy? Is it really more important to spend billions each week on the occupation of Iraq?

So far the government hasn’t done much. The stimulus package now taking effect, at about one percent of GDP and much of it likely to be saved, is quite small. The major legislation that Congress is considering for the housing crisis would mainly bail out lenders and investors while doing little for most underwater homeowners.

The voice of the people has yet to be heard on these questions in the halls of power. It had better get a lot louder, soon.

Oil price spike has wide economic impact

2008-05-22T23:18:00.001-05:00

Continued surge could spark 'something worse than a mild recession'

By John W. Schoen

Senior Producer

MSNBC

updated 6:17 p.m. ET May 22, 2008

As dire forecasts about runaway oil prices become reality, it’s impossible to know how much higher they’ll go. But the impact of the price surge already is being widely felt. And if prices go much higher, the damage to the U.S. economy will be deeper and wider than the fallout from the run-up so far.

Oil prices have doubled in the past year and have shot up nearly 50 percent since January to a record $135 a barrel. Much of the rise appears to be driven by speculators betting that tight supplies — or outright shortages — will push prices even higher.

Consumers — already hit with rising prices and flat wages — are being stretched further. As the Memorial Day weekend kicks off the summer driving season, gasoline prices are at record levels, reaching a national average above $3.83 a gallon. Some analysts predict the average will break past $4 as early as next week. In some parts of the country, prices are already closing in on $5.

“We're already in a mild recession,” said Lakshman Achuthan, an economist at the Economic Cycle Research Institute. “I think if we go towards $150 (a barrel), we start talking about something worse than a mild recession.”

The surge in oil prices is hitting some parts of the economy harder than others. Companies that use lots of oil have already been hurt; the recent surge will only make matters worse.

Airlines have been struggling to make a profit, even as they cut jobs and flights. American Airlines became the latest to announce it was tightening its belt another notch, saying Thursday that it plans to shrink capacity by as much as 12 percent and cut thousands of jobs.

To offset the rapid rise in jet fuel prices, the airline also said it plans to start charging passengers $15 to check the first bag of luggage for each passenger. United Airlines said it’s considering a similar move. The carriers already charge $25 for a second bag.

“(Higher oil prices are) going to send some smaller airlines into bankruptcy," said Nick van den Brul, an airline analyst at the French investment bank, Exane BNP.

Surging gasoline prices are further dampening sales at U.S. carmakers, whose product lines are more heavily oriented toward higher-profit, lower-mileage trucks and SUVs than their foreign competitors.

Ford Motor Co. said Thursday it’s cutting production by 15 percent in the second quarter of this year and another 15 to 20 percent in the third quarter. Ford now says it won’t hit its target of getting back in the black by next year and may have to lay off more workers and close more plants.

Some parts of the economy will hold up relatively well; companies and regions that produce oil will do better. Oil companies are enjoying a spike in profits because production costs have not risen nearly as rapidly as market prices. Those higher profits could help boost local economies in regions where oil and natural gas are produced.

But those benefits will be more than offset by the negative effects of the surge in energy costs. Higher oil prices have already begun to spill over into higher costs for a variety of products and services, including food prices.

The threat of higher inflation makes life even more complicated for policymakers at the Federal Reserve, who have been slashing rates for nearly a year to try to offset the fallout from the housing slump and turmoil in the credit markets.

The surge in oil prices could force the Fed to reverse course and begin raising rates — before the benefits of those rate cuts have had time to take hold. Minutes of the Fed's April policy meeting, released Wednesday, indicated that the central bank could start raising rates in the fall.

The biggest concern is the potential impact on consumer spending, which accounts for about 70 percent of U.S. economic activity. Consumers have already been hit by the slump in housing prices — eliminating the equity "piggy bank" that many homeowners tapped as prices were rising. Home prices fell 3.1 percent in the first quarter of 2008 compared with last year, according to data released Thursday by the government’s Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight.

Another widely followed reading, the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller index, has shown even larger declines for major U.S. metropolitan areas.

Rising gasoline prices are one more burden on consumers. Economists estimate that every additional penny at the pump takes roughly $1 billion out of overall spending. Taxpayers getting rebate checks designed to revive spending and get the economy moving again have already spent much of that bonus to gas up their vehicles.

So far, there seems to be enough oil and gasoline to go around: Refineries are still adequately supplied with crude, and gas stations aren’t running out of fuel.

Prices are surging as traders see an increased risk of that happening. But that so-called panic buying could quickly reverse, sending oil prices sharply lower.

“This is all about psychology, and we are not very good at oil companies about forecasting the psychology of prices," Jeroen van der Veer, CEO of global giant Royal Dutch/Shell, said on CNBC Thursday. “So we'd better prepare ourselves for more volatility because if this is psychology, it can change very quickly.”

The spike in oil prices also has brought calls for government action, despite the limited short-term impact those responses could have. The Department of Energy has suspended purchases of oil for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

But Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said Thursday he did not support the idea of selling oil from the reserves to try to drive down oil prices.

The petroleum reserve "is meant to deal with ... the physical interruption of the flow of oil to our country. We don't have that issue today," Bodman told a House hearing.

The last such move came in September 2005, when the U.S. released millions of barrels of oil from its reserves as part of a coordinated effort by the International Energy Agency to head off possible shortages. But the amount conrolled by the United States is a relative drop in the global barrel and would likely have little impact on market prices.

The price surge has also revived debate on U.S. energy policy. Some longer-term proposals that have failed to win the support of the majority in Congress, like opening up new areas of the U.S. for oil drilling, may now get another look.

“We have to expand domestic exploration, we have to add additional new refineries, we have to add nuclear power into our electricity grid portfolio, we have give rewards for conserving energy and have to continue to invest in research and development,” Rep. Adam Putnam, R- Fla., said Thursday. “We have to have an ‘all of the above’ energy policy.”

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24778287/page/2/

Uncle Sam Wants Thugs And Illegal Aliens

2008-05-22T12:27:00.000-05:00

Ethan Allen
Intel Strike Network
May 22, 2008

In the eyes of the military, it’s a simple numbers game. But the recruitment process for America’s armed forces is changing, and so is the look, feel, and policy of the military itself.

According to national statistics, felony waivers for recruits have been doubling almost every year for the past several years. Military.com reports:

“The number of felony waivers granted by the Army grew from 411 in 2003 to 901 in 2006, according to the Pentagon, or about one in 10 of the moral waivers approved that year. Other misdemeanors - from petty theft or writing a bad check to some assaults - jumped from about 2,700 to more than 6,000 in 2006, representing more than three-quarters of moral waivers granted by the Army. Army and Defense Department officials defended the waiver program as a way to admit young people who had made a mistake but overcome past behavior.”

Felony waivers consist of the worst elements, but there are also ‘conduct waivers’ for recruits who have had small issues on their records such as traffic tickets and minor drug offenses. Conduct waivers for Army recruits rose from 8,129 in fiscal 2006 to 10,258 in fiscal 2007. For Marine Corps recruits, they increased from 16,969 to 17,413.

“In particular, the Army accepted more than double the number of applicants with convictions for felony crimes such as burglary, grand larceny and aggravated assault, rising from 249 to 511, while the corresponding number for the Marines increased by two-thirds, from 208 to 350. The vast majority of such convictions stem from juvenile offenses. Most involved theft, but a handful involved sexual assault and terrorist threats, and there were three cases of involuntary manslaughter.”

The changing face of the military and increased use of felony waivers is even angering gays, who have already felt scorned for years because of the military’s ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy.

Not only are recruits with felony waivers being signed up with the military, they’re also promoted faster.

“The Army study compared the performance of soldiers who came in with conduct waivers against those who did not during the years 2003-2006. In that time, 276,231 recruits enlisted in the Army with no prior military service. Of those 6.5 percent, or nearly 18,000 had waivers.

In a comparison of both groups the study found that soldiers who had received waivers for bad behavior:

– Had a higher desertion rate (4.26 percent vs. 3.59 percent).

– Had a higher misconduct rate (5.95 percent vs. 3.55 percent).

– Had a higher rate of appearances before courts-martial (1 percent vs. 0.71 percent).

– Had a higher dropout rate for alcohol rehabilitation failure (0.27 percent vs. 0.12 percent).

But they also:

– Were more likely to re-enlist (28.48 percent vs. 26.76 percent).

– Got promoted faster to sergeant (after 34.7 months vs. 39 months).

