The National Electronic Vaccine Tracking Registry

BARBARA LOE FISHER
National Vaccine Information Center
Monday October 22, 2007

History of Mandatory Vaccination
Immunization laws in the US are not federal, but state mandates. The authority of U.S. states to promulgate regulations which protect the public health and safety is well established, having historical roots in health regulations created in the colonial states during the 18th century. A seminal Supreme Court decision in 1905, Jacobsen v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 (1905), affirmed the authority of state legislatures to assign "police powers" to health officials to enact quarantines and enforce mandatory vaccination laws to prevent epidemics. Although the historic and legal precedent for state authority to enact and enforce mandatory vaccination laws is clear, it is not without legal limitations and ethical imperatives.

State public health laws in the U.S. can be traced back to the 18th and 19th centuries when unpredictable epidemics of highly contagious, dangerous diseases such as yellow fever, typhoid fever and smallpox would sweep through crowded, unsanitary port cities after diseased immigrants would disembark from boats and infect the community. Eventually volunteer citizen committees formed to quarantine the boats entering the harbors for weeks until those disembarking were certified "disease-free."

At the turn of the century, after doctors had taken over these volunteer citizen committees and funding from taxes supported the beginnings of a state and national public health infrastructure, the first state vaccination laws were enacted by legislatures at the urging of physician public health officials. Soon the idea of quarantining those with infection during epidemics extended to those who were not vaccinated, such as excluding unvaccinated children from school during smallpox epidemics.

The Supreme Court Speaks in 1905
In 1905, a man named Jacobsen and his son sued the state of Massachusetts for requiring them to get a second smallpox vaccination or pay a $55 fine. Jacobsen refused to get re-vaccinated or pay the fine, claiming he and his son had had a bad reaction to a previous smallpox vaccination and were afraid they would be injured or die by a second one. Jacobsen maintained that forcing him to be revaccinated was "an assault upon his person" and violated his Constitutional rights.

The Supreme Court rejected the evidence Jacobsen presented to show that the smallpox vaccination can cause injury and death and that doctors cannot distinguish between those who will be harmed and those who won't be harmed by the vaccination. The Court concluded "The matured opinions of medical men everywhere, and the experience of mankind, as all must know, negate the suggestion that it is not possible in any case to determine whether vaccination is safe."

The fact that the nine Supreme Court justices at the turn of the century did not have accurate medical information upon which to base their precedent-setting decision is as understandable as it is unfortunate. It has been proven in the succeeding 94 years, most recently in the U.S. Claims Court in Washington, D.C., where more than 1 billion dollars has been awarded to some 1,000 American families whose children have died or been injured from the adverse effects of childhood vaccines, that often doctors cannot predict ahead of time which children will react to vaccines and die or be left with mental retardation, medication-resistant seizure disorders, learning disabilities, chronic arthritis, paralysis or other immune deficiencies and brain damage.

Between 12,000 and 14,000 reports of hospitalizations, injuries and deaths following vaccination are made to the government's Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) every year, yet it is estimated that fewer than one percent of all doctors report serious health problems which occur following drug or vaccine administration. The fact that genetic and other as yet unidentified biological factors can place some individuals at higher risk for vaccine-induced injury and death calls into question the constitutionality of a one-size-fits-all forced vaccination policy that does not take into account individual biological differences.

This is a critical point in measuring the consequences of assigning police powers to public health officials for the purpose of enforcing vaccination, particularly in cases where parents suspect their children are at increased risk for reacting to vaccines even though health officials, anxious to achieve a 100 percent vaccination rate, disagree. In their opinion, the 1905 Supreme Court justices acknowledged that vaccination must not be forced on a person whose physical condition would make vaccination "cruel and inhuman to the last degree. We are not to be understood as holding that the statute was intended to be applied in such a case or, if it was so intended, that the judiciary would not be competent to interfere and protect the health and life of the individual concerned."

Therefore, when interpreting Jacobsen v. Massachusetts in 1999 it is important to remember that, although the Court stated that states may enact "such reasonable regulations established directly by legislative enactment as will protect the public health and the public safety," the Court also made it clear that mandatory vaccination laws must not be applied unreasonably so as to result in harm to individuals. When public health officials in 1999 make the argument for government-forced vaccination, they often omit mention of this signal by the US Supreme Court that the state does not have the right to command that an individual sacrifice his or her life in the name of the public health.

What, then, did the 1905 Supreme Court mean when it went on to declare that "it was the duty of constituted authorities primarily to keep in view the welfare, comfort and safety of the many, and not permit the interests of the many to be subordinated to the wishes or convenience of the few"? The "wishes or convenience" of the few certainly does not translate into the "lives" of the few, but, nevertheless, the historical context in which this declaration was made is extremely important.

Utilitarianism and Sacrifice of Individuals
In 1905, the political doctrine known as "utilitarianism" was a popular philosophical tenet which had been developed by a 19th century British philosopher and science devotee, Jeremy Bentham. A consequentialist theory, utilitarianism judges the rightness or wrongness of an action by its consequences and holds that an action that is moral or ethical results in the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. With its emphasis on numbers of people, Bentham created utilitarianism primarily as a guide to state legislative policy. Karl Marx used utilitarian principles to formulate his economic theories, while modern cost benefit analyses are also descendents of utilitarianism.
In 1927, the renowned American jurist Oliver Wendall Holmes embraced the utilitarian rationale when he used Jacobsen v. Massachusetts to justify the forced sterilization of a mentally retarded woman to, in effect, protect the public welfare. Writing for the majority in a 8-1 Supreme Court decision, Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927), Holmes said "The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes."

Not long after, Hitler would embrace the same kind of rationalization used by Holmes in that stunning 1927 legal opinion and go on to pursue his own brand of social engineering to eliminate from society those individuals deemed by the Third Reich to be genetically defective or inferior. At the Doctor's Trial at Nuremberg after World War II, physicians employed by the German state forwarded a utilitarian defense to justify euthanasia of the mentally and physically handicapped and the conducting of medical experiments on individuals without their informed consent. They maintained that the sacrifice of some individuals would improve or save the lives of many. It was at the Nuremberg Trial in 1947 that the full measure of the tragic moral failure of utilitarianism was finally revealed.

The Public Health Empire
The statements made by the Supreme Court in 1905 must be viewed in their historical context to be interpreted reasonably and judiciously in 1999. What is undeniable is that Jacobsen v Massachusetts, which confirmed the right of state legislatures to assign police powers to physicians employed by the state, has been used by state and federal health officials to build a powerful and massive public health infrastructure in the US during this century. This public health infrastructure and operation of the mass vaccination system within it is fueled by billions of tax dollars as well as funding by a pharmaceutical industry eager to capitalize on government-forced purchase of its vaccines by all citizens.

Operating as an independent executive authority with funding from, but little oversight by, the legislative branches of government, this public health empire created by government health officials has seen its most dramatic growth in the last 25 years. Its power over and reach into the life of every American now threatens our privacy, our liberty and the biological integrity of our children and grandchildren.

Nowhere is this threat more evident than in the creation of a national, government operated vaccine tracking registry system that will tag all American citizens with a national ID number at birth and track their movements throughout life for the express purpose of enforcing vaccination with all government-endorsed vaccines. It was the desire by government health officials to enforce citizen compliance with mandatory vaccination laws that first created the need for a National ID number and the national electronic medical records database promoted by the Clinton Administration in 1993.

An Abuse of Police Powers
And yet, even the most zealous interpretation of Jacobsen v. Massachusetts can come to the conclusion that this invasion of privacy and threat to individual liberty constitutes an abuse of the police powers originally assigned to public health officials by state legislatures to protect the public from smallpox epidemics. Today, public health officials are using Jacobsen v. Massachusetts to force vaccination of all children with 33 doses of 10 viral and bacterial vaccines by age five for childhood diseases as benign as chicken pox and diarrhea, and for hard-to-catch adult diseases transmitted through contaminated blood like hepatitis B. Waiting in the wings are several hundred new vaccines being created in government and drug company labs using live viruses and genetically engineered bacteria often grown on human or animal cell tissue cultures to theoretically prevent everything from ear infections, stomach ulcers and the common cold to herpes, gonorrhea, and HIV. Most, if not all, are being slated by public health officials for future use by all children when drug companies put them on the market.

As the use of multiple vaccines to suppress all infectious diseases increases, so do the rates of chronic illness such as asthma, learning disabilities, attention deficit disorder, autism, juvenile diabetes, multiple sclerosis, chronic fatigue and other autoimmune and neurological dysfunctions which have crippled many children and young adults during the past few decades. The price this and future generations will pay for unrestricted police powers wielded by government health officials forcing vaccination in a vacuum of scientific knowledge is as yet unknown, but landmark reports published in 1991 and 1994 by the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences are revealing.
Committees of non-government, non-industry physician experts reviewed the medical literature for evidence that vaccines can cause injury and death and confirmed that the DTP (Diphtheria-Tetanus-Pertussis) vaccine can cause acute brain inflammation and permanent brain damage that ranges from learning disorders to severe and profound mental retardation; the DT (Diphtheria-Tetanus) vaccine can cause Guillain-Barre syndrome, including death, as well as brachial neuritis; the rubella vaccine can cause acute and chronic arthritis; the live oral polio vaccine can give polio to the person being vaccinated or to someone who comes into contact with that person's body fluids; and the MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) vaccine can cause shock and death from measles vaccine strain viral infection. But because there were so few scientific studies investigating vaccine-induced immune and brain dysfunction in existence, the Committee was not able to properly evaluate a long list of vaccine-associated health problems, such as diabetes and multiple sclerosis, and concluded:
The lack of adequate data regarding many of the [vaccine] adverse events under study was of major concern…. The committee encountered many gaps and limitations in knowledge bearing directly or indirectly on the safety of vaccines. These include inadequate understanding of the biologic mechanisms underlying adverse events following natural infection or immunization, insufficient or inconsistent information from case reports and case series…and inadequate size or length of follow-up of many population-based epidemologic studies.

A Political Agenda
Although Congress passed the Immunization Assistance Act in 1965, setting up categorical grant programs to states to provide federal funds to purchase vaccines for public health clinics and establish immunization programs, it was not until Dale Bumpers became Governor of Arkansas in 1971 that the idea of using vaccination as a political tool became fashionable. In 1973, he and his wife, Betty, enlisted the help of the media and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and then called out the Arkansas National Guard to vaccinate every child in Arkansas.