– Had a lower rate of dismissal for personality disorders (0.93 percent vs. 1.12 percent).”

But this is all old hat. Felony waivers, while on the rise, have been used for years. It’s just a matter of changing times, right? We used to hold our military to a higher moral standard, not only because of the deadly weapons of war the tax payer funds, but also because we send these boys and girls across the world to set an example to others as to how Americans behave.

But another aspect of the changing military, and one harder to justify, is the use of illegal aliens in the different branches of the armed forces. Recruiters have been caught trying to enlist illegal aliens, but of course official military policy is to deny that illegal immigrants are targeted, because as of right now it’s against policy to do so.

“There are currently about 37,500 foreign nationals from over 200 countries serving in the active duty forces and reserves . Seventy-one have died in Iraq and three in Afghanistan. The law currently provides for expediting the citizenship applications of U.S. service personnel, who become eligible to apply the first day they enlist. The presence of non-citizens in the U.S. armed forces dates back to the 18th century—“more than 660,000 military veterans became citizens through naturalization between 1862 and 2000,” according to a report by the nonprofit CNA Corporation.”

This ‘use but deny’ policy strategy has been brought to light more so in the past year, especially with the DREAM ACT which was introduced in 2007 as part of the Amnesty Bill.

“The Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act, or DREAM Act, is part of the stalled package of proposals that many in Congress are seeking to resurrect. The proposal, applicable to an estimated 750,000 undocumented residents of military age, stipulates that those who arrived in the United States before age 16, graduated from high school, and meet other qualifications could immediately enter the path to citizenship in exchange for at least two years’ service in the armed forces.”

Mexican citizen groups have also claimed that US recruiters have been seen near the border on enlistment drives.

“According to Prensa Latina on Friday in Culiacan, the capital of the northern state Sinaloa, civil activist Ildefonso Ortiz Cabrera told reporters that US military officers use young men of Latin American origin to recruit for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Then there’s this news report from Los Angeles that shows immigrants, some of which are admitted illegals, confessing to being approached by US recruiters. There’s also footage taken showing immigrant recruits training at the facility, which has grounds beside a mall in LA. When the reporters are discovered by Marine officials, the immigrant recruits are shown running inside the complex to hide from the reporters’ cameras.

It’s easy to see tyranny in motion when the United States military openly hires felons, and goes against its own policy to also hire illegal aliens in return for citizenship and goodies. The British Empire used foreign mercenaries for over 200 years in their reign. Is this the example we want to follow? Uncle Sam used to look for the best and brightest, the few and the proud. Now the Army is scraping the bottom of the barrel to fill replacement slots, that is until it can automate the whole thing and shut out all humans in return for robots and space based weapon platforms. When the entire military is made of chrome and metal and terminator robots are manning death camps, the days of hired thugs and illegal aliens will seem like a wonderful trip down memory lane, as will be the idea of our once free Republic.

Report: CIA Pushed Torture Envelope

2008-05-20T21:46:00.001-05:00

Justice Department Says FBI Warned Spy Agency, Military, That Their Tactics Were "Borderline Torture"

CBSNEWs 5-20-2008

A Justice Department report released Tuesday, May 20, 2008, found that the CIA and military ignored repeated warnings from the FBI that their interrogation techniques were tantamount to torture. (CBS/AP)

(CBS/AP) CIA and military interrogators bucked repeated warnings from the FBI that methods used to question terror suspects were in some cases "borderline torture" and potentially illegal, the Justice Department's internal watchdog reported Tuesday.

Prosecutors stopped far short of pursuing charges against interrogators, however, after concluding that the Pentagon was ultimately responsible for policing the treatment of al Qaeda detainees who were being held in military prisons.

More than three years in the making, the audit issued by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine generally praises how the FBI handled terror interrogations following the Sept. 11 terror attacks through 2004.

When al Qaeda terrorist Abu Zubaydah was captured - six months after 9/11 - the FBI took first crack at his interrogation. But, when the CIA concluded agents were merely getting "throwaway information" - the spies took over - using what one FBI official later called, "borderline torture," reports CBS News Correspondent Bob Orr.

Agents pulled out as FBI headquarters ordered them not to take part. But, Tuesday's report from the Justice Department's Inspector General makes it clear, FBI agents for several years witnessed wide-ranging abuses at three military lockups in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay.

Agents repeatedly asked FBI headquarters for guidance, but didn't get it, as prisoners at Gitmo were threatened with growling dogs, had their thumbs twisted back and heads wrapped in duct tape.

While the Inspector General's report "...found no instances in which an FBI agent participated in clear detainee abuse..." it blamed the FBI for failing to give clear instructions to its agents in the field.

The split, pitting the FBI against the CIA and Pentagon, came to a head over the treatment of the so-called 20th hijacker Muhammad al-Qahtani. Qahtani is accused by the government of attempting to enter the United States in August 2001 to be a muscle hijacker on one of the planes used in the 9/11 attacks. He was turned away at the Orlando airport and not allowed entry into the country.

Fine's report raises troubling questions about CIA and Pentagon interrogators whose use of snarling dogs, short shackles, mocking of the Quran and other abuses of detainees overseas appear to have overstepped what U.S. courts would allow in collecting evidence.

At the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, FBI agents in 2002 openly clashed with military interrogators bent on "aggressively" interrogating al-Qahtani by confronting him with agitated dogs and keeping him awake for continuous 20-hour interviews daily.

"The plan was to keep him up until he broke," the FBI agent told superiors, the Justice Department report said.

FBI officials complained to the White House after learning that military interrogators forced al Qahtani to "perform dog tricks," "be nude in front of a female," and wear "women's underwear on his head".

Al-Qahtani's attorney, Gitanjali Gutierrez with the Center for Constitutional Rights, says that Qahtani recently attempted suicide in his cell at Guantanamo Bay because of his conditions.

"The tactics that were used against and the impact, the pain and suffering it caused him and the damage that it caused him does rise to a level of torture," Gutierrez told CBS News.

The treatment of al-Qahtani recently forced the government to drop the charges against him, because had the Pentagon proceeded with his military tribunal, all of the evidence of his treatment would be made public.

For at least part of the time covered by Fine's investigation, the CIA and Pentagon were working under Justice Department guidance that their interrogation methods were legal. However, FBI agents recognized as early as 2002 that they would not be allowed to use those methods to interview prisoners in the United States.

FBI agents are explicitly banned from using brutality, physical violence, intimidation or other means of causing duress when interviewing suspects. Instead, the FBI generally tries to build a rapport with suspects to get information.

"Beyond any doubt, what they are doing (and I don't know the extent of it) would be unlawful were these enemy prisoners of war," one agent wrote back to FBI headquarters in a document cited in the Justice report.

Fine's investigators found no evidence that FBI agents witnessed or were otherwise personally aware of cases where terror suspects were subjected to waterboarding, a particularly harsh interrogation tactic that critics call a form of torture. The CIA has acknowledged waterboarding Zubaydah, in part out of concern that he had information that could prevent another imminent attack.

Such tactics "have been employed only when traditional means of questioning - things like rapport-building - were ineffective," CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said Tuesday.

In al-Qahtani's case, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said no evidence of torture has ever surfaced after extensive internal reviews. Al-Qahtani, designated as an additional hijacker for the 2001 attacks, was forced to wear a bra, dance with another man and behave like a dog while at Guantanamo Bay, according to a 2005 Pentagon report.

Whitman also said he was unaware of any Pentagon actions that would have delayed the Justice report. Fine's audit, however, describes seven months of foot-dragging and negotiating by the Pentagon over how much information in the report should be classified or otherwise shielded from public review. The 438-page report issued Tuesday is only sparsely blacked-out.

The report surveyed over 1,000 agents, interviews with hundreds of other witnesses and a review of more than a half-million documents. It concluded FBI agents in nearly all cases refused to participate in harsh interrogations and left the room when they were ongoing.

Agents also were fairly vigilant about reporting their concerns to their superiors, the report shows.

At Guantanamo Bay, two FBI agents "had concerns not only about the proposed techniques but also about the glee with which the would-be (military) participants discussed their respective roles in carrying out these techniques, and the utter lack of sophistication and circus-like atmosphere within this interrogation strategy session," the report found.

Still, the FBI did not emerge unscathed in the report.

Auditors found that agents in a few cases did not always report the harsh tactics and in a few cases remained throughout the interrogations. Fine's office blamed the lapses on unclear guidance from FBI headquarters on how agents should confront interrogators who were working under rules dictated by the CIA or Pentagon.

In August 2002, FBI Director Robert Mueller ordered agents to withdraw from interrogations during which coercive or extreme methods were used to get information from detainees. But identifying or defining coercive behavior proved difficult for FBI agents who also wanted to get information from terror suspects, and who were assured by their counterparts that the methods were "approved at the highest levels," the report found.

Critics said senior FBI and Justice Department officials should have done more to stop the abusive interrogations.

"While I take comfort in knowing that, for the most part, FBI field agents followed the agency's policies regarding interrogations, I find it very disturbing that many senior FBI and DOJ officials failed to take strong action after identifying interrogation abuses," House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., said in a statement.

Mueller said his agents will continue to be trained and fully aware of FBI policy against participating in coercive interrogations.

India finds pesticides in colas

2008-05-20T10:18:00.001-05:00

By Jyotsna Singh
BBC correspondent in Delhi

Indian MPs have upheld the findings of an environment group which reported that Coca-Cola and Pepsi drinks contained pesticide residues.

The Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) said last August that its investigations revealed the drinks contained harmful residues and posed a health risk.

The report led to a massive row with both Pepsico and Coca-Cola strenuously rejecting the allegations.

A public outcry led the government to form a parliamentary committee to examine the report.

The 15-member committee, which included MPs from both the government and the opposition, said the CSE findings on the presence of pesticide residues were correct.

"The committee has appreciated the whistle blowing act of CSE in alerting the nation to an issue with major implications to food safety, policy formulation regulatory framework and human and environmental health," it said.

The committee has asked the government to set higher safety-standards for soft drinks.

Victory for environmentalists

The Vice President for Coca-Cola in India, Sanjiv Gupta, said the company was still reading the report.

But he said his company would comply with "whatever new standards the government decides to bring".

CSE director Sunita Narain told the BBC she was very pleased with the report.

"It endorses our agenda that the issue of public health care and food safety is central to the country."

Cola ban

Both Pepsi and Coca-Cola have always maintained their drinks were absolutely safe.

But the parliamentary committee said it "felt that claims made by the Cola companies in their advertisement tantamount to misleading the public as their products do contain pesticides which have ill effect on human health in the long run". the report said

The CSE in its report had alleged that pesticides in the drinks could cause cancer and birth defects.

The report triggered demonstrations in India against the companies and a number of bans on the sales of their drinks.

Parliament banned its cafeterias from serving Pepsi and Coke while the defence ministry issued a circular ordering its clubs to stop selling the drinks.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/south_asia/3458365.stm

Published: 2004/02/04 13:34:32 GMT

Iran busts CIA terror network

2008-05-19T09:21:00.001-05:00

Tehran Times
May 18, 2008

TEHRAN - The Intelligence Ministry on Saturday released details of the detection and dismantling of a terrorist network affiliated to the United States.

In a coordinated operation on May 7, Iranian intelligence agents arrested the terrorist network’s members, who were identified in Fars, Khuzestan, Gilan, West Azerbaijan, and Tehran provinces, the Intelligence Ministry announcement said.

The group’s plans were devised in the U.S., according to the announcement, which added that they had planned to carry out a number of acts such as bombing scientific, educational, and religious centers, shooting people, and making public places in various cities insecure.

One of the terrorists was killed in the operation, but the rest are in detention, the Intelligence Ministry said, adding that the group’s main objective was to create fear among the people.

The United States Central Intelligence Agency comprehensively supported the terrorist group by arming it, training its members, and sponsoring its inhumane activities in Iran, the Intelligence Ministry stated.

The terrorists had maps, films, pictures, and sketches of important and sensitive sites in various cities in their possession when they were arrested.

They also had a large number of weapons and ammunition and a great deal of highly explosive chemicals and cyanide.

The blast at a religious center in Shiraz last month was carried out by this group, and it also had plans to carry out similar attacks on the Tehran International Book Fair, the Russian Consulate in Gilan Province, oil pipelines in southern Iran, and other targets, the communiqué stated.

Thirteen people were killed and over 190 others wounded in a bombing carried out on April 12 at the Rahpuyan-e Vessal religious center, which is part of the Seyyed-ul-Shohada Mosque complex, located in a residential area of Shiraz.

Iran Busts CIA-Backed Terror Group

2008-05-19T09:19:00.001-05:00

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Monday, May 19, 2008

The Iranian Intelligence Ministry busted a CIA-backed terror group that was planning to bomb scientific, educational, and religious centers, and carry out assassinations, according to a report in the Tehran Times. The arrests come weeks after Ret. Gen. Thomas McInerney urged the U.S. to carry out terror bombings in Iran.

"The Intelligence Ministry on Saturday released details of the detection and dismantling of a terrorist network affiliated to the United States," reports the newspaper.

"The United States Central Intelligence Agency comprehensively supported the terrorist group by arming it, training its members, and sponsoring its inhumane activities in Iran, the Intelligence Ministry stated."

The attack on a religious center in Shiraz last month which killed thirteen people and wounded 190 was blamed on the same group and according to the report, "it also had plans to carry out similar attacks on the Tehran International Book Fair, the Russian Consulate in Gilan Province, oil pipelines in southern Iran, and other targets."

While it’s obviously naive to take a report out of Iranian state-controlled media at face value, top Neo-Cons have been calling for the US to back terror groups in Iran and other reports clearly indicate that this program has already been in place for years.

On Friday we reported on the comments of Ret. Gen. Thomas McInerney, who in a Fox News appearance publicly called for the U.S. government to support groups like MEK (Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization), which is listed by the State Department as a terrorist organization, and carry out deadly bombings in Iran.

"Here’s what I would suggest to you. Number one, we take the National Council for Resistance to Iran off the terrorist list that the Clinton Administration put them on as well as the Mujahedin-e Khalq at the Camp Ashraf in Iraq," said McInerney.

"Then I would start a tit-for-tat strategy which I wrote up in the Wall Street Journal a year ago: For every EFP that goes off and kills Americans, two go off in Iran. No questions asked. People don’t have to know how it was done. It’s a covert action. They become the most unlucky country in the world," he added.

Last November, Fox and Friends host Brian Kilmeade openly called for US support for acts of terrorism, such as car bombings, in Tehran. Colonel David Hunt, who has over 29 years of military experience including extensive operational experience in Special Operations, Counter Terrorism and Intelligence Operations, agreed with Kilmeade, stating "absolutely" in response to Kilmead’s question about whether cars should start blowing up in Tehran.

The U.S. government is already funding MEK and the group has been linked with numerous bombings inside Iran over the course of the last few years. The organization has also killed U.S. troops and civilians since the 70’s.

According to Global Security.org, "In the early 1970s, angered by U.S. support for the pro-Western shah, MEK members killed several U.S. soldiers and civilians working on defense projects in Iran. MEK members also supported the 1979 takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, in which 52 Americans were held hostage for 444 days."

In addition - British SAS have been caught training insurgents in Iraq to carry out hi-tech bombings that are later blamed on Iran.

Another Iranian-based terror group that the Bush administration is already funding as a means of regime change in Iran is Jundullah - a Sunni Al-Qaeda terrorist group formerly headed by the alleged mastermind of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

"The CIA is giving arms-length support, supplying money and weapons, to an Iranian militant group, Jundullah, which has conducted raids into Iran from bases in Pakistan," the London Telegraph reported last year.

The group has been blamed for a number of bombings inside Iran aimed at destabilizing Ahmadinejad’s government and is also active in Pakistan, having been fingered for its involvement in attacks on police stations and car bombings at the Pakistan-US Cultural Center in 2004.

As award-winning journalist Seymour Hersh reported back in 2004, U.S. intelligence and Israel’s Mossad are busy at work stirring up trouble in Iran in preparation for an attack on that country. In early 2005, the Guardian reported that “American special forces have been on the ground inside Iran scouting for US air strike targets for suspected nuclear weapons sites."

Virginia Cops Taser Autistic Man for Arguing

2008-05-19T09:14:00.000-05:00

Williamsburg News
May 18, 2008

JAMES CITY - James City County police officers used a Taser gun on a 24-year-old autistic Williamsburg man Thursday after police said he became unruly with employees at Wilson’s Leather at the Prime Outlets-Williamsburg shopping mall.

Police responded to the store on Richmond Road around 2 p.m. after employees reported that the man had become argumentative during a dispute over a returned item, according to police spokesman Mike Spearman.