The national publicity generated by that action helped to catapult Bumpers to the US Senate in 1974. In 1976, when Jimmy Carter was elected President, it was Dale and Betty who persuaded Jimmy and Rosalyn and HHS Secretary Joe Califano to map out a nationwide campaign to enforce vaccination laws. Bumpers explained, "Betty went over to see Rosalyn and talked to her about it and said 'You know, this is something the President can do so that when he runs for reelection, he can say the government did it.' Because you know, the government was in such disrepute, nobody thought the government could do anything."

Bumpers was successful in doubling annual federal appropriations for vaccine programs from $14.5 million to $33 million in 1978 and to $46 million in 1979, and by 1989 vaccine appropriations hit $141 million. On June 14, 1999, President Clinton announced the establishment of the Dale and Betty Bumpers Vaccine Research Center, with $200 million in annual funding. Clinton said "Until an AIDS vaccine is tested and approved, it will remain the primary mission of the Dale and Betty Bumpers Vaccine Research Center…. I look forward to the day when I can come back here...heralding another great vaccine achievement for mankind, the end of AIDS."

In 1997, Clinton issued a public challenge to government and industry scientists to put a vaccine for AIDS on the market by 2007. That same year, a member of the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, the federal committee that sets national vaccine policy, publicly reminded government and industry HIV vaccine developers to test the candidate AIDS vaccines in children because a future AIDS vaccine will be targeted for use in all 12-year-old children.

A 1986 Law To Eliminate Liability
After national publicity in 1982 with the broadcast of the NBC-TV documentary DPT: Vaccine Roulette informing the public about DPT vaccine risks, the vaccine manufacturers and physician organizations lobbied Congress for legislation to protect them from vaccine injury lawsuits. Parents of vaccine injured children, who co-founded the National Vaccine Information Center, fought to protect the rights of families and to insert vaccine safety provisions in the law such as mandatory reporting and recording of vaccine reactions by physicians. Federal health officials opposed the legislation to the very end, maintaining that vaccines have no substantial risks and that those children who are injured or die following vaccination are, in effect, genetically defective and would have died or been disabled even if no vaccinations had been given.

In 1986, President Reagan signed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act into law (PL99-660), giving historic societal acknowledgement that vaccines can injure and kill individuals and creating a federal vaccine injury compensation system. Since 1993, federal health officials under Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Donna Shalala have moved to systematically gut the law and fight every claim with the help of Department of Justice lawyers. Today, three out of four vaccine injured children are turned away, and more than $1 billion sits idle in the vaccine injury trust fund created by a small surcharge or "user fee" charged to parents for each state mandated vaccine their children receive.

Therefore, since 1986 the vaccine manufacturers and physicians administering vaccines have been absolved of liability for their products and actions with regard to selling and administering mandated vaccines to children. When the FDA licenses a new vaccine, the drug company lobbies federal health officials at the CDC to issue a recommendation for "universal use" of the new vaccine by all children, and after that happens, state health officials add the new vaccine to the list of mandated vaccines. The vaccine manufacturers have a stable, predictable yearly market for their product and no product liability.

Robert Wood Johnson Gets Involved in 1991
In 1991, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation created ALL KIDS COUNT, a national program to set up electronic vaccination registry and tracking systems to monitor and follow-up pre-school children in order to enforce mass vaccination. Grants totaling $9 million were given to 20 cities to set up vaccine tracking systems. ALL KIDS COUNT is headquartered at the Task Force for Child Survival and Development at The Carter Center in Atlanta, from which former President Jimmy Carter works with federal health officials to implement government public health initiatives both here and abroad.

That same year, EVERY CHILD BY TWO was co-founded by Betty Bumpers and former First Lady Rosalyn Carter. EVERY CHILD BY TWO is a national campaign to set up mechanisms to vaccinate children with all government-endorsed vaccines by age two and is funded in part by grants from vaccine manufacturers Merck, Lederle, and Connaught.

1991 was also the year that the CDC recommended that all newborns be given hepatitis B vaccine at birth before they leave the newborn nursery, even though only about 21,000 cases of hepatitis B were reported to the CDC in all age groups in 1990 and even though hepatitis B is an adult disease spread through infected blood. Although hepatitis B is primarily confined to adult high risk groups such as IV drug users and persons with multiple sexual partners, by 1999 42 state health departments had added three doses of hepatitis B vaccine to the mandatory vaccination list for all children attending grade school and high school.

Between July 1, 1990 and October 31, 1998, there were 24,775 reports of hepatitis B vaccine-related adverse events reports to the government, including 9,673 serious adverse events and 439 deaths. During the same time period, there was a total of 2,424 adverse event reports, with 1,209 serious events and 73 deaths in children under age 14 who got hepatitis B vaccine alone without any other vaccines. This means that one out of two case reports of health problems following hepatitis B vaccination in children ends with a trip to a hospital emergency room, a life-threatening condition, a hospitalization or permanent disability.

The Clinton Administration, The National ID and Electronic Tracking Systems
Bill Clinton's election in November 1992 brought Donna Shalala, close friend of Hillary Clinton, to Washington, D.C., as the nation's new Secretary of Health and Human Services. (Founded in 1973, the Children's Defense Fund (CDF) was formerly chaired by Hillary Clinton and then by Donna Shalala and is now headed by Marian Wright Edelman. One of CDF's main goals is to register and monitor all children in a national computerized vaccination tracking system.) Within weeks of taking office in January 1993, Shalala announced "President Clinton's Immunization Initiative."

Hillary Clinton then moved to play a key role in the Health Care Task Force to restructure US health care with a plan to tag every citizen with a Unique Health Care Identifier Number and to record and track everyone's vaccination status and personal health information from birth to death in a government-operated electronic database. Ira Magaziner said that President Clinton wants to "create an integrated system with a card that everyone will get at birth."
Although public opposition to the Unique Health Care Identifier Number, National ID "smartcard" and a medical records tracking system eventually scuttled Hillary's Health Care Plan, on April 1, 1993, Senators Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and Don Riegle (D-MI) and Congressman Henry Waxman (D-CA) introduced "The Comprehensive Child Immunization Act." A key provision in this bill directed Secretary Shalala to "establish a national system to track the immunization status of children." Information obtained on citizens could be used by government health officials and disclosed to other third parties without the consent of the individual or parent or guardian. The price tag to set up the electronic surveillance database, which would track citizen's movements from state to state, was $1.1 billion.

A coalition of privacy advocates formed to oppose the vaccine tracking provisions, including the Free Congress Foundation, Eagle Forum, Family Research Council, National Center for Home Education, National Vaccine Information Center, American Civil Liberties Union, Concerned Women for America, Traditional Values Coalition, Christian Life Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention and the American Association of Christian Schools.

By the Fall of 1993, strong opposition from the Republicans, privacy advocates and the pharmaceutical industry (which would be forced under the law to sell vaccines to the government at a lower price so children could get free vaccines) forced modifications of the bill. The national vaccine tracking system was eliminated, but language was inserted authorizing $417 million in appropriations to HHS so Shalala could work with state health officials to establish a national network of "state registry systems to monitor the immunization status of all children." The law which passed gave Shalala authority to award federal grants to states to set up vaccine tracking systems and money to reward states between $50 and $100 per fully immunized child, with the dollar figure determined by the total percentage of children fully vaccinated in the state.

The National (and International) Vaccine Plan Takes Shape
In 1994, the Department of Health and Human Services published The National Vaccine Plan, which is a strategic plan for vaccinating every American child with all existing and future government-recommended vaccines and for positioning the US mass vaccination program within the context of a global mass vaccination program. The Plan emphasizes that the US is a co-sponsor of the Children's Vaccine Initiative (CVI) launched at the World Summit for Children in 1990 in New York City to vaccinate all the world's children with existing and future vaccines developed by drug companies. In addition to the vaccine manufacturers, funding for CVI is provided by the United Nation's Children's Fund (UNICEF), the United Nation's Development Program (UNDP), the Rockefeller Foundation, the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO).

Shalala Appropriates Social Security Numbers
On March 9, 1995, Shalala published a notice in the Federal Register of the intent to establish a new routine use of the Social Security number. This permits the Social Security Administration to disclose the Social Security number of a newborn to state health department officials for public health programs including, but not limited to, establishing public immunization registries with the goal of operating a national network of coordinated statewide immunization registries. The new routine use of the Social Security number permits HHS to disclose information about individuals without their consent if it is for the purpose of administering a government public health program or for conducting medical research.

Teenager Is Jailed For Failure to Show Proof of Vaccination
After a policeman pulled him over for driving his mother's van with expired license plates, a Milwaukee teenager was handcuffed, stripped and jailed overnight in April 1996 when police discovered he had failed to show public school or county health officials proof that he had gotten a second MMR shot. The busy mother of Jacob Kallas had ignored repeated court orders to provide her son's school with proof of vaccination.

By 1996, parents were being charged with child medical neglect for failing to vaccinate their children with all government-recommended vaccines. Since 1982, six states have abolished philosophical or personal belief exemption to vaccination, leaving only 15 states with this right. All states still provide for medical exemption (which must be written by an M.D. or D.O.), and all but two allow an exemption for sincerely held religious beliefs.

However, in July 1999, CDC officials mounted an assault to counter parent-led informed consent legislative initiatives in Texas, Illinois, New Jersey, Massachusetts and other states in the past few years. An article was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association criticizing parents who claim philosophical or religious exemptions to vaccination for their children as a potential disease threat to other unvaccinated persons as well as to vaccinated persons for whom the vaccines have failed to work. Attaching a new label to those who take exemptions to vaccination ("exemptors"), the federal health officials said "Persons who claim philosophical and/or religious exemptions may create some risk to the community because unvaccinated or undervaccinated persons may be a source of transmission…. Exemptors also pose a social equity issue."

Addressing the issue of religious exemption to vaccination, CDC officials suggest that more stringent screening standards for proving the quality and sincerity of religious beliefs must be applied when government officials review a religious exemption to vaccination for acceptability.

Some states require an unequivocal statement from a religious leader that immunization conflicts with the person's religious belief. This type of requirement for an exemption essentially assesses the strength of conviction of the individual applying for an exemption, similar to Selective Service boards assessing exemptions from the military draft. Other states grant exemption based on a form signed by parents, indicating that immunizations are against the individual's personal belief. In these states, efforts may not be made to assess strength of conviction.