The man, whom Spearman called “large in stature,” became combative with police and refused to leave the store. Officers incapacitated him with a single shot from the Taser, placed him under arrest and charged him with trespassing and resisting arrest, both Class 1 misdemeanors.

Police only learned the man suffered from Asperger’s syndrome, a mild form of autism, after he had been placed under arrest, Spearman said.

Read entire article

Ron Paul Fox Business Interview David Asman 05/13/2008

2008-05-14T12:40:00.000-05:00

http://libertymaven.com/
http://ronpaul2008.com/

JPMorgan Chase CEO: Recession Just Beginning

2008-05-13T17:21:00.000-05:00

Money News
May 13, 2008

NEW YORK — JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s chief executive said Monday that while the crisis in the credit markets appears to be three-quarters over, he believes a U.S. recession is just beginning.

“Even if the capital markets crisis resolves, it does not mean that this country will not go into a bad recession,” said CEO James Dimon, whose bank saw its first-quarter profit fall by half due to the recent collapse of the U.S. mortgage market. “The recession just started.”

“We don’t know if it’s going to be mild or severe,” he continued, speaking at a conference in New York hosted by Swiss bank UBS AG. “We’re thinking there’s a third of a chance that it’s going to be pretty bad … closer to the 1982 recession than the very mild recessions we had in 2001 and 1990.”

Also incomplete is JPMorgan’s acquisition of Bear Stearns Cos., the toppling investment bank that JPMorgan offered to buy in March.

Read entire article

Face Scanners To Catch Underage Drinkers

2008-05-13T17:20:00.000-05:00

Daily Mail
May 13, 2008

Underage drinkers who attempt to buy alcohol may be thwarted by the technology that police use to identify suspected criminals.

A supermarket chain is introducing face recognition cameras to prevent staff mistakenly selling cigarettes and alcohol to under-18s.

The biometric technology is being piloted by Budgens at one of its London branches.

If successful, it could be rolled out across the country to create a database of youngsters who try to buy alcohol.

The system alerts a cashier if it ‘recognises’ someone who has previously been unable to prove they are 18.

It is believed to be the first time a British retailer has used the technology in this way.

The software takes measurements between key points on the face to make a template of a person’s features that is stored as a “token”.

Customers’ images are monitored and relayed to a control centre to be compared with under-18s already on record.

Future options include other retailers linking the scheme to their shops to create a giant database.

Read entire article

Chicago Suburb Hosts “Disaster” Drill

2008-05-13T17:19:00.000-05:00

Daily Herald
May 13, 2008

Suburban firefighters, police officers and other emergency workers gathered today with hundreds of volunteers at the Sears Centre arena in Hoffman Estates to test how efficient the area’s emergency plan is when it comes to distributing antibiotics to combat threats such as anthrax.

More than 20 emergency departments were on hand for the drill, where volunteer victims were given scripted roles. Some of the volunteers were to get microchips like those attached to the shoes of marathon runners to time how long it takes them to go through the lines. Event sponsors were hoping for as many as 3,000 volunteers.

Emergency personnel, under the watch of the Cook County and Illinois departments of public health, were to hand out pill bottles.

Though the exercise will last only a few hours, the full-scale emergency plan’s goal is to be able to distribute medicines to a population of 50,000 to 100,000 within a 72-hour window. The thinking is that under real threat, a family member could go through the screening and bring pills home to relatives.

Read entire article

Endgame: Hundreds Arrested in Iowa Immigration Raid, Fairgrounds Used as Federal “Holding Facility”

2008-05-13T17:18:00.000-05:00

Cryptogon
May 13, 2008

UPDATE #1: Largest Single Site Raid Ever:

Customs and law enforcement agents worked through the night processing the detainees, said Claude Arnold, the ICE special agent in charge of the operation. Detainees were “administratively arrested” but have not yet been criminally charged, he said.

Detainees who are charged with aggravated identity theft, unlawful use of a Social Security number or other offenses will be given lawyers and sent to appearances in one of three makeshift courtrooms at the detainee center in Waterloo, Arnold said.

The set-up includes three courtrooms – two in trailers and one in an existing room. A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s office said the court proceedings would be open within space constraints.

Video footage shot by federal agents showed a large “intake area” in McElroy Auditorium with folding chairs and tables. The footage, which did not show any detainees, included images of a kitchen, break room, restroom and shower facilities used by detainees.

Arnold would not disclose how many people were involved in Monday’s effort, citing security concerns.

— End Update —

This is almost certainly a Department of Homeland Security ENDGAME operation.

I hosted the document on Cryptogon:

U.S. Department of Homeland Security
Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement
ENDGAME
Office of Detention and
Removal Strategic Plan, 2003 - 2012
Detention and Removal Strategy for a Secure Homeland

Via: The Gazette:

More than 300 people here have already been arrested in what is being called the largest operation of its kind in Iowa, federal officials said this afternoon.

At 10 a.m., Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents entered Agriprocessors, Inc., as part of an ongoing investigation and to execute criminal search warrants for aggravated identify theft, fraudulent use of Social Security numbers and other crimes, as well as a civil search warrant to find people living illegally in the United States.

At a 2 p.m. news conference in Cedar Rapids, ICE spokesman Tim Counts said most of the arrests so far are for administrative immigration violations, although more information about the identities and jobs of those arrests are not being released at this time.

Those arrested are being held in Estel Hall at the National Cattle Congress grounds in Waterloo, until at least Wednesday night, he said. Estel Hall, also known as Cedar Valley Expo, serves as the grounds’ merchant showroom.

The Agriprocessors raid has already netted the largest number of arrests carried out at a single location, Counts said. He would not say whether other companies or locations will be involved in the raid.

“I can only talk about today,” Counts said. “We can’t comment on any future investigations or activities.”

Investigation into activity at Agriprocessors began in October 2007, said Matt Dummermuth, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Iowa. Officials would not answer more in-depth questions on the background of the raid or how it is being carried out.

ICE agents are asking detainees “several times” if they have medical, child care or other humanitarian needs, said Claude Arnold, ICE Special Agent in Charge. The interviews will help determine if those arrested will be detained or conditionally released on humanitarian grounds.

So far, 44 people have been released under supervision, mostly because they are the primary caregivers of children who have no other responsible adult to care for them.

Counts said the Department of Human Services was contacted before the raid began to provide services to families. A 24-hour information hot line at 1-866-341-3858 was established for family members to check on the status of the detainees.

An official update on the raid is expected at 10 a.m. tomorrow. Counts said 63 pages of the search warrants used in the raid have been released to explain more about the basis of the investigation, and government video of the inside of the holding facility is expected to be distributed.

Revisionist History: How Spin Works, with Dana Perino

2008-05-13T17:17:00.000-05:00

Scott Creighton
American Everyman
May 13, 2008

In a recent video, found on 911Blogger, here, a young journalism student asks White House Spokesperson Dana Perino, some questions about the seriously flawed 9/11 Commission.

If you go watch the short film, you will see that the film-maker backs up the young man’s claims with clips of cited MSM news reports lifted from CNN and the New York Times, as well as others.

But that isn’t why I call your attention to this piece.

At around 1:20 in the video, Dana skillfully disregards this young man’s query by suggesting he is simply being taken in by “spin” and then at around 2:40, she definitively states that he should remember that the country hasn’t been attacked since 9/11 and the no-one has died since as a result of “terrorism”. Perino’s obvious lie is becoming common knowledge in America.

If you read “Violent Islamist Extremism, The Internet, and the Homegrown Terrorist Threat: a report by The U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs” (that’s right HR 1955 is alive and well and operating, quietly, as we speak (headed by none other than Joe Lieberman, no less)), you will see that they too seem to have misplaced a little information on the track record of this current administration when they list three (now discredited) “homegrown terrorist “plots and plans” as reasons that we must remain vigilant and even step up the efforts to thwart “the extremists”.

What was Perinos and the Committees obvious lie?

“The 2001 anthrax attacks in the United States, also known as Amerithrax from its FBI case name, occurred over the course of several weeks beginning on September 18, 2001. Letters containing anthrax spores were mailed to several news media offices and two DemocraticU.S. Senators, killing five people and infecting 17 others. The crime remains unsolved.” From Wiki, here.

Now why is it that Perino wouldn’t consider this “an attack”, or that the Committee wouldn’t think to list it as a case of “homegrown terrorism”?