They conclude by signaling that government health officials will be taking an even more aggressive and intrusive approach to forcing vaccination in the future, employing "interventions" to persuade exemptors to become vaccinators.

Having determined that exemptors are a risk factor for contracting a VPD (Vaccine Preventable Disease), it is important to discover the underlying reasons why individuals are claiming exemptions. Interventions should be developed and implemented to counter misunderstanding of the relative risks and benefits of immunization at both the individual and societal level.

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (PL 104-191)
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996, also known as the Kennedy-Kassebaum bill, further reinforced the government-operated electronic surveillance and tracking mechanism for monitoring every American's medical records, using vaccination as the vehicle. Uniform electronic data element, collection and exchange standards were adopted. HIPAA also resurrected the Unique Health Care Identifier Number. Officials operating the National Immunization Program and HHS were pleased with HIPAA and stated:

"Any standards…should support the ability of health care workers and public health officials to access appropriately specific and precise health data."

"A current recommendation is for the first dose of hepatitis B vaccine to be given at birth. To record this first vaccination, when it is given in the hospital nursery and to support its ultimate linkage with the immunization registry, either the New Unique Health Care Identifier would have to be assigned expeditiously within a few hours of a request, or a temporary ID number that would ultimately link to the definitive identifier would be needed."

"We see entries in the immunization registries as a small part of what could ultimately develop into more comprehensive clinical and preventive databases."

"State laws intended to ensure privacy have presented barriers to immunization registries in some areas. Preemptive federal legislation is needed to ensure appropriate privacy while allowing participation in registries that protect the public by reducing disease. It is not clear that signed consent by the patient is necessary…."

Shalala Will Decide Privacy Rights If Congress Does Not Meet Deadline
HIPAA provided that, if Congress does not enact legislation to create standards to protect individually identifiable health information in medical records by August 21, 1999, then the Secretary of HHS is required to establish rules governing how much information the government and other third parties can get out of private medical records by February 21, 2000. Currently, there are four medical privacy bills in the House and Senate, including the Health Care Personal Information Nondisclosure Act of 1999 (S.578-Senators Jeffords/Dodd); the Medical Information Protection Act of 1999 (S.881-Senator Bob Bennett) and the Medical Information Privacy and Security Act (S.573/H.R. 1057-Leahy/Kennedy).

All of these medical "privacy" bills allow extensive exemptions for unrestricted access and use of personal medical information in an individual's medical records by anyone who invokes a right to access and use this information in the name of the public health including government officials, researchers and law enforcement officers. Citizens can be enrolled without their informed consent as research subjects in medical experiments if researchers make the case that the study will contribute to the public health.

This means that, without the individual's informed consent, researchers working with government, industry and private physicians will be allowed unrestricted access to personal medical records for the purpose of enrolling unsuspecting patients in medical research experiments. Scientific researchers of the future could experiment on citizens with new drugs and vaccines. The elderly will not know whether the nursing home doctor urging the use of a new antidepressant or the family pediatrician recommending to a mother that her infant get 15 vaccines in one day, is making that recommendation because it is in the best interest of the individual or because the doctor has enrolled his patients in a government-endorsed medical experiment.

Conclusion
The government push for a national ID and national electronic medical records database originated with the desire by government and industry to find an institutional mechanism to enforce mandatory vaccination. The linking of state vaccine tracking registries to a national medical records database operated by government can be used not just to enforce vaccination but also to limit health care choices and impose economic and other sanctions on those who do not conform to any government health policy.

Children are already being denied an education and being turned down for health insurance by HMOs for failing to be vaccinated with all government recommended vaccines. Vaccination status is being linked to government entitlement programs, and there have been suggestions by legislators at both the state and federal levels to make the obtaining of a child tax deduction dependent upon compliance with vaccination laws.

Being tagged and tracked in a government-operated electronic surveillance database could lead to severe economic and other government-sanctioned punishments at the hands of health officials assigned police powers to "protect the public health." Citizens who do not, for example, comply with government mandates to use an AIDS vaccine when it is brought to market in the future could effectively be prevented from functioning in society by being denied an education, health insurance, a driver's license, employment or even admission to a hospital, hotel or airplane.
The erosion of medical freedom, privacy and the right to self determination under the guise of protecting the public health is a threat to individual liberty and the very foundation of freedom as we have known it since the Constitution was ratified in 1787 and amended by the Bill of Rights in 1791. A de facto medical dictatorship, which has been set up by government health officials using police powers assigned by state legislatures, affirmed by the Supreme Court in Jacobsen v Massachusetts, fueled by federal funds, and aided by politicians eager to control the people "for the greater good," is destroying the most sacred of all individual freedoms: the human right to choose what one is willing to die for or, in the case of a parent, what one is willing to risk a child's life for.

If the state can tag, track down and force citizens against their will to be injected with biologicals of unknown toxicity today, then there will be no limit on what individual freedoms the state can take away in the name of the greater good tomorrow. It is time for Americans to call a halt to the immoral use of utilitarianism by government officials to justify and enforce public policy and to reclaim our right to freely and privately choose the kind of health care we want for ourselves and our families.

Barbara Loe Fisher is co-founder and president of the National Vaccine Information Center, a non-profit educational organization in Vienna, VA founded in 1982. For more information, go to www.NVIC.org or call 703-938-0342.

Selected References:
Arras JD, Steinbock B. "Moral Reasoning in the Medical Context." In: Arras JD, Steinbock, eds. Ethical Issues in Modern Medicine. Mountain View: Mayfield Publishing Co; 1995: 1-39.
Barondess J. "Medicine Against Society: Lessons from the Third Reich." JAMA. 1996; 276: 1657-1661.
Coulter H, Fisher BL. DPT: A Shot in the Dark. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: 1985.
Duffy J. The Sanitarians: A History of American Public Health, Chicago: University of Illinois Press; 1992.
Institute of Medicine. Adverse Effects of Pertussis and Rubella Vaccines. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press: 1991.
Institute of Medicine. Adverse Effects Associated with Childhood Vaccines: Evidence Bearing on Causality. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press; 1994.
Institute of Medicine. DPT Vaccine and Chronic Nervous System Dysfunction: A New Analysis. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press; 1994.
Monthly Statistics Report (through April 5, 1999) of the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (PL99-660).
Pertussis immunization: family history of convulsions and use of antipyretics - supplementary ACIP statement. MMWR 36: 281-2 (1987).
Sidel V. "The Social Responsibility of Health Professionals: Lessons From Their Role in Nazi Germany." JAMA. 1996; 276

EU: History Of Deceit

Christopher Booker
London Telegraph
Monday October 22, 2007

Lisbon crowns a history of deceit

It was apt that Gordon Brown's agreement to the EU treaty should have coincided with the announcement that MPs are to get an additional two weeks' holiday a year because there is so little for them to do.

The Lisbon Treaty, after all, is another giant step towards a new form of government, empowered to decide most of the laws that govern our lives, making our Westminster MPs even more redundant than they are now.

It was equally appropriate that Mr Brown and his puppet foreign minister, David Miliband, should have agreed this treaty on the basis of the most shameless political lie one can recall: that the new treaty is completely different from the rejected EU constitution – with which it is 96 per cent identical.

Three years ago, when Richard North and I were writing a history of the European Union, trawling hundreds of books and thousands of documents, nothing struck us more than how consistently this grandiose project has been built on deceit as to its true nature (hence our title, The Great Deception).

It is more than 60 years since one of its progenitors, Altiero Spinelli, wrote that its aim should be stealthily to assemble the components of a supranational government and only to declare its true purpose at the end of the process by unveiling a "constitution".

It is more than 50 years since another founder, Paul-Henri Spaak, advised Jean Monnet, who was above all "the Father of Europe", that the only way to achieve their goal – a politically integrated Europe – was to pretend that it was only a "Common Market".

It is more than 40 years since Harold Macmillan and Edward Heath went along with this, deciding to withhold from the British people that the real aim was a European state – a deceit perpetrated by Heath in spades when he took us into the Common Market in the 1970s.

Of all our prime ministers since, the only one who did not go along with this concealment was Mrs Thatcher. In the last years of her premiership, she woke up to the dangers of this stealthy, relentless drive towards full political integration – and her determination to fight it played a crucial part in the way she was brought down.

In this respect, the decision of Europe's political leaders in 2001 that the building of the European state should culminate in drafting a "Constitution for Europe" was entirely in keeping with the strategies proposed by Monnet and Spinelli decades before, marking the moment when the "project" could at last come out in its true colours.

When, to their horror, it was rejected, their solution was simply to bulldoze it through regardless of popular wishes, as recent months have shown.

Mr Brown's deceit over this treaty is in some ways no worse than that practised by Macmillan and Heath before him. But he has pulled off a brilliant tactical victory by focusing discussion on those "red lines" (so aptly described by Gisela Stuart MP as "red herrings"), thus diverting attention from the treaty's real significance as a further huge step towards creating a European state.

Of all the immense changes this will make in how we are governed, none is arguably more important, or has received less attention, than the formal creation of the European Council as the cabinet of our new government. The prime ministers who make it up are placed under a wholly new obligation to put their loyalty to "the Union" above that to their own countries.

With this treaty we shall finally be ruled by a government that cannot be dismissed, making Britain, in effect, a small part of a giant one-party state. This may make Mr Brown feel important, as part of "the Big Show", but it is hardly surprising that he does not dare consult the wishes of his countrymen on what he has done.

White House denies stirring tensions with Iran

AFP
Tuesday October 23, 2007

The White House insisted Monday it was still committed to diplomacy with Iran, despite menacing comments from the US president and vice president attacking the Islamic republic's nuclear drive.

Spokesman Tony Fratto said also that the replacement of Iran's chief nuclear negotiator did not alter President George W. Bush's determination for Iran to stop enriching uranium.

"I wouldn't call it stepping up the rhetoric," he told reporters after Bush said last week that a nuclear-equipped Iran evoked the threat of "World War III," and Vice President Dick Cheney warned of "serious consequences" for Iran.

"In fact what the vice president said was a very clear review of the situation in the Middle East," Fratto said following a hawkish speech by Cheney on Sunday.

"And by the way it's not at all different from what he has said before, what the president has said before, what Secretary Rice has said before," he said, when asked if the administration was setting the stage for conflict with Iran.

Fratto said that Bush, Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates "have all been incredibly clear and consistent in our message on Iran."