By definition terrorism is inflicting harm or the threat of harm onto a population to affect change either socially, politically, of economically through the use of fear. All the targets of these attacks were of one political party or media members that seemed, at the time, to support them. So, it would seem that the perpetrator of the attacks had a political goal in mind.

The Patriot Act was on the table and waiting to be voted on. It was shuffled in just days after 9/11 and had been written well before any planes hit their targets. Perhaps they don’t mention this terrorist attack because of this reason. It seems a little fishy, now doesn’t it?

or maybe they don’t mention it because of this:

“‘The DNA sequence of the anthrax sent through the US mail in 2001 has been revealed and confirms suspicions that the bacteria originally came from a US military laboratory.

The new work also shows that substantial genetic differences can emerge in two samples of an anthrax culture separated for only three years. This means the attacker’s anthrax was not separated from its ancestors at USAMRIID for many generations.‘ ” Wiki.

I am sure there are many reasons why Dana lies with impunity. That doesn’t surprise me. But what does surprise me is that if you read the letter written to Dana by one of the producers on the 9/11 Blogger site, you will see that he agrees with her (and thanks God) that there haven’t been any attacks since 9/11.

“It is true, we have not been attacked since September 11th, 2001, and thank God for that.”

No, young man, that isn’t true.

This case, as yet unsolved, is being placed in the WTC7 file labeled “unmentionable”. And now, even the critics and those that question the events of that day, are starting to forget the course of events as they actually played out.

And that is exactly what Perino’s bosses want. No discussion of the more delicate facts of what happened to bring us to this totalitarian state.

And as you can plainly see, it’s working.

If you run a site, or blog regularly at one, please feel free to put this up, or just do your own article on the the anthrax attacks of 2001 and the suspicious collapse of building 7. We cannot let this dishonest administration continue to redefine history any longer.

Nothing good will come of it. Of that I am sure.

Survey: Americans Are Strongly Opposed to the North American Union

2008-05-13T17:15:00.000-05:00

Barbara L. Minton
Natural News
May 13, 2008

Americans are catching on to the North American Union scheme and voicing their opposition. The right wing grassroots organization, American Policy Center (APC), has just concluded a survey of one million American households. The survey, titled "Do Americans Support a North American Union" asked a series of questions concerning the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) and the Trans Texas Corridor (TTC). Included with the survey was a four-page report prepared by APC entitled "NAU Fact Sheet", providing details about the SPP, the TTC, as well as an explanation of how these programs are being implemented without public scrutiny in meetings held behind closed doors, like the one just completed in New Orleans.

The chosen households represented no specific political ideological positions. They were from a wide variety of American households living in the direct path of the proposed Trans Texas/NAFTA Corridor, running from Mexico to Canada across the midsection of the U.S. — learn more at (http://www.naturalnews.com/023058.html) and (http://www.naturalnews.com/022974.html) .

The survey questions were:

1. Have you heard of the Security and Prosperity Partnership? 58 % of those responding said they did Not know about the SPP.

2. Do you think private corporations should have the power to enforce trade policy that may adversely affect our national sovereignty and independence? This question related directly to the establishment of public/private partnerships between private corporations and government, granting no-compete clauses and comprehensive development agreements which provide guarantees by government to the corporations as investment returns. The TTC is not a free enterprise, but is government sanctioned monopolies. As this question was explained by the APC, 95% of respondents Opposed such policy.

3. Chapter 11 of the NAFTA agreement states that disputes over NAFTA-related issues will be heard in NAFTA courts superseding U.S. local, state and federal courts, including the Supreme Court. Question three asked, Do you think this would be a threat to U.S. sovereignty? 91% of respondents said Yes.

4. The SPP calls for expanding the U.S. security perimeter to include the borders of Canada and Mexico. Question 4 asked, Do you think it would strengthen U.S. security to expand our borders to the outer borders of Canada and Mexico? 87% of respondents answered No.

5. Do you think it will strengthen U.S. Border security to allow trucks from Mexico and Canada to travel, free of inspection, up a corridor which has been built and is controlled by foreign corporations into the heartland of the United States? Texas Department of Transportation has already signed a 50-year agreement with a Spanish company named Cintra to build the TTC. In September of 2007, the Bush Administration started a pilot project to allow Mexican trucks to cross the U.S. border without inspections and be free to travel inside the United States. The Senate has also passed the omnibus spending bill that "was clearly written and designed to put the breaks on the current pilot program", according to Senator Byron Dorgan. Yet the Bush Administration, under the leadership of Transportation Secretary Mary Peters, continues the program, now in violation of federal law. 95% of respondents to this survey Opposed the Mexican truck project.

6. Would you support efforts to replace the U.S. dollar with a common North American currency some call the "Amero"? Though denied by the Bush Administration, there has been much discussion about the creation of a North American currency that would mimic the Euro. In an October, 2007 appearance on the Larry King Show on CNN, former Mexican President Fox answered in the affirmative when King asked about the creation of a united currency. 92% of respondents said they would Not support such a common North American currency.

7. Do you believe there should be public hearings and debate on this policy before it is allowed to move forward? So far, there has been no congressional legislation, hearings, or oversight concerning the establishment or operation of the SPP. No federal money has been officially allocated by Congress. No official authority has been provided for the creation of the SPP. 95% of respondents answered Yes, there should be debate and discussion with public participation. Americans believe it is wrong to make such significant national policy changes without debate and discussion.

8. Should the Bush Administration be allowed to move forward with its plans to create a "North American Community" without Congressional approval? Again, the American people have shown they understand that it is Congress which should decide such policy as this. They responded with a resounding 97% No to this question.

9. Do you believe the United States should be "harmonized" or merged into a union with Mexico and Canada? The words most often used by the Administration concerning the SPP are "harmonize" and "integrate". The U.S. is a representative Republic; Mexico is a socialist government; and Canada is part of the British Crown. There are no grounds for "harmonization" unless drastic changes are made to the U.S. judicial and financial systems. 88% said No to harmonization with Mexico and Canada.

10. Respondents were asked to provide comments and thoughts on the SPP. The word most often used was "treason". Another said, "I want no part of the social health care of Canada and I do not want to incorporate Mexico’s turmoil and poverty into our United States.". Many others said, "I want secure borders, not easy traffic between the U.S., Canada and Mexico. And another bluntly said, "Bush’s actions formulate a horrifying destruction of our proud nation". Many others used even stronger language. Once Americans learn about the SPP, they are clearly opposed.

In the face of this overwhelming opposition, on April 21-22, in yet another closed door meeting in New Orleans, President Bush and heads of state from Mexico and Canada continued to deny the SPP is anything more than a "dialogue" among the three nations.

Tom DeWeese, president of the American Policy Center, sees it differently. "As the Texas Department of Transportation signs an agreement with the Spanish company Cintra, containing no-compete clauses and guaranteed returns; as the Kansas City council loans $2.5 million to build the inland truck port called KC Smart Port; as the twenty SPP working groups continue to write policy; as the Mexican trucks roll over our borders; as high level meetings go on –- the Bush Administration dares to deny that Anything is happening. Why? The responses to APC’s survey show why. When Americans understand the truth, they say No in resounding numbers." Concludes De Weese, "Clearly the American people are overwhelmingly opposed to the harmonization of North America. We just want our country –- strong, independent and secure."

Complete Media Lockdown On Athens Bilderberg Meeting?

2008-05-13T17:13:00.000-05:00

Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Tuesday, May 13, 2008

A sole report from a small greek media outlet indicates that the annual Bilderberg meeting took place undetected over the weekend in Athens, Greece amidst a complete media lockdown.

However, veteran Bilderberg investigator Jim Tucker has suggested this report may be a ruse to deflect attention away from the group who could actually be meeting this coming weekend.

The alleged meeting could also have been a pre-conference steering session.

The articlefrom Patris.gr, (rough translation here) also carried a small picture (opposite) of some members of the elite group flanked by security. One of the men appears to be former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, a long time Bilderberger.

The report states:

In Greece (in a Vouliagmeni hotel), is currently happening, according to information, the world Congress of secret Club "Bilderberg", which is brought proapofasj’zej for the chances of world, but also this is where Prime Ministers are nominated. It should be stressed, that according to the infamy that circulates round the club Bilderberg, they play for some reason, the role of an ‘informal world government’.

Jim Tucker has told Infowars that he has not yet received 100% confirmation from his sources regarding the situation with the 2008 Bilderberg Group meeting.