"And that is that we first seek a diplomatic solution, we are committed to a diplomatic solution, we are committed to working with our international partners in a unified way to put pressure on Iran to stop its activities."

In his speech to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Cheney said: "The Iranian regime needs to know that if it stays on its present course, the international community is prepared to impose serious consequences.

"The United States joins other nations in sending a clear message: We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon," said the vice president, the administration's toughest hardliner on Iran.

At a White House press conference last Wednesday, Bush said that he had told world leaders "if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them (the Iranians) from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon."

Iran, which says it only wants peaceful nuclear energy, has brushed aside US warnings, and announced Saturday that its top nuclear negotiator was being replaced by Saeed Jalili, an ally of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Ali Larijani had held the post for over two years but resigned after falling out with the hardline Ahmadinejad over the handling of Iran's nuclear case.

Jalili was to meet European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana in Rome on Tuesday for his first talks on the atomic crisis with the West, amid little expectation of a breakthrough.

"Changing the lead negotiator doesn't change the need for Iran to change its policy," Fratto said.

"It doesn't change the fact that Iran needs to comply with the UN Security Council resolutions to stop their (uranium) enrichment and reprocessing activities."

Middle East experts who spoke at the Washington Institute conference after Cheney's speech said that US rhetoric against Iran was being sharply escalated.

"The language on Iran is quite significant," former Middle East presidential envoy Dennis Ross said. "That's very strong words and it does have implications."

Cheney did not mention any military action, but several US reports have said that he is arguing for strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities and Revolutionary Guards units accused of fomenting unrest in neighboring Iraq.

However UN nuclear watchdog head Mohamed ElBaradei, in an interview with the French newspaper Le Monde, denied that Iran represented a "clear and present danger."

Iran breaks with the US dollar

Press TV
Tuesday October 23, 2007

The Central Bank of Iran says the process of converting the country's dollar reserves to other foreign currencies has been completed.

The process of diversifying Iran's foreign exchange reserves by converting reserves held in dollars to other currencies is almost complete, Fars news agency quoted Tahmasb Mazaheri, President of the Central Bank of Iran, as having told the American publication, The Emerging Market.

He added that the procedure has been carried out in the best possible way and achieved maximum results.

Experts believe Iran has gained huge profits by adopting the measure because of the sharp fall in the value of the US dollar.

Other countries are also said to be taking similar measures for the same reasons. Arab Persian Gulf states, for one, are believed to be holding 30 percent of their foreign exchange reserves in currencies other than the dollar.

Police State Rules in NJ High Schools

Jack Duggan
Lew Rockwell.com
Tuesday October 23, 2007

On the morning of Friday, October 12, 2007, Steinert High School in Hamilton Township, New Jersey, was flooded by police with five drug-sniffing dogs accompanied by a prosecutor and school officials. The whole student body was arrested by being detained in various classrooms and forced to wait while the search of their lockers verified that each student was innocent of drug possession. Every locker got searched. And every student was under technical arrest until cleared of drug possession, approaching unlawful imprisonment.

The school sent us a letter home with our son saying it was a "...pre-planned search of student lockers using trained narcotics detections dogs." It continued, "As per our ongoing protocol of ensuring a safe and orderly drug-free environment...this search was a component of our program to deter illegal activity." There was no reasonable suspicion of any drug activity. It seems that this search was itself an illegal activity because it was a warrantless dragnet, pure and simple.

This incident is proof to parents that the government has little common sense when it comes to our children. They teach about human rights, the U.S. Constitution and tolerance, but do not practice what they preach.

Many of the kids are saying that Steinert H.S. teachers, counselors and principal are not about education, just prosecution of the 'War on Drugs.' There are over 1,625 students and guess what percentage of them were discovered to have had drugs or marijuana in their lockers? Zero. Nada, as in not one. For this, the Hamilton Township police and school administration alienated the trust of all 1,625 students, many of whom now feel that students are automatically guilty until proven otherwise. The kids know that they would never do the same thing to their teachers' lockers, nor publicly owned offices of the U.S. Congress, the White House and all federal agencies to weed out all those who seem to be definitely on drugs.

The Hamilton School District and Police Department stand on the point that the students' lockers are public property and thus subject to search at any time. However, how far can a police agency go into warrantless searches of over a thousand people's effects without probable cause? Why must students have no expectation of privacy of their personal effects when given no choice but to use school lockers for their burdensome books, note pads, lunches, clothing and other paraphernalia? And why are other public employees storage spaces not routinely searched while teachers, office clerks and even Congressional representatives are held under lock down?

If you go to a restaurant and place your parka on a public coat rack, can a police officer search every coat on the rack, go inside your zippered pockets and indict you for any contraband that he might find? Or do you still have rights to privacy in your personal effects no matter where you set them temporarily?

Whether these searches were legal or not, what kind of message are they sending to the whole student body? That they are guilty until proven innocent and that their freedoms are secondary to elites advancing their political careers by posturing themselves as effectively dealing with juvenile drug problems. There is no juvenile drug problem, just a problem in the judgment of out-of-touch-with-reality Hamilton, New Jersey, community leaders.

Unsaid is that this tactic of arresting whole student bodies and searching every locker is a pseudo-terrorist tactic designed to frighten kids into not bringing controlled substances to school. In the War on Terrorism, even local government has become a neo-terrorist operation, indulging in situational ethics where the end justifies whatever means it chooses.

In Hamilton Township, New Jersey, a drug-free environment is a rights-free environment. From the failed and embarrassing search at Steinert High School, Hamilton's "zero tolerance" proves its zero intelligence.

It’s Time for the Banks to Face the Hangman

Mike Whitney
Dissident Voice
October 19th, 2007

Officials in the Treasury Department — working with their colleagues at Citigroup, J.P. Morgan and Bank of America — have concocted a scheme to rescue the banks from their massive losses in mortgage-backed securities. The group is planning to set up a $100 billion emergency fund that will purchase non-performing assets for short-term debt. In truth, the fund is a bailout that provides the financial giants with an excuse for not reporting their enormous losses from bad bets.

The story first appeared in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal and was followed on Monday with a second headline piece:

“RESCUE READIED BY BANKS IS BET TO SPUR MARKET”

WSJ: “The high stakes plan to RESCUE BANKS FROM LOSSES on mortgage securities amounts to a big bet that a consortium of financial giants — AT THE PRODDING OF THE US GOVERNMENT — can PERSUADE INVESTORS TO POUR MORE MONEY INTO THE TROUBLED CREDIT MARKET.”

That’s right. The Treasury Dept is directly involved in a scam that saves the banks while trying to “persuade” investors to “pour more money” into toxic mortgage-backed sludge. Treasury Department officials clearly have a different idea of “moral hazard” than the rest of us.

The banks are presently holding hundreds of billions of dollars in mortgage-backed securities (MBSs) that they cannot sell — because there are no buyers — and don’t want to take back on their balance sheets because they’ll be forced to increase their capital reserves. So they’ve decided to launch a public relations campaign to promote some goofy sounding fund, called the “Master-Liquidity Enhancement Conduit” or M-LEC, which will allow the banks to place their unwanted bonds in Limbo until some future date when the public appetite for garbage improves.

The WSJ does a good job of disguising the real motive behind the new “Super-Conduit” (a.k.a. the Bailout fund) but in the last paragraph, buried in Section C-3, they reveal the truth:

“The goal is to reassure investors and make them more willing to buy its short-term debt.” So, the fund is really just a way of rearranging the marketplace until the next crop of gullible investors sprouts up and buys more mortgage-backed garbage.

Bloomberg’s Mark Gilbert puts it like this:

“It seems the way to reassure investors that it’s safe to buy the repackaged junk that has torpedoed credit markets in recent months is to repackage the least-junky bits of the junk into more palatable securities. The pyramid just grew another layer. . .

I can’t decide whether the Treasury’s willingness to patronize such a misguided effort is evidence that the situation is more desperate than anyone thought, or a positive sign that financial markets will continue to evolve and innovate and might eventually wrestle the subprime demon to the ground.”

Indeed.

Where are the regulators? The SEC and Treasury should be forcing the banks to be straightforward with the public and let them know about the hanky-panky they’ve been up to with their risky SIVs (structured investment vehicles) Citigroup alone has nearly $80 billion in off-balance sheets operations which are in distress. The bank accounts for “25% of the global SIV market. As of August, assets held by SIVs totaled $400 billion”.

SIVs are set up as a way to make money without taking the risk onto their balance sheets. “They issue their own short-term debt, usually at relatively low rates …then use the proceeds to buy higher yielding assets such as securities tied to mortgages.” (WSJ)

Ever since Bear Stearns blew up in late July, investors have been steering clear of any securities connected to real estate, which means the SIVs are getting the Double Whammy — they can’t sell their asset-backed commercial paper (because it’s mortgage-backed) and they find buyers for their collateralized debt obligations. (CDOs) To a large extent, the market is still frozen despite the upbeat cheerleading on the business pages. Clearly, the worst is yet to come.

How bad is it?

An article in yesterday’s Financial Times of London said that, “Only $9.9 billion of home equity loan securitizations have come to market since July 1 — A 95% DECLINE FROM THE $200.9 BILLION IN THE FIRST HALF OF THIS YEAR AND A ROUGHLY 92% DECREASE FROM THE SAME PERIOD LAST YEAR.”

The banks are in trouble. Big trouble. Main sources of revenue have dried up overnight and they’re stuck with hundreds of billions of debt. That’s why the papers broke the story on Saturday when there was NO chance of triggering a stock market crash.

Imagine the horror of investors around the world when they discover that the major investment banks are running these shabby “off-balance sheets” operations while concealing their real financial condition from their investors. Consider the disgust the public feels when they see Treasury officials bailing out the banks instead of ordering them to report their losses and get on with business.

Still, Wall Street nonchalantly leaps from one swindle to the next never considering the damage it’s doing to the credibility of the market.

Susan Pulliam summed it up like this in the Oct 12 edition of The Wall Street Journal:

“Since the invention of the ticker tape 140 years ago, America has been able to boast of having the world’s most transparent financial markets. The tape and its electronic descendants ensured that crystal-clear prices for stocks and many other securities were readily available to everyone, encouraging millions to entrust their money to the markets. These days, after a decade of frantic growth in mortgage-backed securities and other complex investments traded off exchanges, that clarity is gone. Large parts of American financial markets have become a hall of mirrors.”

“Hall of mirrors” is an understatement. The system is thoroughly opaque and crooked as a ram’s horn. The market’s new architecture, “structured finance,” is a dismal rip-off from start to finish. Consider the mentality of the hucksters who dreamed up “securitizing” subprime mortgages and selling them off as precious jewels in the secondary market. This was a blatant con job. How can the liabilities of “borrowers with bad credit” be traded to foreign investors and pension funds like they were valuable assets? And where were the regulators while this scam was going on?

Isn’t this sufficient evidence that the system is totally out of whack?

Wall Street avoids transparency like the plague. That is to be expected. But what about the government? It’s the government’s job to protect the investor and maintain the integrity of the system. Is that what Treasury Dept is doing or are they “LURING investors to buy debt issued by the rescue fund as part of the plan”? (Wall Street Journal)

“Luring”? Is that how Paulson sees it; like luring turkeys to the chopping block with a trail of breadcrumbs?

The idea of protecting the little guy has never occurred to anyone in the Bush administration. Their job is to shift wealth from one class to the other via equity bubbles and government bailouts — anything that advances the corporate agenda.

Presently, the banks are sitting on $200 billion in non-performing mortgage-backed securities (MBSs) and collateralized debt obligations. (CDOs) They are also holding another $300 billion in collateralized loan obligations (CLOs) from mergers and acquisitions that stalled after the Bear Stearns meltdown. If the present bailout doesn’t materialize, we’re likely to see bank closures and a plummeting stock market.

Shouldn’t the regulators have considered the probability of a crash before they allowed trillions of dollars of radioactive bonds to flood the market when no one had any idea of their real value? Wouldn’t that have been the prudent thing to do?

Now we know what they are worth. They’re worth nothing. That’s why the banks are running scared and refusing to put them up for auction. They’d rather sleaze them into a lofty-sounding superfund that masks their true value.

In the last two weeks the stock market soared on the news that the banks were reporting billions of dollars in losses. Investors were hoodwinked into believing the banks were being honest and had “come clean” about their financial condition. What a joke. In reality, the banks only reported roughly 5% of their potential losses; the rest were hidden in their off balance sheets operations.

Equities skyrocketed to new heights. Wall Street was euphoric.

Now we know the truth. It was all baloney.

The Wall Street Journal: “The new fund is designed to stave off what Citigroup and others see as a threat to the financial markets world-wide: the danger that dozens of huge bank-affiliated funds will be forced to unload billions of dollars in mortgage-backed securities and other assets, driving down their prices in a fire sale . . . . The ultimate fear: If banks need to write down more assets or are forced to take assets onto their books, that could set off a broader credit crunch and hurt the economy. It could make it tough for homeowners and businesses to get loans.”

It could “hurt the economy” and “make it tough for homeowners and businesses to get loans?” Ahhh, yes. It’s all clear now. The banks only cooked up this colossal bailout to make things better for us common people. How is it that we didn’t notice that before? Our problem is that we don’t see the magnanimity and altruism which drives the corporate agenda.

From the New York Times:

“The conduit (The bailout fund) is expected to start operating in 90 days and will stay in place for a few years until it has disposed of the assets it buys, according to people familiar with the negotiations. . . . To maintain its credibility with investors from whom it would raising money, the conduit will not buy any bonds that are tied to mortgages made to people with spotty, or subprime, credit histories. Rather, it will buy debt with the highest ratings — AAA and AA — and debt that is backed by other mortgages, credit card receipts and other assets.”

We already know about the problems with the ratings agencies and how they are in bed with the investment banks. We also know that the whole purpose of the new fund is to off-load mortgage-backed tripe which is no longer sellable on the market. What we didn’t know is that the New York Times eagerly provides the peppy public relations narrative to assist big business in dumping its failing assets.

New York Times: “The conduit will pay market prices for the securities it buys. But it remains unclear how officials will determine the price of some bonds that have not been actively traded since August, because the difference between what buyers are willing to pay and what sellers want has widened significantly.”

Of course, they’ll pay full price because they want to be “made whole” again. The truth is, however, that these derivatives will probably only fetch pennies on the dollar unless they get another Wall Street PR face-lift.

Christian Stracke, market analyst from the research firm CreditSights, said the effort appears to be “an attempt to soothe tense investors in the debt market, rather than to provide substantive relief to the worst-hit mortgage securities.”

Stracke added, “For me, this is more of a P.R. blitz.”

Bingo.

The announcement of the forthcoming Master-Liquidity Enhancement Conduit or M-LEC further underlines the gravity of the problems facing the banking system. The fund creates a “buyer of last resort” so that these dubious assets won’t be sold on the market at fire-sale prices.

Citigroup appears to be the greatest beneficiary of the current plan. They have a number of Enron-type SIVs that could be at risk.

Again, the problems that are surfacing in the banking sector today are the direct result of Greenspan’s loose monetary policies coupled with the dismantling of the regulatory regime that was created following the 1929 stock market crash. We are now back to Square 1. All of the various scams and swindles which permeated that hyper-inflated market are now back in full-force foreshadowing a steep decline in investor confidence, increased market manipulation, and an unavoidable economic calamity.

“Structured finance” has transformed US markets into a carnival sideshow. Productivity and real growth have been replaced with never-ending credit expansion and speculative abuses. Reckless monetary policies and the behemoth current account deficit have destabilized the global economy a set the stage for a fiscal Armageddon.

The subprime mortgage crisis and subsequent shrinking of asset-backed commercial paper (ABCP) has thrown a wrench in the funding of daily corporate operations. These are the harbingers of an impending recession. As mortgages continue to default at a record pace; the aftershocks will continue to rumble through the credit markets where subprime loans have been “securitized” into bonds and leveraged at maximum levels. It’s just one domino knocking down the next.

The financial system is at greater risk now than any time in the last 80 years. Regrettably, the only remedies coming from the Fed are more currency-destroying rate cuts or hundreds of billions of dollars in repos to remove mortgage-backed bonds from the banks’ balance sheets. Neither of these solutions addresses the critical issues; they do not stabilize the market, reinvigorate lending, or restore investor confidence. They are merely band-aids on a sucking chest-wound. They won’t stop the bleeding.

The Fed’s monetary policies promote financial speculation that inevitably leads to equity bubbles. Under Greenspan’s stewardship, the country has lurched from the 1990’s bond bubble, to the dot.com bubble, to the subprime meltdown, to the liquidity crisis, to the credit crunch — all engineered at the Federal Reserve with ancillary assistance from the charlatans in the banking industry.

An article in China Worker, “Credit Crunch threatens Global Downturn” summarizes our present predicament it like this:

“Financial globalization has rebounded on the system. Capitalist leaders boasted that the near total integration of financial markets across the globe would provide lenders and borrowers everywhere with instant access to a completely liquid money market. New types of financial securities and sophisticated derivatives would spread the risk of borrowing so widely that it would eliminate risk entirely. While economies were growing and bubbles inflating, it appeared that — through derivatives trading — losses would be widely diffused among speculators, reducing risk to very low levels. Not even the most astute financial analysts could predict what would happen in the event of recession. The unanswerable question was: Who would ultimately bear the risks arising from widespread defaults or bankruptcies? The veteran investor, Warren Buffet, warned that derivatives would prove to be ‘weapons of mass destruction’.

The fantasy of financial alchemy transforming high risk gambling into low risk money-making has now been shattered.”

The author is right. “Structured finance” is a fraud. Risk has not been eliminated. In fact, it has exploded and become a system-wide problem. The dead wood is everywhere.

The banks are being crushed by a debt-load they generated through “securitization”. They need to accept responsibility for their poor judgment (or greed?) and report their losses. The Super-Conduit is just a dodge to put off the unavoidable day of reckoning. The whole wretched plan should be scrapped. No amount of financial chicanery will eradicate billions of dollars in bad bets. It’s time for the banks to face the hangman.

Rescue Efforts to Save Banks Reveals Total Bankruptcy of Financial Policies

Matthias Chang
Peace in Space
October 20, 2007

Recap of Past Events

The recent temporary rally of the Dow (as forecasted by me – continued ups and downs, but overall trend down as stated in previous Red Alerts) to an all time high (exceeding July 14,000 points) last week, had many people confused, especially the greedy ones and those in state of denial.

Some people went plunging into the stock market, to catch the rally and got burnt again. These people never learn and they deserve the trashing and I have no, absolutely no pity for such fools. It is like playing a poker game with the cards stacked against the stooge. The game at the global casinos was rigged from the word go.

If these people had examined critically, even for five minutes, the current state of affairs, it would have been apparent to them, that Bernanke’s sell out to Wall Street was a stop gap measure to calm the markets and create a state of illusion. But it did not work for the simple reason that one cannot simply revive, on a permanent basis, a hopelessly terminally ill patient, when all its organs are failing rapidly, save the ventilator maintaining the last few breaths.

The final clue that the global banking collapse is speeding down the one way street without any driver in control was the announcement by Paulson, the Treasury Secretary and the three big banks, JP Morgan Chase, CITI Group and Bank of America to set up a US$100 billion fund to mop up the toilet paper commercial paper market (i.e. to buy the structured vehicles’ toilet paper assets).

The global security fraud is now beyond redemption – what this means is that “investors” are not buying these commercial papers supposedly backed by securities, as their values are dubious. To avoid pubic auction of these toilet paper assets and then finding no buyers (i.e. finally being exposed that they are totally worthless), Paulson and these big banks are trying to buy these papers to avoid such a public exposure and in the hope that when things have “settled and there is no more panic” to unload them again to some other idiots. After all a fool is born every other day!

But their very act of setting the fund, have shown their scheme for what it is. The whole world is shouting. “The Emperor has no clothes!” I was shouting and shouting. Few heard my screams and saved their life savings.

This is the critical implication. Hence, the dramatic collapse of the Dow.

The End is Near

The rate cut of a hefty 50 basis points on 18th September 2007 by the Fed was a diversionary tactic and to buy time for the Banks to come up with another fraudulent scheme to hoodwink the self deluding public that all was well. It worked for barely three weeks and then lost all steam!

The dollar has plunged again – a massive 300 points. Gold has soared. Crude is heading for the US100 target by year end. Foreign funds (especially Sovereign Funds) are ditching US dollar assets. Long term bond yields are rising in tandem.