Though not unheard of, Bilderberg usually convene at the end of May into early June. The 2005 meeting in Germany was in early May but every other meeting in the last ten years has been later in the month of May or in early June.

Another Bilderberg investigator Tony Gosling of www.Bilderberg.org, explained how difficult it has been to pin down the elite power brokers this year:

This year was the most difficult ever to discover where and when Bilderberg is met. Intelligence gathered indicated the 2008 conference would take place in Greece on one of the first two weekends in May. We failed to positively identify the date and location before this year’s ‘private’ meeting of the Nazi-founded (Prince Bernhard) handful of people who control most of the money in the world.

Not since the early 1990s has the group’s meeting gone completely undetected in some form.

Speculation suggested that this years meeting would be held in Lisbon, Portugal to coincide with the impending ratification of the Lisbon Treaty, the new name for essentially the same EU Constitution that was previously rejected by European voters.

Others predicted that the meeting would be held somewhere within the US to coincide with a recent meeting of the Trilateral Commission, the private organization, established by David Rockefeller, of which many Bilderbergers are also members.

The alleged location of the past weekend’s meeting, if it indeed did take place, in Vouliagmeni near Athens, would mean a repeat of the 1993 meeting which took place in the same area.

We are still awaiting confirmation of the actual hotel involved, however it is likely that it would have been The Nafsika Astir Palace (pictured), which was used by the group in 1993.

From www.hotelsofgreece.com:

The Nafsika Astir Palace is hidden from view, except from the sea, being built along the pine-dotted cliffside. Thus the reception area is on ground level and the rooms, each with its own spacious and secluded veranda facing the bay, stretch down to the Olympic-size swimming pool and private beach at sea level. It has 163 rooms including the Presidential Suite, one Executive Suite and 8 Junior Suites and also houses the Business Center and the largest conference room of the resort. It is considered ideal for gala dinners and theme parties, which can be held by the pool or in one of the two restaurants.

In 2006 Alex Jones traveled to Ottawa, Canada after gaining intelligence that the Bilderberg meeting would take place there. Jones and his team were detained by Canadian immigration on orders of the Bilderberg Group for a 15 hour nightmare of interrogation, accusations and threats of arrests in anticipation of the conference.

However, Jones made it to the Brookestreet Hotel in Ottawa, met up with Jim Tucker and Daniel Estulin, author of The True Story of the Bilderberg Group, and captured footage that would later appear in his seminal film Endgame.

It was mainly due to the efforts of the three activists combined that elements of the Canadian media produced a rash of reports about the Ottawa meeting.

Media moguls who attend Bilderberg, such as Washington Post CEO and Chairman Donald E. Graham, swear an oath of secrecy and fulfil a promise each year to omit any coverage of Bilderberg from their news outlets.

2007 saw the elite confab head to Istanbul in Turkey under an increased media lockdown.

Insiders at Istanbul revealed that the Bilderberg agenda for 2007/2008 included a hiking of oil prices towards the $200 mark, something that seemed unbelievable at the time but is now predicted to happen by analysts and corporate heads before the end of the year.

The fact that the group has managed to evade detection this year indicates they have ratcheted up the secrecy level even more in response to recent exposure they have received at the hands of Jones, Tucker and Estulin.

The Ordinary Face of Everyday Evil

2008-05-13T17:03:00.002-05:00

Pro Libertate
May 13, 2008




Havin’ a good time, guys? SWAT operators wearing Nazi-style bucket-head helmets enjoy a mirthful moment on the YZF Ranch as child "protection" workers prepare to kidnap the FLDS community’s children.

What stuck in the minds of these men who had become murderers was simply the notion of being involved in something historic, grandiose, unique ("a great task that occurs once in two thousand years"), which must therefore be difficult to bear. This was important, because the murderers were not sadists or killers by nature; on the contrary, a systematic effort was made to weed out all those who derived physical pleasure from what they did….

Hence the problem was how to overcome not so much their conscience as the animal pity by which all normal men are affected in the presence of physical suffering. The trick used by Himmler — who apparently was rather strongly afflicted by these instinctive reactions himself — was very simple and probably very effective; it consisted in turning these instincts around, as it were, in directing them toward the self. So that instead of saying: What horrible things I did to people!, the murderers would be able to say: What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders!

Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil




The unremarkable face of unspeakable evil: A Sheriff’s Deputy stands ready to use whatever force may be required to compel an FLDS mother to surrender her children to the State.

Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends… [I]n periods when millions are slaughtered, when torture is practiced, starvation enforced, oppression made a policy, as at present over a large part of the world, and as it has often been in the past, it must be at the behest of very many good people, and even by their direct action, for what they consider a worthy object.

Isabel Patterson, “The Humanitarian With the Guillotine,” from The God of the Machine, 1943

Terry Secrest, a 54-year-old social worker from Austin, Texas, is having a hard time sleeping at night. Many of her professional associates share that affliction, and for the same reason: Like Secrest, they have been assigned or have volunteered to work with mothers from the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS) whose children have been stolen from them at gunpoint.




	Terry Secrest

Mrs. Secrest and her colleagues and, from all indications, essentially decent people. The same is probably true of the hundreds of people mobilized by the State of Texas to carry out this scheme of mass child abduction under the color of "compassionate" care.

Stipulating that all of us are fallen, flawed, sinful people, it’s still true that, as Isabel Patterson pointed out decades ago, there just aren’t that many genuinely wretched and vicious people in the world (in proportionate terms, of course).

It’s likely that nearly every individual involved in the seizure of the FLDS children — from those who passed along what was, in all likelihood, known to be a bogus phone call from a "victim" of domestic abuse at the FYZ ranch, to the overgrown adolescents in SWAT regalia a who participated in the paramilitary assault on the religious community, to the CPS workers who used threats, lies, manipulation, and finally brute force to steal more than 400 children from mothers who loved them — believed himself or herself to be animated by the purest motives on behalf of a worthy object.

And yet, at least some of them are now suffering long-deferred misgivings about their actions.

"Experts" — ah, yes, those emissaries from some transcendent realm — "say many of those professionals [working with FLDS mothers and children] may be suffering from secondary traumatic stress, a condition that affects people working with victims of trauma," reports the Austin American-Statesman. "Symptoms include anxiety, sleeplessness, nightmares and intrusive thoughts."

One source of this unexpected emotional turmoil is found in the fact that while social workers generally can offer at least a plausible explanation for the seizure of children from their homes, in this case "they didn’t know the details of the investigation or what led up to the mass removals," explains Vicki Hansen, executive director of the Texas chapter for the National Association of Social Workers.

"These workers are used to going into homes where things are really bad and feeling good about moving children from risk and danger," Hansen continues. "This situation is completely different. To look at the mothers and children, you would see love and affection and bonds, plus children who appear to be in good physical condition. It was wrenching to pull children away from their mothers."

Not surprisingly, at least some of the FLDS mothers are "showing signs of post-traumatic stress disorder, such as having flashbacks of the raid on their ranch," as well as increasing anxiety over the prospect of never seeing their children again.

For the suffering of the mothers — entirely understandable, given the criminal violence inflicted on their families — there is little official sympathy. Most of it has been directed, Himmler-style, at those who committed that criminal violence, or who have been required to clean up the mess once the deed was done.

This spectacle of inverted sympathy is both familiar and disgusting. It must be said, however, that beneath the emotional contrivances there is an elemental truth — the irrepressible human conscience. At least some of those involved in this massive crime are suffering because the capacity to identify good and evil has yet to be seared from their souls.




	Handiwork of the "rescuers": A ruined safe, its contents seized by the armed "law enforcement" officers who raided the FLDS religious community, lies discarded on the floor. Elsewhere kids’ rooms were ransacked and their private possessions rifled by the raiders. Odd, isn’t it, how often "law enforcement" actions resemble acts of routine criminal thuggery?

Once this is understood, the key question becomes: Why didn’t anybody do something to stop this crime, before it was consummated?

Of the hundreds, or thousands, of people implicated in this crime, there must be at least a few dozen as decent as Mrs. Secrest appears to be. Why were they silent?

What might have happened if only one of the many people called upon to executive the raid on YFZ ranch have said, "I’m sorry — but this just isn’t right"? Granted, there were probably many others willing to take the place of anybody who suffered a sudden attack of conscience. Still, under the right circumstances, the refusal to carry out patently illegal orders can become contagious. Unfortunately, although Mrs. Secrest and some other social workers display all the symptoms of coming down with a painful case of decent shame, the people who ordered and carried out the raid and abduction seem to have developed an immunity.