Literally, blood will flow in the streets in major cities of USA and UK in the not too distant future, when the full impact of the collapse hits every aspect of the economy and Joe six packs finally realises that Bush, Cheney, the neo-cons and the bastards controlling the City of London have taken them for a ride and robbed them of their pensions and future.

The policy of control chaos will be implemented and we will witness in major cities of the USA, UK and Europe of street battles, orchestrated by the Intelligence Services, between the white folks and the immigrant population. In the USA, it will be against the Latinos and then the blacks (after they realised that the Jewish community has abandoned them). In the UK and in Europe, it will be against mainly immigrants from Turkey, the Northern Mediterranean states and Pakistan and they are essentially Muslims. There is therefore, the added fuel of Islamic radicalism, which in the first place, was the creation of the Western intelligence services.

These immigrants (cannon folders for the continuing war on terrorism) will be blamed for the woes that afflict the white population. The big banks and the 1% rich have all disappeared with their mistresses and bunnies in some island resort and have engaged mercenaries like Blackwater to guard whatever real estate that need to be protected from the marauding crowds. The Katrina rehearsals have prepared such private armies to do their dirty work. They have their work cut out for them.

It will be ugly.

In the Middle East, the Western intelligence Services will ensure Muslims will slaughter fellow Muslims, as otherwise, only the West will be suffering from the consequences of the financial tsunami.

The Inevitable War

The G7 countries will give their consent and support Cheney’s mad adventure in the Middle East as their only solution to the mess which they have created.

I see no other scenario. How I wish I am wrong. But I doubt it. Events following every previous Red ALERTS have come to pass.

I am no soothsayer. But applying common sense, we must be realists and prepare our people and our family for the coming wars and prepare to take part in the Global Resistance, in whatever way and means at our disposal.

Take care and God bless you all.

Kosovo politicians refuse to reveal sources of wealth

B92
October 17, 2007

PRIŠTINA — The richest candidate in the Kosovo elections will be President of the New Kosovo Alliance Behgjet Pacolli.

He has declared property worth EUR 420mn to the Central Electoral Commission in Kosovo alone. Of all the party leaders, Kosovo President Fatmir Sejdiu came bottom on EUR 250,000.

The politicians generally put their wealth down to presents from wealthy associates, director of the NGO COHI Avni Zogiani told B92.

In Kosovo, it is common for politicians to live in houses costing EUR 5mn, says Zogiani.

The director of the NGO, which deals with the study of corruption, told B92 that the organization had been trying for some time to uncover the source of Kosovo politicians’ money.

“A year and a half ago, the Kosovo Anti-Corruption Agency was formed. We are applying pressure, but we always get the same answer. They claim that by law they are not permitted to reveal information concerning the sources of their wealth.”

“We disagree. There’s not a single sentence in the law which prohibits them from doing so. On the contrary, there is a Law on Information of Public Importance, which explicitly stipulates that independent agencies are obliged to publish information of public interest,” he says.

Zogiani says that the agency controls politicians, “who, at the same time, are corrupt and mixed up in organized crime.”

He adds that, “When we ask politicians about where they acquired such riches, they usually reply that they received it from old friends, or that supporters built their houses for free. However, everyone knows that the authorities are corrupt, that politics is linked to organized crime.”

“Everyone knows that their money comes from crime, or from directly manipulating state funds. Because of the current situation, Kosovo’s unresolved status, it’s hard to determine the origin of certain people’s wealth.”

“I think that everything will come to light once status has been settled, and I think a lot of information has been collected on how they made that money,” he predicted.

Other than Pacolli and Sejdiu, the remaining candidates have also declared their property. Reform Party leader Ora Veton Surroi declared property totaling EUR 2.5mn.

Prior to the 2004 elections he declared EUR 40mn, while it is known that in the meantime he has transferred ownership over his Koha Ditore company to his sister.

Hague accused and Alliance for the Future of Kosovo party leader Ramus Haradinaj declared EUR 1.3mn worth of property, while Democratic League of Dardania leader Nexhat Daci and Democratic Party of Kosovo leader Hashim Taci are worth EUR 300,000 each.

Kosovo politicians are not legally bound to declare the source of their property. However, some things are widely known. Kosovo’s richest politician, Pacolli, is the equivalent of Bogoljub Karić or Milan Panić, weekly Vreme correspondent Dejan Anastasijević told B92.

“The man owns a company in Switzerland which has done a lot of work with the Russians, particularly during the Yeltsin years. At one point, Carla del Ponte, while still a prosecutor in Switzerland, investigated him, and tried to prosecute him for laundering Russian money. It is presumed that the bulk of his wealth comes from those dealings in Russia,” explains Anastasijević.

Neither have there been any surprises concerning the wealth of the other candidates, says the journalist. “There’s no big mystery concerning Haradinaj, for example. Everone knows he’s the wealthiest man in Kosovo after Pacolli and Ekrem Luka, Haradinaj’s great friend and one of his party’s main donors.”

“As to the others, it’s a well known fact that after the ’liberation’ of Kosovo, that is the withdrawal of Serb forces, all the leading KLA commanders immediately ’liberated’ the most attractive business premises and cafes in Priština,” Anastasijević alleges.

Is the CIA helping itself to the Afghan heroin harvest?

Nick Possum
Whispers from the Mean Streets
October 22, 2007

No names, no pack drill, like we used to say in the army, but I had a client who wanted me to look into some aspects of the world heroin trade.

I googled a bit, and made a few phone calls and began to have disturbing suspicions.

Since the fall of the Taliban regime, which had seriously honoured an agreement to close down the trade, heroin production in Afghanistan has surged. In 2006 there was a 50 per cent increase in the poppy harvest and it created a new record for world production, my contact in the UN Office on Drugs and Crime told me. Afghanistan now accounts for 92 per cent of the world’s illicit production. She expected it would take another leap upwards this year.

So where is the stuff ending up? So far, not in Australia, but that’s only a matter of time. Once again, the streets of Western Europe and Russia are awash with the stuff and that fact got me thinking about the CIA.

The espionage game provides a powerful motive, superbly trained teams and the perfect cover for large-scale drug smuggling. It’s hardly a secret that, in the past, the CIA has partaken of the feast and, collectively, it couldn’t give a damn if the stuff gets dumped on the despised nations of ‘Old Europe’.

The US clandestine agencies are a sprawling brotherhood of silence and trust. And it isn’t just the huge bureaucracy of the CIA itself. Now, there’s also a freelance parallel universe of ‘special forces’ and ‘security contractors’ – created by the neocons for their War on Terror – doing everything from assassinations to ‘interrogation’. No mainstream politician wants to know what these people are doing in their name.

For security reasons these organizations are rigidly compartmentalised. Everything is on a need-to-know basis; “Don’t ask, don’t tell” is the rule. When (somewhere in the world) a Learjet from one of the CIA’s front companies rolls into the hanger at a US military airbase you just say “Hi, Raul” to the pilot and forget you saw the manacled guy being frogmarched down the steps, wearing a blindfold and earmuffs. You certainly don’t ask what those big black duffle bags might contain.

And, of course, this vast bureaucracy has a limitless appetite for money – over and above the official budget, itself often partly concealed. We’re talking about black, untraceable money. Money in quantities you can’t achieve by any means other than drugs. We’re talking hundreds of billions.

I read Amnesty International’s 2006 report on the CIA’s ‘rendition’ flights – Below the radar: Secret flights to torture and disappearance – and my suspicion deepened. Officially available flight details for known aircraft of the CIA’s clandestine fleet combined with observations by Amnesty’s global network of plane spotters reveal that these aircraft fly too often, and touch down far more often, than can be explained by the rendition of the hapless suspects they were carrying at the time. They often stopped at US air bases where the local authorities have no control over what gets loaded or unloaded.

I was musing on all this when a contact in the US emailed, drawing my attention to an 11 October piece in the New York Times.

“The director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, has ordered an unusual internal inquiry into the work of the agency’s inspector general, whose aggressive investigations of the CIA’s detention and interrogation programs and other matters have created resentment among agency operatives.

“A small team working for General Hayden is looking into the conduct of the agency’s watchdog office, which is led by Inspector General John L. Helgerson. Current and former government officials said the review had caused anxiety and anger in Mr. Helgerson’s office and aroused concern on Capitol Hill that it posed a conflict of interest.”

It seemed that the General Hayden’s investigation is particularly focused on complaints that the inspector general had not acted as a fair and impartial judge of CIA ops but was instead conducting a crusade against participants in controversial detention programs.

“Any move by the agency’s director to examine the work of the inspector general would be unusual, if not unprecedented, and would threaten to undermine the independence of the office, some current and former officials say.

“A CIA spokesman strongly defended the inquiry … saying General Hayden supported the work of the inspector general’s office and had ‘accepted the vast majority of its findings’.

“‘His only goal is to help this office, like any office at the agency, do its vital work even better’, said Paul Gimigliano, the spokesman.”

Yeah, I’ll bet. Given that inspector general is appointed by the president and reports to both the director of the CIA and to Congress, one would have thought that he had every right to check up on what was going on in the CIA’s gulag archipelago.

But maybe that wasn’t where he’d trespassed. Maybe, just maybe, John Helgerson, in the course of auditing the whole dirty rendition process had begun to have the same suspicions as I about an even dirtier secret.

Scientists a step closer to steering hurricanes

Tim Shipman
Telegraph
October 21, 2007

Scientists have made a breakthrough in man’s desire to control the forces of nature – unveiling plans to weaken hurricanes and steer them off course, to prevent tragedies such as Hurricane Katrina.

The damage done to New Orleans in 2005 has spurred two rival teams of climate experts, in America and Israel, to redouble their efforts to enable people to play God with the weather.

Under one scheme, aircraft would drop soot into the near-freezing cloud at the top of a hurricane, causing it to warm up and so reduce wind speeds. Computer simulations of the forces at work in the most violent storms have shown that even small changes can affect their paths – enabling them to be diverted from major cities.

But the hurricane modifiers are fighting more than the weather. Lawyers warn that diverting a hurricane from one city to save life and property could result in multi-billion dollar lawsuits from towns that bear the brunt instead. Hurricane Katrina caused about $41 billion in damage to New Orleans.

Hurricanes form when air warmed over the ocean rises to meet the cool upper atmosphere. The heat turns to kinetic energy, producing a spiral of wind and rain. The greater the temperature differences between top and bottom, and the narrower the eye of the hurricane, the faster it blows.

Moshe Alamaro, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), told The Sunday Telegraph of his plans to “paint” the tops of hurricanes black by scattering carbon particles – either soot or black particles from the manufacture of tyres – from aircraft flying above the storms. The particles would absorb heat from the sun, leading to changes in the airflows within the storm. Satellites could also heat the cloud tops by beaming microwaves from space.

“If they’re done in the right place at the right time they can affect the strength of the hurricane,” Mr Alamaro said.

The theory has so far been tested only in computer simulation by Mr Alamaro’s colleague, Ross Hoffman. Mr Alamaro said: “With small changes to this side or that side of the hurricane we can nudge it and change its track. We’re starting with computer simulations, then will hopefully experiment on a small weather system.”

Last month scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem announced that they had simulated the effect of sowing clouds with microscopic dust to cool the hurricane’s base, also weakening it. The dust would attract water but would form droplets too small to fall as rain. Instead, they would rise and evaporate, cooling hot air at the hurricane base.

In findings presented at a conference in Trieste, Italy, the team led by Daniel Rosenfeld demonstrated that dust dropped into the lower part of Hurricane Katrina would have reduced wind speeds and diverted its course.

The MIT team has now hired a professor of risk management to advise on steps necessary to protect themselves from legal action by communities affected if a hurricane is diverted. It is pressing for changes to US law and for an international treaty to settle possible disputes between neighbouring countries.

Mr Alamaro said: “The social and legal issues are daunting. If a hurricane were coming towards Miami with the potential to cause damage and kill people, and we diverted it, another town or village hit by it would sue us. They’ll say the hurricane is no longer an act of God, but that we caused it.”

Related: The U.S. government routinely conducts experiments on weather modification

Alex Ansary Video: Michael Chertoff Visits Topoff 4 Exercise

Topoff 4 took place at multiple locations in the Portland Metro area, as well as Phoenix, AR and Guam. In this clip, Mr. Chertoff visits David Douglas High School where 1100 teenagers volunteered to take part in this anti-terrorism exercise. The basketball court has been turned into a Rapid Screening Point (RSP) which is a temporary facility for high production screening of individuals with non-acute symptoms who are potentially ill or exposed to a harmful substance. Later, a press conference with Michael Chertoff, Mayor Tom Potter and the Governor takes place. Alex Ansary was fortunate enough to get his question in first (at 23:23) which pertained to the strange nature of nearly a dozen major war games happening around the world and asked Chertoff when the American people would be told about the situation with China and Russia. (note: Mic was only on Chertoff, sorry). This question is quickly dismissed, but is later followed by an excellent question from Ginny Ross from the OTA (oregontruthalliance.org) about the drills that took place on 911. Steve Keller, another concerned reporter, asked the panel about the possible use of private military contractors in the exercise or in future law enforcement locally. In general, Chertoff pushed the message of a never ending terror threat in nearly all of his responses to the press.

My first day reporting on Topoff 4:

Top Off 4 kicked off in Portland, Guam, and Phoenix on October 15th, 2007. This drill takes place alongside several other drills including both war games and martial law simulations. Our team (Oregontruthalliance.com) met over Thai food as we got our press passes. The first day seemed fairly quiet, so I took the time to go home and get some rest for the long week ahead. Earlier in the week, I made a request to play a victim to the site, t4volunteers.com. I got a email saying they were already done accepting new recruits, followed by another strange one saying that I could participate in a red cross exercise that was taking place in a church in Gresham, or Vancouver. It said to bring whatever I may need to stay overnight and provided an address. Meanwhile, the director of my television program called me up and told me she was driving home from Clackamas and the power was out. We made a note of it.

The next morning I assembled my camera gear.Upon hanging up the phone with Jack Blood, (a radio talk show host on Gcnlive.com) I heard the sound of jets overhead. Then I looked at the clock. 15 minutes til 9 AM, the official launch time of the “live” Topoff 4 drill. It was time to move.

I weaved my way through rush hour traffic worried that the drill in progress would delay my arrival for the official press conference that would pave the way for the rest of the day. The traffic was clear heading north on I -5. Deep sigh of relief…

At approximately 9:06AM a mock dirty bomb exploded at Portland International Raceway. However, the real area of concern is the Topoff 4 exercise was the east end of the Steel Bridge. P.I. R. was determined to be a better location to practice the response capabilities so the city center doesn’t have to come to a halt. The media tent was located about 1,000 feet from the staged incident. You could see about 50 police, all in black, with helmets with faceguards. One was walking a K-9 as he stopped to chat with a friend dressed up in a bio-hazard suit. I saw about 40 or 50 of them. This took place to the backdrop of an entire fleet of ambulances, firetrucks, and Red Cross tents. Dozens of firefighters moved into action taking care of the victims. On the ground there appeared to be several non-moving bodies. In another area, you could see a bunch of bodies in some kind of protect quarantine zone.

I was present to witness the press conference that followed with FEMA. There were multiple agencies present, including the FBI and ATF.

I was one of only a few independent videographers present. I traded contact info with a report from Willamette Week. I also bumped onto a reporter from KBOO community radio who came up to me to give me a warm greeting for being there.

Many of the questions that were asked were very basic. I saw all of the television and local radio stations present today, although not all were present during every single staged media event. I asked the media coordinator about Vigilant Shield 08. He told me he couldn’t answer any questions on that. That was a DOD issue. I still have yet to find the DOD’s PIO (public information officer) . Later I spoke with three AFT agents about the simultaneous drills. The ladies, all in their 40s, listened with partial interest, but gave no facial or verbal response when I was finished. That kind of hurt, but I accept the fact that many participants are simply earning their paychecks, (just like the reporters) and are really too compartmentalized to know or have a reason to care about the ‘other’ drills.

The next stage was OHSU, one of only two level 1 trauma centers in the state of Oregon. There the media witnessed victims enter a decontamination phase as they entered the hospital. Men in white bio-hazard outfits seemed to be all over the place, and doctors and coordinators conducted interviews with the media. I decided to regain some trust from the FEMA coordinator by asking him some softball questions. He welcomed my interview request by saying with a smile, “I remember you. You’re the ‘Vigilant Shield’ guy. I was amused when a half dozen role playing victims pointed at me. They were viewers of my show, saying “that’s the Outside the Box guy.”

At 12:30 I was happy to appear on Deadline live. It was the break I needed after the press conference and simulated terror. After a brief 2 hour rest and reflection on the days events, I went back to P.I.R. for the press conference with the DHS, the Mayor, and Governor. The main coordinator of the conference noted that the questions should be kept to Topoff 4, as he glanced in my direction. However, this time the questions got a bit more spicy. One reporter asked about the details about the last drill and why we don’t have the information about the results. He mentioned something about martial law that I couldn’t quite make out. The response was that information is withheld so it won’t fall into the wrong hands. The conference was meant to move very quickly, with no elaboration on anything. Every response was a general one about “working together to keep us safe.”

Finally, it was my turn as one of the coordinators said only a few more questions would be granted. I asked the following:

“If this attack does happen, the city will likely be evacuated. Who will make that decision, who will direct it? Also, can the mayor guarantee that the military will NOT be involved in domestic law enforcement in the case of a disaster? I’m asking this due to ND51 pushed into law in May of this year by Bush.”

The mayor answered saying that he was the mayor and is in change of those decisions. He then talked about the importance of working with the Federal government in terms of the drill, but never really addressed the real question. He simply sidestepped it with a simple response, to which the coordinator of the conference added his thoughts that that directive is only for an extreme situation. Later, a man had an unrelated question for the governor about a recent scandal involved a Multnomah Country sheriff. The governor shocked the crowd by refusing to answer the question and stormed off the stage. I will remember that moment with a smile for a long time.

The last theatric spectacle of the day for the media to watch took place at Legacy Emanuel Hospital in NE Portland. There, an even more elaborate set up with mock victims was taking place within special tents where the victims were showered down for several minutes. One particular actor enjoyed screaming in pain loudly. He was about 50 or so. This was his moment in Shakespeare. The Topoff4 staff collectively laughed, for this was somewhat comical, but also a bit disturbing that someone would look at this event as a joking matter. One of the media coordinators for the hospital was curious exactly who I worked for, since Portland Community Media did not ring a bell in her head. Throughout the day, I met several people that asked me who I was with. I dressed very professionally and physically blended in. But I think it’s hard for a lot of people to comprehend that someone would come to every exercise and event simply to document it for access television. It also seems to stir suspicion about my intentions. I could feel that from a few mainstream reporters.

I was relieved to finish the day, and maintain my press badge, even though its deteriorating from the exposure to the rain . On my route home, near the intersection of NE Columbia and I 205, the traffic lights were blinking red, obviously out of order. I rarely see that happen in Portland. After talking with my friend who witnessed the blackout in Clackamas last night, we figured out it happened during the same time of the evening, yet on two different days in different parts of the Metro area.

I will have another report for you tomorrow. Please spread this report. Thank you. Thursday we will have a full hour special on this topic. Ginny Ross from the Oregon Truth Alliance will be with me. (oregontruthalliance.com)
homepage: http://alexansary.com

Global stocks see sharp declines

Wall Street losses prompted a broad sell-off in Asian markets

bbc news
European shares were down sharply in late afternoon trading, mirroring earlier falls in East Asia as worries about the US economy continue.

The UK's FTSE 100 index was 1% lower at 6,464 by late afternoon in London, while Germany's Dax had lost 1.2%, and France's Cac had shed 1.7%.

And on Wall Street, the Dow Jones index lost ground - extending Friday's heavy fall which first prompted the slumps.

Earlier, Tokyo's Nikkei index closed 2.2% lower.

Caterpillar warning

The Dow Jones, the main US share index, fell 367 points on Friday, the 20th anniversary of the Black Monday stock market crash.

And it had lost another 80 points in the first hour of Monday trading, though the tech-heavy Nasdaq index was 0.1% ahead.

Friday's slump on Wall Street is going to dominate market sentiment as the new trading week gets under way Matt Buckland, a trader with CMC Markets Q&A: What's troubling the markets?

US falls were triggered by concerns that the full effects of the housing slowdown had not yet been seen.

It started when the building equipment firm Caterpillar cut its profit forecast, blaming the state of the economy.

Caterpillar added that the US economy would be "near to, or even in, recession" next year.

'Sentiment driven'

"Friday's slump on Wall Street is going to dominate market sentiment as the new trading week gets under way," said Matt Buckland, a trader in London with CMC Markets.