There is at least one other group of people who tried to do something to stop the criminal assault on the FLDS mothers and children while it was in progress — and the treatment they received reveals a great deal about the mechanisms of organized evil that carried out this abominable act.

After the FLDS children were seized at gunpoint from their eccentric but loving mothers, they were confined — imprisoned, really — in temporary shelters under the control of the Texas Department of Child Protective Services. Employees of the Hill Country Community Mental Health-Mental Retardation Center (MHMR) were assigned to help the CPS see to the needs of the abducted children and their mothers.

As medical professionals bound by an exacting ethical code, the MHMR personnel understood their task to be to look out for the best interests of the children as individuals. The CPS officials, by way of contrast, work for the State, which meant that their prime directive was to uphold the interests of that monstrosity. If in doing so their actions were to the benefit of the children and mothers of YFZ ranch, so much the better; if not, those under CPS control would simply have to suffer in the interests of the "greater good" — as defined by the State, naturally.

These conflicting visions resulted in predictable tensions between the humanitarians of the MHMR, and the collectivists from the CPS, and those tensions were resolved in predictable fashion: The State officials first forced the mental health workers to sign non-disclosure agreements, and then threatened to have the state’s hired thugs arrest any medical professionals accused of "interfering" with the CPS officials.

Oh my stars and garters! Who would ever want to "interfere" with the CPS — that cadre of self-sacrificing public servants, pure of motive and overflowing with supernal compassion?

At least nine of the MHMR employees assigned to help CPS care for the FLDS children, that’s who.

They described the needless and illegal seizure of the FLDS children as an atrocity, and the treatment of the children in CPS custody as an exercise in gratuitous cruelty.

Notes the Houston Chronicle: "All nine reports [from MHMR staffers] expressed varying degrees of anger toward the state’s child welfare agency for removing the children from their communit, separating them from their mothers or for the way CPS workers conducted themselves at the shelter."

"I have worked in Domestic Violence/Sexual Abuse programming for over 20 years and have never seen women and children treated this poorly, not to mention their civil rights being disregarded in this manner," wrote one MHMR worker. Others described how CPS employees routinely and deliberately lied to the mothers in order to make it easier to consummate the plan to kidnap the children. Several of the mental health professionals reported that CPS denied the mothers access to legal counsel.

Anybody familiar with conditions in a day-care center knows how they quickly become incubators for sickness. So it’s not surprising that cramming several hundred children (even exceptionally clean and healthy children) into a makeshift shelter in a sports stadium resulted in an outbreak of chicken pox and upper respiratory infections.

It’s tempting to think that this demonstrates the "good enough for government work" ineptitude of Texas CPS — but some MHMR workers believe that the CPS deliberately created these conditions as a form of low-intensity biological warfare: "The more uncomfortable [the children were]," one mental health professional wrote in disgust, "the more CPS thought they would talk" about the abuse they had supposedly suffered.

Had a parent deliberately exposed his children to highly communicable childhood diseases as a psychological manipulation tactic, the children would be seized from him and he would probably wind up in prison. But the Texas CPS saw nothing amiss in torturing other people’s children — having just recently nursed three of my children through severe bouts of the chicken pox, I think the word "torture" applies here — and they wouldn’t countenance any criticism of their methods. One report pointed out that "The entire MH support staff was `fired’ the second week; we were sent home due to being `too compassionate.’"

Referring to the reports from MHMR staff, submitted anonymously because of the non-disclosure agreement, hospital board chairman John Kite remarked: "We were literally astounded at what they told us. They are trampling all over human decency and those people’s civil rights…. We should not just sit here and watch it happen."

To the considerable credit of the MHMR staffers, they were more than merely passive witnesses to acts of surpassing viciousness. But unless something is done, very soon, to return these children to their mothers and punish those responsible for conceiving and carrying out this crime, the outrage expressed by Mr. Kite and the anonymous whistle-blowers will quickly dissipate without leaving so much as a stain on the drab, gray edifice of the official child "protection" bureaucracy.

When one thinks of it, the official color of collectivist evil is not Marxist red or fascist black; it is bureaucratic gray. Evil makes plentiful use of banners drenched in red or saturated in black, of course. But its real work is carried out within the warrens of official bureaucracy, with the eager help of normal, upstanding people who crave the safe anonymity of cooperation, and don’t have the courage to make themselves conspicuous by naming officially approved evil for what it is.




A symbol of obvious evil — But it was the phlegmatic evil of Senator Palpatine, not the flamboyant evil of Darth Maul, that was the real Menace.

Our conditioned expectations of evil lead us to look for the lurid and obvious, rather than the mundane and unexceptional. We are taught to expect evil to come in the guise of the Bizarre Outsider — a visibly deranged dictator with an odd haircut, or people from a socially isolated sect who wear funny clothes and eschew popular culture.

But wrapping our expectations about evil in such convenient packaging can be deadly. Yes, there are times when Evil gives us due notice by following the accepted blueprint, and incarnating itself in the frothing tyrant or the dead-eyed cult leader.

But a figure of that sort is a mere catalyst for the evil that coalesces out of the collective efforts of common people — many of whom are otherwise decent people who believe in the principle of absolution through mass conformity. It’s because we expect that Evil will always materialize as a leering apparition that we become blind to the ordinary face of everyday evil.

Photos courtesy of captivefldschildren.org

Layoffs Rise 68 Percent in April

2008-05-02T06:50:00.003-05:00

Reuters
May 1, 2008

NEW YORK (May 1) - U.S. companies’ planned layoffs jumped 68 percent in April from the prior month to the highest since September 2006, pointing to further deterioration in the labor market, a report showed on Thursday.

Planned job cuts in U.S. companies totaled 90,015 last month, up from 53,579 in March and up 27 percent from a year earlier, employment consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. reported.

The April layoffs were the steepest since the 100,315 cuts announced in September 2006.

Most of the announced job cuts came from the financial sector, due to the housing slump and about $300 billion in write-downs on bad mortgages and investments, the firm said.

The financial services industry announced 23,106 cuts in April with almost half of them occurring in a two-day period that saw hefty planned layoffs from Citigroup (C.N) and Merrill Lynch (MER.N), it said.

The telecommunications sector was second in announced layoffs in April with 8,007, followed closely by 7,954 planned cuts in the transportation industry.

Employers have announced 290,671 jobs to be eliminated in the first four months of 2008, up 9 percent from the 266,658 cuts recorded during the same span in 2007, the firm said.

Going forward, the fallout from record oil prices may result in more layoffs than the housing slump, John A. Challenger, chief executive officer of Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

"The impact of high gasoline prices is rippling through the economy much faster than the housing collapse ever did or will," Challenger said in a statement.

The Lords of Capital Decree Mass Death by Starvation

2008-05-02T06:50:00.001-05:00

Glen Ford
Counter Currents
May 1, 2008

“No amount of emergency aid is sufficient to make up for the wild price rises that have already occurred.”

Fidel Castro called biofuels “genocide,” and he was right. And there can be no question as to the identity of the perpetrators of this global genocide: the Lords of Capital that formulate the foreign and domestic policy of the United States. That policy calls for 20 million acres of corn from states like Iowa to be converted from food to fuel. As should have been expected, such a massive diversion almost immediately pushed up the price of all other basic foodstuffs - a global disaster made quick and easy by the fact that, over the past several decades, planetary food production has been taken over by agribusiness - the speculative human parasites that control how food is bought and sold, and to whom, and for what purpose. These Lords of Capital are killers on a mass scale.

“Hot” money has totally distorted the “marketplace” for life-sustaining goods, causing millions of the desperately poor in scores of countries to take to the streets. “In less than a year,” writes the Guardian newspaper, in Britain, “the price of wheat has risen 130 per cent, soya by 87 per cent and rice by 74 per cent.”

These are nothing less than crimes against humanity, and cannot help but destroy the lives of millions who are already at the very edge of the precipice.

“The Lords of Capital have imposed a triage of death by starvation on the planet.”