"Obviously there's speculation that we may see a repeat of the losses from Black Monday some 20 years ago, and with little economic data being scheduled for release, it's going to be sentiment rather than the fundamentals that provide the bulk of the direction."

On Black Monday in 1987, the Dow Jones fell 23%, which nowadays would mean a drop of more than 3,000 points.

The fall on the FTSE 100 comes after it had recovered from the panic that gripped markets in August in the wake of the global credit squeeze.

Last month the US Federal Reserve slashed interest rates from 5.25% to 4.75%, making borrowing cheaper, in a bid to encourage more consumer spending and corporate activity.

And some believe that polic ymakers will reduce rates again when they meet next week.

Iraq: US involved in terrorist acts

Press TV
Monday October 22, 2007

A report by Iraq's parliament confirms that the US military had cooperated with terrorists in a raid on a village in Diyala province.

Ali Adib, an MP form the United Iraqi Alliance, in a report to the Iraqi National Assembly on Sunday said that a probe launched by the parliament into the incident had proved that the US army helped terrorists attack the Shia village of Jizani al-Imam on October 15.

At least 26 civilians, including women and children, were killed in the raid, one of the bloodiest massacres since the US invasion of Iraq.

According to IRNA, after the report, Iraqi MP's considered a bill to end the presence of foreign forces in Iraq.

The report and the decision by the MPs represent another challenge to the embattled Bush's administration which is under fire over the unpopular war in Iraq.

The Iraqi parliament also condemned an attack on Baghdad's Sadr city by the US military which left 49 civilians dead.

Dollar slides to record low against euro

Neil Dennis
Financial Times
Monday October 22, 2007

The dollar hit a record low against the euro on Monday after the weekend G7 summit failed to explicitly address dollar weakness.

In their post-meeting communique G7 finance ministers urged China to let its renminbi appreciate more rapidly, but did not mention dollar weakness, which provided the catalyst for traders to dump the currency.

”The communique did not make any references to the levels of the dollar, euro or yen,” said Sue Trinh at RBC Capital Markets. She added: ”This is, in effect, a green light to sell the dollar.”

After hitting a record $1.4348 against the euro, the dollar later clawed back to trade up 0.2 per cent on the session at $1.4280. Sterling climbed as high as $2.0537 against the dollar.

Japan’s yen hit a six week high of Y113.27 against the dollar, helped by rising aversion to risk after tumbling US equity markets drove the Nikkei 225 more than 2 per cent lower.

Full article here.

Sunday NY Post Blacks Out Ron Paul

FreeMarketNews.com
Monday October 22, 2007

Even though Jeffersonian conservative presidential candidate Ron Paul has declared the media blackout of his candidacy is over, don't tell that to the editors of the New York Post.

The "conservative" paper owned by Media Mogul Rupert Murdoch, has managed the feat of covering the Family Research Council's recent "Values Voter" presidential debate, and ranking candidates according to their popularity with "values voters" without mentioning third-place finisher GOP presidential contender Ron Paul (R-Tex).

The page 4 story in the Sunday Post, "Religious Right Rejects [Giuliani's] Values Plea" chooses to report only the "onsite voting results" and then actually drops off Ron Paul's name. It also manages to write a full article without mentioning either Ron Paul or his results. This is in marked contrast to other major news outlets (CNN, Daily News) that mention Ron Paul and his results as an obviously routine part of the coverage of the Values Voter debate.

Maybe there was justification in leaving Ron Paul out of commentary in a crowded field six months ago. But Ron Paul has now raised more money than most of his fellow GOP candidates and finished higher, on average, in more straw polls than any other GOP candidate.

Coming from behind as a "dark horse," Ron Paul is arguably the biggest story in American politics in this political year – one of the reasons that, as a free-market news site, FMNN has continually covered him and his campaign.

At this point, the New York Post would seem to owe its readers an explanation of just what its editorial really policy is and what it considers a "conservative." Even in its own press release, the Family Research Council chose to highlight the on-line straw poll rather than the smaller "onsite" poll results.

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http://www.frcaction.org/get.cfm?i=PR07J04

Nearly six thousand votes - 5,775 - were cast in the first-ever Values Voters Straw Poll at FRC Action's 2nd Annual Washington Briefing. FRC Action members had the choice of voting on-line, by mail, or at electronic voting stations during this weekend's event. All presidential candidates from both parties were listed on the ballot. The following are the straw poll results:

Candidate Name Total Votes Percentage
1. Mitt Romney 1,595 27.62 %
2. Mike Huckabee 1,565 27.10 %
3. Ron Paul 865 14.98%
4. Fred Thompson 564 9.77 %
5. Sam Brownback 297 5.14 %
6. Duncan Hunter 140 2.42 %
7. Tom Tancredo 133 2.30 %
8. Rudy Giuliani 107 1.85 %
9. John McCain 81 1.40 %

* The full results can be accessed at www.frcaction.org

The straw poll voting process is constructed so that each member of FRC Action will only be able to vote one time regardless of how the voting occurs (i.e. US mail, email alert or at the event). Every member of FRC Action has a unique identifier which must be used in order to vote electronically.

For more information on The Washington Briefing 2007: Values Voter Summit, log onto www.frcactionwashingtonbriefing.org

Turkey on brink of invading Iraq after rebel clashes kill 17 troops

Tim Shipman
UK Daily Mail
Monday October 22, 2007

Turkish leaders last night held a crisis summit to consider invading Iraq after border clashes with Kurdish separatists left dozens dead.

Rebel positions along the rugged Turkish-Iraqi border were shelled by Turkish artillery units in retaliation for a rebel attack that killed at least 17 soldiers.

The attack, the worst in more than a decade by separatists from the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), came four days after Turkey's parliament approved a motion to allow troops to enter Iraq to fight guerillas hiding there.

Kurdish rebels want to carve out their own homeland from part of south-east Turkey and northern Iraq.

Turkish military, civilian and intelligence leaders gathered for an emergency meeting last night to decide whether to push into mountainous northern Iraq to try to inflict a blow on the increasingly aggressive Kurdish rebels.

Turkey's defence minister, Vecdi Gonul, said they were "planning to cross the border" – but added "not urgently".

Britain, the U.S., the EU and Iraq all oppose an invasion. U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates met Mr Gonul in Ukraine yesterday and urged Turkey not to launch a major cross-border incursion.

The 17 soldiers died when an estimated 200 guerillas attacked an infantry company near the village of Daglica, less than three miles from the Iraqi border.

Mr Gonul said 16 Turkish soldiers had also been injured and ten others were missing. The PKK claimed that its guerillas had captured a "number" of Turkish soldiers.

In a separate attack yesterday, one civilian was killed and at least 13 more injured when a landmine exploded as a minibus – part of a wedding convoy – passed near where the soldiers died.

Turkey said its troops were chasing the rebels and pounding 63 suspected positions.

Deputy prime minister Cemil Cicek would not say whether the positions were on Iraqi soil. Turkish troops, backed by helicopter gunships, had killed 32 rebels.

"Whatever is necessary in this struggle is being done and will be done," he added. "Every kind of attack will be avenged many times over."

Foreign Secretary David Miliband said: "I utterly condemn the attacks by the PKK. I want to express my complete solidarity with the government, armed forces and people of Turkey.

"The Turkish government is right to seek a solution through dialogue with the Iraqi government."

UPDATE 3-Crisis was "accident waiting to happen"-Greenspan

WASHINGTON, Oct 21 (Reuters) - An unusually high degree of risk-taking across asset classes made recent financial market turmoil all but inevitable, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said on Sunday.

"The financial crisis that erupted on August 9th was an accident waiting to happen," Greenspan said in a speech on the sidelines of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank meetings. "Credit spreads across all global asset classes had become suppressed to clearly unsustainable levels."

"Something had to give."

"If the crisis had not been triggered by a mispricing of securitized U.S. subprime mortgages, it would eventually have erupted in some other sector or market," Greenspan said.

Greenspan himself has drawn some criticism for cutting U.S. benchmark interest rates to 1 percent in 2003 and holding them there for a prolonged stretch, which some say helped inflate the U.S. housing bubble. But the former Fed chief said it was low long-term interest rates set in financial markets that pushed down mortgage costs and encouraged home buying.

"Central banks around the world have essentially lost control over the markets beyond maybe three or four or five years out. In other words, there is no evidence that we at the Fed had the capability of affecting mortgage interest rates," he said, noting that even when the U.S. central bank began raising rates in 2004, mortgage rates remained low.

Defaults on subprime loans, made to borrowers with poor credit records, have spiked in recent months, setting off a chain reaction that has tightened credit conditions around the globe. That, in turn, has raised worries about the U.S. economy that have sent the value of the U.S. dollar tumbling.

The weaker dollar is helping to rein in a large U.S. trade deficit by lending support to U.S. exporters, who are finding their goods more competitive in overseas markets.

NO UNDUE ALARM

Some economists have been concerned that a large U.S. trade shortfall could lead to a sharp and economically harmful drop in the value of the dollar.

Greenspan, who stepped down from the Fed early last year, said apprehension about the size of the shortfall in the U.S. current account, the broadest trade measure, was not groundless. However, he said would not view the unwinding of the deficit with "undue alarm," unless protectionist trade pressures and budgetary red ink continued to grow.

"If the pernicious drift toward fiscal instability is not arrested and is compounded by a protectionist reversal of globalization, the current account adjustment process could be quite painful for the United States and our trading partners," he warned.

The U.S. current account gap swelled to more than 6 percent of gross domestic product last year, leaving the United States heavily reliant on foreign capital to finance that deficit.

"At some point, foreign investors will balk at increasing their share of dollar-denominated assets in the portfolios they hold," he said, adding the recent dollar decline is an indication that America may be nearing that point.

Some economists worry the growing role of state-controlled investment funds may increase fears in the United States about the potential takeover of strategic U.S. assets.

These sovereign wealth funds are thought to have some $2.5 trillion at their disposal, with much of that under the control of trade surplus countries, such as China, Russia and the Middle East oil exporters.

Greenspan said the wealth funds may be disappointed by the level of return they receive on investments, and he said he suspected they would "fade eventually".

Still, he said Western countries were justifiably worried that the funds may base investment decisions on political rather than economic motives, and said such actions could destabilize financial systems. (Additional reporting by Steven C. Johnson and Lesley Wroughton)