The so-called “market” - which is actually a club of super-rich men who distort and destroy everything of value to humanity that they touch - will be the death of us all, and much quicker than through the effects of global warming, which is also greatly accelerated by the ghoulish, greedy rush to grow food for cars rather than people. In such a murderous environment -manipulated purely for the profits of the Lords of Capital - neither trees nor peasants stand a chance. The United Nations says it needs about half a billion dollars for the most critical cases of starvation, but no amount of emergency aid is sufficient to make up for the wild price rises that have already occurred - and which will put trillions in the pockets of the Lords of Capital.

Agribusiness wiped out small farmers in the U.S., and impoverished and pushed off the land untold millions of peasants, worldwide. Now the Lords of Capital have imposed a triage of death by starvation on the planet. The people who live on two dollars or less per day will have to die, and then, as prices rise, the three dollar people will follow.

The men who profit from such mass murder use terms like “structural adjustment” and “economic fundamentals” to attach a veneer of rationality to a chaotic system they have created on the fly for the sole purpose of mega-theft. In the end, the Lords of Capital have mastered only one art: the production of overlapping calamities, each more lethal than the last. Soon, if not already, the Haitian poor will have no cooking oil to mix with clay for their diet of dirt pies. The Lords of Capital will have turned them into dirt for another Haitian’s consumption and demise.

DC Madam Predicted She Would Be Suicided

2008-05-02T06:48:00.001-05:00

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Thursday, May 1, 2008

Click here to listen to Palfrey clearly state that she would not commit suicide.

DC Madam Deborah Jeane Palfrey predicted she would be "suicided" on several occasions both recently and as far back as 17 years ago - comments that now appear ominous in light of the announcement that the former head of a Washington escort service allegedly killed herself today.

"If taken into custody, my physical safety and most probably my very life would be jeopardized," she wrote in August 1991 following an attempt to bring her to trial, "Rape, beating, maiming, disfigurement and more than likely murder disguised in the form of just another jailhouse accident or suicide would await me," said Palfrey in a handwritten letter to the judge accusing the San Diego police vice squad of having a vendetta against her.

During several recent appearances on The Alex Jones Show, Palfrey also said that she was at risk of being killed and that authorities would make it look like suicide. She made it clear that she was not suicidal and if she was found dead it would be murder.

Palfrey had threatened to release the names of well-known clients of her upscale call girl ring in the nation’s capitol, and had indicated that Dick Cheney may be one of them.

"We now know it goes at least as high as a United States Senator," Palfrey told The Alex Jones Show, "I’m hearing rumors now from other people that there are other possibilities in that stratosphere so to speak, on that level."

"No I’m not planning to commit suicide," Palfrey told The Alex Jones Show on her last appearance in July, "I’m planning on going into court and defending myself vigorously and exposing the government," she said.

"Blanche Palfrey had no sign that her daughter was suicidal, and there was no immediate indication that alcohol or drugs were involved, police Capt. Jeffrey Young said," according to an AP report.

Click here to listen to Palfrey clearly state that she would not commit suicide.

Click here to listen to the entirety of the last interview with Palfrey.

UPDATE: In an almost uncanny development, as soon as this article started to go viral on the Internet, Time Magazine released a story claiming that Palfrey told author Dan Moldea that she would rather commit suicide than go to jail. What a funny coincidence!

FLASHBACK: D.C. Madame: "Big Names" May Be On Client List

Developing…..

Oliver North: Rev. Wright “A Recruiting Campaign for Al Qaeda And All The Enemies Of America”

2008-05-02T06:46:00.001-05:00

News Hounds
May 1, 2008

In the second-to-last segment of an entire Hannity & Colmes show devoted to Rev. Jeremiah Wright last night (4/29/08), convicted liar Oliver North (his conviction was later overturned on appeal) joined race-obsessed Sean Hannity in the Rev. Wright pile-on. Instead of the racial angle that Hannity harps on, North accused Wright of being “a recruiting camaign for Al Qaeda and all the enemies of America.” With video.

Hannity has spent night after night attacking Wright but when Wright complained at the National Press Club that Oliver North, as part of the Iran Contra scandal, sold arms to the Contras who were killing the peasants and indigenous peoples, Hannity got on his Hanctimonious high horse and declared, “There he is, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, taking a shot at our own friend, Col. Oliver North!”

North and Hannity were full of bullboy swagger about being proud of being attacked by Wright.

With hammy outrage, Hannity said, “He attacked me in a eulogy at a funeral, for crying out loud!”

Funny, but Hannity had no compunction about smearing his supposed friend, Rev. Joseph Lowery and his eulogy for Coretta Scott King because Hannity thought it too critical of President Bush.

North hyperbolically said, “("Wright) has gone after everything that is good and decent in America.”

Hannity, never one to slavishly stick to the facts when he’s on a smear campaign, claimed that Wright had “basically” accused North of “murder and atrocities.”

"Patriotic" North added, "And what this man has become is a recruiting campaign for Al Qaeda and all the enemies of America.”

Kudos to Alan Colmes for stepping up to the plate and telling North “This is an effort to just blast Obama, blast Wright, denounce these people when they have done nothing wrong.”

Colmes continued, “Was there an Iran Contra scandal? Was he right about that?"

North agreed there was, then neatly sidestepped the issue by saying, “Nobody ever accused me of murder.”

North continued, “The reality of life is that America supported Democratic movements all over the world and we did so in Nicaragua and thank God they won.” In other words, he has no regrets about what he did.

Referring to the accusations against Obama for serving on a board with former radical William Ayers, Colmes pointed out that Bush 41 sits on the board of The Carlyle Group with a member of the Bin Laden family. “Do we go after him for that? …Do we play that game of guilt by association?”

Then North went on to smear Wright for having bought “about a $10 million mansion in an all white neighborhood.” That kind of puts the lie to his being a racist, eh? But somehow North missed that.

“Good for him,” Colmes said. “Aren’t you a capitalist?”

North said, “I certainly am, but I don’t do it on a public charity”

Oh, yes he does! His Freedom Alliance charity was given an F last year for its meager spending on veterans relative to the monies received. Furthermore, out of the hefty ticket price charged for the so-called "benefit" Freedom Concerts that Hannity puts on for North’s charity each year, less than 1% goes to the charity.

CIA Chief Sees Unrest Rising With Population

2008-05-02T06:44:00.000-05:00

By Joby Warrick

Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 1, 2008; Page A15

Swelling populations and a global tide of immigration will present new security challenges for the United States by straining resources and stoking extremism and civil unrest in distant corners of the globe, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said in a speech yesterday.

The population surge could undermine the stability of some of the world's most fragile states, especially in Africa, while in the West, governments will be forced to grapple with ever larger immigrant communities and deepening divisions over ethnicity and race, Hayden said.

Hayden, speaking at Kansas State University, described the projected 33 percent growth in global population over the next 40 years as one of three significant trends that will alter the security landscape in the current century. By 2050, the number of humans on Earth is expected to rise from 6.7 billion to more than 9 billion, he said.

"Most of that growth will occur in countries least able to sustain it, a situation that will likely fuel instability and extremism, both in those countries and beyond," Hayden said.

With the population of countries such as Niger and Liberia projected to triple in size in 40 years, regional governments will be forced to rapidly find food, shelter and jobs for millions, or deal with restive populations that "could be easily attracted to violence, civil unrest, or extremism," he said.

European countries, many of which already have large immigrant communities, will see particular growth in their Muslim populations while the number of non-Muslims will shrink as birthrates fall. "Social integration of immigrants will pose a significant challenge to many host nations -- again boosting the potential for unrest and extremism," Hayden said.

The CIA director also predicted a widening gulf between Europe and North America on how to deal with security threats, including terrorism. While U.S. and European officials agree on the urgency of the terrorism threat, there is a fundamental difference -- a "transatlantic divide" -- over the solution, he said.

While the United States sees the fight against terrorism as a global war, European nations perceive the terrorist threat as a law enforcement problem, he said.

"They tend not to view terrorism as we do, as an overwhelming international challenge. Or if they do, we often differ on what would be effective and appropriate to counter it," Hayden said. He added that he could not predict "when or if" the two sides could forge a common approach to security.

A third security trend highlighted by Hayden was the emergence of China as a global economic and military powerhouse, pursuing its narrow strategic and political interests. But Hayden said China's increasing prominence need not be perceived as a direct challenge to the United States.

"If Beijing begins to accept greater responsibility for the health of the international system, as all global powers should, we will remain on a constructive, even if competitive, path," he said. "If not, the rise of China begins to look more adversarial."

CBS News: US Prepares Iran Attack

2008-05-01T07:47:00.001-05:00